Ask HN: Startup owners/employees, would you use a service like this? - <AUTHOR> Hi,
Through my own experience of working in startups I've found that as a startup gets bigger, communication between teams can break down. Monday morning catch-ups can become drawn out and people tend to lose focus after a while.
As an engineer I like to have an idea of what, for example, the sales and marketing teams are working on/towards, and have found that this feeling is often reciprocated. I believe that bridging the communication gap between teams can lead to an increase in focus and awareness of the company as a whole.
I've come up with a potential solution for this problem and have created a landing page which gives its general outline [1].
I'd love to hear if anyone else has faced a similar problem and whether they would use the service I'm proposing.
Any feedback would be much appreciated.
Thanks in advance!
[1] http://tomszpytman.com/beanstalk/ <comment><USER2> Have you checked basecamp or trello out? How does your value proposition differ from them?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, thanks for your comment. Whilst I haven't used basecamp before, I've used trello quite extensively. Suppose each team in a company had its own board, and each board had lists splitting milestones into 'this week', 'this month' and 'this year'. Sure, you could go through each board and see what teams were up to, but wouldn't it be easier if you could aggregate all of that data in one place? Wouldn't trello boards become even more complicated if you wanted to add the concept of individual lists, whilst still maintaining the format 'this week', 'this month' and 'this year'? Lastly, I've yet to see how trello could provide a 'timeline' visualisation of milestones that were achieved in the past alongside those which are still yet to be achieved.

Basecamp, on the other hand, does appear to provide a 'timeline' visualisation of a project, but the service seems to focus more on keeping 'stuff' to do with a project in one place. My proposal is very different in that it focuses solely on milestones. Users would have the ability to group similar milestones together, for example 'achieve X sales' where the value of X could then be plotted on a graphed alongside the date achieved. This would allow, say, a team lead to monitor the progress of an individual or the team itself. I think this is quite different from basecamp's offering.

Hope that answers your question!</comment></comment>


USPS Discrimination Against Atheism? - <AUTHOR> http://www.atheistberlin.com/study <comment><USER2> Not enough packages to make a real claim. The variance on package delivery times in the USPS is high. As an example, I recently had two identical packages shipped to me. They both left the same facility at the same time. They were identical weight(heavy) and dimensions. They were wrapped the same. They were shipped from in the same state as me. One arrived in 2 days. One arrived in 10.

Also, they mentioned that one of the packages in Michigan took 37 extra days. With that sample size it explains about 10 percent of the average right there.

<comment><USER3> n = 85 and p < 0.01. What's inherently wrong with that? (I have my own personal crusade against the 5% p-value, but this is under 1%.)

I agree that the sample size is far too small to criticize individual states, but 85 seems plenty large for the hypothesis of "Atheist-branded packages sent by the USPS are being delayed more than normal packages."

<comment><USER4> In fact n= 178, which is more than enough for a study with only 2 conditions.

<comment><USER3> I misread your post when I re-skimmed it, and ignored the 2 shoes thing. Whoops. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> All of these are international packages going through Jamaica Bay in New York which is notorious for delays. A significant percentage of packages are selected for extra screening here, but no where near 100%. Those go into a set of queues that always mean randomized and often lengthy delays. Most of the packages chosen for the screening are picked by humans that I would almost guarantee are more likely to pick the packages that catch their eye for any reason.

Also, if you send through a package that weighs just north of a kilogram it is almost guaranteed to be subjected to extra screening. This is by no means a secret among international shippers, and would make it pretty easy to stack the deck if you wanted to. I bet a lot of shoes weigh around that much, no?

<comment><USER4> Just to confirm, not all of the packages pass through Jamacia Bay and we were careful to ensure the packages were as similarly eye-catching as possible... but those selecting humans would be wiser than to only choose the most eye- catching packages. I'm not gonna put a flag on a package containing drugs, for example. And as the other commenter says, we only sent tote bags, not shoes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What did the two kinds of packages actually look like?

If the illustration is accurate, the "atheism" tape is white with black text, while the other tape is perhaps standard brown packing tape.

Could it be that the standard packing tape is just better tape?

Could it be that black text on white tape confuses a scanner somewhere?

A better control might be identical tape but with a different word (something neutral like "shoes").

<comment><USER7> These guys share an office with us, so I saw the packages. The Atheist tape is standard packing tape, there's no difference in quality of the tape.

<comment><USER6> Great, so can you tell us what the tape looked like? Is the illustration accurate?

<comment><USER4> the illustration is accurate. you're right about the better control, we may do that if we replicate the study... but really I don't think the absence of writing on the neutral tape can explain the findings.

<comment><USER6> > ... but really I don't think the absence of writing on the neutral tape can > explain the findings.

To me, it seems like a far more likely explanation than a USPS bias against packages affiliated with atheism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For those that say this is just USPS sucking in general.... my wife runs a small business that sends thousands of packages per year both in the US and international. The number of packages that have been truly lost numbers in the single digits. Delays happen, but rarely (most delays are the individual post offices holding on to the package until the recipient comes to the post office to pick it up... we still don't know why they do that).

If she suffered 10% loss of deliveries, she'd go out of business. Luckily, that doesn't happen... though she also doesn't label her boxes with atheist tape.

</comment><comment><USER9> _some of our customers asked us not to use ATHEIST-branded packing tape on their shipments_

 _We sent 178 packages to 89 people_

 _4 participants didn't get back to us with their dates and so were not included in the analysis_

So they used easily-spoofable data submitted by people who knew about the study and _a priori_ believed to be discriminated against.

It may easily be just trolling by atheist jihadists from the US.

<comment><USER4> if only that were the truth. sadly not, no data spoofing involved.

<comment><USER9> That's very sad, indeed.

Anyway, thank you for your explanation. It really increased my confidence in reliability of your sources.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I bet if you put "Allahu Akbar" tape on a package it'd fair much worse.

<comment><USER11> I'd legitimately be interested to see that tested.

<comment><USER12> I'd like to see it AB-tested against some gibberish non-sense written in arabic.

<comment><USER13> Now you're just being picky.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't know if it is just USPS. Mail between Germany and the U.S. has never been reliable in my opinion. My experience was that one of of two packages I sent to my Mom back in the states would disappear somehow.

I've had TSA people wrinkle my shirts and leave behind an apologetic yellow tag, but only in Germany have I had them carefully take apart everything in my cases, find something they didn't want me to have, remove it, put everything carefully back the way it was, and never say a word.

</comment><comment><USER15> Out of 89 packages (half of the 179), 9 went missing? That's 10%.

That is __insane __for the US Postal Service to be allowed that, but it follows my personal experience with them. I don't think I've ever had them lose a _letter_ in my life, but when it comes to packages I don't know how they lose so many. I shudder when I get a USPS tracking email from an online seller because I know there's fair chance I will never see the damn thing.

<comment><USER16> Where do you live? In MA, CT, and NC I have had a USPS package go missing exactly twice. In the first case I'm pretty sure the mailperson just left it on the wrong porch and the neighbor never admitted it. In the second, they had confirmed delivery, but the package was not there, so Amazon sent another item.

<comment><USER17> I live in IL, and have had exactly 0 USPS packages go missing. In fact, I take the opposite stance. I prefer USPS, both when receiving and when sending.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wow, didn't expect this in a developed country :-(

</comment><comment><USER19> Perhaps its God Himself intervening..

<comment><USER20> God also apparently intervened against their webserver, perhaps by creating ten thousand bored hackers 15-50 years ago, who hit it from Hacker News today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This makes the migh moral standards claim of believers staggering.

