My coffeehouse nightmare (2005) - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2132576/ <comment><USER3> I don't know why the title says from 2010, the story is from 2005, so take the prices with a grain of salt. Even in New Hampshire $2 for a good croissant* is very low.

I have a few close friends who are cafe owners in NH (and when the time is right I will probably open one as a "side project"), and even here, getting a low-volume cafe or a two-person cafe working well, with staff dedicated to preparing food at bad margins is unlikely. Instead focus on coffee coffee coffee or raise your margins until you're happy to sell every item.

I don't think he understands the leeway he has on prices. Imagine the article his competitor (still in business) didn't write. It goes like this: "We doubled the prices of food expecting demand to go down, but it went up!"

Humans, they aren't rational. And the "coffee buyer" breed of human, they are hardly the price-sensitive crowd. At least in New Hampshire, you already lost the price sensitive crowd to Dunkins. Forget them. Sell the amazing $3.50 croissants with pride. The people who crave it will come no matter the price.

* there are no good croissants in New Hampshire.

<comment><USER4>
        It goes like this: "We doubled the prices of
        food expecting demand to go down, but it went
        up!"

I've had that experience selling (small, cheap, non-critical) software* to end users (i.e. not business or bespoke solutions). When I released at $10 I got a lot of complaints about the price (including many "it should be free!"), panicked, and lowered the price.

I later experimented with various price points (without announcing, just changed the price on the home page) & lo and behold- I sold as many units at $9.99 as at $4.99 and $6.99 (I didn't dare raise it beyond the launch price)!

The corollary is to not listen to customers saying what they _want_ , but to observe what they _buy_.

* this was in 2011 and that particular market has changed since, please do not email me asking "how to make money selling software online" \- I don't know!

<comment><USER5> Another anecfact: people who buy on the lower end of the market for almost anything are the most difficult customers.

<comment><USER6> * They're the most price sensitive customers.

<comment><USER7> They're also often the worst, and will bitch for everything -- and not the ones that can't afford to pay more either...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The coffeeshop fallacy (2011):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3134322](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3134322)

> Lots of people think they want to start a coffeeshop. They likely don't. > That's like buying a minimum wage job for two hundred grand. What they want > is to be a customer and sit in a cafe, drink coffee, be nice to people, and > possibly curate an art gallery. [...]

<comment><USER9> > That's like buying a minimum wage job for two hundred grand.

This is literally true.

If ignoring your own labor you calculate that you will make $20,000 a year on a $200,000 investment for your business, it seems pretty awesome, until you realize you could just work minimum wage and not have to put up the $200,000 investment.

I think is actually the most common mistake initially made by people who want to open a cafe or similar small retail business: treating your own labor as free and ignoring opportunity cost.

For the purposes of calculating return on investment, you should imagine you are paying yourself whatever you would have to pay to have someone else to do the same work in your business.

<comment><USER10> > _treating your own labor as free and ignoring opportunity cost._

this goes for any services business. people consistently undervalue/underprice their own labor, especially when it comes to managerial work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> When Highway Community Church settled on taking over the failing Red Rock coffee shop in Mountain View CA in around 2007 or so (?) I thought it was an unconventional move and likely to fail. But such institutions aren't supposed to be rational ... what the heck. They wanted to provide an open community space and to engage with the greater community. And there were many coffee passionates there with expertise.

I've moved away since but every time I drop inn during a visit to work HQ I can't help but be amazed at how well they continue to do with Red Rock. A lot of people worked on the concept in the initial years without recompense.

<comment><USER12> Oikos Cafe in Erdington, Birmingham is similar.

Run down shopping centre in a working class area of the outer ring of the city. Quite a large space. Sandwiches at lunchtime and cakes all day. Coffee is standard expresso on the steam machine. They use the space for community activities in the evenings. Well patronised on the two times I've been in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I had to smirk at this one:

> none of us would ever consider opening a Laundromat or a stationery store

I've actually fantasized numerous times about selling it all and buying a laundromat or two. The dream was all around the "virtually passive income" fantasy. The guy who owns the laundromat I use stops in a few times a week, and counts his money.

That isn't to say it isn't completely free, he's got issues with local homeless people (one guy lit a fire in one of the driers and turned it on), he's got ongoing maintenance. But for the most part he isn't around. People come to his place, drop off money and leave.

I could imagine having a job where you spend a couple hours a day or maybe a day or two a week, then spend the rest of your time pursuing hobbies and hanging out with family and friends. Or volunteering & playing with fancy technology.

</comment><comment><USER14> It's a tough business. Even Starbucks couldn't make it just selling coffee. They had to start selling sugar drinks and bad food.

I could tell you stories but the article covers it well. A cafe/restaurant will destroy the most savvy of business people. I don't care how successful you were at what you did. The food business is a different level of insanity.

If you are going to open up a coffee shop, you better own the building, roast your own beans, and have a location where 1000's of people walk by everyday to work or public transportation. Even at that your chance at success is marginal.

It all looks romantic until you're in the hole 150k with no end in sight.

Great Article.

<comment><USER15> I used to commute into London from an unremarkable train station that had a remarkable coffee 'hut' on the platform. I was aware that he and his helpers had a 5 a.m. start but their day was not anywhere near as long as the customers with their commutes.

In chatting with the guy I realised he had more money, time, friends, trips to the country and holidays abroad than me. Unlike every other platform coffee place en-route his 'hut' was not part of a chain, the coffee was essentially unbranded. Okay, captive market, known footfall, no opportunity for growth, however, I think that Neville was getting the economics right. He also does customer service and remembers everyone's name. So by the time you get to the front of the queue your drink will be made to your normal specifications already. As well as working back the queue he also keeps an eye on time, so he will give you a wink or a no if there really is no chance of you getting your drink and the train.

There is no branding, no lifestyle to be sold, just what you want for your commute. Prices are not overly cheap but certainly not expensive for London. So you pay a fair price for a fair product.

His helpers are family members as well as his daughter's friends. So it is a team of two on site with his other half dropping off supplies. Despite the dawn starts they have nothing to complain about, job satisfaction is high.

I respect the business acumen and hard work that goes on at this particular owner operated place, it is a business I want to support. I don't feel I have to though, I would buy from the nearby Costa if that was the only option and pay the 50p surcharge with delay.

I don't believe Neville is waiting for Starbucks to buy him out for millions and I doubt that he cares that his kids go into the business, since he hasn't even 'expanded' to the other platform yet - 'branched out' \- I doubt he wants to take on the world with some mission statement to deliver excellent coffee (with everyone's names remembered). There is no romantic love of coffee, the business is just what it is, there is no struggle, it is all under control.

Edit...

P.S. What happened to Slate, why are they no longer a thing?

<comment><USER16> I would estimate that Neville can sell about 100 coffees per day with a profit of about £1 per coffee, so he earns around of the order of £100 per day. Surely that can't be more than you, unless I'm nearly an order of magnitude too low in my estimates?

<comment><USER15> That is a low estimate for an hour, I am too focused on getting the train to get the stopwatch out and count cups served, but there is a queue and a lot of fast action behind the counter. Unlike Starbucks there is also multi-tasking and multi-threading going on. But yes, I will have to ask him the direct questions on how it works as a business one day.

<comment><USER16> I'd be very interested to hear the response!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> _The house brew too cold to be sold for $1 a cup was chilled further and reborn at $2.50 a cup as iced coffee, a drink whose appeal I do not even pretend to grasp._

That's because they're doing it wrong: for a tasty iced coffee, don't use stale cold coffee, make a fresh (double) espresso (or any other strong coffee, I suppose) and immediately chill it with ice.

<comment><USER18> There are three ways I know of, your americano on ice method, the brew cold overnight method, and their method.

All three produce varying acidity levels of the same horrible drink, IMO. Most people I see drinking iced coffee either A. drown it in sweeteners and cream, or B. just slam it down black for the fastest caffeine intake on a hot day.

I'm sure many people disagree with me, but I've tried it in probably every form there is, and it's just a waste of coffee to me.

<comment><USER19> Finally a sane man in a sea of sycophants! I love coffee, I absolutely do not get cold brew. Its the worst thing you can do with those beans. I read a while ago on a hot day a hot beverage actually helps cool you[1] making cold brew even make less sense.

[1] [http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/07/11/156378713/coo...](http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/07/11/156378713/cool- down-with-a-hot-drink-its-not-as-crazy-as-you-think)

<comment><USER20> Two remarks come to mind here:

1\. A great cold brew has so much more flavor to me than hot brewed coffee. It also is significantly less acidic, which helps my stomach a lot.

2\. If I ever consider the weather while ordering beverages, I do so strictly to avoid an uncomfortable carrying situation (carrying a cold drink in an even colder environment). My warm bloodedness gives me a lot of agency to drink what I want and not what the weather tells me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've spoken to various friends over the years who start businesses doing something that they love.

They aren't ready to hear the tough realities until they have hit the hard downside and possibly gone out of business. After that point, they get a real understanding of why the most important thing in business is how much cash comes in. Before that point they tend to be not much interested in understanding cash.

