Rate our pivot: A Python cloud spreadsheet  - <AUTHOR>

We're a not-quite-startup that's pivoting. We're looking for feedback on our new product, Dirigible, a programmable cloud spreadsheet.

   http://www.projectdirigible.com/
 Dirigible is a spreadsheet that displays in a browser and calculates on the server. It uses Python both as its formula language and as its (more than) macro language. Our users can run their spreadsheets in parallel across a bunch of servers.
It's in free beta right now, we're aiming to start charging for compute time soon (we're using EC2, so will be charging a mark-up on what Amazon charges us).
We'd appreciate any feedback at all, but we're particularly interested in:
- Ideas about people that might benefit from using it (so far we have thought of bioinformaticians, finance professionals and accountants/actuaries).
- Missing features that would prevent you from using it.
- How well we're presenting our case.
- How smooth the signup process is.
Any thoughts would be much appreciated -- thanks in advance! <comment><USER2> I love the product, but I have doubts on whether or not you can make this a long term success.

>>>\- How well we're presenting our case.<<<

I think that's the central challenge to your startup. The problem isn't that whether or not dirigible is good (which it is). It's the fact that why should anyone use this?

As the average jane I really don't care about using Python in my spreadsheet or that it can contain other objects than just text or numbers. I really don't care. I have Google on one end, Zoho in another corner and something nice from Microsoft that's as cool as the Office on my PC.

So, why should I invest time to learn something like this? The website really isn't that clear on the matter and other than terms like that why should anyone move beyond options that work okay for now?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's excellent feedback, many thanks. I think that you're right that the average user won't get any benefits from Dirigible -- it only really helps power users, so it sounds like we need to be crystal-clear on that, and then make it clear how it can benefit those power users:

\- maintainability (which is the real advantage of the whole objects-in-the- grid thing)

\- calculation speed (through parallelism and big-iron servers on the backend)

\- potentially, larger spreadsheets (we'll need to work to implement that but in theory we should be able to support vast datasets)

Would that improve the pitch, do you think?

<comment><USER2> There isn't any need to thank me. I actually like doing this.

Yes, but the thing is that why can't I just run this locally without having to worry about network lag?

If you target quants then most of the serious ones already have their own setup to crunch numbers. So, why should they use something like that? Or why shouldn't they just write a python script on EC2? And download a raw text file or something instead?

I think that the core of your product is wonderful and it has many, many uses, but I'm afraid that as a market the entire spreadsheet business isn't the best one to be in. I might be wrong as I hardly have any experience other than reading stuff, but the thing is that it seems to _me_ no one will have the, um, otaku in this field to make your product a success (as Seth Godin would say).

I just hope that I'm wrong.

<comment><AUTHOR> I hope you're wrong too, but it's a very good point. The advantage we _think_ we have over writing their own Python (or Hadoop, or...) on EC2 is that it's just easier to put these things together in a spreadsheet environment. But we clearly need proof points for that, and perhaps we should be focusing as much as possible on finding someone who can champion it.

One thought -- as lazylland suggested elsewhere in this thread, perhaps we should consider downplaying the spreadsheet aspect? Ultimately, what we're trying to do is provide an easy-to-use way for people to access large-scale computing resources. It just so happens that a spreadsheet-like interface turns out to be a great way of doing that, but that doesn't mean we need to bill ourselves immediately as "a spreadsheet".

(Also -- it sounds like we should be promoting the option of running the app on local server farms more heavily.)

<comment><USER2> You know something why don't you take the core of your service (the ability to handle large datasets) and just make something that's essentially Quantitative Analysis for dummies. Or a HFT fund for dummies?

There are tons of, um for the lack of a better word, amateur would be stock brokers who like to play the market, but they really don't have the knowledge neither the access to tools like this. So, if you offer this to them then the sky is the limit to what you can make. Essentially leverage all of your abilities to help amateurs to professionals work in the cloud and handle datasets.

Moreover, replace python by your own query language that has an english like syntax that will appeal to such people.

If you see this then can you email me to continue this conversation? This is an interesting problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Only just saw this! I'll drop you a line now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Charging based on compute time makes no sense to me. Not only does it force your customer to guesstimate their required compute time (a function of code they haven't yet written and servers they don't administer), but it also implies that your service offers little more value than the commodity infrastructure underpinning it.

I'm far more likely to have advance knowledge of the number of inputs and outputs I'm expecting and to pay more for features. My gut feeling is that the real value in what you've developed is that business types with little programming knowledge can use a spreadsheet based on data automatically imported from elsewhere. They'll be the sort of people very happy to pay more for widgets that simplify using the relevant libraries (your screen-scraping example is excellent) and very uncertain about how many minutes I need (unless I'm doing something very simple on the free plan). If you need to charge more for intensive processes it might make more sense to have it as an abstract bolt-on like Heroku's dynos that can be added on top of the monthly fee.

Unrelated aside: for some reason I have to sign in to view one of your examples: /user/tutorial/sheet/1024

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, thanks for that. Our model for the compute-time-plus-markup was the plethora of companies that make money doing a similar model with storage -- Dropbox being the shining example. But you raise a good point that those are inherently more predictable for the users. You know that you need _N_ Gb of storage because that's what's on your hard drive, whereas knowing how many seconds a calculation will take is much less knowable.

Of course, if we were to take the more-technical route suggested by others on this page (ie. moved from being a "super-powerful programmable spreadsheet" to being "easy cloud supercomputing [with a shiny spreadsheetlike interface]") then perhaps our current pricing model would make sense.

On the other hand, if we stick to the spreadsheet model, you could well be right.

Hmm. Food for thought. Thanks for the pointer, anyway, and in particular for the reference to Heroku's dynos -- always good to know how people have successfully solved similar problems!

Oh, and thanks for the heads-up re: the sheet that needed a sign-in, I've fixed that, and 1025 as well (it seemed to have the same problem).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very interesting tool.

Two main thoughts:

I felt that you could remove the word programmable from 'programmable cloud spreadsheet' - since most people will think that spreadsheets are programmable.

I am a little worried that you have only gone half-way to your users. If you are about the cloud and your users understand that, then perhaps you should let them deploy to their own cloud machines, the other alternative would be to not charge per compute time but to charge per operation (line of code).

Beyond that you might need to experiment with a couple of things: Try giving an example of how much a small license will buy me, or just giving me an example per compute time. Try letting me just buy buy time so that you can see what I would do with it, and perhaps don't show the number of concurrent servers in the signup page - just making the decision process simpler. Having lots of options means more decisions that a new user will have to go through - it might work for you if they are aligned with your users, but otherwise it might just mean more work for you to do to get it right.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for that.

Re: "programmable" -- what we're trying to emphasise with that is that it's more programmable than (say) Excel -- the whole Python in cells thing, plus its ability to rework the recalculation loop with Python code. Our first cut was actually "a Python cloud spreadsheet" but we figured that we didn't want to tie ourselves down to people who already knew and liked Python, so we moved on to "programmable". Is there a better word, do you think?

We've definitely been thinking about having some kind of option for people to deploy to their own private clouds (or indeed to their own server farms) but I see that we've not put anything on the site about that; we'll add something for that.

I like the idea of having an example of what the different pricing plans/compute time allowances get you, we'll definitely add that.

We've had a lot of debates internally about the concurrent server support; perhaps we should just drop that from the plans entirely?

<comment><USER4> Re: "programmable". What you are saying makes sense. But when I first see a site that says 'programmable cloud spreadsheet' - I don't get that.

Infact, there is a part in me that is still trying to figure out in which problems you are better than Google Spreadsheets and its programming model (even though I understand that you are different from it).

Perhaps what you need to do is talk about the problems that you solve instead of what you are building. This will definitely be helpful when trying to get to product/market fit.

Re: dropping concurrent server support - I doubt that anyone can really tell you what you should do there. You need to experiment. And the answer right now (with early adopters) might be very different from the answer a few months down the road.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, that makes sense -- the classic benefits versus features balance -- which is, of course, made more complex by the fact that one user's benefit is another user's feature, but that's not to say that there's no balance to strike. One thing we did with our earlier product was to have a "How we can help..." section on the front page, naming three markets, with links through to separate pages for each, naming appropriate problem and solution/benefits for each. Perhaps we need to do the same thing here.