</comment><comment><USER22> Well, this is almost certainly illegal. (What is described by the article.) I wonder if any kind of investigation is going to follow. Perhaps not criminal, but journalistic. Freedom of speech is paramount to a broad spectrum of Americans, as far as I can tell, and I expect many would be interested.

</comment><comment><USER23> The actual statistics are in teeny tiny print near the bottom. They don't give the raw data, unfortunately.

I'd copy-paste the text here, but everything is embedded in images. (Which is absurd.)

Also, one of the four comments I can see is not like the others. (It might be removed before you see it.)

</comment><comment><USER24> Remember when televangelists raised funds and sold trinkets by telling people that "they" (the non-religious, secular institutions, other religions...) were plotting against them in nefarious ways?

You still can't gaze into the abyss without it gazing into you.

</comment><comment><USER25> It seems to me that their control packages should have had tape with 'less offensive' text on them. This would ensure that it's not just a matter of the atheist packages being more eye-catching or out of the ordinary.

</comment><comment><USER13> They should make similar experiments with Saudi-Arabia and maybe a few other countries :-)

<comment><USER26> Because discrimination is perfectly fine so long as you're not discriminating as much as somebody more extreme?

Of course not.

And don't try to wiggle out of it by saying you were only joking. You are still perpetuating the viewpoint.

<comment><USER27> What view point is being perpetuated? I read that pretty literally - that they should, indeed, try this with addresses in Saudi Arabia. Because, you know, it would be interesting.

Even if that's not true, I don't think that this is a scientific enough study to suggest that there's serious discrimination problem at the USPS, or where the problem even lies. Does the sender name trigger delays in customs? Does the sender's activity trigger delays in customs and has been flagged for further scrutiny but the name is coincidental?

<comment><USER28> They sent a mix of parcels, some with "ATHEIST" branding and some without it.

They claim that the parcels with Atheist tape were delayed. If the problem wasn't with the tape we'd expect to see delays spread across all parcels.

> I don't think that this is a scientific enough study

I agree. It'd be interesting to see a bigger study with better numbers.

140 parcels is a _tiny_ number compared to what USPS handles per day.

<comment><USER29> They did some statistical tests on the data (look at the bottom of the article) which, AFAIK show that the number of boxes sent is big enough to show a significant difference between packages with atheist branding and those without them.

What is the methodological objection to the article claims?

<comment><USER28> Oh, yes, sorry. Thanks for pointing that out.

I think that a sample size of 85 (89 marked parcels; 89 unmarked parcels; with 4 removed because of late response) is too small to really know much.

And I think I'm a bit worried about the conclusions being drawn in this thread.

<comment><USER29> But the t-test says otherwise. Why is it that you find the t-test is wrong?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Maybe they discriminate against public display of private belief in general.

<comment><USER31> I'm pretty sure most people would not be OK with any kind of editorial discrimination by the handlers of mail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> They sent packages from _Berlin_ to the US and found a bunch of variance in delivery times and their first thought was "its the tape"?

They have more faith than I do.

<comment><AUTHOR> If they were relying on "faith" they wouldn't have bothered to test their guess, would they have? Isn't that the very opposite of "faith"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> A/B testing may be safe in the hands of Athiests, but would you want it in the hands of terrorists?

</comment><comment><USER33> I read this and was left wanting control tests using other couriers such as UPS and Fedex.

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm just wondering...will France ban pupils from wearing these shoes in schools? ;)

</comment><comment><USER35> This is unbelievable, somebody gotto do something about it.

<comment><USER36> Like what? What would you suggest somebody "gotto" do?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> We must fight the twin evils of godless communism abroad and liberal humanism at home.

</comment><comment><USER38> I've bought two artofmanliness.com shirts online that were to be delivered by USPS, they never arrived... all I know this service is shit.

</comment><comment><USER39> I would like to see a similar experiment where boxes, some randomly labled with "Christian" tape, are handled by atheists.

We all know the results would be the same.

<comment><USER40> How do you come to the conclusion that the "Atheist" parcels must have been handled by Christians? Why are you apologizing unprofessional conduct of USPS employees?

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I believe with all my heart that evangelist goblins with fear of god are interfering with the sorting process to delay those evil packages. Sure, it is possible that a foreign vendor might forget to put the full zip code on the address label; but where is the morality in that explanation.

</comment><comment><USER42> Honestly, this concept of building a product around such a sensitive issue like religion/spirituality is kind of "dumb".

Wasn't it clear to them that such problems will arise, sooner or later? People get offended if you brand your product with something "christian" or "islamic", so why should people not be offended by atheism? I dont get this whining.

Keep religion to yourself, in all endeavors.

<comment><USER11> Are you seriously saying a private business has no right to conduct uhh private business with their customers because it might offend someone?

Essentially you're just playing the classic victim blaming card.

Someone was mean to you because of your religion/sexual preference/etc? You should have hidden it better, quit this whining! It is your fault for being different!

Atheism also isn't a religion.

<comment><USER39> Not believing in god is not a religion.

Atheism itself though has grown into a full blown region. There is a point where your "not-golfing" becomes hobby, and it seems that atheism, at least for some, crossed that line long ago.

I grew up in a very religious environment, but I have been an atheist for 10 years (I'm 30 now). I don't see much of a difference between "loud atheists" and "loud Christians." The intolerance is the same, the language is the same, and even the "I'm a better X than you" and "You're not a real X" are the same.

<comment><USER43> [Ed: I see you edited your original comment to be less general. To address that, I'd say you're seeing similarities that aren't characteristic of religions, but of humans rooting for their team. Your last sentence applies just as well to "loud fans".]

This is as wrong as calling the technological singularity idea a "rapture of the nerds."[1] It's important to separate religious-minded-thinking, which is more generally irrational (or if you prefer a less general statement for the sake of argument, non-scientific) thinking, from an actual religion. Do atheists suffer from the same cognitive biases religious people do? Of course. Do some of them (I'd guess a minority) make errors in probabilistic reasoning by assigning p(a god exists|observations) = 0, actual 0, rather than the technical 0+epsilon that permits Bayesian updating in case a god ever decides to show itself? Sure. None of this makes atheism a religion. Where's the promise of salvation, but only for atheists? Where's the Holy Book? Where's the rituals and traditions? Are you called an "inactive atheist" if you don't go to chu^H^H^H weekly meetups and thus get shunned by your fellow atheists? Where's the singular code of morality? Where are the articles of faith? If you spend five minutes thinking about it, can you think of other ways atheism differs, categorically, from a religion like Mormonism?

[1]<http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/steven/?p=21>

<comment><USER44> And to add pretty much every believer is an atheist regarding the gazzilion of gods he does not believe, but others do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> This is a bullshit premise. A policy of "non-branding" packages, is not discriminatory. In particular, one that is actually enforced on politically sensitive/provocative topics. If the "brand" were white supremacy (a-chromatic or KKK...) or perhaps anti-semetic (NAZI brand !) packing tape, I don't think the PO should feel bad about not putting these types of "billboards" // "targets" on people's door steps. The USPS, is strictly not in the business of delivering Hate Mail.

But...Nice try!</comment>


How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123980920727621353.html <comment><USER3> I always thought the E-Book would've caught on awhile ago. It has taken awhile to get into prime time.

<comment><USER4> It was the E-Ink screen that was holding them up. It still is in a way - <USER2> the most expensive component.</comment></comment>


Somebody make this – 2 speed video conferencing - <AUTHOR> A really useful tool would be a video conferencing system for doing interviews (like Skype) except it also simultaneously records a much higher resolution video of the local feed to hard disk.
So interviews can be conducted in real-time at moderate resolution then the system uploads (managing time syncing) the high res versions from both ends for editing/publishing on the web. <comment><USER2> How many times have you needed such a thing?