</comment><comment><USER22> TLDR; 'How do you make a million dollars in the coffee shop business?'

'It's easy, just start with ten'.

<comment><USER23> I wonder if Andy Rubin and his wife are subsidizing their cafe or if it stands on its own merits since it's been open a few years now. [https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2015/01/29/all-aboard- th...](https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2015/01/29/all-aboard-the-pastry- train)

<comment><USER24> Prices are quite high there but it's not a superbly highly trafficked place. Revenues do not seem super high, though the place is seemingly never empty (unlike PA, VdT seems to be the only good cafe in downtown Los altos; Satura doesn't make the cut esp after ownership change).

They seem to be experimenting with their offerings, which is either the proprietors satisfying their whims or searching for a winning formula.

Also I imagine they bought the land from Maria's Antiques so it'll take forever to recoup costs there (though I guess the land will just appreciate).

In any case I'm happy they're around. Sad that they changed their macaroon recipe.

The real question is how Area 151 in downtown Los altos possibly turns a profit. Is that one of Sergey's toys?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The story is the same the world over. No matter what business it is - be VERY careful starting a business around something that you are passionate about, love as a hobby, or that people tell you you are good at.

There is a BIG difference between doing something part time because you love doing it, and doing it all day every day (including weekends) because you HAVE to. The excitement of 'being your own boss' is quickly ripped away when you realise that you have a thousand bosses - EVERY SINGLE customer of yours is essentially your boss for a short time.

Not that it isn't rewarding, but as others have pointed out in here, you have to go into it with the right expectations. I highly recommend that anyone looking to start a business reads Michael Gerber's "The E-Myth Revisited". It will outline a different way of looking at your business at the outset.

Back to the coffee shop though - unfortunately, a lot of lay people still see the romantic notions around owning a coffee shop, and they all assume that business owners are raking cash in and are out to rip off the poor workers. Here in Australia there was a big backlash recently when conditions around weekend overtime rates were changed, affecting a lot of people in the hospitality industry. Coffee shop, cafe and restaurant owners were castigated by the media and the public for not deigning to pay staff time and a half or double time on weekends etc.

Nothing against paying workers fairly, but I know many friends who run such establishments. For many of them, opening on a Sunday or a Public Holiday is mandated by the mall or premises they are in (written into their lease), and for most of them, weekend trade actually COSTS them money, rather than makes them anything. Unless of course they reduce staff and work weekends themselves, but staff calling in sick or not turning up for shifts mid week usually means they work 7 days a week.

Nearly every cafe in my town closes at around 2 or 3 pm, after the lunch rush because demand is so low after that that it is economic suicide to try and keep the doors open and pay wages etc. for a handful of customers. Bad luck that I tend to try and arrange meetings and do work outside my home office in the late afternoon...

<comment><USER26> > EVERY SINGLE customer of yours is essentially your boss for a short time.

A fallacy. The other day I signed an employment agreement and among other unreasonable matter (aka normal employer employee relations in US) enjoyed the bit about their version of extended at-will agreement having the additional meaning of changing the pay, position, and responsibilities "without notice". :)

Your customer may be your "boss" but she is not your employer.

<comment><USER25> I can guarantee that pretty much EVERY business owner has at one stage, or more than once, had to work extra time after hours for no compensation in order to resolve a customer issue or fix a bad situation. Sometimes even do the job of another employee who is unavailable.

One of my customers owns a multi million dollar food wholesale business with nearly 50 employees, and recently one day he had to drive the delivery truck himself to one particular defence site to meet the terms of their contract because one of his drivers called in sick and everyone else was out.

If that doesn't constitute change of pay, position and responsibilities "without notice", then I am not sure what does. Granted, not a permanent or a legal change, but they have (and will exercise) that privilege over you from time to time.

I've run my own business for over 30 years now, and many time the very survivability of my business hinged upon just a single large customer making their payment on time or renewing a massive contract.

Pretty much the same as if you had a boss and your future employment hinged upon getting this particular project just right.

<comment><USER27> Also at least no one has to give their employer 90 credit terms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The lesson is, with no secret sauce, you're competing against everyone else with a home equity loan and some desire.

Any secret sauce would have helped. Not literally caramel flavoring syrup but anything at all that makes the business special or unique. Fund all your capex off kickstarter. Hybrid model "hacking" the local zoning codes by putting software devs in the back room and having meetings with amazing coffee in the front. Offer non-traditional food, maybe coffee and gyros or coffee and bbq. Organic and healthy is massively oversold, how about molecular gastronomy coffee that tastes like watermelons or stinky cheese, or is florescent orange. A lot of cash based local retail is only in business long term because of money laundering, you can't compete with a guy stuffing $25K/month of weed growing cash into his register when you're not growing $25K/month of weed, so I'm not saying you have to do something illegal, but if the numbers don't work out if you do everything legally, that's because the successful competition is doing it illegally, so you'd be a fool to compete solely legally, and in some cities that means you simply cannot compete in cash based walk in retail unless you're willing to grow weed on the side, find another city, find another market, learn some gardening skills, but if your competitor has an extra $10K of cash revenue that you don't, you can forget about it.

A job looking fun cool and trendy means you'll have the local divorced dentist or ER doctor funding it as a hobby to be cool and meet people. Again you can't compete unless you have a similar funding source. You can't sell coffee if a local NBA player thinks financing his mom's coffee shop or antique store or froyo shop would be oh so trendy and cool. Very few NFL players or CEOs think that their wives should operate a septic tank pumping business as want- raprenuers to keep them out of trouble, therefore you can make great piles of money going into exactly that kind of work.

"We're gonna be just like everyone else" is in good times and bad, and the bad times are really, really bad and business lifespan is extremely short, so with a strategy like that, they're doomed like every other cookie cutter that fails.

<comment><USER29> Just had to make this comment :-)

 _operate a septic tank pumping business as want-raprenuers to keep them out of trouble_

My local septic service wanted $75 to deliver a new tank cover to my house 7 miles away.

"Can't the driver just drop it off when he comes to pump the tank?"

"No, he's not set up to deliver items. It has to come on a different truck."

[Sigh] "Never mind, I'll come pick it up after I get off work."

"OK. We'll be closed by then, but we'll leave it outside the front door. It's heavy enough that no one'll steal it."

Point being that there are many profitable, unglamorous, businesses that most of the HN crowd will never think of entering.

<comment><USER28> Uber for septic tank pumping. Hey he's out in the tanker truck and your tank needs pumping, swipe right or swipe left, either way its a business more likely to survive than most, as long as humanity continues to poop.

Another strange idea... rural monthly delivery boxes, today you get a new bespoke artisinal flypaper. Or .22LR ammo monthly gift box, do I get the frangibles this week or the varmint hunting high speeds?

<comment><USER29> Awesome. I like the way you think :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I knew a guy who ran a famous coffeehouse once. He made so many mistakes, truly glorious fuckups, and came out of it with barely any skin left on his ass.

He's a multi-millionaire now, having built a major tech company. I always look back on his coffeehouse days and wonder just how incredibly valuable it must have been, to be able to suffer such colossal screwups and come out of it with enough knowledge, tenacity and sheer willpower to continue in the capitalist game.

One of the conclusions from this thought process is that he must really have learned to deal with customers, principally, as his business grew/failed, in spite of it all. And, I think, that's really the only good reason to own/manage a coffeehouse: you really like the customers.

</comment><comment><USER31> The article almost hits on the rule of 30-30-30-10. 30% of revenue to rent, payroll and goods. You take home 10%.

If you have a restaurant or a coffee house with a revenue of $1 million, you take home $100K per year. Ouch.

Food is not an easy business.

<comment><USER32> What sort of tax do you pay on that $100k, in the US? Would it be taxed as if it were salary?

<comment><USER33> Short answer: yes it would.

Slightly longer answer: there are various ways allowed under the US tax code to receive income from a business and have it taxed not as salary; some of those ways have significantly lower marginal rates than if the income were salary; none of those tricks is going to do you much good at the $100k tier though. May as well think of it as salary for tax purposes.

What you could, and likely would do as this business owner with $100k in profit, is you'd arrange for the business to buy things that are legitimate business expenses but also make your life nicer and/or cause you to need to spend less money from your personal finances. e.g. you need computers, phones, tablets to conduct your business so now you don't need to buy any of those things with your own money. You can't do this with cars, fwiw.

<comment><USER29> _You can 't do this with cars, fwiw_

Since when? I've known a number of people who bought their vehicles with business money for a business writeoff. The least likely to survive audit was the carpenter whose Corvette was a "company car."

Yes, he had a separate (junky) work truck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Author went on to right an enjoyable novel about the whole affair: [https://www.amazon.com/Kofemolka-M- Idov/dp/5271245489](https://www.amazon.com/Kofemolka-M-Idov/dp/5271245489) (not sure if there's an English version). He later went on to become the editor-in-chief of Russian GQ, and I think, got the return on his investment in some way as his literary career progressed.