Re: what we're better at than Google spreadsheets -- our big benefits come in simplifying complex spreadsheets, by using programmerly techniques such as objects/lists/NumPy arrays in cells, and in automated parallelisation for large calculations. These are definitely power user features, for normal cashflow spreadsheets and the like there's no advantage to using Dirigible instead of Google.

(Random thought: we're currently using the example of calculating the orbits of the planets to show a bunch of those features off. We chose that example specifically because it's simple enough for most technical people to grok pretty quickly and doesn't require any real domain knowledge to see what's going on. Perhaps we also need more industry-specific examples to make the same point -- eg. pricing portfolios of exotic options for the finance guys.)

Re: concurrent server support -- well, I guess a bit of A/B testing might be in order -- with a mind to the fact that we'll need to keep running the tests as time goes on and we (fingers crossed) cross the chasm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not going to comment on the usefulness of the product but...

1) I love that the website presents a video right away that is calm and clear and explains both the simplicity and the power at the same time

2) What you revealed here about the simple fact that you're running right on top of EC2; I think that you should be made clear on the website because it's a trustworthy brand and a transparent business aspect

3) The light blue background colour hurts my eyes. It's very intense and sharp and not pleasant background for the white logo.

4) What is the logo? I Balloon trapped in ropes? A H2O molecule?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. It's really useful:

1\. Cool. We noticed yesterday that it could use an update, but we'll stick with the calm simplicity.

2\. Excellent idea.

3\. Interesting. We'll experiment with a less intense version to see how that looks.

4\. Like ihumanable says, it's an airship where the gas envelope is a cloud. It breaks up into pixels to suggest a spreadsheet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Do you have any plans to license the software to clients, where we could use it on our own servers? The functionality looks great, but I have concerns about proprietary and confidential information.

<comment><USER7> We do. We're using the public version to polish the interface and debug the server provisioning, but a self-hosted version is definitely on the cards.

<comment><USER6> What kind of pricing model are you planning?

<comment><AUTHOR> To be honest, we haven't given that any thought. We are open to suggestions, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hi,

I know this is outside of your requested feedback but have you considered adding some vertical business back ends to it.

I cannot see why I would want to use your spreadsheet over google apps'. But, if you where to offer built in statistical analysis or say accounting functions, then market it to that user base you may be able to make it stick.

Another example would be common functions used to perform land surveys.

Just my 2 cents. Probably worth less than that.

<comment><USER8> Just to add a little more... Could you create an API so third party developers could create "function packs" that could be bought and sold to end users?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that's a great idea -- sorry for the slow response (PyCon got in the way)

We already support a bunch of Python modules -- for open source ones it's just a case of using pip to install them on our server -- and we've always intended to allow people to upload their own. Making it easy for people to share extension modules they've written with other people (hmm, and maybe even to charge for use, app-style) would make this much more powerful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> * 'Spreadsheet' is a really bad summary of the product. My first impression was 'Great another Office wannabe, _NEW_ with Python', but when I watched the video, I saw it as "effortless desktop supercomputing" .. cool !

* Another message that could be given is "wrangling big data the easy way"

* Focus the product on the niches you have already identified, all the big boys with the hard numbers to crunch. Do not dilute for the Mom and Pop segment.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh wow, that's an ace tagline! Still, it does run on web servers, would "effortless cloud supercomputing" have as good a ring, do you think?

We're definitely going to avoid trying to cater for the Mom and Pop segment -- Google docs have a perfectly decent solution for them.

<comment><USER9> Now that I think of it .. just "effortless supercomputing" would suffice ! Maybe it's just me, but the "cloud" term is so overused now that it has become to mean everything and nothing.

Kudos to you guys on a cool product .. wish you all success !

<comment><AUTHOR> Heh, we had a crisis of conscience before we decided to use it :-) <http://blog.projectdirigible.com/?p=507>

Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> love the web interface, it's quite clean.

i didn't rtf-faq, but can you do things like import xls and google doc spreadsheets? that would be pretty cool to translate xls macros into python.

it would also be cool to have like a side by side comparison of say a common problem that's done in an xls spreadsheet versus this and how much easier it would be to use this.

nice work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We can import xls files, but only the values right now -- not the formulae or the macros. Formulae are definitely on the cards, we're not so sure about macros -- compiling VBA to Python is doable but might lead to completely unmaintainable code.

Google Docs is something we definitely need to add.

I love the idea of the side-by-side comparison, we'll have to do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice. I sometimes wonder why I have to write my formulae as one line into one tiny window when I have a full-HD screen on my desk.

The simplest example on your examples page consists of a Python program with a function and a for-loop. Perhaps you could add even simpler examples to pick up spreadsheet users (e.g. just add A1 and B1, giving C1)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that's great feedback. We kind of expect that our users will know how to do the spreadsheet basics, but I think you're right that the for loop should move out of the first tutorial, and maybe the function too. Best not to scare people off :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Clickable: :)

<http://www.projectdirigible.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Couldn't get it to work in the post. HN markup remains a mystery to me...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Reminds me of <http://www.resolversystems.com>

<comment><USER14> It is the same person.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, that's right. Resolver One is a desktop app, we're now focussing much more on the web (though we'll obviously not abandon Resolver One)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> My first thought upon getting into an actual spreadsheet was "I'd use it if it supported Ruby or Javascript". Any plans to support languages other than python?

Also, any plans to import spreadsheets from excel/gdocs?

<comment><AUTHOR> We definitely could support other languages, Python is the first one we went for because of modules like NumPy and SciPy, which are a great fit for spreadsheets that do serious number-crunching.

If we were to support Ruby or JS, the one question would be what to do with the formula language. Right now we recognise a language that is kind of a superset of both "traditional" spreadsheet formula syntax and Python expressions. (We actually started with the BNF for the Python grammar and then extended it.) Once we've parsed formulae using that grammer, we compile down to Python and run it. Now, obviously we could compile down to Ruby or JavaScript equally well, but I suspect we'd need to use a more Rubyesque or JavaScript-like formula language too, which might be... interesting.

We currently can import values from Excel, but not formulae -- we've definitely got to improve that. Gdocs import is something we'll get sorted too.

<comment><USER16> Before spending time adding support for additional languages, I would wait for someone to demonstrate their need and willingness to pay for this feature.

I have read some interesting things about Python being used in the maths/science worlds (NumPy/SciPy being great examples), but have never heard of Ruby or JS being used in this context. So I think a lot of web devs will say "It should support Ruby/JS/whatever" - but how many of those people are actually going to pay for the site? Is there any reason to support these languages other than the cool factor?

Adding support for VBA would probably help bring a lot of corporates over to your site, although I really feel for whoever ends up coding that! :-)

This is a great site btw, lovely logo/design, and a fantastic piece of tech behind it. I could see this being bought by Google and folded in to Spreadsheets.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds sensible. And definitely agreed re: VBA...

> This is a great site btw, lovely logo/design, and a fantastic piece of tech > behind it. I could see this being bought by Google and folded in to > Spreadsheets.

Thanks! Our fingers are crossed :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This looks very interesting. Have you looked at Hypernumbers? They are building something similar. YC-funded Skysheet was also working on a web-based spreadsheet but they seem to be still in private beta mode.

<comment><AUTHOR> We've been watching Hypernumbers, they look pretty good. I'd somehow missed Skysheet (great product name), thanks for the pointer!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Haven't checked it yet, but calculating on the server, in particular with Python as a macro language, sounds like a can of worms: doesn't it make very easy for any malicious user to DoS your server?

<comment><AUTHOR> We've done a lot of work on locking stuff down, and the back-end runs across a number of servers, so it would be pretty hard to take down the site as a whole. But yeah, there are bound to be loopholes.

OTOH, if we're charging for compute time and someone chooses to write something that locks up the server completely, then, hey, it's their money ;-) So long as we can keep it running for everyone else, anyway.

We're a bit more worried about how to stop people from using it to create a botnet or otherwise use it to do Bad Things to other people; but I guess every cloud computing service ultimately hits that problem, and all you can do is monitor and shut stuff down quickly if something bad starts happening.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> What was your original idea/goal? Why did you pivot? Pure curiosity.