Most video / phone interviews are assumed to be ephemeral.

People take notes as it happens and that's about it.

Deliberate recording by either party might be off putting for A LOT of people and cause people to be more nervous then they need to be.

<comment><AUTHOR> Im thinking of the specific use case for doing interviews over the web. People typically use Skype which provides poor resolution. In this case they would be fine with the local recording.

<comment><USER2> I understand the use case. :)

Maybe I didn't frame my response clearly.

How many times has someone needed this?

i.e: While you and I can see this as a problem to be solved, how many users are actually demanding this functionality now?

What metrics have you got to demonstrate that it'd be worth someone's or a team worth of people's time to clarify requirements, design, implement, test and roll out such a product?</comment></comment></comment>


Yearly lessons by a freelance dev concerned with holistic productivity - <AUTHOR> http://harrischris.com/article/yearly-review-2017-lessons <comment><USER2> Fantastic ideas here! I love your peaceful, holistic approach to an industry that is so often dominated by stress, last-minute planning, and local optimisation at the expense of the whole. Thanks so much for sharing.</comment>


What's new in Textastic 3.0 - <AUTHOR> http://feedback.textasticapp.com/topic/61492-whats-new-in-textastic-30/ <comment><USER2> Really nice. Going with the tmtheme support is smart. Sublime Text does this, too.

Now, if only it had support for git, so I could sync with a remote, even deploy to Heroku...</comment>


Apple's Steve Wozniak Dumps Facebook and Thinks Ethereum Could Be the New Apple - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/montymunford/2018/05/18/apples-steve-wozniak-dumps-facebook-and-thinks-ethereum-could-be-the-new-apple/#68bf8953de5c <comment><USER2> That title is a huge stretch from what he's quoted on in the article. Did he actually say this?</comment>


Fintech in Chains - <AUTHOR> https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2020/09/fintech-in-chains.html <comment><USER2> > For banking there is a reason for regulation, and it is precisely deposits. > Deposits are open to runs. Runs are bad for all sorts of reasons. Financial > crises are runs. Hence we have banking regulations. That's not a defense of > current banking regulation. But there is a problem and a reason for some > regulation.

> But fintech doesn't take deposits. The one central problem with banking is > gone.

All banking regulations are due solely to the fact that banks take deposits? There is no other reason one could imagine for why banks, FinTech, or other financial services providers need to be regulated? All financial crises are runs on deposits?

Pretty undeveloped and unconvincing reasoning. If you think for a few seconds it's easy to imagine other situations that led to necessary regulations in banking.

<comment><USER3> > All financial crises are runs on deposits?

Interesting question. I'm thinking he means more than just folks withdrawing their cash at the teller when he says "run". I found this:

[https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/04/toward-run- free-f...](https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/04/toward-run-free- financial-system.html)

"At its core, our financial crisis was a systemic run. The run started in the shadow banking system of overnight repurchase agreements, asset-backed securities, broker-dealer relationships, and investment banks. Arguably, it was about to spread to the large commercial banks when the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve Board stepped in with a blanket debt guarantee and TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) recapitalization. But the basic economic structure of our financial crisis was the same as that of the panics and runs on demand deposits that we have seen many times before.

"The run defines the event as a crisis. People lost a lot of money in the 2000 tech stock bust. But there was no run, there was no crisis, and only a mild recession. Our financial system and economy could easily have handled the decline in home values and mortgage-backed security (MBS) values—which might also have been a lot smaller—had there not been a run.

<comment><USER4> > At its core, our financial crisis was a systemic run. The run started in the > shadow banking system of overnight repurchase agreements, asset-backed > securities, broker-dealer relationships, and investment banks.

Note how none of these things are consumer deposits. Fintech and shadow banking are two names for the same thing, and the same risk of runs and need for regulation applies.

<comment><USER5> Shadow banking isn't fintech. It's non-bank lenders like hedge funds.

<comment><USER4> I should've said fintech is a subset of shadow banking, because not all shadow banks are tech-oriented. But a fintech company is more-or-less by definition a non-bank doing bank-like things, which is the definition of a shadow bank.

<comment><USER5> FinTech is more than that though. Fintech is also advanced analytics for helping banks price derivatives. And for auto-pricing real estate.

<comment><USER4> Derivatives pricing and real estate pricing were major causal factors in the last financial crisis. A lot of the banking regulations regarding reporting, data integrity etc. are if anything even more important when the data analysis is being done by a separate entity from the one that's performing the transactions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In general, I'm in agreement with this thesis, but it ignores consumer protection. What entity should handle consumer protection in respect to fintechs? Should it fall under state and local laws? Then, what if Jonny in California (which has strong protections) takes a loan from Fintech X in South Dakota. Can Jonny apply California regulations to his loan, placing a cap on interest that he has to pay Fintech X? Can Fintech X take Jonny's house that he signed over as collateral, ignoring California's regulations?

Financial regulation is a giant headache here and in many of the countries we've worked in. Looser regulation should be beneficial to most consumers. But what about consumers or businesses that sign themselves into bad deals or get purposefully taken advantage of? Which is really the heart of a lot of politics, how much do we protect people from their own poor choices.

<comment><USER7> How in the world is looser regulation of opaque (at best) SV bullshit CO's a good idea? The more relevant question to ask is what exactly is the value prop of fintech?

I don't see it as any different than the mortgage brokers of the 2008's: stripping fees off transactions with ZERO value add to the consumer...

If you want to really fix things start with the national market system. At this point between dark pools, HFT and non-public company markets it is an unqualified effing disaster from both a price discovery and accessibility perspective.

#justsayin

<comment><USER8> > stripping fees off transactions with ZERO value add to the consumer...

The explosion of online shops made possible by companies like Stripe enabling secure credit card processing without imposing PCI DSS compliance on small businesses would disagree with you on whether there's value to the consumer. If nothing else, greater variety of shops available means greater choice, which is generally considered good for the consumer.

Or PayPal, which allows the unbanked population to load funds to a widely- accepted online wallet and actually participate in online marketplaces, which they might otherwise be unable to do.

Or Affirm, which provides on-demand credit to consumers and lets them amortize large one-time costs over a few months, enabling them to afford, e.g., tuition when they otherwise might not be able to. (Tuition is maybe a bad example since most universities already offer tuition financing options; but online education services frequently don't)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As this blog bluntly points out, deposits are subject to runs when used for lending and reserve requirements must be met. If you don't lend against deposits, runs are of no consequence (hold deposits in a Treasuries money market fund, implicitly guaranteed by the Fed and the Treasury, no different then a brokerage core account). If you want to lend, originate it, securitize it, and sell it on the bond market (last point the blog makes about FinTech doing most mortgage origination volume now). The Fed is working on providing instant payment infra, which minimizes the need for domestic wires and Zelle (bank consortium instant payment platform) long term.

One of the most annoying issues I have with the Fed and the OCC are the denial of charters for narrow banks to prevent competition against legacy banks. I am very pro consumer finance regulation but very anti regulatory capture enabling regulation. You can, in a very straightforward way, protect consumers from predatory financial business practices while supporting financial innovation (which, at this point, is cannibalization of inefficient banking goliaths and necessary evolutionary pressure).

Most definitely, remove the chains from innovators and let them build more efficient platforms for their customers on open protocols and existing derisked primitives.

<comment><USER10> There's still a need for some degree of attentive supervision for deposit-only institutions to make sure that they're actually investing their customers' money in liquid, secure, assets.

In the absence of regulation, the incentives for management would be to invest customer deposits in high-yield, and therefore high risk and/or illiquid, assets. Customers need to be protected against losing their deposits because management invested everything in junk bonds or real estate.