<comment><USER35> It is the same? [https://books.google.com.mx/books/about/Ground_Up.html?id=Pl...](https://books.google.com.mx/books/about/Ground_Up.html?id=PlgIa8BN85gC&redir_esc=y)

</comment></comment><comment> nommm-nommm Following your passion can also make you blind to your mistakes. I know a guy who failed at an Irish pub. Guy was totally blind to all his mistakes that where extremely obvious to both me and (at least some of) his staff. He was too busy living the dream of meeting patrons, hosting his friends, and singing for strangers to really see where he was going wrong from the business perspective. His business practices were just all over the place - no actual concrete plans. He seemed to have a "fun first, business second" attitude. When he closed he blamed it on "the market," guess he didn't notice that every other place on the same street was busier than ever.

</comment><comment><USER36> I have forwarded this piece to dozens of people I know who told me they wanted to open a nice little local coffeeshop. Some of them might have thought I was a killjoy at the time, but I know for a fact at least a few of them are glad they never did it.

</comment><comment><USER37> I own a coffee shop in addition to my tech work. Most people know having runway is important to any startup. If he had to declare bankruptcy 6 months after opening he wasn't set up for success.

If you make good coffee, choose the right location, and do a decent job of marketing you can get cash flow positive with time. Acquiring customers can be slow, but once they taste good coffee they will come back.

Much of the other comments here are true, you don't open a coffeeshop to get rich. The only way you can make good money is to scale into multiple locations.

</comment><comment><USER38> So true! The worst part is, I am rebuilding my capital in a cube farm to make up for all the fun I had running my Art Gallery/Pottery shop -- but I still dream of doing it again.

</comment><comment><USER39> Anthony Bourdain, who wrote our epitaph in Kitchen Confidential: "The most dangerous species of owner ... is the one who gets into the business for love."

</comment><comment> matt-attack Thank you for posting this. I'll never forget reading this article when it came out, and I've been searching for it for years.

</comment><comment><USER40> In a way, I think the main problem was lack of research. I've dreamed about opening a small cafe or coffee shop - as simple of one as possible - <USER2> worked in one such place with a chef (It was only me and him most days, save weekends).

Restaurants are a bit unique. They are horribly expensive to start up. Coffee machines, kitchen equipment that meets state regulations. In Indiana, this includes getting certified by the board of health as well (You have to have someone certified on sanitation and food safety working at all times). Location is really important, and folks often work really long hours.

Many many close within a year - I've read many similar stories. Folks are doing exceptionally well if you make any profit the first year, and the second year can be a loss as well. Even after you get some profit, margins tend to be thin.

I still think it would be gratifying, but the risk is rather high.

</comment><comment><USER41> His novel "Ground Up" that describes this coffeehouse nightmare in details is one of my favorite modern books. Can't recommend it enough!

</comment><comment><USER42> Wait. The guy who wrote this lives in Moscow. So was this coffee shop in America, or Russia? Huge difference.

<comment><USER43> He said in the first sentence that it was in Manhattan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> So, how do the chains like Starbucks or Costa manage to sustain their business?

<comment><USER18> Because the coffee has a ridiculous markup on it, and they are brilliant at marketing. Microwave breakfast sandwiches with names like "Double smoked bacon and egg". Frozen pound cake for 3 dollars a slice. Lattes for up to 5 dollars each.

And a constant flow of customers and it being just uncomfortable enough for people not to stay too long.

<comment><USER45> > it being just uncomfortable enough for people not to stay too long.

OMG this is so true. I suspect their tables and arrangement may also be designed for this, as I've never felt too comfortable working from any starbucks (they are usually too small for me).

Another factor I've found, at least in Austin and outside the collegy areas: they're filled with Teenagers. This isn't bad in itself, except that they're often loud when in groups.

<comment><USER43> I noticed the coffee shop near my university replaced their tables with tiny little things that cannot properly hold up a laptop. I'm quite sure that was the intent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> lulz too cheap. my local shop sells coffee+pastry for 8-10$. solid traffic from 7:00-19:00. two staff.

<comment><USER47> The number in parenthesis after the title indicates the year the story takes place. In this case, the prices are from 2005.

<comment><USER46> right, my shops still here because they got on the fancy spency coffee game early on (2010). sold to blue bottle, opened another 10 blocks away with even higher prices (the one i described)</comment></comment></comment>


DeepFaceDrawing Generates Photorealistic Portraits from Freehand Sketches - <AUTHOR> https://syncedreview.com/2020/06/04/deepfacedrawing-generates-photorealistic-portraits-from-freehand-sketches/ <comment><USER2> So this sort of thing seems like a big deal for indie video game devs.

One of the big problems at the moment is that photorealistic texturing basically requires finding and mapping a real life actor, which is all sorts of expensive.

This looks like a way to get past that in a super-efficient way: just mock up what "look" you're going for with a character, hit render and out pops all the data needed for a texture (I suspect we're not too many iterations way from also getting bodies, meshes and animation skeletons).

This would make it a huge field-leveller for catching up for HD content production.

<comment><USER3> There's a huge copyright issue waiting for you when you use this kind of tech outside of research.

The way how these AIs work is that they have memorized aspects of celebrity photos and then recombine them as needed. That means if your sketch looks in any way like a celebrity from the training data set, then the AI will likely reuse parts of those photos, which would make your generated texture a derived work, meaning you'd have to pay royalties to the celebrities in the dataset.

<comment><USER4> No court has yet decided on this.

Previous research has shown that if you search the entire training dataset for the image most similar to one generated by a generative model like this, the images actually look pretty visually different. To a non-expert, they'd say the images are similar, but neither copied the other.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have one question about this, I'm sure it's completely explainable and honest but it comes across as suspicious.

In the image labelled "Illustration of the model's deep learning framework architecture", the input face has a strange line drawn underneath the chin. It seems like an odd thing for a human drawer to put in, and makes the person look like they have a double chin.

Yet in the output shown at the end of the pipeline, it appears as a shadow. I didn't go into the article suspicious, but this immediately made me wonder if for some of these sketches, a face to line drawing network was used for some sort of reverse process.

The image does appear in a part of the article discussing their learning methods, though, so I'm probably missing something important. But given that they "are working to release their code" it doesn't really help with confidence.

<comment><USER6> Adding a line where you want there to be a shadow in the output seems like something you could learn from trial and error when messing with a model. It somewhat weakens the accomplishment of the paper if the sketches aren't drawn by naive users, but it's a lot more defensible than generating the input like you suggest.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. It just looks a bit strange and doesn't help to instil confidence in the paper. My first guess would be that they've used a reverser for the learning process somehow. As it's a preprint, hopefully comments like this will help them to strengthen the paper and release their code!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow, this is cooked.

In a few years, deep learning is going to make any sort of development of real skill feel as archaic as assembler. Learn guitar? What's the point. The little magic black box soon-to-be-smaller-than-your-smartphone can make just about any song based on minimal inputs (i.e. a beat-boxed backing track). You'll be able to generate unique and stylized paintings of your relatives and pets in seconds. Probably you'll be able to generate printable 3D objects from descriptions. Engineers will be able to sketch parts from one perspective and have the details automatically fleshed-out from best-practices learned across millions of similar parts.

You'll never get away with an illegal U-turn ever again because the city will pull footage from peoples' internet-of-crap dashcams and the machine learning algorithms will comb the feeds and send fines directly to your mailbox with basically no human intervention.

<comment><USER8> Those mostly sound like good things to me. I'm sure people who enjoy music or art will still do it regardless. The people who might enjoy it but don't quite have the talent will have more powerful tools to help them express their creativity. And as for the engineering, that seems like an absolutely good thing, as long as we don't get too complacent and overly trust the machines to do it for us without double checking.

<comment><USER7> Not saying it's a bad thing at all, it's just going to be very different from the world we know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Reminds me of this one (used to be called PaintsChainer) where the input is line drawings, output is colored-in using anime palettes. User can override the color choices. Very satisfying, especially on drawings by kids.

[https://petalica-paint.pixiv.dev/index_en.html](https://petalica- paint.pixiv.dev/index_en.html)

<comment><USER10> That to me looks waaay more impressive than the DeepFaceDrawing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This reminds me of edges2cats [https://affinelayer.com/pixsrv/](https://affinelayer.com/pixsrv/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Goodbye, modeling industry!

This is extremely impressive. Extrapolating for possible applications, I could imagine that techniques like this could one day become invaluable tools, say, for asset creators in the game industry. The video speeds up the process, but of course in a couple of years, this will be actual real-time performance. Extended to more than just human portraits, this could be a fantastic design tool.

</comment><comment><USER13> Could police sketch artists use this as a tool?

<comment><USER14> For extra fun hook it up to the DMV photo database so that every returned image always looks just like an actual person in the area.

Your conviction rate will go through the roof when the artist's sketches are a dead ringer for the suspect!

<comment><USER15> A) people commit crimes in places they don't live

B) even so dmv photos are notoriously bad

<comment><USER14> > A) people commit crimes in places they don't live

No problem! Conviction/case-closure stats don't care if the person you convicted was local or not.