<comment><AUTHOR> We started out to produce a similar desktop tool (see comments about Resolver One). That was working out OK but hasn't been the breakout success we'd always hoped for. In addition, people kept asking us (quite reasonably) about a cross-platform version.

So we thought about that and decided that a rewrite for the web would solve the cross-platform bit (JavaScript being the ultimate cross-platform language ;-) and also allow us to support parallel execution of spreadsheets so that people could scale their compute resources up and down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Can I upload my companies proprietary modules? And restrict access to the api?

<comment><USER7> I'm another developer on Dirigible. We already have module upload on our roadmap. We know what we need to do to implement is and all the hard work to prevent cross-sharing of modules between users is already done.

The API is secured with a key that is unique to each spreadsheet and it can be easily regenerated if necessary. Do you have other restrictions that would be interesting to you?

<comment><USER14> Can I generate multiple api keys to control customer access?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not yet, but soon.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Project West Ford - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_West_Ford <comment><USER2> Did we actually get 480,000,000 dipole antennae into space? This seems utterly impossible.

<comment><USER3> If I'm calculating right, _all_ of the dipole antennas could have been packed into a box the size of an old-fashioned toaster (a 15cm or 6-inch cube).

Calculation: Volume of cylinder (πr²h) x 480M antennas (assume half were of each diameter) = 3.14x(0.00254/2)^2x1.78x240000000 + 3.14x(0.00178/2)^2x1.78x240000000 = 3225cm^3; cube root of 3225 is about 15cm or 6 inches

<comment><USER4> Yup. Even smaller than an old fashioned, toaster, even - although this is assuming perfect packing density, which wouldn't be the case, and would add about 10% to the needed volume.

[https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=the+volume+of+a+cylind...](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=the+volume+of+a+cylinder+of+diameter+25.4%CE%BCm+and+length+1.78cm+multiplied+by+480000000)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Since _Mythbusters_ proved that finding a needle in a haystack isn't that difficult, I propose that the term be changed to "finding a needle in the ionosphere." [Not applicable to orbital debris trackers...]

<comment><USER6> Given that the ones still up there are in large clumps, I feel this analogy is flawed, much as I enjoy the mental image.

<comment><USER5> Define large...</comment></comment></comment>


Successful techniques for dealing with lawyer bills?  - <AUTHOR>

My startup just closed a round (yay!) and our legal bills are really high. What are techniques people have found for negotiating down or deferring their legal bills with their counsel? I'm staring at these expenses and thinking "this is an entire engineer-year", and anything I can do to defer them or minimize them will impact my probability of success. <comment><USER2> Congrats on closing! :D

You should always ask for an estimate on how many hours any job will take and how much it will cost (ask for a max if you need to in order to get a cap) when you have them do work. At all times you should know how much any of their jobs will take. To protect yourself in the future you can also say that for anything costing over $X you need to have written approval by the CEO/CFO before they can start the work, they will complain about it, but you can always play it off as establishing internal controls in the company. If you've done the above and if something is wrong, talk to them, they are usually reasonable people. Customer service is a part of their business.

In your particular case, I'd recommend asking to split the payments over time. They may ask for interest, but at least it will help your cash flow. Keep in mind, they want to make you happy now - You just got funded and are a growing company. They want you to stick around and be their client as you grow into a billion dollar business, not have you leave to a competitor over a $40k+ bill. It's almost trivial when compared to a long term business relationship.

edit: What's the worst that can happen? They say no and you pay the bill.

Hope that helps!

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds high — 40k, 50k, 60k? Scratch that, sounds scary. I'm not so sure I want to start my startup now.</comment>


More People Are Using Facebook via Phone For the First Time Ever - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5980329/more-people-are-using-facebook-via-phone-for-the-first-time-ever

<comment><USER2> Why is this so surprising? A+ for those photos of Mark.</comment>


Vanishing New York - <AUTHOR> http://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/?m=1 <comment><USER2> Maybe I'm just cynical because all the dive bars that were once comfort zones around where I live eventually end up in the news because of this shooting, or that gang intimidation problem. They might have the better music and cheaper beer, but they aint pretty, and only attract the kind of attention one usually wouldn't want as the landmark in your otherwise "neighbourhood with character".

The bubble tea place sure looks more inviting than what preceded it.</comment>


Open Source Migrates with Emotional Distress (e.g. Python 2 = 3) - <AUTHOR> https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2019/12/28/open-source-migrates/ <comment><USER2> This was quite an interesting meditation on configuration management.

Telling quote: "I have been a part of the Python 3 migration and I can tell you that it sucked out all my enjoyment of being a part of that community. No matter on which side you were during that migration I heard very little positive about that experience."

Armin Ronacher is among my heroes: Sphinx, Flask and Click are just superb. I hope he regains some joy in time for the next go-around.</comment>


Extremely dexterous robot can solve a Rubik's cube one-handed - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/2219939-extremely-dexterous-robot-can-solve-a-rubiks-cube-one-handed/ <comment><USER2> Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21259765](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21259765)

In case you'd like to see the take from alternate sources, here are some other submissions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21280450](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21280450) (analyticsindiamag.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21268770](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21268770) (nytimes.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21265954](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21265954) (ieee.org)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21264505](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21264505) (nytimes.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21263011](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21263011) (theverge.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21261419](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21261419) (medium.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21260493](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21260493) (nytimes.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21260099](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21260099) (twitter.com)</comment>


YouTube introduces six-second Bumper ads - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/26/youtube-bumper-ads/ <comment><USER2> YouTube ads are really egregious and extremely annoying, and the option to block them (YouTube Red) isn't even available in my country. So I'm forced to use other methods of ad blocking. I literally want to pay them to make them stop, but they don't want my money.

<comment><USER3> I agree with you. Youtube is one of my favorite apps, but I cannot tolerate the advertisements. If I think of all the things that annoy me the most in the world; Youtube ads are in the top 3. I can, however, deal with 6 second ads, and it's likely they'll be more effective on me. I have no problems with SnapChat and Facebook ads and there are times I'm engaged with the message being presented.</comment></comment>


He Has Millions and a New Job at Yahoo. Soon, He'll Be 18 - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/26/business/media/nick-daloisio-17-sells-summly-app-to-yahoo.html?hp&_r=0 <comment><USER3> While stories like his are interesting novelties, I feel like they are distracting and counterproductive to the startup scene at large.

Instead of focusing on what Nick D'Aloisio has actually created, perhaps looking at this "algorithmic invention, which takes long-form stories and shortens them for readers using smartphones" and digging into what makes it special, the story is all about the jackpot of millions he's lucked into.

I'd love to know more about the technical details behind Summly, or what Nick went through to create it.

This kind of lottery mentality just gives the general public the impression that there's a gold rush going on, and causes the kind of magical thinking that's similar to teenagers all hoping to become the next rock star or sports legend, or in this case, startup founder, that will make millions, focusing on the money instead of asking themselves what they want to do with their lives.

For every teenage millionaire that hits the startup jackpot, there are thousands of hard-working entrepreneurs that build for the love of building. I'm not saying Nick D'Aloisio isn't doing what he does out of genuine passion - I don't know anything about him, I expect he's very driven and geniune - <USER2> I would rather focus on the work than the jackpot.

<comment><USER4> I hear what you're saying but I think what you're describing is not the most notable part of the story, in fact, possibly the least interesting part of it. I don't know what his algorithm is; I have some doubts as to it's efficacy but apparently Yahoo! did not. I'm more interested in how this person got celebrities and billionaires interested in the product early on. Seems odd.

<comment><USER3> It seems like we're seeing evidence that the class system is alive and well in the UK. Listen to his posh accent, and look at the easy way he casually hangs out with Stephen Fry: <http://vimeo.com/52014691>

I suspect the story behind this is simply "upper-class child with family connections finds success."

<comment><USER5> From the video, he also seems like he's greatly overhyping the whole thing (as is everyone else, of course). Genetic algorithms are not even remotely close to human intelligence, quantitatively or qualitatively, so his claims to that effect are nonsensical and misleading.