There's also the risk of embezzlement to consider. Non-bank accounting controls might not be adequate to protect large volumes of consumer deposits from theft.

The fragility of (unregulated) cryptocurrency exchanges paints a very clear picture of what would happen if deposit-only institutions were allowed to operate without any supervision.

<comment><USER9> Yes! I agree, but this is exactly what these regulators are for, and systems should be required to be built to attest to and meet continuous compliance requirements as it relates to monies management. When deviations are detected via instrumentation and telemetry, triage is triggered to ensure controls haven't been breached (and if they have been breached, regulators assume control to provide an orderly transition for the benefit of the financial consumers in question) (ie Don't be Citi risk management)

Disclosure: I work in financial infrastructure. Thoughts, opinions, and rants are my own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Cochrane seriously misconstrues what the WSJ op-ed is about, which I think is understandable since it adopts a pro-regulatory tone while in the underlying Second Circuit appeal that the op-ed is about the OCC is adopting a (sort of) deregulatory position.

I think this article gives a better understanding of what's actually happening: [https://www.kilpatricktownsend.com/Blog/fintech/2020/8/Banki...](https://www.kilpatricktownsend.com/Blog/fintech/2020/8/Banking- on-the-Business-of-Banking-How-the-2nd-Circuits-Ruling-in-Lacewell-v-OCC- Could-Change-the-Future-of-Fintech-Regulation)

In brief, if you want to set up a fintech company now, you may need to comply with 50 states laws. That isn't just being basically law-abiding, but involves serious compliance work. I started looking up licenses for Square as an example and got bored after the first few as state web sites are all different and inconvenient:

[https://dbo.ca.gov/2018/04/02/square- inc/](https://dbo.ca.gov/2018/04/02/square-inc/)

[https://www.dob.texas.gov/entity-search/entity- detail?bid=10...](https://www.dob.texas.gov/entity-search/entity- detail?bid=10417&eid=26&bn=0)

[http://www.dora.state.co.us/pls/real/BIDS_Search.Individual_...](http://www.dora.state.co.us/pls/real/BIDS_Search.Individual_Information?p_institution_id=9183&p_facility_id=NULL&p_PD=)

Each of those, and also for all the other states, involved satisfying a state agency that Square was adequately solvent and would comply with a host of laws. You may notice that the first two have license numbers and the numbers are small. That says something about how easy it is to get the licenses. This is a meaningful part of these companies' moats.

The OCC action that New York is challenging is to provide a federal alternative structure in which companies would get one federal license and receive nationwide permission to engage in a host of banking-like activities. They would still be able to get state licenses instead, if they wanted. This system (of picking between a state and federal regulator) is called dual chartering and has existed in the banking industry for a long time; it establishes a check on both state and federal regulators by allowing the regulated entity to switch to an alternative regulator.

</comment><comment><USER12> Fintech companies often do take deposits in the short term. People have balances with PayPal, which could potentially go bust or be looted. There's no deposit insurance.

Classical money transfer companies like Western Union don't hold money very long, days at most. But PayPal, Venmo, etc. do.

<comment><USER3> Seems like this should be just a theft issue. If Fedex goes bankrupt while my package is in transit, I wouldn't expect them to be allowed to auction it to pay off their debt.

<comment><USER13> Money is a lot more portable than parcels. If Daniel H. Schulman wires all paypal customer deposits to a bank account in a hostile jurisdiction, then flies his private jet to that country, what should the US do?

Should the US say, start a literal war with Russia because Schulman stole $20M? You could say "economic sanctions", but what economic sanctions hasn't Congress already enacted against Russia?

There are a lot of countries that don't have extradition treaties with the United State, and many more than that which don't mind seeing American customers ripped off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Can't read the WSJ article linked, but

> For banking there is a reason for regulation, and it is precisely deposits. > Deposits are open to runs.

I don't agree that this is the sole reason for banking regulation. For instance, Glass–Steagall was not a regulation designed to prevent "runs."

<comment><USER15> Actually, that is exactly the reason it was put in place. Banks had a habit of losing money on the investment side, which was commingled with deposits side, leading to rumors and the resulting bank runs.

Glass-Steagall prevented many of the activities that led to bank runs, and its passage greatly increased the safety of a saver's deposits.

This should be a pretty reliable source: [https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44349.pdf](https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44349.pdf)

<comment><USER16> Yes, it was about the _activities that led to bank runs_ , in particular:

> _Banks had a habit of losing money on the investment side, which was > commingled with deposits side_

Not the bank runs themselves.

<comment><USER15> By definition, bank capital is commingled. If you and I both have an account at a bank and the bank loses enough money, then _we_ lose money.

What Glass-Steagall did[0] was separate the investments from the deposits, thereby eliminating one of the ways a commercial bank could lose capital.

My apologies if my use of the word "commingled" caused any ambiguity. For anybody who has ever worked on Wall Street or in investments, rumors run like the Mississippi during a spring flood through the community. Those same rumors can take down an investment house (e.g. Bear Stevens with the repo rumors) or a pre-Glass-Steagall bank. Hence the importance of eliminating the source of those rumors and the accompanying bank runs.

[0] The law did more than that of course. I'm merely showing one key piece of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Fintech can be summed up as "companies doing illegal things to lose money". It's seriously the thing that made me realize there is something very, very wrong with tech today.

For most of history the reason to do illegal things was because it was profitable but I have personally witnessed self described "fintech" companies do illegal (or at the very least questionably legal) things that anyone with a brain would say "wait, that will clearly lose more money than it makes"

Of course the trouble is that no regulatory bodies can actually enforce the majority of the regulations they are supposed to. If the government had the staff to enforce the regulations they are responsible for half of the CEOs doing fintech work would be in prison.

"bubble" doesn't even come close to describing the situation we're in.

<comment><USER18> Square and stripe are doing illegal things to lose money?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Stripe and Square are more expensive than the prior regime. They're more convenient but more expensive. It's not clear there's a benefit to consumers.

<comment><USER20> Convenience implies a reduction in cost. These businesses are doing well and their customers are happy.

What do you think is happening? How are consumers getting screwed?

<comment><USER16> > _Convenience implies a reduction in cost._

No, why would it? Convenience and cost are two completely separate things.

<comment><USER21> Cost is not purely monetary (price); transaction costs also factor in convenience, risk, and other factors.

<comment><USER16> I'm pretty sure GP was talking about monetary cost. This is moving the goalposts.

<comment><USER22> Disagree. Consider the phrase "time is money". That is, if Stripe costs more money, but saves me time, and I can do other things with my time, and some of those things make me money, then... is Stripe actually more expensive?

This is especially relevant if "I" am a small business rather than an individual. Then the person whose time is saved can do something else with the time that can make money for the business. Or the business can run with fewer people, which saves money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The reason for banking regulation is so that banks do not take high-risk-high- reward-huge-losses types of risks with other people's money. If fintech does the same behavior with indirect or direct leverage of other people's money, then they should be subjected to regulation as well.

<comment><USER24> > high-risk-high-reward-huge-losses > types of risks with other people's money

Many HN readers run or work for businesses that take these kinds of risks (with money from VC funds). But those businesses (along with fintech companies) are different from banks: banks can take retail deposits.

If a bank fails then, in the absence of a government-run deposit guarantee scheme, regular people can lose their entire life savings.

If a business other than a bank fails, it's unlikely anyone other than the owner(s) will lose a large percentage of their wealth.

<comment><USER22> Then maybe the relevant distinction is "big boy investors", "fully informed of the risks", or "sharing in the rewards". Retail depositors think banks are safe places to put their money, are not equipped to parse complicated financial statements, and are not going to reap the benefits if the bank's financial wizardry pays off.