> B) even so dmv photos are notoriously bad

They're often unattractive but they usually identify people pretty well when they're not too old to do so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is certainly interesting research, and as an artist I think I'd be hugely frustrated by the amount of non-local change which seems to happen in the video. A fair number of small pen strokes seem to affect a large part of the generated face.

For example, take the difference between 2:20 and 2:27 in the video. The upper half of the drawing hasn't changed, but the generated image has a lot more hair and different ears. While the technology looks impressive as it is, it seems to me that it would be better to leave areas the artist has barely defined as blurred rather than flickering between various high resolution features that are all roughly equally matching the sketch.

<comment><USER17> That's most likely a training data issue.

The whole thing works on statistical priors: if I have feature a at location x, there's a 90% I should have feature b at location y. So if the majority of pictures of beards in my dataset were also, say, wearing sunglasses, then naturally if I freehand draw a beard the net will probably output sunglasses even if I don't change the eyes!

The solution is to ensure that you sample the full data space that you wish to reproduce (not trivial). Neural nets do seem to interpolate but this is super high dimensional space so it's not always intuitive...there are many orders of magnitude more directions in which to move to get from point A to point B.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> There seems to be a good use case for video game assets generation without copyright fear.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'd kind of like to see what it does with assorted cartoon character pictures. What does it do with, say, Charlie Brown or Calvin?

<comment><USER5> Or Garfield.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Combining this with Deep Fake Videos [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23423372](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23423372) [https://myvoiceyourface.com/video/?id=255d940d00](https://myvoiceyourface.com/video/?id=255d940d00)

</comment><comment><USER20> When will accent correction come to market so non native speakers (who have difficulty in pronouncing some words) are able to make quality voice overs for YouTube and podcasts?

Looking at the virtual agents, it seems they are able to understand very crappy English (with all my attempts), how far are we from correcting it?

<comment><USER21> I wouldn't be too concerned with getting accents perfect (unless your are an actor). There are so many extremely diverse native English accents, like Western American, Boston American, Received Pronunciation, Scouse, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Australian, etc. I think different pronunciations are accepted.

And the magical accent corrector wouldn't fix bad grammar.

<comment><USER22> Yep, I can easily believe it'll fix the pitch, but not the phrasing, or the pauses, or without the odd glaring error. And the uncanny valley effect might actually be considerably worse than the traces of native languages English people are used to hearing from ESL speakers.

I'm reminded of a former flatmate whose father chose not to raise her as bilingual in the mistaken belief a second language would impair her learning. Instead, when she chose to learned Spanish as an adult anyway, she picked up the slang and pronunciation of her Colombian relatives, but never quite reached native fluency. She pointed out the drawback to having a local sounding accent and name instead of being an obvious foreigner was that everybody who met her assumed her misunderstandings, pauses or the odd really ungrammatical phrase was because she was an unusually stupid Colombian.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is this open sourced anywhere? I didn't see it in the article

<comment><USER24> From the article: "They are working on releasing the source code soon."

<comment><USER5> Article shouldn't have been accepted. Research papers relying on code without any verifiability ought to be more of an issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> About a year ago I was explaining to a friend of mine how I thought that increases in artistic AI combined with procedural generation could change art forever.

He immediately thought "we should use to to make porn without actors, that would make money" this seems closer to possible everyday.

</comment><comment><USER26> The real question: if one is trying to draw a likeness of a real person, is it possible to get this software to generate a decent likeness because the drawing projects that likeness, or are these "drawings" really just weak pseudo-random number generators and the software presents a realistic face regardless?

</comment><comment><USER27> Given that this was created by Chinese people, in Hong Kong, why are all their examples white/hispanic people?

<comment><USER28> Of all the possible things you could choose to comment on about this product, why did you feel like this was the most relevant for discussion?

<comment><USER27> I just noticed it and found it interesting.

Why is it interesting? Well for one, it raises an eyebrow as to the motivations behind either the technology or that of the promotional material produced for it.

I'd find it similarly interesting if, for an example, an entirely Russian team produced deepfake tech and produced promotional material for it entirely consisting of black people.

Especially in an era where we already acknowledge the prevalence of nation state cyber psyops / propaganda / manufactured news and "facts".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is very cool indeed. I can imagine application in the game industry, advertising etc. However.... all results are frontal. No three-quarters or profile at all. This heavily restricts its use. If the user was allowed to input both a profile and a front view, then all would be fine.

</comment><comment><USER30> Evolution of face reconstruction using eyewitnesses memory of face:

0\. Portrait painted by trained artist in consultation with a witness;

1\. "Identikit";

2\. "PhotoFIT";

3\. "DeepFaceDrawing" \- [0] powered by ML & AI (which are trained on [1] & [2]?).

</comment><comment><USER31> I find it interesting and yet am unsettled by how AI engineering is ofsetting human creativity and artistry. And whats with this fetish for deepfake? Are we pursuing this or we do it because we can?

</comment><comment><USER32> How do the faint lines work? The grey ones already there when they start drawing in black. Are they just a guide or being used, if so in what way?

<comment><USER14> I think they're some kind of back projection from the nearby space of the image. Without them, you'd be more likely to draw features in the wrong place because you and the computer have a different idea of the intended scale and end up monster faces.

<comment><USER32> Aha! That makes sense. Thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Anyone know projects that have done this in reverse? I've seen a really good one but I've lost track of it.

<comment><USER34> Maybe this one [https://youtu.be/6LmQS4DJl6c](https://youtu.be/6LmQS4DJl6c)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> IDEA/REQUEST (if anyone has this running)

Trace over some famous cartoon characters and see what it outputs.

</comment><comment><USER35> Wow, watched the video. I'd love to use the sketching program. Looks like fun!

<comment><USER36> yeah lot of these "AI does the thing" stuff looks extremely interesting to play with, especially to see what happens when you poke the model with weird data (say, no eye, no hair, two noses etc) but most of them are completely inaccessible to non researchers, even when the code/model is released building the solution requires so much effort and expertise to make it impossible to play with

this is why I loved so much the pix2pix cat drawing demo [https://affinelayer.com/pixsrv/](https://affinelayer.com/pixsrv/) I hoped it would make a turning point for demoes but alas this is still unique

<comment><USER35> Very cool!! Some of them don't quite look real once I've messed with it (bad drawing skills) but that's very impressive, especially across such a diverse set of objects (each has their own model, but still.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Someone please draw a penis and share the results.

</comment><comment><USER38> Is there a demo we can try?

<comment><USER39> [http://geometrylearning.com/DeepFaceDrawing/](http://geometrylearning.com/DeepFaceDrawing/) says "[Coming Soon]" for the code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I find it a bit disturbing that there is a lack of racial diversity in the models. Especially given what is going on nationally in the US.

I can imagine it's much easier to train on type of face, but this could lead to later bias.

<comment><USER41> I don't know why you are downvoted. To me this is a very valid point. Does anybody care to give some arguments for downvoting?</comment></comment>


How Madonna Influenced Our Culture - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/16/arts/music/madonna-birthday-impact.html <comment><AUTHOR> I know this is a bit of a puff piece but I submitted it because it highlights Madonna as an entrepreneur and businesswoman and not just as an artist.

e.g. _MTV declined to play her steamy "Justify My Love" video, so Madonna did the next best thing: released it on home video as a "video single." The cost: $9.98._

The there's this: _Madonna's 38 Top 10 hits on the Billboard 100 singles chart have put her in rarefied air (the Beatles are behind her, with 34)._</comment>


Why not regulate the voltage with software? - <AUTHOR> http://gregable.com/2010/02/battery-voltage-regulation-prediction.html

<comment><AUTHOR> You could also use this approach for things like deciding how frequently to sync email/text messages, how often to retry connecting to a tower in an area with low reception, how bright to make the screen, how often to run garbage collection.

</comment><comment><USER2> "Loss aversion" at its best. I just use my battery how I please, and it usually lasts as long as the computer it powers is useful to me. If it dies, I just buy a new one for $50 or whatever, and then it's brand new.</comment>


Show HN: Chat via the console, with now and socket.io - <AUTHOR> https://gloubiboulga.now.sh/ <comment><USER2> A tip: all the action only starts after you send the first message.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good tip indeed, thanks for the feedback ! I'll update the code

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is very silly... nice job!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks !!

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> I liked the memo a lot.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did not think anyone would read it, thanks a lot !</comment></comment>


Show HN: Builder.io – Drag and drop page building for any site - <AUTHOR> https://builder.io <comment><USER2> We use Builder to power a lot of the dynamic content on [https://www.shopstyle.com](https://www.shopstyle.com).

Builder enables our product / marketing teams to iterate, test and customize different parts of the site really quickly. These days we rarely receive marketing tickets because they can build whatever they want in Builder.

As an engineer, it's been great to use our custom components in the web UI, and the ability to connect to our own APIs has been pretty cool as well. Plus, it's super fast and stable. We were initially concerned it might impact load times, but the client sdk is really lightweight and the content loads faster than our own APIs.