One common strain I see with child prodigies, or whatever you want to call them, is that their accomplishments are often greatly exaggerated and they usually don't end up contributing as much as many who make great contributions later in life (few famous historical scientists and artists, with the exception perhaps of Mozart, were what we would consider child prodigies, and many were quite the opposite). I don't know if it's caused by resting on their laurels, burning out, or them just not being as good as they claimed, but it doesn't seem like a healthy model at all.

Summly in particular doesn't come across as being all that complicated - genetic analysis of text is a well-researched and thoroughly trodden part of applied complexity theory - but rather a smart business move made by investors and businessmen mostly behind the scenes. D'Aloisio comes across more as a poster boy than anything - he's put up as this child prodigy, but I've never read or heard anything particularly new, profound, or even that interesting from him.

<comment><USER6> >few famous historical scientists and artists

Plenty of artists: Mozart, Chopin, Liszt, Bizet, Bieber (all right, maybe not the last one) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_music_prodigies>

Others: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_child_prodigies>

<comment><USER7> Not forgetting Mendelssohn as the prime example. Neither Mozart nor Chopin wrote anything comparable in stature to the Octet written when Felix was 16 years old. It's one of the those pieces where within a minute or so you simply 'know' you're listening to a work of genius. Yes, entirely o/t especially on this site. Sorry!

<comment><USER6> Somewhat subjective :] I love Chopin myself.

<comment><USER8> I don't like that the word 'child prodigy' is thrown around for this. For Mozart, Chopin, Liszt, etc. you simply have individuals who were all offspring of musicians, who started at young ages, who both listened to music played by their parents for hours and practiced it for themselves for hours more. Likewise with mathematicians, programming prodigies, etc.

And, Chopin's later work is indeed much more mature -- compare the difference for example between the Nocturne in E minor which he wrote when he was 19, and Nocturne in C-Minor, No 21, which he wrote shortly before his death. The difference is pretty stark -- and even non-musicians can sort of detect the growth. I can say likewise for most composers, their craft honed with time -- it's difficult for me to think of any composer who composed something tremendous in the very beginning just out of nowhere -- that kind of stuff doesn't happen.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure calling Mozart and Chopin prodigies qualifies as throwing terms around [lightly]. With so much recorded music being created over the millennia (since the invention of musical notation), these two, among a few others, stand out as undeniable geniuses of their craft. It also so happens that they started to make waves very early, which wasn't that easy to accomplish in an artist's lifetime back then, especially when you consider that Chopin gave only some 30 public performances in the last 19 years of his life spent in Paris and away from oppressed Poland. Chopin was seven years old when he composed two critically-acclaimed Polonaises, in G minor and B-flat major. Would you really not call him a prodigy?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article makes it sound like a "whiz kid loner" sort of company, but the summly.com website suggests there's a lot more to it than is implied by this article. The About page shows a pretty senior, experienced team (decades of engineering and research experience): <http://summly.com/about.html>

And the technology page says the algorithm is actually from SRI! <http://summly.com/technology.html> (SRI language technology was also behind Siri, of course.) There are various NLP researchers on their SRI team list, like Appelt, Israel, Nallapati, etc. Did Summly license the technology from SRI? Did they contract with SRI to maintain or develop the core algorithm? Who owns it?

If the valuation includes Yahoo acquiring SRI technology, IP, and some portion of those researchers' time for futher product development, plus the very nice UI and marketing for it, and maybe they want to acquihire some of the team as well, that all makes the valuation seem a bit less far-fetched than you might think from the NYT's coverage (or the negative comments on HN).

The more interesting question than the valuation, I think, is how this company went from a very young founder to all those investors, a pretty senior executive team, and getting the NLP technology.

[I once worked for a startup, Powerset, whose core NLP system was licensed from Xerox PARC; Powerset also quietly acquired an SRI spinoff and its NLP technology, and I think IP acquisition was an important motivation. When Powerset was acquired by Microsoft, I am told IP was at least a somewhat important part of the valuation. I have no idea if this is actually applicable to this situation; maybe it's an overextrapolation.]

<comment><USER10> My guess is that if what was reported is close to real, it was basically an SRI spin-out, there was a real team behind it before it even started, and they either merged with Summly or brought on D'Aloisio as 'Founder' as a marketing tactic.

Oh, and Yoko Ono was also an investor in the series A...

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So a kid that came from money, got lucky and sold his app for more than it's worth. I hate these types of garbage articles the media propagates.

The media always has the same story they want to tell:

\- Brush over the amount of time/work real achievement takes

\- Downplay the amount of investment taken or starting capital

\- Over-hype the selling price to give a rags-to-riches over-night success story

<comment><USER12> "So a kid that came from money, got lucky"

Those aren't disconnected points: To a great extent we can attribute the "luck" here to the video launch. It clearly cost some money to put together the launch video, and that's not necessarily something most people have or are willing to spend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Okay. So based on reading the comments I can surmise that this is just a wealthy kid who wrote an overly hyped trivial app, got his banker/attorney parents to pay celebrities to appear in his cliched demo video and due to the pull of his parents, was able to convince Yahoo to buy his company. Him being a good actor was also a big help. Plus Yahoo needs to appear hip, what better way than acquiring a startup with a nice indie video?

Written this way, it all seems over the top and gives a strong impression of sour grapes, yet the above is a faithful summarization of this thread. It saddens me. Here is a more balanced view.

He is well off and has parents that are able to help him pursue his goals to enviable (as this thread can attest to) standards. You cannot begrudge them what you would yourself do given the chance. He has this opportunity and he used it to multiply his advantage.

It is not fair that he has this advantage and multiply not fair that he went geometric on it, but at least he did not waste it. How many kids his age, rich (or not) are writing interesting programs, leveraging connections and successfully cashing out? He certainly could have done worse than get a startup acquired by Yahoo. And If he did in fact merely sell them a plot of moon real estate then that too is impressive. Hustling? Hacking non mechanical systems? I don't like that he lied in that email but I'm not going to form an opinion without knowing him. Certainly, he is a very lucky rich kid with a posh accent but most of you are also taking for granted how lucky you are yourselves.

He wrote an application that does _extractive summarization_. They are not trivial to write but can, with a day or so of work get to something that is objectively no worse than any other. This is because summaries are hard to judge. You will spend most of your [indefinite] time polishing sharp corner cases. At some point you hit a ceiling because any more effort requires a use of semantics and grammar that might as well be spent on _abstract summarization_. But now you are verging on AI completeness.

Anyhoo, he gave his not so run of the mill app a shiny coat of paint then used the initial storm of ridiculous hype from his well financed cliched video to attract trained talent.

He, with his parent's help was able to work out a deal and sell Yahoo a skilled team that had possibly interesting IP? IP that they might not have had the resources to monetize but possibly better placed resources wise to explore at Yahoo. Trade off being the large chance that they will be thoroughly digested by incompetent management. Whatever way they win.

Well played rich kid =)

<comment><USER14> For me, at least, the rich kid part casts doubt over everything, including things we typically take for granted in stories about startups.

Did he actually write the software, or did he leverage his wealth to have others build it? The fact that he started "coding" at 12 and then built something at 15, then had it finely polished at 17 seems a bit odd. That's not even enough time to properly learn the basics of engineering, let alone research heavily into such a heady field that requires an enormous amount of base knowledge to begin with.

It's not really clear here. Your average story about a garage or basement- based hacker coming up with an independent app or game that is ground breaking and/or makes millions is more impressive because the person didn't have the means to hire talent to build the idea, meaning they had to do it themselves or convince others that the idea was good enough to invest in (either with their money or with their time in exchange for equity).

Substitute money for the talent and hard work in that scenario and it's like coasting downhill. Just about anything considered reasonable is fairly straightforward to get done. It makes everything seem a lot less impressive. Building Facebook with $10,000,000,000 in the bank wouldn't be impressive because it wasn't something you hacked up in a few weekends, instead you'd come up with ideas and throw money at people until a product appeared. I mean we certainly don't have that sense of awe when Google or Microsoft announces a new project every now and then. It feels like that's what this article is trying to build -- sensationalizing the person, his age, etc to make it feel more awe-inducing, when the reality might just be that it's just not that impressive at all.