But if you have someone who is able to understand the risks, fully informed of what they are, and invests for a payback that is proportional to the risk... I don't see a problem with letting them do so. Just don't make the little guy take that risk, _especially_ when he doesn't know he's doing so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I see fintech companies promoting and using heavily cryptocurrencies and ledgers. A strong use case for them is the fact that in certain jurisdictions they witness a high level of trust thanks to strong financial regulations, while in others there's too much room for transaction fraud. So a distributed ledger works actually to provide a level of trust otherwise brought by regulations.

</comment><comment><USER26> Those poor gamblers, if only they were allowed to show all the recklessness they're capable of. What a disgrace.

</comment><comment><USER27> Why regulation of fintechs? Wirecard

<comment><USER28> That's an interesting example; Wirecard is a case of regulatory failure in that it before its collapse, the German financial regulator BaFin had been instead filing criminal complaints against reporters and short seller covering the firm.

<comment><USER29> Sure that proves that Wirecard was not regulated properly, and needs regulation.

If a city burned down because all firefighters were drunk, noone would be arguing that we don't need firefighters.

<comment><USER28> Quite right - in that case, wirecard _bank_ was (poorly?) but the parent company is a more ordinary but prominent public company and they were clearly more concerned about potential market abuse in the stock then what the company itself was up to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Off topic, but for the longest time I thought "Fintech" referred to tech companies based in Finland or Scandinavia more broadly.

Those have a word, don't they?

<comment><USER31> As an aside, Finland is not in Scandinavia, as it is usually defined:

[https://satwcomic.com/how-the-north-works](https://satwcomic.com/how-the- north-works)

[https://soulofsweden-blog.tumblr.com/post/47742341547](https://soulofsweden- blog.tumblr.com/post/47742341547)

Roughly, Scandinavian refers to mainland Europeans who speak a language derived from Norse. Scandinavians are the majority in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, so those are Scandinavian countries, and a minority in Finland, so that is not. Tove Jansson, Linus Torvalds, and Michael Widenius are all Finnish Scandinavians, apparently.

Nordtech sounds right, though. I imagine that various places have already been dubbed Silicon Fjord, Silicon Sauna, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Only one thing could possibly improve the travesty that is fintech: a per- transaction tax. Even a $.0001 tax per trasaction would buy universal college education and universal medical care, with plenty left over to replace all coal and oil-fired power with renewables and storage and replace the air fleet with hydrogen-powered craft.

<comment><USER33> > Only one thing could possibly improve the travesty that is fintech: a per- > transaction tax. Even a $.0001 tax per trasaction would buy universal > college education and universal medical care, with plenty left over to > replace all coal and oil-fired power with renewables and storage and replace > the air fleet with hydrogen-powered craft.

That would only happen if fintech didn't change their behavior in response to such a tax. I do not find that to be a reasonable assumption.

<comment><USER32> It would still be worth conducting fintechy business. It would barely affect bonuses. It would still buy all that stuff after behavior adapted to the change.

Your claim is of a piece with claims that raising the minimum wage would destroy jobs, and people on minimum wage would be out of work. Guess what, we tried it anyway, jobs didn't vanish at all, poor people have more money to spend on necessities, and everyone is better off.

<comment><USER34> US healthcare spending in 2019: $3.6 Trillion

US Financial Sector profits: $422 billion

>It would still be worth conducting fintechy business. It would barely affect bonuses.

It is absurd and blatantly false to claim the entire burden of the U.S. healthcare system could be placed on a single industry with little effect.

<comment><USER32> Still it's worth a try.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Interactive Map of Linux Kernel - <AUTHOR> http://ldn.linuxfoundation.org/article/interactive-map-linux-kernel

<comment><USER2> Here's a direct link: <http://www.makelinux.net/kernel_map></comment>


Show HN: A WebAssembly System Interface Implementation for Deno - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/caspervonb/deno-wasi <comment><USER2> So this can compile other languages to run on deno using Web assembly?

Seems like a lot of indirection to emulate the native assembly code. I guess it's cross-platform though right?

<comment><USER3> I imagine this type of approach will replace TypeScript in the long run. Instead of some wonky half-assed typed language that's chosen for running on a server and client, you can compile Java to wasm that can run on the server and client.

<comment><USER4> That's a bit of a stretch. What makes you think WASM is going to give developers an appetite for statically typed languages? If anything, WASM opens the door to Python, Lua, and plenty of other languages that are not statically typed to run (performantly!) in places where only JavaScript has historically been practical.

<comment><USER5> > What makes you think WASM is going to give developers an appetite for > statically typed languages?

Well, they did say it will give TypeScript developers better alternatives. Presumably, if you're using TypeScript, you already had an appetite for statically typed languages.

<comment><USER4> I suppose it depends on what problem you use TypeScript to solve. If you're writing a complicated and self-contained system, sure, I can see the appeal of "upgrading" to Java. If you're trying to enforce contracts between different codebases/libraries/etc., WASM hardly provides a better alternative: integrating with other libraries—especially JS ones—or even the DOM is non- trivial.

Which is to say, using TypeScript as a quality of life improvement to provide autocomplete and checking for easily-detectable bugs is not going to lend itself well to being replaced with WASM. If the goal is to write a 100% typed codebase (e.g., having a complex, entirely self-contained tool that runs in multiple environments), you will have better luck. But I suspect the number of folks that could benefit from that are fairly low, because it assumes that JavaScript is the bottleneck for correctness and performance. But if the real reason why you're using TypeScript is that JavaScript was your only choice and you like the increase in safety, having a more appropriate language could be an even more attractive option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is amazing and very useful, now you will be able to compile any c++, c, rust app to wasm and run inside Deno, so you can easily distribute to any platform.

No need to re-write your current native apps, just compile them to wasm and they can run everywhere!</comment>


You Might Be A Data Radical - <AUTHOR> http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/03/08/you-might-be-a-data-radical/

<comment><USER2> I'm the "radical" author of this post. It expands this other post ([http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/03/07/partition- tolerance...](http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/03/07/partition-tolerance- myth/)) that busts some commonly propagated myths about partition tolerance in data stores.

But the part that I really wanted to emphasize, and I worry might get lost in the surrounding discussion about partition-obliviousness, is the following:

      NoSQL has the potential to supplant RDBMSs and capture the
      bulk of the database market. The "daddy knows best"
      attitude that RDBMSs bring to data management, the way they
      strip all information that the developer had about her data
      and force her to write a declarative specification of what
      she wants, only to try to then come up with an efficient
      evaluation plan in the query optimizer, all reflect a
      klunky aesthetic to system design that the lean and mean
      NoSQL movement can and will supplant. NoSQL is to RDBMSs
      what Unix was to Multics.

My group is working on bridging the gap between NoSQL and traditional RDBMSs (with a second-generation NoSQL store called HyperDex that provides strong guarantees), and so are others. And meanwhile, RDBMSs are trying to retrofit NoSQL features. Overall, there is a big revolution afoot in data management, and it's an exciting time for system builders and application developers alike.

<comment><USER3> There are two primary categories of applications that were traditionally developed on sql platforms: Operational and Analytical. Operational applications want the ACID and transactions features of the RDBMS, but analytical applications benefit tremendously from the SQL language itself. If there is a question that my user wants me to answer and I can answer it by writing a SQL query but in the NoSQL world I have to write a program, I just lost one of my super powers. SQL gives me the ability to rapidly answer complex questions about my data. Please recognize that ACID and transactions are not your only hurdles to successfully competing with RDBMS.