Overall, I'd highly recommend giving it a try.

</comment><comment><USER3> Honestly the easiest content creation tool I have used. From building small data models to creating full HTML content modules, Builder.io is super powerful.

Incredibly easy to integrate with whatever framework you use, react, angular, vue. You could even build your entire website using builder.

</comment><comment><USER4> Builder has been great for getting content out of our code base and giving more control to marketing without risking bugs as a result of content mistakes.

It also integrates really nicely as an angular component installed via npm.

would definitely recommend

[https://www.stilt.com](https://www.stilt.com)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone,

I built this whole thing myself and am looking for feedback from anyone who will give it.

Thanks in advance!</comment>


Fever effect - <AUTHOR> https://embraceasd.com/the-fever-effect/ <comment><USER2> Rhonda Patrick has an information-dense talk on sulforaphane.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zz4YVJ4aRfg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zz4YVJ4aRfg)

<comment><USER3> Rhonda is a rare gem of critical thinking in the wild west of nutrition science. I cannont suggest her enough. I do wish she would make more layman- accessable content, but am loathe to ever ask anyone to dumb themselves down. Very dense in information and theory, but assumes an understanding of some basic biology to follow. I think her appearances on the Rogan podcast are the easiest to parse for most.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've often noticed that I'm weirdly productive with a low level illness. It's as though my focus is improved .

<comment><USER5> Similar to having a single drink or two. It dulls the brain just enough to remove internal distracting thoughts, but not enough to dull all higher thought functions.

<comment><USER6> Sleep deprivation (I'm an insomniac) has a similar effect if I have a lot of grindy work to do there is a point between tired and exhausted where I can hammer through it.

It's a but like the balmer peak though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Seems like the virus has a greater chance of spreading when its host is behaving more social.

<comment><USER8> I have a probably TMI story about a case of food poisoning my wife and I had that was prefaced by us being especially frisky for a few hours — we even both said something to each other about how unusual it was. I've always wondered if there was a connection.

<comment><USER9> I see a possible multi-billion research program there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I used to spend a lot of time on an alternative medicine forum whose primary goal was to provide support for parents of children with ASD and similar conditions. They primarily were focused on metal poisoning, but some kids were being treated for infection, such as PANDAS.

Perhaps some cases of ASD involve infection and fever helps suppress it a bit.

</comment><comment><USER11> I belive this is caused by anti-inflammatory medication and not by the fever itself.

There is plenty of research linking brain fog with inflammation. I myself am far more social on ibuprofen than the default and I suggest you try this yourself; try taking 400-600mg ibuprofen even when not sick but "not feeling like yourself" and notice the effects.

EDIT: Reading the article further they tried to give sulforaphane to patients and they saw improvements. This compound is believed to have anti-inflammatory and neuro-protective effects ( [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5225737/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5225737/) ).

<comment><USER12> Be cautious when taking ibuprofen regularly and/or in large doses, and be aware of potential side effects.

Ibuprofen can cause gastrointestinal problems (eg stomach ulcers), and has also been linked to reduced male fertility.

<comment><USER13> > has also been linked to reduced male fertility.

Short term while actively using it, or even long term after you stop using it?

<comment><USER3> Long term when used as a child, possibly negligable in adults, but likely was my understanding.

<comment><USER14> Here are a couple of the discussions on HN

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18787086](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18787086)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16254760](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16254760)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have a hypothesis that getting sick (and taking the necessary rest to heal) is beneficial to mental health. The current culture of taking a pill and plough on regardless might be a cause of these epidemic spread of depression, etc.

</comment><comment><USER16> "Obviously making people purposely sick would be unethical"

What if it could save or improve their lives?</comment>


The Hubris of Biohacking - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/04/biohacking-siren-song/557849/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> The point seems sensible given the recent behavior of some guys.

But biohackers are indispensable as well as more mainstream scientists. They are the practitioners of Metropolis-Hasting that help overcome some local minimum in knowledge of biology.</comment>


A Bible Of Color Theory Is Now An App - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcodesign.com/1673122/a-bible-of-color-theory-is-now-an-app#1

<comment><AUTHOR> Really blown away by not only the design but by the content. Really surprised that it was developed by Yale University Press, in-house?! Hmmm...</comment>


What Happens Every Minute on the Internet in 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://www.visualcapitalist.com/every-minute-internet-2020/ <comment><USER2> I actually spend 30% of my workday on emails, something is missing here...</comment>


L.A. may charge drivers by the mile - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-pay-to-drive-20190122-story.html#nws=mcnewsletter <comment><USER2> "The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is pushing to study how what's commonly referred to as congestion pricing could work in L.A., including converting carpool lanes to toll lanes, taxing drivers based on the number of miles they travel, or charging a fee to enter certain neighborhoods and business districts."

I can already see who this will impact (Middle class and poor.). Also that last sentence is very concerning ("or charging a fee to enter certain neighborhoods and business districts.").</comment>


Show HN: LaughMatch - <AUTHOR> http://www.LaughMatch.com/

<comment><USER2> OT: Get out of the habit of saying "I built this in 3 days". Most of the time, people say that because they're nervous about being judged. Ironically, "I built this in 3 days" probably exclusively attracts the kind of attention that benchmarks and judges what you built; either way, it's hard to see how it constructively promotes anything you're doing or planning to do.

Get used to people tearing you down. HN is full of people --- most of whom have never built anything --- who tear new products down for sport. But the world is also full of people who will be dismissive in more insidious ways. If you're going to launch products, build up your thick skin now. The industry is full of people who launched less impressive things than this, promoted their work ruthlessly and without neurotic humility, and later went on to run the table on their competitors.

<comment><USER3> Somewhat ironically, your comment doesn't have anything at all to do with what he actually built -- a really cool new take on personality matching.

<comment><USER2> There. Fixed it for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like this. One thing I would add, is the ability for users to submit a YouTube URL (add a new video).

For example, Mitch Hedberg[1] is my favorite comedian. I'd like to submit a clip of his in hopes you'll match me with women who like it.

Plus, your job is easier when people are submitting content (you'll need some vetting process probably).

Plus, you can show people stats on the videos they upload. And "here are all the women who liked the video you uploaded," which is kind of awesome. I could write them and be like "Hey.. I'm glad you liked that video I uploaded..." nice ice-breaker.

Good work.

[1] Here's some Mitch. Enjoy. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7auvTMm47uM>

<comment><USER5> This sounds like a great added feature. Added feature opportunities like this seem important to make this app just that...more than a feature.

I'd hate to see existing Match sites run with your idea as-is. Seems like added depth created by a more tailored experience (this above feature as an excellent example) would help you differentiate significantly enough to be significant on a standalone basis.

tl;dr Steal this^ feature idea before Match, etc., steal yours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like the idea. It has the clever advantage of offering something of value before anyone else has signed up - funny videos. Maybe you should offer more videos before the signup page. Maybe even split the sign up fields between videos. Obviously this is a good candidate for testing.

One major thing I don't like though are the highly restrictive options for gender and orientation. In the case of a dating site, classifying gender does seem like a neccesary evil, but the options could at least allow more people to sign up. I would suggest, as one possibility, adding more options, such as none and other, and also making this a check box selection for people with more than one gender.

Additionally, why do you ask for orientation? You don't need to know this, and you fail to ask the necessary question of "which genders would you like to be matched with". These things are not the same. This section could also allow check box selection of desired matches.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is one of those ideas that seem so obvious to me that I wonder, "Why didn't I think of that." It needs some work, but it's got great potential. Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER8> I really like the idea (as many others here seem to!) but there's an inherent problem with going beyond the US: some of the funny content is not available to the rest of us.

I was voting on some dog against a door stop, which was nice, but the following video was a clip from Portlandia, which I was not allowed to watch (in Canada.)

There were only the choices to not enjoy, or enjoy the video. There was no "skip this please" option.

Otherwise, keep working on this, it definitely has potential!

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting idea, but I find myself bored watching the videos, hoping they get funny (in some cases ... at all), and it's souring my experience of the service itself as a result :(

</comment><comment><USER10> I like the idea of using sense of humor as compatibility test. Has this been done before or did you come up with this idea?

</comment><comment><USER11> Hey there. Few things that I think could be improved:

1\. The slider could have a wider (in height) clickable area, I find it hard to click. Make it fatter a bit.

2\. When I decide whether I find a video funny or not, I then click vote and the video changes to a new one. I did that a couple of time and I was still in the middle of a video, I would have preferred if the vote was registered but that I could keep watching the video, and then click an arrow or something when I want to watch the next one.

3\. I put a bogus postal code, so I can't use the "Meet people" feature. Would be nice if I could see my "laugh profile" and see people with a similar profile, without having to be geographically within 20 miles. Or let the search use different conditions, as 20 miles is kind of random.

4\. Also, it's nothing major but, the rest of the world doesn't use imperial units.

I'll update as I find more.

</comment><comment><USER12> Excuse my ignorance, what does MVP stand for?