<comment><USER15> I disagree - I starting learning C++ at 14, and I had shareware apps for Windows I was making a fair amount of money with by the time I was 17 back in the late 90s...

That included learning how the POP3 and SMTP protocols worked to write email clients and obviously socket programming.

<comment><USER14> I started learning C at 11 and at 13-14 had software developed that assisted in reverse engineering and debugging of applications. These days that knowledge seems fairly trivial to me, and it isn't fundamentally complicated. Now with more understanding of theory and algorithms, it would be a lot easier to build much more useful tools like something that is as simple as dataflow analysis -- something I couldn't have fathomed at 14. Or binary instrumentation.

Similarly, I had done socket work and reversing proprietary protocols, and I didn't consider any of that groundbreaking (nor was it substantially marketable). To walk into a field like AI and summarization which isn't infantile and outdo Ph.D. level experts at their own theory -- that's something you didn't do, nor did Nick, nor does anyone. It just doesn't happen, and hasn't in any subject with a similar depth of specialization as far as I'm aware.

Not to say one can't make useful things and/or learn a lot very rapidly. I tend to understand the young, inexperienced people building games that sell well due to the frameworks available. And I understand how shareware could sell decently in a market that's widely open with lots of low-hanging fruit. But this situation is very different. That he built an application that grabbed parts of text and produced a shortened version by making some very rudimentary guesses about what's important perhaps. What's described -- not a chance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> My hunch is that this says more about Yahoo than anything else, but without technical details it's hard to be sure. There's been good summarization tech that Yahoo hasn't implemented for at least a decade, despite having dozens of engineers who could be doing so. Did this startup they bought for $30m implement something another class above that yet? Or are they buying themselves up to the par they should've already been at?

<comment><USER17> Maybe they were buying a news story.

<comment><USER18> Wow. I didn't think of that before, but it fits. Yahoo's reputation, at least in the eye of the public, largely consists of being a failed competitor to google, a has-been. Hiring Marissa Mayer certainly got the tech world excited, but I'm not sure that excitement spread far beyond those who were already familiar with her in the context of her work at google.

This acquisition answers the skeptical question I think many of us were asking ourselves: how will yahoo shed its reputation as a has-been and get people to give it a second chance? This is how. This says "we're young and exciting again" more effectively than a high-budget series of TV ads and billboards ever could. Maybe it doesn't send quite that message to the jaded startup crowd, but it certainly sends it to the tech bloggers and interested bystanders, who are the people yahoo is after in the first place. The message is even stronger because of the timing with respect to google reader. I haven't yet decided weather or not I want to believe that it was planned all along.

My intent is not to diminish Nick's accomplishment, although in the name of full disclosure I freely admit jealousy (who wouldn't?). I'd categorize it under both deserving and lucky, with the proviso that "deserving and unlucky" is a rather large category. Good job, Nick, although you certainly don't need to hear it from me :)

I still have to reserve my loudest (virtual) applause for yahoo. This is a brilliant move with brilliant timing which has already generated more hype than I would have expected yahoo to be able to pull off had you asked me only a week ago. Bravo. Maybe they actually do have a turn-around in their future. Maybe.

<comment><USER19> Stop over-analyzing things. Saying Yahoo made this acquisition for the sake of publicity is an extraordinary claim which is completely unsubstantiated.

<comment><USER20> That's not an extraordinary claim at all. It's called marketing. Companies spend millions on it all the time.

And it's far from "completely unsubstantiated." Summly was objectively not very good, and the developer appears to have more family connections than he does raw engineering talent.

Yahoo! has tons of talented engineers working for them who could have easily put together another shoddy summarization app (except Yahoo! isn't even using the app--they're shutting it down). Why would they dish out (reportedly) $30 million for a kid who hasn't even graduated from high school?

<comment><USER19> Your logic: It's not option 1 or 2 (statement is unsubstantiated - when you say it "was objectively not very good," you really mean "in my opinion it was not very good"). So it must be option 3 (also unsubstantiated), since option 3 is the only option left (unsubstantiated).

To answer your last question: 1) As far as I know that kid did not hold any high-ranking role at the company anymore; the talent probably lay elsewhere. 2) There are many reasons and unless your name begins with Marissa and ends with Mayer, you cannot know for sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Google redirect for NYT:

[http://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=...](http://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CDcQqQIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2013%2F03%2F26%2Fbusiness%2Fmedia%2Fnick- daloisio-17-sells-summly-app-to-yahoo.html)

</comment><comment><USER22> The most nonsensical part of all of this seems to be that Yahoo's going to kill the app and just integrate the technology into it's own products.

As far as I can tell, the reason the app was so valuable was due to the story that came with it, not the technology. Two years ago it got it got national coverage due to the surprisingly young age of the founder managing to create a popular app and raise funding. At the time the summarisation technology was highly unsophisticated. It appears that's now improved by using a combination of machine learning and natural language processing but I'm yet to hear a strong case that this tech is particularly innovative or protected from being reproduced elsewhere.

By killing the app, they're losing all the users up to this point and all the potential customers that would check it out after hearing this story. These people don't particular care for the summarisation algorithm, they're not going to be searching for yahoo's own version of the app in a months time.

Yahoo's either being stupid or know something we don't.

<comment><USER23> You think all his users are using his app because he's young? I think that is unrealistic; they use it because it provides value. Yahoo! just wants to incorporate that value into their own offerings. How is this surprising? To make something great, you have to bring lots of good things together.

<comment><USER22> No, I think they started using it because they heard of it (because he is young) _and then_ stuck with it because it provides value. Whether that value is strong enough to essentially start again with a whole new app is debatable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "How to cause massive _ressentiment_ among your current employees?" Well, maybe he's a genius but there are no examples provided, so I'm guessing this is an expensive promotion by Yahoo!. From what I've seen, summarization software's quality is no where near the typical tldr at the end of reddit post, so what exactly has he done that's worth 30 million dollars? What does the average Yahoo! employee think?

Is that the point? To get >30 million dollars worth of them to quit in rage?

<comment><USER14> For me, I think this should receive more attention.

You have a company that's trying to attract talent, but they pay market wages for you and me and anyone else. Then there are stories like this, where they outright throw money at some people whether it be to generate a huge story or to acquire a team and research contracts that weren't a part of the hyped story. Employees look at this and get jealous and rightfully so -- they are probably not super-long-timers with valuable equity. Why would they stick with a company that's throwing money around for things that don't appear to have a coherent vision nor that will likely improve the company overall?

It feels like the no-telecommuting decision might've been short sighted in the same way. Sure, there might've been bad apples abusing the system, but to outright ban the practice would put a very bad taste in my mouth as an employee.

I'm now quite curious about the morale at Yahoo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> In my honest opinion Yahoo! acquired Summly for their launch video: <https://vimeo.com/52014691> It's simply so cool. Yahoo! is nowhere near that cool. The experiment now is if buying cool makes you cool.

<comment><USER26> Is it cool to have the exact same "indie" ad that every other tech company has? (<http://sandwichvideo.com/>)

<comment><USER25> I mean, I hate to say it, but yes? "Being Cool" at its core is mass imitation of good design.

Think of the in-crowd in high school, they looked great, but one wouldn't come close to calling them unique.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> jmcdonald-ut It seems that he came from money and privilege? He attracted a very peculiar crowd of investors to say the least, and I wonder what role (if any) his background played. Good on him though, and congratulations. He certainly seems brilliant.

</comment><comment><USER27> And this is the stuff that dreams are made of, other people's dreams. The dark side of this move will be dealing with his new colleagues at Yahoo, there are dragons there and I hope he has enough introspection to understand the less nice reactions he will get. That said, let's hope that he finds his passion and doesn't leave us early like Aaron did. If nothing else it is difficult to fathom the impact that will have on his psyche going forward.

<comment><USER28> _this is the stuff that dreams are made of, other people's dreams_

This sounds a lot like René Girard: people desire others' desire. I think it's one of the most important things to understand about human psychology. Without it, you can really run aground in a painful way.

It's worth noting how shamelessly the article's headline exploits this. How many people here are compulsively comparing themselves to what it depicts?

<comment><USER18> > How many people here are compulsively comparing themselves to what it > depicts?

 _sigh_

Me. I can't help myself.