<comment><USER2> Absolutely spot on. But there is no reason why the translation from the user's query into a series of data accesses cannot happen in the front end. In many ways, NoSQL is a reaction to the poor job RDBMSs were doing in the front end. Everyone has seen the cases where AWK programs on desktops could outperform expensive Oracle servers, and that's mostly because they enable the user to put to use what they know of their specific data and their access patterns.

So, in between "writing a program for each query" (which I agree is a non- starter in some settings) and "SQL is the one and only interface" lies an exciting space of opportunities.</comment></comment></comment>


Golisto: The Social Platform for Collectors - <AUTHOR> https://golisto.com <comment><AUTHOR> Collect, Organize and Share Your Collection With Golisto!

We've been in beta for a couple of months and would really love for you guys to try it out and give us some valuable feedback!

Best regards, Emil Ottar Riise CEO & co-founder @golisto</comment>


Steve doesn't like Flash because he wants us all to use Quicktime - <AUTHOR> http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1004fk8d5gt/event/

<comment><USER2> I'll take QuickTime over flash any day of the week.</comment>


Ask HN: How to test assumption that free users can be converted to paid? - <AUTHOR>

We have have a lot of free users (~95%). We operated under assumptions that these users cannot be converted to paid.
However, some of smart people here on HN pointed out that some Free users can still be converted to Paid.
How to test this assumtion? To make Free tier more restrictive? <comment><USER2> Making the free tier more restrictive for current users is probably a bad idea. The generally accepted thing to do is grandfather free users in.

How important are free users to your app? Is it a network-effect, where those free users make your service better? If not, you may toy with removing free entirely. You'll remove a lot of support time/costs, and only keep around paying customers.

Free plans are effectively a type of marketing. The cost to support those free users adds to the acquisition cost per user, which means you need a higher lifetime value from each paying user.

As an alternative to slashing Free, you could make your Paid tiers better. And aggressively try to convert free users. Send drip campaigns, show them screencasts about your Paid tiers, etc etc.

Free users _can_ be converted. You need to find out why they are staying free. Price may be the reason, or maybe not. Do some customer outreach to both free and paid and find out why the two populations are in their current tier.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you have a way to segment your free users then come up with an idea and test it on 10% of them. See what happens. If you made a bad choice and piss of 10% of them, then you can turn off the test and leave the other 90% of the free users blissfully unaware. If your idea works, then you can expand it to a larger test cell, or to all free users.

View it as an A/B test, but don't just default to a 50/50 split.

</comment><comment><USER4> Do some work and research the freemium model and you'll see that it is possible. Depending on the nature of your product, you may want to checkout dropbox & Evernote. Both are great examples of different strategies that help convert free to paid users.

Generally speaking, a 5% paid to 95% paid to free ratio is really good.

Good Luck.</comment>


Leadpages acquires Drip - <AUTHOR> https://www.pehub.com/2016/07/3342271/ <comment><USER2> Totally surprised at this news as it seems like Drip is growing its customer base by leaps and bounds. They have a great product.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's often the best time for an acquisition! Leadpages got the chance to acquire a successful and growing product, Rob and Derrick managed a successful exit to a motivated and engaged buyer.</comment></comment>


Use two Dropbox accounts on one computer - <AUTHOR> http://theterran.com/blog/2012/6/14/use-two-dropbox-accounts-on-one-computer.html

<comment><USER2> I left a comment on the main blog as well, not sure if OP is blog author:

I think users may want to proceed with caution: How do you get around the files DropBox makes not colliding? If you look at a default install, just one instance, view all files in ~ using something like ls -la and you will see a pid file, some caches, some SQLite DB files, all hidden from Finder view.

Then there are the preference files and others stored in Application Support and Preferences, plus possible launchd items as well. Also Contextual Menu Modules that need to know the active user ID. You may find your public share URL's don't work or share the wrong paths.

It seems the second instance is going to stomp on the files of the first. I can estimate why it works in the beginning, as much data may be resident in memory. One app will always load first no matter what.

I think over time this may start to fail.

One suggestion to possibly make this a little cleaner, assuming it does continue to work, is put the call to launch the app into Automator for both apps. Then you are only adding one item to your startup items and never even launching the DropBox app directly from their package .app launcher.

Or, you could dig into the package and edit the startup paths there, but you probably will want to stay outside the .app bundle for update reasons. Updates would nuke those changes.

I think launching both from one Automator action is the cleanest. Though I am curious, for example, the black and white icon versus color. Those are stored as preference values. Can you look on your system to see where they are stored, and how DropBox is now storing two separate values? Does it do it in the same file or somehow magically create a separate file and know where to go looking for it?

<comment><AUTHOR> There is a .dropbox folder in the HOME folder (whatever that is set to). It contains the following files:

        $ file *
        config.db:     SQLite 3.x database
        config.dbx:    data
        dropbox.pid:   ASCII text, with no line terminators
        filecache.dbx: data
        host.db:       ASCII text
        host.dbx:      ASCII text
        hostkeys:      data
        l:             directory
        photo.dbx:     SysEx File -
        sigstore.dbx:  data
        unlink.db:     data

config.db doesn't contain any interesting information, the directory "l" is empty, and I can't easily get any information out of the other files. It doesn't seem unlikely that all preferences are stored here, though.

Still, running both instances from a non-default HOME seems like sound advice.

<comment><USER3> > Still, running both instances from a non-default HOME seems like sound > advice.

Setting HOME to a new value means that ~/ will always be resolved to that value. I think that the far more likely result is that this will work as expected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> matthew-wegner Or you could just run Dropbox Encore on OS X: <http://www.joyofmacs.com/software/dropboxencore/>

<comment><USER4> I second, works great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good to keep in mind is that even though we now have some kinds of workarounds for situations that cause this problem, Dropbox is still doing something seriously harmful and potentially misleading. I like Dropbox, and I hope they rectify this situation natively, because the problems with having this kind of behavior in the app aren't entirely functional, but also ethical.

<comment><USER6> _Dropbox is still doing something seriously harmful and potentially misleading._

Hmm, what do you mean? Which Dropbox behaviors are you referring to?

<comment><USER7> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4962975>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In Windows you can (I believe) just use "runas /user:Foo dropbox.exe" -- doesn't OS X have an equivalent option? This seems like a much simpler workaround.

<comment><USER9> Using 'su'[0] is the wrong approach. Setting HOME makes the home directory look different, while keeping all of the permissions the same as the current running user. This is all that's needed, as Dropbox (by default) uses '$HOME/Dropbox'.

0: [https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwi...](https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/Reference/Manpages/man1/su.1.html)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Posting this after reading <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4962975> , and also being wary of how the administrator in Dropbox for teams can access your account.

I've tried it with a temporary account, and it seems to work well.

</comment><comment><USER10> There is a pretty well know document on the Dropbox Knowledge Base about this.

[http://www.dropboxwiki.com/TipsAndTricks/MultipleInstancesOn...](http://www.dropboxwiki.com/TipsAndTricks/MultipleInstancesOnUnix)

Wouldn't this be the best solution?

</comment><comment><USER11> I can understand why they would restrict it on free accounts, but why do Dropbox not allow multiple paid accounts on a single machine?

</comment><comment><USER12> May I ask one question: why would I want to have two different Dropbox accounts under same login?

If this is about having "work" and "personal" Dropbox accounts then, please "listen to elders": it is really bad idea to mix "work" and "personal" stuff.

If nothing, just have a separate Windows users for "work" and "personal" use of your computer.</comment>


Silicon Valley Came to Kansas Schools. That Started a Rebellion - <AUTHOR> https://www.acq5.com/post/silicon-valley-came-to-kansas-schools-that-started-a-rebellion/ <comment><USER2> This is blogspam copying a NY Times article from two days ago:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/21/technology/silicon- valley...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/21/technology/silicon-valley- kansas-schools.html)

Previous HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19711851](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19711851)

</comment><comment><USER3> The bit about them learning in isolation made me sad. School is not simply a matter of memorizing facts, it's also a space for children to develop socially.