<comment><USER13> Minimum Viable Product. They generally exist to validate an idea before investing time and money into it.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Pretty cool. Couple of ideas:

1\. Ability to skip voting on a video (looks like you can click "watch videos" at the top to skip, but then it might come back)

2\. Ability to suggest funny videos, since it seems the selection is limited (or the random generator is skewed!)

</comment><comment><USER15> Great idea. My first impression is: "wait, I'm being judged after only two videos?" You probably want to increase that number to five or so. Good luck!

<comment><USER16> I would like to see more about the metric used, for example, an explanation of the model or formula you're using to weigh the dimensions of my sense of humor for classifying or clustering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Cool idea.

One nitpick is: you're asking me to vote on whether a set of 30 or so jokes in a three and a half minute clip were funny. It's hard to do that, because some were funny, and some were not. Maybe with time addressing of the clips (possible with Youtube URLs I believe) you could offer up shorter segments and the idea would be more convincing, and probably work better as well.

</comment><comment><USER18> Interesting take on behavioral target marketing. Good start. Have you considered adding a stronger call to action for the sign up process (upper right).

Also I noticed a blue button. Have you considered split testing red and yellow buttons? Those colors consistently work. Check out the color of Paypal or Amazon's CTA buttons - you'll see what I mean.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER19> Nice idea,

btw you should make the Facebook Page a 'Community Page' not a person so I can like it not have to friend it.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think it's an alluring idea for match making. But what's to stop OKCupid from releasing this same feature for their audience in less than 3 days. I assure you that their engineers also read Hacker News. That aside, really innovative use of youtube, better than Feross Aboukhadijeh's creation of Youtube Instant.

</comment><comment><USER21> Great idea! However, when I signed up, the first clip I found was 7 minutes long. Based on that it would take quite a while to build up any sort of useful profile. Some sort of screening questions might be helpful, e.g. do you have a morbid sense of humor? Do you generally like these comedians? Etc.

</comment><comment><USER22> I am curious of clustering and categorization of sense of humor which they used while choosing the videos.

</comment><comment><USER23> I don't like the slider. I'd prefer a boolean :) or :(. Other than that, this is great.

</comment><comment><USER24> Make the smilies clickable.

Unless you expect your users to make an in-between choice (in that case, making the smilies clickable will go against what you want)

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm loving this idea, except I'd be afraid to date anyone who _does_ share my sense of humor :)

You're onto something here -- keep us posted.

</comment><comment><USER26> Have you also considered doing a browser extension that will display an interface for voting when you're on Youtube?

</comment><comment><USER27> love the stark contrasting colors in your design. wonder how the login/vote buttons would look if they were flat like the rest of the design. too bad i already have an awesome gf (with a very similar sense of humor), i would definitely use this.

</comment><comment><USER28> The top photo looks kind of silly on resolutions above 1440, but otherwise it's very nice.

</comment><comment><USER29> Brilliant! This would be the dating site of my choice had I needed one. Great job guys!

</comment><comment><USER30> dood this has potential to crush it and I rarely see stuff like this. Please keep working on it and innovate some more.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is a truly awesome idea.

</comment><comment><USER32> Nice but time consuming idea.

</comment><comment><USER33> This is an amazing idea.

</comment><comment><USER34> Love this idea!

</comment><comment><USER35> Wow...good job!

</comment><comment><USER36> I would be shocked if you've used a dating site before. Not to critize your product (the site looks pretty nice), but it's solving a problem that doesn't exist.

<comment><USER37> For what it's worth, there was a new yorker article from around the middle of 2011 where the feature is online dating. One of the researchers they interviewed concluded that guys are basically looking for girls that laugh at their jokes, and girls are basically looking for guys to make them laugh (to the point that they joked their next dating service would be called girlsthatlaughatmyjokes.com and guysthatmakemelaugh.com)

<comment><USER36> I worked on something similar to the MVP shown (not about jokes specifically, but a "gimic" dating site). The real problems have to do with gender imbalance, men shotgunning messages, and the fundamental issue with these gimic sites: attractivness is all that matters online. It really doesn't matter how witty you can make yourself appear (which, I'm not sure this site allows for that? seems to just see if 2 users have the same sense of humor, not how funny someone is), if you're not attractive. Where in the real world, personality and confidence can have a much larger effect. The unspoken assumption is not that people want girlsthatlaughatmyjokes.com and guysthatmakemelaugh.com, It's hotgirlsthatlaughtatmyjokes.com and hotguysthatmakemelaugh.com.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why don't freelance hackers and development companies create startups? - <AUTHOR>

They have the skills and a good idea of what people are prepared to pay for so why do they continue to build bespoke software instead of creating a startup? <comment><USER2> Here are several reasons, from experience -

1) Consultants live off of short term payouts. Its a challenging business leap to go from getting paid lump sums now to building something essentially on spec and hoping for a payout later.

2) When you are a consultant, your time is typically tied to billable hours. It becomes extremely difficult to sacrifice billable hours in the short term with hopes for it performing well in the future.

3) Taking resources away from clients to work on an internal project narrows the bandwidth you have for taking on more clients.

4) Consulting work typically is linear - in that you build once, to the client's spec, release it and then move on to the next project. Its rare to be in it for the long haul, improving on different iterations and monitoring performance. This is a big mental gap when building a product - its not just a single launch and done like a client project. Its a long term process nurturing and iterating until the product is successful. We consultants just don't have enough experience in this, and have become pretty hardwired to projects being "done" and instant payouts at launch time. Personally, I've struggled with this a lot in the past and am still learning how to break free of this "one and done" mentality.

So basically thats why consultants who make successful products are an exceptional and special breed.

<comment><USER3> Interesting angle, as I'm probably the opposite on the 'done' aspect for client work. I mean, at some point, I stop, but usually want to keep iterating on things for the client when they simply don't want to. They don't have the bandwidth for continual iteration - they need something that works for needs X, Y and Z. Once it meets those needs, they're 'done' (and usually 'done' with me too). I struggle to _not_ keep working on something, iterating, etc beyond what the initial specs were.

I'm working with a couple clients where it's an interesting mix - we're iterating the product to meet evolving needs, and discovering some of those needs as we go along, but many projects aren't like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Some people may simply enjoy the process of development moreso than the process of building a business.

I've been at this crossroads for a a while now, and as a local startup guy in the area has posited, "consulting is like crack". From a financial standpoint, it's pretty hard to give up - even moreso if you're not really passionately on fire for _one_ idea, which I do think you really _need_ to be to focus on that one idea/service/product for a long time (years).

Additionally, just because you've got an idea about what people are willing to pay for because you've done consulting for some clients, doesn't mean that you _can_ (easily). Much of what you've learned working for, say, 3 clients, may need to be validated with a larger group. The few clients you worked with may have extremely focused needs, and what you've built for them has limited value outside of those handful of orgs. _Finding_ the other orgs that could also benefit from a similar service/product may simply be too much work (and it's not guaranteed to find anyone at all).

On top of that, some of what you've built may have been predicated on confidential information/processes which you can't replicate. You can often whiteroom something, but again, is it worth it?

It may surprise you, but many companies are willing to pay a _lot_ of money for a solution that ties in with existing systems and matches their business process 100%, rather than use a genericized system which they'd have to adapt to (and which some of their competition might be using as well).

In my case, I've not yet found an idea that I'm really passionate about pursuing as a full-time venture. Until that time comes, I consult (and do things like indieconf.com - conference for freelancers like myself!), getting to the point where, should an idea strike me, I can self-fund the venture if need be.

</comment><comment><USER4> Consulting is a job. You have one or a couple clients, and you only have to satisfy them to get paid. You can work during the day, relax at night, take vacations, and generally let work come to you, since there is massive demand beyond supply for your services.

A startup is your whole life. Your job isn't just to satisfy a couple focused business people, but generally thousands or millions of fickle consumers. There is a high probability you won't ever be paid for your work, and if you are paid, it is often way more than you actually need.

<comment><USER5> > There is a high probability you won't ever be paid for your work, and if you > are paid, it is often way more than you actually need.

Way less you mean? Getting paid way more than you actually need is the part of why people start a business isn't it? :P

<comment><USER6> I think he did mean "more". If you could choose between being more or less guaranteed a certain amount of pay, why take the risk of working and potentially getting nothing out of it? The answer might be because if you do succeed, the returns are much higher, but if you don't care about the higher returns, then you're taking the risk for no reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 1) They'd have to quit consulting to be a real startup. It takes a fulltime effort. Otherwise its just a small business.

Most software devs get paid quite a bit to consult, so they'd be taking a huge pay cut.

A lot of people don't like that risk.

2) Most dev shops I know have side projects they release as products

3) Mostly importantly, building products is _really_ hard to do well. To make any significant amount of money from them is even harder, which makes those dev contracts look so much easier and accessible.

</comment><comment><USER8> Some of my consulting work integrates different packages - commercial, academic, and in-house - into a single system. It also needs to understand the local database configuration, the cluster queuing system, the shared filesystem, and other customer-specific configurations.