<comment><USER28> I don't think one gets rid of it _per se_. One learns to understand and recognize it in oneself, and that causes the inflammation gradually to diminish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Wait a second - Yahoo! couldn't figure out how to algorithmically shorten a long-form story for display on mobile? It took a 17-year old and $30M to make this happen?

What is going on here..

<comment><USER30> It's hardly a simple problem. And by buying out another successful company they get the consumer base it already has rather than spending resources and pushing their own product and risk having it fail or having to compete with the other company.

<comment><USER31> But is it really a $30,000,000 problem?

<comment><USER30> Do you mean is it worth $30 million or do you mean does it cost that much? I don't know the economics behind it but I imagine if there were enough consumers using it, it could conceivably be worth that much.

As far as taking that much to build a system like that, definitely. It's a natural language problem. The computer not only has to process natural language, which is a hard enough problem on it's own, but then decide what parts are "important" or not. And then this has to be scaled up to process hundreds or thousands of articles simultaneously, each within a few seconds or less.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Will he have to move from London to California or will he be allowed to telecommute?

<comment><USER33> From the article:

 _... he will make arrangements to test out of his classes and work from the Yahoo office in London._

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Any faith I have in yahoo's recovery is definitely fading. They are either guilty of buying hype marketing about technology (which demonstrates that yahoo has no interest in actual innovation) or buying technology that doesn't work very well (which shows that they do not know how to use their money effectively).

What are they actually doing?

</comment><comment><USER35> Success breeds success. There is very much a class system alive and well in the world today, which reinforces wealth creation. While there are many exceptions to the rule, it's undeniable that those who come from the upper classes (not necessarily wealthy, mind you) have certain privileges the hoi polloi don't.

</comment><comment><USER36> "... and a new job at Yahoo."

Poor kid.

</comment><comment><USER37> I read another article about this acquisition that linked to this Gizmodo article from 2010 that was openly mocking him after naming his app "worst app of the week": [http://gizmodo.com/5830076/how-i-made-a-15+year+old-app- deve...](http://gizmodo.com/5830076/how-i-made-a-15+year+old-app-developer- cry)

Nice to see he got the last laugh. It's inspiring to think that his company went from a joke to some people to a $30MM acquisition in a little over 2 years.

<comment><USER20> To be fair, it seems they mocked him for a reason. He dropped lines like this:

> now I'm going to have to go without food for the next month.

His dad works at Morgan Stanley and his mom's a lawyer. Sure...

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Yesterday, Yahoo! was the poster child of Internet... now it is acquiring a company founded by someone who wasn't even born when Yahoo was founded in 1994. How time flies...

</comment><comment><USER10> If it smells like it doesn't quite make sense, the most likely explanation is that it doesn't make sense and they are spinning a narrative that suits them.

</comment><comment><USER39> Lots of speculation about how this young man managed to achieve these accomplishments, a lot quite negative and bitchy.

Seems straight forward to me - his prototype generated interest and investment (nepotistic or otherwise), he paid SRI to develop real technology behind the product, Yahoo bought that technology.

</comment><comment><USER40> If this is such a problem, why aren't news sites delivering executive summary like articles for mobile customers? A 400 character summary written by the article's author would be easier and more accurate than this.

</comment><comment><USER41> Everything else aside, straight to the core of the product/app, the production, execution, marketing/branding and front is beautiful and well done. From the app to the site to the marketing. A machine that well oiled, no matter who is the public face, should be applauded. The fact they have a real R&D firm providing the tech even more so. This machine may produce some great things and may inspire others. Persistence and production/quality paid off.

<comment><USER42> I think it is remarkable that they've assembled a very qualified (looking) executive team to make all of this happen. That is arguably the most "unlikely" bit of the endeavor, especially given the founder's age.

<comment><USER43> I agree. Who cares about the "solo engineering kid aspect" of this. More impressed about the ability to build a company around this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Eugene Ciurana's, author of "Developing with Google App Engine", works there in CTO role and I bet he's one of those two engineers selected by Yahoo. His Linkedin profile [1] provides an insight on the technical stack of Summly as well as gives you an idea of the size of the development team.

1\. <http://www.linkedin.com/in/ciurana>

</comment><comment><USER45> I wonder how similar his algorithm is to that of Mac OS X: [http://www.tuaw.com/2008/11/19/mac-101-shorten-text-using- th...](http://www.tuaw.com/2008/11/19/mac-101-shorten-text-using-the- summarize-service/)

EDIT: I just watched the launch video, and apparently Summly uses a genetic algorithm. I doubt that Mac OS X does.

</comment><comment><USER46> Just saw this story on german TV... These guys sure know how to create some hype...

</comment><comment><USER47> I guess this is better than his parents forcing him to follow in one of their footsteps, they invest tens of thousands in him and he walks away with around $30mil, good investment if you ask me.

</comment><comment><USER48> I remember watching his interview on Techcrunch back in the days. He is a great guy and is really talented. Congratulations to him.

</comment><comment><USER49> Techcrunch interview : [http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/01/summly-app-nick- daloisio-vi...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/01/summly-app-nick-daloisio- video-interview/)

I was just blown away by Nick's clarity of the core idea, the product & he really seems to know what he is talking about & he is only 17. What a badass !

</comment><comment><USER50> What I really want to know is why he's planning on majoring in _philosophy_. Why not computer science?

Also, did he write this app himself? Watching the video/ad he made with Stephen Fry, it seems like it was one hell of a lot of work... I frankly find it hard to believe he created that all himself by hand at age 15. (Or did I miss something?)

<comment><USER51> Why bother with a CS degree if you've already written software successfully and cashed out?

Regarding philosophy: in the UK, graduates of the "Politics, Philosophy and Economics" course at Oxford are pretty much running the show.

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11136511>

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Where can I learn more about this "Genetic algorithm"?

</comment><comment><USER53> spare me from the preening of wunderkinds

</comment><comment><USER54> when I see stuff like that I think I am too old to do anything with my life.I am 17.

<comment><USER55> I could play "Master of Puppets" on my guitar when I was 17. But just the rhythm guitar part. That was a big accomplishment. Seeing this, I now feel like a failure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Let's all cling to the fact that he "comes from money", so that we can cope with our impending feelings of inadequacy.

:)

<comment><USER57> It's a fact you can't ignore though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I can't read this article. I have to pay 99 cents for the first four weeks first.

</comment><comment><USER59> Kid is wicked smart...will be interesting to see where he goes from here.</comment>


Causal Analytics - <AUTHOR> https://blog.clearbrain.com/posts/introducing-causal-analytics <comment><USER3> Scott here from ClearBrain - the ML engineer who built the underlying model behind our causal analytics platform.

We're really excited to release this feature after months of R&D. Many of our customers want to understand the causal impact of their products, but are unable to iterate quickly enough running A/B tests. Rather than taking the easy path and serving correlation based insights, we took the harder approach of automating causal inference through what's known as an observational study, which can simulate A/B experiments on historical data and eliminate spurious effects. This involved a mix of linear regression, PCA, and large-scale custom Spark infra. Happy to share more about what we did behind the scenes!

<comment><USER4> I've noticed two questions on twitter:

\- Do you use a causal graph? Would it make sense?

\- Spark seems over-kill for what you yourself describe as regression: is there something more intensive here that we could be missing?

<comment><USER3> Our analysis runs over our user's customer data (usually collected through either a tag manager or a CDP such as Segment), which is a few petabytes of data for some of our larger customers. The reason for using Spark is to quickly transform this massive amount of raw data into a ML-ready format. You're correct that the regression itself does not need to be done inside of Spark.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very exciting to see causal theory being productionized!

From the article, this seems like a normal regression to me. Would be interesting to know what makes it causal (or at least better) compared to an OLS. PCA has been used for a long time to select the features to use in regression. Would it be accurate to say that the innovation is on how the regression is calculated rather than the statistical methodology?

Either way, it would interesting to test this approach against an A/B test and check how much an observational study differs from the A/B estimates, and how sensitive is this approach to including (or not) a set of features. Also would be interesting to compare it to other quasi-experimental methodologies, such as propensity score matching.

Is there a more extended document explaining the approach?

Good luck!