<comment><USER4> Generally a pretty shitty one at that, full of bullying, cliques, popularity contests and anxiety. Being constantly surrounded only by people your own exact age for 18 years isn't a great design.

<comment><USER3> > Being constantly surrounded only by people your own exact age for 18 years > isn't a great design

Some kids are bullied, so it's best if kids isolate themselves until they go to college?

<comment><USER4> I don't think my comment implies isolation. What I'm saying is that it would be better for students to not all be pushed through school at the same rigid one-size-fits-all pace, not only so that they can learn better, but so that they can be exposed to a wider variety of students of different ages, and have the opportunity to play mentor and mentored with them. Part of learning and developing socially is not just the content, but this dynamic, and it's largely absent. And when people your own age are just a fraction of those you're exposed to, and you also interact with people who you look up to and people who look up to you, I think many of the situations that currently lead to bullying and anxiety would be tempered.

<comment><USER3> Ah, I see your point now. Fair enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Out of curiosity, is it legal to post an article from the Times on you own site without making it clear that it was pulled from another publication and without the name of the original author?

<comment><USER6> IMHO it's illegal even if you make it clear that it was pulled from another publication and with the name of the original author.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If one of the selling points of Summit is individualized learning, shouldn't it be taking into account that online learning might not always be the best option (even if it usually is, a statement that I'm not sure I agree with). Someone with epilepsy, whose doctor has recommended limiting screen time to, should not be using this.

</comment><comment><USER8> > "There's people who don't want change. They like the schools the way they > are," she said. "The same people who don't like Summit have been the sort of > vocal opposition to change throughout the process."

This is an infuriating sentence. It's dismissive of a huge swath of people, and demonstrates an attitude of unwarranted superiority. It's the same attitude that gets people pissed at education systems in general.

People care about their kids' education, and they aren't against change. They may say "The new way is stupid, I learned fine the old way", but if you dig deeper the reasons they will only hint at become apparent:

* New education methods often teach new working methods. If you haven't spent time and energy getting parents involved in how they work, they can't help their kids learn. Parents don't want to feel stupid when their kid asks them for help with simple arithmetic, and they don't know the methodology the kids are required to use.

* There's a huge amount of lip service in education to "there are also other ways to achieve the answer", but grades are affected negatively if the preferred method isn't used (in "show your work" type problems). Further, teachers are dismissive or condescending to students who work better with a methodology that differs from the 'one true' method.

* There are whole swathes of subtlety and context dependent answers that get reduced to "this one is right the rest are wrong" which leads to a mentality of "there's always the one right answer". Generations of people have been trained that this is true, so any new attempt to get past this can't just be shoehorned in and forced on parents, see my first point.

Finally there are the people who are just cautious. They don't necessarily think the status quo is good, they just don't want to be an experiment[1] - it's 100% reasonable to be concerned that the new experimental method may turn out to be worse that status quo, and result in setting the kids back.

[1] Since we are talking about the lifelong results of education, it takes a couple decades to find out if the changes actually had a real, long-term impact of a method of teaching. Lot's of people argue against this notion, pointing at short-term grades, and test performance, but the people pushing the new methods talk about how they will set the kindergarteners up for "better college results, and better career results". When talking about 5 year olds, we need to wait at least 25 years to see how they are faring in their careers.</comment>


Why we shut down a product that was $75,000/year profitable - <AUTHOR> http://wildbit.com/blog/2012/01/26/why-we-shut-down-a-product-that-was-75000year-profitable/ <comment><USER3> After reading the article I have to question whether it really was profitable. I think one of the mistakes that coders (and most business owners) make is to value a profit solely on the accounting values: (income from the application) - (direct expenses of the application).

However, the true way to value profitability is to take a more financial perspective (financial being different than accounting). A financial perspective would value the opportunity cost of working on this application compared to working on another application. If the team spent 10 hours a week on the application, and those 10 hours a week could grow their other products by more than $75,000 a year, then of course the application isn't profitable. It's actually losing money.

Another way to look at its profitability is to look at it from an operational standpoint. The employees on the team would be consider a fixed cost (yes, they could hire more people, but that just changes the fixed cost). The limited resource for this particular fixed cost is time, and from their article I can assume that their time was maximized (working as many hours a week as they wanted to). Operational theory says when a fixed cost is at its maximum utilization, higher marginal profitability items should be prioritized. Basically, they are better off working on other items if they don't want to work more hours.

<comment><USER4> I agree on the point of questioning it's true profitability figure.

If it was profiting @ 75K a year, thats half a designer, half a marketer and half a programmer for a year. Hire them in, and let them do what they like with it for 6 months. Get interns and let them have a play with it if you want to give some kids a chance.

It's usually a bad idea to shut down a profit center, unless it truly is unsustainable. @75K this was doing well and IMO should not have been shut down.

<comment><USER5> You're valuing a designer, marketer and programmer at $50K/yr each?

<comment><USER4> At this level, yes. Go for 0 years experience but lots of passion and a basic skill set. Give them a shot on it. You don't want pros for a project like this, they're better used elsewhere, just a small team to keep the lights on and try to grow it.

My usual strategy works well here: Hire in @min wage, with a huge bonus linked to new subs.

<comment><USER6> You probably need someone experienced to semi-supervise the project. A bunch of newbies might end up exploring more than being efficient and productive.

<comment><USER7> I know what you are saying, and I strongly agree. But in comparison to chopping $75k off of you're bottom line then I think you are going to struggle to find a way to be less efficient.

Depending on the size of the company it might just make a great graduate / junior dev recruitment program. Take them on with a probationary period and watch how well they do with the sideline gig. If they turn the code to spaghetti within months then you probably don't want them working on the core business. The last one through the mill becomes supervisor for the next one.

The only potential issue with this strategy is damaging the brand name of the consulting company. I'm not entirely convinced that this is really an issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I rather question the customer service aspect of all this.

I'm not sure I'd dig my electric company cutting off my electric service just because they felt they could be more profitable somewhere else and didn't "believe" in my service anymore. Service that I've paid for, come to rely on, and have integrated in to my business.

Selling this or partnering with another company to transition accounts over to them would have been better. Maybe they did that and didn't mention it in the article (or I missed it).

Yeah, I get it. You're entrepreneurs and want to "have passion" about what you do. But.. WTF - people are paying you for something that they obviously want, and you just shut the accounts down - with or without notice, I don't really care. How do I feel now about postmark? Will you still have passion for it in 15 months, or will you decide beanstalk is more profitable, and shutdown postmark? regardless of what is said now, making decision like this is emotional (read the language of the post) - emotions will change next year.

"Selling would have involved a lot of effort and time, and we just needed to focus on our products that were growing. " Don't you think the existing paying customer deserved that bit of respect for you to put the effort in to selling, and ensuring their continued success as well?

Puzzling a best - disconcerting to say the least.

EDIT: [http://help.newsberry.com/kb/subscribers/transferring- subscr...](http://help.newsberry.com/kb/subscribers/transferring-subscribers- from-newsberry-to-campaign-monitor)

There's a help link to transition to campaign monitor. Fine that's there, but the language of the post still seemed to ignore the needs of the existing users, and focused their decision solely on the feelings of the people running the show. Let's hope they always feel positive about postmark, otherwise you'll be seeing 'transition from postmark to xxxxx' in their help pages in the next year or two.

<comment><USER9> Hi there. Chris here from Wildbit. I want to make sure I clarify some points.