I have a framework for this project. It takes about a week to write. The other year of work I did for one client were the modules and components to fit their internal requirements. This included porting some of their software from IRIX to Linux. Overall, only a relatively small amount of that development could be shared with another client.

I thought about spinning that part off as a product. I haven't been able to make a viable business plan out of it. The type of people who could build their own components for my framework is the same as the one who could build the framework in the first place - and indeed, other companies have in-house frameworks for the same thing. And while I think mine is better, it's biased towards Python but this sort of software tends to be written by IT staff more interested in C# or Java.

Also, I like working close to the end-users, with frequent iterations to get what they want. Selling software (I work in chemistry, where it's hard to develop web-based apps due to the proprietary nature of the end-user's chemical structures) is one step removed from the users, so I don't have the same feeling of connection.

When consulting it's easier to know that work = income = profit. With a startup or product development, you spend a lot more effort to develop a product before knowing that you'll make profit.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm almost twenty-three years old with schooling for Computer Science and Business doing freelance full-stack engineering work primarily for the flexibility (fiancée has a few years of school left so I'm delaying "settling in" because there are no interesting tech companies around her University), and I would love to start a startup.

However, as some other posters have said, a big burden is the regular pay. Freelance work pays now when I need the money, verses startup work being, in a lot of cases, basically an "option" to be paid later...maybe. I'm working on a pretty ambitious start-up idea in spare time but unfortunately I can't afford at the moment to focus my entire work life on it. Ideally I would try to bootstrap it but other expenses ( _cough_ student loans _cough_ ) take some precedence.

It really is a frustrating position to be in.

</comment><comment><USER10> Perhaps the question should be why do people who could be billing their time to enterprises for $100+/hr or on 6-figure salaries spend years of their life trying to build a startup that has a very small chance of becoming profitable. Consulting or even full-time employment is debatably a more economically rational choice.

Thankfully, people are not rational economic actors so there's a healthy ecosystem where talented hackers are basically free to work on whatever they like. Here's to the freedom of being able to do what we love, whatever that may be.

I personally like consulting work as it's very low overhead, get to meet lots of smart/interesting clients, high cashflow, exposure to lots of exciting new projects. I even enjoy the hustling and pitching part of the business. I'd like to build a successful product one day (as most consultants do) but it's hard to find an idea I care about enough to dedicate years of my life to, especially when I have a steady stream of consulting work that pays well and satisfies my need to create.

</comment><comment><USER11> Most do.

37Signals, Pivotal, Zurb are great examples of companies who have transitioned from client based to product, or are currently doing both.

I'm a freelance developer and based on my situation and those of my peers, everyone is working on side projects. The reason I choose to consult and have clients is because it lets me be my own boss and create a business doing other people's (clients) work. I can craft and hone my skills doing client work, while always brainstorming an idea or product to launch in my spare time. When the moment strikes I will already have all the resources and knowledge available to make a great stab at the startup scene.

</comment><comment><USER12> My guess is that some freelance hackers do indeed create startups, just not the majority of them.

Regarding development companies, well you'd have to ask yourself why the owner who has already spent time going through the pains of starting up, want to throw away a working business in favour of one that may or may not work.

The owner could encourage side projects if so minded, but it's more likely once their business is running, that they have too much to worry about running one business to have time to think about creating another.

Either that or they have lost interest once the dough starts coming in!

</comment><comment><USER13> Many do! 37 Signals, Magento, and also our agency Company 52 (responsible for Pluggio and TinyGrab) being some examples.

<comment><USER14> Harvest, Balance Media, Disrupto, Pivotal (I know 6 months ago they were starting to get serious about Tracker as a product), and that's only off the top of my head. I think turning to product dev is a pretty common aspiration for consulting companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think as many folks have said, building real products and startups is a risk - the kind of risk that most freelancers tend to avoid. Freelancing and not knowing where your paycheck for the next 6 months is coming from is risk enough.

That said, any development company who wants their revenues to outpace their ability to hire new employees is going to be investing some measure of their talent, resources, and insight into new products. Pivotal, 37signals, etc, etc, etc.

I work for a company called ELC (<http://elctech.com>). Over the years we've been in business have started RightCart (bought by Buy.com), RightSignature (online doc signing) and RightScale (cloud management company). All of these began as internal tools or projets and were spun off into fully functional companies, taking some of our developers with them.

For us, spinning off these companies makes for a great investment and when they succeed, a big feather in our cap. But the fact is, the internal structure of a startup (at least any successful one) is worlds different from a professional services group, and spinning them off is necessary for their success. Times we've tried to do the startup entirely within our organization has been considerably less successful.

</comment><comment><USER16> As a freelance developer you don't have to build things that are profitable. You just need to build something for someone with money that they think will be profitable. I don't know how many stupid products I've built that I don't personally find to be profitable.

It's easy to find many products that are wanted by only one person. Therefore, consulting is easy. Building a startup is about finding one product that many people want, which is much more difficult.

</comment><comment><USER17> Typically, wife/kids. Also, mortgage/car payment.

</comment><comment><USER18> Can you give me an example of a development company or freelancer that _isn't_ working on their own products in some capacity?

<comment><USER19> This is a really short-sighted view, there are literally thousands (if not more) of freelancers and development companies who have no wish to work on their own products. It just isn't in some peoples mindsets. They literally just don't care.

Just because in our dimension every development agency, or freelancer writes a blog doesn't mean they're the only guys who exist.

<comment><USER18> > there are literally thousands (if not more)

Like who?

<comment><USER8> Me. I started working for myself in 2000. Certainly I've had ideas for a product, and a few that I've prototyped, but nothing more than you might expect from someone trying out a few things at home, away from their actual job.

(Strictly speaking that's not quite correct. I have released a few open source "products", but I charge no money for them. My revenue for the last 12 years is from consulting and training.)

<comment><USER18> That qualifies as "in some capacity" as far as I'm concerned.

<comment><USER8> Which, the release of open source projects, or the two weeks of work over 10 years which never went anywhere?

It feels like any number of employees who read HN are in the same category as freelancers who read HN in having any of a number of, say, github projects and ideas for products which never go anywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It takes a while to come to the "product does not suck" stage. People need to be able to eat and survive during the development stage and there are only handful of examples of companies that switched successfully from service to product (Mailchimp, 37 signals and few others come to mind). Starting a startup/new product requires full time commitment. Part time commitment often means part time success so for a lot of people it is better to stick to security they have providing freelance work and services. Just my 2c

</comment><comment><USER21> What a coincidence. I had a discussion with the head of a software development house for start-ups on this weekend. He strictly said no to such a proposal because they have had a only failures trying to build products. I think it takes a lot of commitment and full focus to really build a successful product than just moonlightining on an idea.

</comment><comment><USER22> I see hybrids of this a lot and, as dalke points out, consulting is an important part of having a solid income while working to spin off in-house tools or new ideas - much like we see developers here offering consulting hours while bootstrapping.

</comment><comment><USER23> People pay 6 figures a year for part time work doing hard tech things. That's a comfortable, easy living with interesting work and people.

Additionally, I've helped make several OTHER people's start-ups, I'm just not a real employee.

</comment><comment><USER24> Freelancing / development companies are businesses. A developer just getting started as a freelancer _is_ a startup. Try taking a serious run at two startups at the same time. It's hard, and I think that's your answer.

</comment><comment><USER25> Creating a startup is not easy and you have to slave your self over for the first year or two easy and if it all fails then you just lost a lot of your time/money investment.

</comment><comment><USER26> Many have the best of both worlds: a small team environment with freedom, and the ability to pay the bills right now.

</comment><comment><USER27> An awful lot of startups fail. Some people don't want to break new ground or change the world or whatever and certainly don't want the exposure to risk that is involved. They just want to pay their bills. There is nothing really wrong with seeking an honest day's pay for an honest day's labor.

</comment><comment><USER28> I see two reasons: (1) A very small proportion of the applications ever built, constitute ballgame-changing breakthroughs. The other applications could still make some money, but not much. (2) The closer to the client, the bigger the slice in the value chain. A client may pay 5000 USD for small modifications -- often only applicable to his own setup -- to a program that may only have cost 100 USD to buy in the first place or that he even downloaded free of charge. In other words, for lots of developers, it makes economically more sense to customize a ball-game changing application for a client rather than to spend their time trying to push self-created but actually mediocre applications.</comment>


The Pixelbook is being used to test Google's Fuchsia OS - <AUTHOR> http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/12/30/pixelbook-used-test-googles-fuchsia-os/ <comment><USER3> Aside from control, what does this provide over Linux?

IMO, the Linux desktop problem is due partially to relying on the antiquated X Windows system, but mostly a lack of funding a good vision, e.g. Unity.

After growing up with OpenLook, then Motif, the plethora of Linux window managers, and unhappy years with Windows, I noticed most of the elegant apps were being written for OSX. I'm not sure how much of this is due to the devs or the OS/libraries, but probably both.

The solution I want is a Linux OS, a WM with a good, cohesive, long term vision, and an easy way to build apps within at vision — something like a native Electron minus the memory and CPU overhead. I believe Google could do this.