<comment><USER3> Yes, you're correct that the underlying algorithm used is very close to OLS. What allows the regression to provide an estimate for average treatment effects is how it is structured. Namely, adding in pre-treatment confounders as well as interactions between the treatment and confounders. I found this chapter ([http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/arm/chap9.pdf](http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/arm/chap9.pdf)) on causal inference does a good job of outlining the approach.

Yes, we actually explored other approaches such as PSM. The main reason we did not initially go with PSM was because of the compute power required - <USER2> would need to train a model for each treatment variable. However, we're actually in the midst of developing a way to train a model for each treatment variable efficiently, which will allow us to add items such as inverse propensity weighting (or explore other approaches such as PSM).

<comment><USER6> This approach only works if all confounders are known, which is never the case in practice, so the model you fit is correlational and not suitable for causal inference. Propensity matching suffers from the same issue if the propensities are estimated from the same features. If not all confounders are known, you must be able to find instrumental variables to build a causal model.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I only skimmed it, so forgive me if I got this wrong. The causal model used here makes some incredibly strong (unlikely to be close enough to accurate) assumptions. Are these results valid if there are unobserved confounders or selection bias?

<comment><USER8> Well, at the end of the day, you can never really be sure of strongly ignorable treatment assignment/unconfoundedness, no matter what problem you're working on. Especially if you're an economist or an epidemiologist working with data that've been collected by someone else—you can't exactly easily go back and measure more predictors of treatment assignment. But if you're running a website, there are a _lot_ of variables you can measure on the user end and more opportunities to iterate, and so SITA then begins to look more and more like a better bet.

<comment><USER7> Maybe you run a different kind of website or ask different kinds of questions, but despite being able to measure all kinds of things, there's so much at my job that you need experimentation for. You do the observational study, and it points in this direction. Sometimes it's true and sometimes it's not. Selling this kind of observational analysis as 'you don't need A/B tests anymore' is totally disingenuous.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the feedback! I totally agree about observational studies being suggestive but not replacing A/B tests - that's why the main use case I listed in the blog (and how current customers have used the product so far) is "prioritization of a/b tests", not replacing a/b tests themselves. The language around "simulating a/b tests" is just a way to try to concisely explain to someone at a high level who may not be very technical or has never heard of an observational study. Happy for suggestions on how to better explain observational studies to less technical customers without over- selling! It's something we've been iterating on ourselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have been involving in causal inference analysis since 2015. We use a mixed model of decision tree and fixed effect regressions. I read your paper and could not find a reference of why, while one cannot do AB test to verify the relationship but can use observational analysis to do it. Could you share a reference please? Thank you for this insightful article!

<comment><USER3> You can definitely do an AB test to verify the causal relationship - in fact, that's the preferred method! Our platform is for situations where you didn't run an A/B test - either because you can't run as many as you'd like or you forgot - in order to give you an estimate after the fact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Cool stuff, thanks for sharing publicly.

Did you all consider using Double Selection [1] or Double Machine Learning [2]?

The reason I ask is that your approach is very reminiscent of a Lasso style regression where you first run lasso for feature selection then re-run a normal OLS with only those controls included (Post-Lasso). This is somewhat problematic because Lasso has a tendency to drop too many controls if they are too correlated with one another, introducing omitted variable bias. Compounding the issue, some of those variables may be correlated with the treatment variable, which increases the chance they will be dropped.

The solution proposed is to run two separates Lasso regressions, one with the original dependent variable and another with the treatment variable as the dependent variable, recovering two sets of potential controls, and then using the union of those sets as the final set of controls. This is explained in simple language at [3].

Now, you all are using PCA, not Lasso, so I don't know if these concerns apply or not. My sense is that you still may be omitting variables if the right variables are not included at the start, which is not a problem that any particular methodology can completely avoid. Would love to hear your thoughts.

Also, you don't show any examples or performance testing of your method. An example would be demonstrating in a situation where you "know" (via A/B test perhaps) what the "true" causal effect is that your method is able to recover a similar point estimate. As presented, how do we / you know that this is generating reasonable results?

[1] [http://home.uchicago.edu/ourminsky/Variable_Selection.pdf](http://home.uchicago.edu/ourminsky/Variable_Selection.pdf) [2] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.00060](https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.00060) [3] [https://medium.com/teconomics-blog/using-ml-to-resolve- exper...](https://medium.com/teconomics-blog/using-ml-to-resolve-experiments- faster-bd8053ff602e)

<comment><USER3> Thanks! Yes, the concerns you mentioned would also apply to PCA. What we've actually done to help alleviate this is a union of components from y-aware[1] and normal PCA to capture variables that are correlated to both the dependent variables and (hopefully) most of the treatment variables. This seems similar to the double selection approach you mention - the difference being that since we are trying to run this at scale for 1000s of treatment variables, running a feature selection with each of the 1000 treatment variables as the dependent variable isn't super feasible, so the normal PCA acts as proxy for this part of the double selection.

Regardless, we're never going to completely remove omitted variable bias, as we're never going to capture 100% of relevant variables. One way we monitor our model's bias is by looking at the error distribution between users in the treatment vs control. If these aren't similar, there's too much bias in our estimate of the treatment effect, so we wouldn't want to serve an estimate of the treatment effect for this variable to our customers.

The current product is in beta and we're working with some of our current customers to try to re-create our results with A/B tests. I'm hoping that by our GA release in the fall we'll have some case studies with specific examples!

[1] [http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2016/05/pcr_part2_yaware/](http://www.win- vector.com/blog/2016/05/pcr_part2_yaware/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Did you guys look into Partial mutual information for confounding variable selection

Granger causality for estimating Granger cause

</comment><comment><USER12> Looks like you lifted this straight of Judea Pearl's seminal research.

Congratulations! Just remember to patent it :)

<comment><USER3> Thanks! You're correct in surmising that our approach was heavily influenced by Judea Pearl's research.

And yes, the timing of the blog post isn't a coincidence, we actually filed a patent last week :)

<comment><USER4> If you are implementing a documented technique, what are your claims of originality for a patent?

I'm asking because we are building our own implementation of mSPRT. There are some variants but I didn't expect enough to patent. We are confronted with internal debates and I'd rather have actual examples than ageing memory of my law class.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the interest! (Cofounder of Clearbrain here).

The patent covers a combination of statistical techniques and engineering systems we built. The tricky part of this is the infrastructure needed to select confounding variables and estimate treatment effects for thousands of variables at scale in seconds. That was what we filed a patent on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> move-on-by An analytics platform without a privacy policy? :(

404: [https://www.clearbrain.com/privacy](https://www.clearbrain.com/privacy)

404: [https://www.clearbrain.com/terms](https://www.clearbrain.com/terms)

<comment><AUTHOR> Apologies! Looks like the site was mid-update when you noted the 404s. It's back live now :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting to note that ClearBrain is in YC.</comment>


Internet Archive is suffering from a DDoS attack - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/AttackNodes/status/743154643820253184 <comment><USER2> Today may be a good day for you to donate to the Internet Archive. If you rely on the Wayback Machine or enjoy the game archives or simply appreciate the amazing preservation work the non-profit is doing, kick them a few bucks.

Naturally their own donate page is offline right now, but you can donate yourself via check or wait for the site to come back.

Internet Archive 300 Funston Avenue San Francisco, CA 94118

TIN: 94-3242767

[https://archive.org/donate/](https://archive.org/donate/) [http://archive.is/UBX0Z#selection-2697.1-2701.24](http://archive.is/UBX0Z#selection-2697.1-2701.24)

<comment><USER3> I had the privilege and joy of meeting several of the team at the Internet Archive who actively police for this kind of content as best they can, while maintaining the openness of their service. They're cheerful, honest, hardworking and energetic people. There's few groups I'd feel so happy to support.

Maintaining an open and freedom-loving service in the face of abuses is incredibly hard. It's an incredible disgrace how badly these attackers have misunderstood their targeting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another comment from them: "Site is down for hosting a mayor [sic] amount of ISIS stuff."[1] They also tweeted about bringing down several other supposedly ISIS-related sites. I'm guessing they're not aware of what the Internet Archive does...

[1] [https://twitter.com/AttackNodes/status/743170229426094080](https://twitter.com/AttackNodes/status/743170229426094080)

</comment><comment><USER5> That's the online equivalent of bombing a church. Assholes.

<comment><USER6> Yes, it's bad, but archive.org is terrible at deleting ISIS propaganda. Archive.org is _the_ website where jihadis are uploading their videos.

<comment><USER7> Why should it have to delete it in the first place? There's just so much wrong with that reasoning, it's hard to know where to start.

If Archive.org deletes it, it will simply be uploaded elsewhere. You _cannot_ prevent uploads internet-wide. It's simply not possible.

And why are you even trying to remove it _at all_? Why are you not investing effort into educating people on why it is propaganda, and why it is false? Your real problem isn't that the materials exist, it's that people believe them!

With these two problems combined, it's not that hard to understand that by removing the materials, you lose your chance at actual damage control. You just push it deeper into the darker corners of the internet, where you have no ability to educate users _at all_ , and where you _completely_ lose control over it.

Why have people still not learned this?

<comment><USER6> You cannot prevent this, but you can and should make it harder.

There is a certain group of things that should be hard to share (not to mention illegal, but execution videos and calls to kill infidels are already illegal to share), and archive makes it easier to share.

You can and should educate people, of course, but you should make the propaganda (again, all the war videos, all the execution videos, all the cut heads and shot disbelievers) harder to get.

The widely shared IS propaganda has been cited as a factor why ISIS is so popular lately. Why so many people are radicalising. The lenient approach archive.org is having to this is helping them and they have big role in destabilizing the current world, if only indirectly.

Yes they are deleting some of the videos but don't delete copies that are uploaded seconds later with the same names. YouTube and others are much more proactive with deleting jihadi propaganda. Archive.org is jihadi youtube.

I don't like it personally. But yeah DDoS is not the solution I guess

<comment><USER8> >(not to mention illegal, but execution videos and calls to kill infidels are already illegal to share)

Source and in what jurisdiction(s)?

<comment><USER9> I would imagine it could be related to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action). Although I am not a lawyer, so take that with a pinch of salt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Official announcement from the Internet Archive's Twitter account: [https://twitter.com/internetarchive/status/74316536307288473...](https://twitter.com/internetarchive/status/743165363072884736)

</comment><comment><USER11> This might be a good opportunity to mention IA.BAK[1], an effort to back up the Internet Archive. Currently, the entire Internet Archive is stored in one physical space. IA.BAK allows users to store copies of the archive which can be used as a source for data recovery in case of a disaster at this location.

[1]: [http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK](http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK)

<comment><USER12> 'Only' the completely public parts of it though. The archives behind the wayback machine are not publically available, 'just' through their interface.

I wish I had the money to host some tens of terabytes for this effort, it's a great idea.

<comment><USER11> Good point. Future versions of the project could theoretically work with encrypted blobs, with the keys (which are significantly easier to keep in multiple physical locations) only known to the Internet Archive. This would probably require some architectural changes to the Archive and might be harder to scale, plus one of the goals of IA.BAK is to not be dependent on any Internet Archive resources other than the actual files.

Definitely something to think about down the road, but in the meantime there are plenty of public datasets to back up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> DDoS is making it so small players (and very large ones like the IA) can't run web sites anymore. It's time to stop bullshitting this problem and pretending it's going to go away or that you can sign up for a magic cheap plan somewhere and all the problems stop happening. We really, really need to start getting active about solving this problem.

That means building DDoS protection into the nature of the web and all hosting _by default_ (AWS and GCS I'm looking at you), and that means actively prosecuting DDoS attackers.

That also means, if you're a cloud DDoS provider, not helping to protect the sites where these attacks are marketed.

<comment><USER14> Hope this serves as a reminder for the importance of a decentralized web; I'd gladly host an Archive@Home node.

<comment><USER15> AKA "torrent". You are so cute.

<comment><USER16> No, a decentralized node. But your attempt at oversimplification coupled with sarcasm was....so cute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm guessing the archive includes some ISIS sites that this person finds objectionable? Idiots.

<comment><USER6> Nope. Archive.org has a part where you can upload videos, it is separate from web archive.

ISIS uses archive.org almost exclusively for sharing their propaganda videos (all the executions, war videos, etc.). It's not the web archive they are using for this, it's the video archives.

I am not sure why are they doing that; probably because the barrier for using it is low and they don't delete the ISIS propaganda so much as other websites (like youtube).

Other website jihadists love to use is justpaste.it for text

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> To you who are encouraging a proliferation of ignorance and punishing the innocent many for the crimes of a guilty few: this is their goal and you are helping to realize it.

</comment><comment><USER18> I donated last month, time to donate again. I was at the Internet Archive building last week for the Decentralized Web Summit. Good folks there.

</comment><comment><USER19> ... hey ... doesn't isis do that?

<comment><USER20> Unchecked vigilantism is no different than terrorism.

<comment><USER21> Well... DDoS's, at least, kill less people...

But attacking the IA is so wrong on so many ways it's appalling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Surprised they are not using a DDoS mitigation provider yet.

With companies like Sucuri and CloudFlare providing it at $20 per month, seems a non-brainer.

<comment><USER12> I guess control over their user's privacy and the integrity of their connections is more important to them and I like that.

<comment><USER22> I see a lot of reasons not to use these providers, but privacy and integrity is not one (and I find it a bad argument against them).

Every traffic passes through so many hops, routers and networks that adding a secure, well tested and privacy-paranoid provider, like CloudFlare will not affect the privacy or integrity of your connection.

Yes, they have to SSL terminate your connection, but does so every proxy that they decide to use (nginx, elb, whatever). Plus, the security that a company like CloudFlare has to protect that data is a lot higher and more strict than the majority of sites out there (including the Internet Archive).

It is also frustrating that people would downvote me above for suggesting to use them, when in fact it is the _only_ way to handle a large scale DDoS uness you have an insane pipe with hundreds of G of uplink.

<comment><USER11> Having access to the plaintext traffic of 5% of all web sites on the internet makes them a _huge_ target for anyone from hackers to nation states/intelligence agencies and what not. I have a lot of faith in their security team, but this level of concentration is not healthy for the internet as a whole.

There's a huge difference between having access to the plaintext of encrypted connections and merely seeing connection metadata, as would be the case with "traditional" DDoS mitigation services that do not act as a proxy. Reverse proxies are certainly not the _only_ way to handle large-scale DDoS attacks, though I would agree that, leaving aside the privacy concerns, those services are hardly competitive in comparison to CloudFlare, especially on price and UX.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think they are bringing down Internet Archive because ISIS are abusing it to spread their propaganda.

Does this justify their actions? I don't know and probably not. But it totally changes your perception about why they are attacking Internet Archive.

<comment><USER24> No it doesn't change my perspective. They might as well torch the internet while they are at it because ISIS is abusing that as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> When things don't make sense, often it is because information is missing and/or misdirection is in play.

For example -

This could be a cover for an operation that Internet Archive is not aware of, that is possibly tied to the Internet Archive truck theft (and recovery) that happened a few months back.

The truck's contents (drives, network gear, h/w's firmware, etc) was the way to get a payload into the internal network. And the DDoS attack is now covering whatever is really happening with lots of noise.

This is pure speculation on my part, but is much more reasonable than the pretense that someone would be stupid enough to DDoS the Way Back Machine because a few sites it auto-archived had some links to terrorists. In combination with someone also being stupid enough to steal a flaming truck ([https://blog.archive.org/2016/04/20/truck-and-back-again- the...](https://blog.archive.org/2016/04/20/truck-and-back-again-the-internet- archive-truck-takes-a-detour/)).

<comment><USER26> I think you're vastly underestimating the arrogance and stupidity of internet vigilantes. Remember when Reddit fingered some random dude for the Boston Marathon bombing, leading to massive harassment of the family of a guy who, it turned out, had killed himself a month previous?</comment></comment>


Show HN: Rotor Ratings – Yelp for drone parts, build lists, comparisons - <AUTHOR> https://RotorRatings.com <comment><USER2> Now if only it would have some reviews for the parts, like Amazon...

<comment><AUTHOR> It only launched today :) I'm hoping for community engagement...</comment></comment>