<comment><USER4> Control is all of it.

Security on Android is a joke for 80%+ of users. They can't run on the latest version of Android, because various vendors' drivers are in out-of-tree kernel patches that are un-upstreamable for non-technical reasons.

(By comparison, Chrome OS is also Linux-based, but, IIRC, it requires all shipping devices to have drivers upstreamed.)

Owning an OS with a stable device driver ABI would allow Google to fix the Android fragmentation problem, and make sure all devices stay up-to-date ala Chrome OS.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h > un-upstreamable for non-technical reasons

It was my understanding that it was almost completely technical reason, i.e., vendors write drivers that mostly work but are completely terrible from a quality perspective.

<comment><USER5> Quality problems with code at this magnitude aren't really a technical problem (i.e. not something you can fix by asking the same programmers who created the problems to fix them.) It's rare that good programmers could write code as badly as these patches demonstrate. Even actively-harmful coding standards directed from the top down wouldn't cause this kind of code.

Instead, the kind of code that ends up in these driver blobs is caused by, in essence, a political problem: they simply _hired bad programmers_. The only way to fix that, is to demand that the driver vendors' management teams adopt higher standards for their software hires: that they fire many of the programmers they have, and hire new ones in a much more stringent process. And probably also pay them more, because that stringent process will likely choke their existing funnel out of existence.

It's much the same as, say, finding that a company is using a low-quality outsourcing firm. Would you say that there's a technical problem inside the outsourcing firm? No, you'd say that there's a management problem in the _choice_ of outsourcing firm.

<comment><USER6> I don't know if this applies so much at the phone / laptop level, but for embedded devices, the example code / reference drivers are often _terrible_ , but it's not entirely fair to blame the devs. This issue is usually not so much that they're bad programmers and more that they're good _electronics engineers_ who, once the hardware is done, are the only people with the knowledge required to implement the drivers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The actual commit includes some details on disk paver.

[https://github.com/fuchsia- mirror/docs/commit/520ed01fd6f258...](https://github.com/fuchsia- mirror/docs/commit/520ed01fd6f2585bd75607e3671604b5de7998fa)

</comment><comment><USER8> Linux is the last Unix and that is ok. Unix is a philosophy, not an implementation. Linux mocked Mach, but was usurped by the hypervisor, violently corralling Linux in a microkernel environment anyway. Lots of things are in the kernel that don't need to be, making them non-updatable, as someone else controls the keys. That past, present and future is awesome. But lets build from the past and build the future. Not saying Fuschia is it, but as Unikernels and Exokernels have shown us, Linux itself is just an app in the stack. Unix is a framework for running processes. Your domain problems are the real problems, the OS is an implementation detail.

</comment><comment><USER9> I wish Google was more outspoken about their plans for Fuchsia. So far, all we have is a lot of speculation.

<comment><USER10> I think they don't know themselves what will become of it. It's more a research project similarly to Midori.

<comment><USER11> Yes, and there are tons of research OSs. Most of them suffer from a lack of Hardware support. I'd be ready to switch to OpenBSD/Solaris/QNX/other fancy OS tomorrow if all my HW components were supported.

I doubt anything non-Linux based is ever becoming popular within the next 100 years. ;)

<comment><USER10> They don't need to replace Linux in one big event. They'll probably test and safely move some working ideas to their production OSes (similarly as Span was introduced in .NET from Midori).

There is also some effort in abstracting device drivers in Android (Project Treble) but how it could be used in Magenta is not clear.

Personally I'd be really interested in seeing this OS deployed in production. I like Linux but it's XXI century, we should be slowly adopting basic security principles in our OSes (capabilities, microkernels). But I fear that Magenta will look similar to Android, while it is open source Google will internally use a customized version that the customers will not be able to compile themselves.

<comment><USER11> Sure, it could be a process and Project Treble goes in the right direction.

However it's insane if you consider how many device drivers there are for Windows and Linux. The large majority of Linux kernel code is drivers. When you consider that Linux still has problems to run on certain hardware, then the problem becomes more obvious.

My bet is, in case this ever becomes a success, then only for a subset of vendors that are willing to cooperate closely with Google. (Oh yeah, and everybody needs to throw away the old hardware.)

I wished efforts would instead go into improving Linux Kernel. It reminds me of Google saying that JavaScript is a complete dead end and must be replaced. So they created Dart which surely has a great design but nobody uses it - <USER2> JS is now better than ever.

Moreover it's a bit of a lame excuse that vendors don't update their Android modifications. It already start that Google doesn't manage to get their Linux kernel modifications into the mainline Kernel - almost violating OpenSource principles...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> From Wikipedia: _Chrome OS is an operating system designed by Google that is based on the Linux kernel and uses the Google Chrome web browser as its principal user interface._

OK so why not Google Chrome web browser on top of Fuchsia, instead of Linux kernel and the usual user space stuff? Google can call that retrofit anything they want, so it could still be Chrome OS.

<comment><USER13> Fuchsia can display web content, it has a web view that currently webkit based not chrome/blink. I think the plan is to use chrome/chromium web browser, once/if arrives in fuchsia,that will be interesting.

<comment><USER14> There is actually a fuchsia port in the upstream chromium tree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Under this OS, who decides what capabilities an app has?

</comment><comment><USER16> I would love this so much. A Linux OS with the support of a major company and decent UI/UX? Yes please.

<comment><USER17> Except it's not Linux?</comment></comment>


The Next Lisp: Back to the Future - <AUTHOR> http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/nextlisp(1).htm

<comment><AUTHOR> But it seems Mark Tarver (the author) is ending his work on Qi:

[http://groups.google.com/group/Qilang/browse_frm/thread/5927...](http://groups.google.com/group/Qilang/browse_frm/thread/592773c562017d87)

</comment><comment><USER2> I find it amusing that although Mr. Tarver himself seems to admit his ideas on the future of Lisp could be better presented by omitting his strawman arguments supposedly debunking the "ecomonics" of open source efforts, he nonetheless can't seem to restrain himself from including them.

My suggestion to Mr. Tarver: if you want me to take your language ideas seriously, save your "opinionating" until after your technical ideas are widely adopted. As much as I'd like to try out a promising language like Qi, an ideological rant against open source won't help convince me or anyone else it's a good idea.

<comment><USER3> And to make his rant painful on top of unconvincing, he confuses free-as-in- speech with gratis.

<comment><USER4> No. He starts talking about FOSS - MIT and BSD stuff. This is nearly in every case free economically. And the GPL stuff is almost always free economically too. In practice if you give people complete freedom over sources you really have to give them the same freedom you have to change and distribute. So by undercutting price tends aymptotically to zero. People know that and so they make it free from the outset. They make their money from hand-holding.

<comment><USER3> My understanding of what he said was - to paraphrase and re-interpret a bit - "Free software is BS, because nothing is (as you put it) 'free economically'."

That's two meanings of the word 'free' in one proposition. The first refers to the rights of the users, and the second refers to putting in labor or cash to create something. The fact that the two might be closely related in practice doesn't matter. For this to work, you'd have to make the additional claim "Free-as-in-Speech is identical to Free-as-in-Beer", which would be insane. See: OpenBSD's cd sales.

Additionally, he's throwing in a third concept, which we could safely call "Free-as-in-Lunch".

What he seems to believe is "Free-as-in-Speech software is BS because nothing is Free-as-in-Lunch". Which I still disagree with, but I think would be a more direct way of expressing the point without using confusion about "free" to a rhetorical advantage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >> 1\. Recursion as the primary mean of expressing procedure calling.

Does anyone know what that statement means?

The author misses the real essence of Lisp, which is that:

1) a single data structure, the heterogeneous list, can be used to express everything in the language, including the program itself.

2) the linear nature of lists makes it easy to recurse on them, thereby enabling significant use of recursion as a control structure, thereby simplifying the reasoning process about the code.

3) the simplicity and pervasiveness of the list structure makes it easy to write macros in the language, thereby increasing the range of abstractions that the language can express.

4) bindings are dynamic, increasing language flexibility and making the use of a REPL even more valuable.

<comment><USER6> I think his point 1 was your point 2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Makes some good points, but calling Python a sugaring on Lisp is a bit weird, especially since it misses 3 of his 5 philosophies of Lisp.

</comment><comment><USER7> Do I hate that the only implementation of Qi is not fully FOSS? Yes.

Do I love this essay? Yes.</comment>


Remind HN: It's Father's Day (in the US anyway)  - <AUTHOR>

Call your Dad. Life is short and you only have so much time to connect (or reconnect) with the people in your lives. <comment><USER2> How can I forget? The spam level is through the roof - every company I have ever done business with is exhorting me to buy one of their wares "for Dad".

I realise there is some good intent around many of these special "appreciation" days, but I am starting to hate them with a passion.

People, if you like your parents, call them once a week through the year. Don't ignore them and then once a year send them an iPod.

</comment><comment><USER3> I called my dad but he didn't sound particularly happy. Oh well.</comment>