A big reason we waited so long to shut it down was leaving our customers stranded. Even at such low revenue, we owed everything to them for allowing us to get our first product off of the ground and finding value in our service for so many years. It was a VERY difficult decision.

We did not make a move until we had a very good transition process for all of our customers. We set up a partnership with Campaign Monitor so each customer could easily migrate their lists and avoid any downtime in sending emails. Sure, it is a pain to export and import lists, but there are many good options out there such as Campaign Monitor. If your electric company shut off your service you would surely be screwed, not really the same case here.

Regarding Postmark, this should make you feel even more confident about it. We've seen amazing growth and our team is so passionate about Postmark that we decided it was worth giving up profits on Newsberry to make it even better. That says a lot about our commitment to our other products and our focus as a team.

In the history of Wildbit there were many times when we could have just added a few employees to keep profits going in one area while we worked on something else. A perfect example is when we decided to drop consulting to focus on products. We could have kept it going along side of products, but focus is everything in business if you want to create something that people really love and enjoy to use.

<comment><AUTHOR> In addition to Chris's point, when we reached out to our customers about the decision, we gave them time to transition, and assistance in the transition plan.

I didn't personally speak to every customer, but many of the customers were understanding and in some cases, very supportive of the decision. The produce hadn't gotten new features or much more than maintenance in over a year. They appreciated our honesty and perhaps more importantly, our empathy for the situation we ultimately created for them.

<comment><USER10> I still don't like what you did and I am sure you made plenty of developer/startup enthusiasts angry and that they would love to be in your shoes profitable. If it was profitable, it means it was sustainable, at least in short period of time. You didnt have to spend your time on it, you could hire a team and literally outsource entire project. You could easily sell it for 10x fold and score $1MM to use for you current or future projects. I assume your team worked hard on this, they should be rewarded monetary-wise as well. Not to mention if you had coming back customers, it means they liked or loved your service. Now you left them pissed. If you were concerned about lists (which is nice thing of you not just selling to spammers), and if a "large companies" truly approached you, I dont see a problem putting a statement in your sell paper how the new company will treat existing database of leads. I am sure if you would sell to Google, they wouldnt go wild and spam the heck out of each lead you had.

<comment><USER11> Funny thing is, selling to Google often also means shutting the product down anyways. For a product of this size, if Google had interest it would most likely be a talent acquisition more than product.

Outsourcing an entire product like this is a pipe dream. It would also likely screw over their customers, who may then pass word around that they were douchebags for doing it.

I think they handled it well, and very morally.

<comment><USER10> closing down (killing) a self running, profit-generating, sustainable business (even if its MVP) that customers love and recurringly use is a good moral decision?

<comment><USER5> Whenever I have the same question as you, I stop and remember that a lot of people use "ethics" and "morality" interchangeably. If it doesn't make much sense with one word, try the other. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is a classic microeconomics case study in opportunity cost and externalities. From an accounting perspective, yes, money was coming in that exceeded expenses in labor and overhead. But the opportunity cost of the effort to support it -- as well as the negative externalities caused by the distraction effect (as well as the negative impact it may have on their brand) -- means that the $75K figure is more of a canard.

If I was a Microecon professor with a 101 class coming up, I know I'd have this article spiked and ready to use for an upcoming semester.

<comment><USER13> If I was Marketing professor...

<comment><USER14> Finance professor: In finance you calculate "Net Present Values" of project and you take every project with an NPV > 0, if they aren't mutually exclusive.

In this case it is arguably a scale problem. You have the company being only able to concentrate on one thing at a time, and even though the product is profitable with NPV > 0, there are better projects out there to take with an even bigger NPV, even if the rate of return might be reduced.

It's kind of like you have a block of land, do you want to setup a park that charges money to enter or build a skyscraper? The park has a 200% rate of return and the skyscraper only 15%.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Something doesn't add up here. It's like they bought a house, started renting it, and when being a landlord got boring, burned it down.

When you start a service and sign on customers, you take on a responsibility to keep that service going. Even if that means selling it or passing it on when you can't carry the torch yourself.

<comment><USER16> You have a responsibility to let your customers know in advance that you will be shutting down, but not to keep the service going.

You have a responsibility to your employees and anyone else that works for the company to do not harm their livelihood. Running a service that continues to waste money can eventually put the company out of business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is why at some point in a company's growth, you have to take the tech guys out of the business positions and stick someone who really knows business in charge.

One of my former coworkers helped build a ridiculous iPhone ringtone app a few years ago that STILL generates positive cashflow, and profited several 100k. This was done strictly through marketing. There are plenty of ways to grow a product, but these guys didn't have the know-how or wherewithal to do it for an already profitable product.

A real business person would have taken that $75k/yr and figured out a way to grow it, through marketing, by pounding the pavement, etc. Most startups are cash flow negative, and will die in a year and yet this company generating profits and weren't able to make it grow? They gave up way too easily, and like people said, it's because they got bored of it. That reeks of arrogance, sorry to say, being bored of $75k/yr.

Hopefully your current products are profitable, so that this isn't a lesson that comes back to haunt you later on. But as other people said, I also hope this doesn't mean that your current customers have to look forward to their product being closed down prematurely because your company got bored of it as well.

<comment><USER8> Well, I think it's primarily a business decision.

"We can devote $x resources on XYZ and make $75k profit, and spend more time and money to figure out how to grow it, or we can spend that $x resources on ABC, make more than $75k from that resource expenditure, and not have to invest more time/money to figure out how to grow ABC because it's already growing (either because we figured it out or we'll figure it out along the way)."

Yes there are plenty of ways to grow a product, but how much time/energy do you justify on learning/testing when you've already got other products that are more profitable and growing?

That said, the original post still focused too much on the feelings of the devs/peeps involved and didn't seem to address things from their customers' perspective. They addressed that in another reply to my earlier post, but it still set a bad tone to me off the bat.

<comment><USER17> Maybe they are making a lot of money to the point where they don't need it the extra cash. I don't know who these guys are, so maybe they're doing really well, and if so good for them.

But balking at spending effort to maintain a $75k/yr business doesn't seem "hungry" enough to me. They tried to killing off the business and dropped their price, and instead they doubled the number of users. What??? How much more of a clue do they need that they really have a viable product here?

Any businessperson worth their salt would take this and start figuring out a way to build on it. What about get an MBA intern from Wharton and give them the project of figuring out how to grow the business? Hire a real entrepreneur and tell them if they can grow the business, you'd split the profits 50/50 with them.

I mean, come on. There's a real solid base there of people who were willing to pay for their service. The BEST solution was to shut it down? I can't believe it.

<comment><USER18> You really negate yourself when you say "I don't know who these guys are."

The truth is from what I can gather and what this posts says, they're very passionate people. They don't want their name attached to a half-baked product. Nor do they want to deal with it anymore. It makes a lot of businesses sense to deal with things they ARE passionate about. $75k is small change. They don't need the hassle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Sounds like a very well-reasoned decision, one I would agree with if in the same situation.

I'd call the entire premise a success (not Newsberry per se, but in light of other product development.) Great recognition of where the product was going and where limited resources should be directed.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm all for making well designed, useful products. But refusing to (at least) sell the product to another company because you weren't sure they "would do do right by our customers and the industry" just seems dumb to me.

<comment><USER21> Why would they ruin their reputation by selling their email marketing company to a spammer, scammer or worse? They would have to be very careful when choosing the buyer - might be more hassle than its worth.

Also, they have a product called Postmark in the same space, Why create a competitor for yourself?

It's their decision to sell or not. They did right by their existing customers in first making an honest go of the business, then cutting the price when that didn't work, and then getting a transition plan for closing it when the lower price brought too many low quality (ie: borderline spammer) customers.

You can have an opinion if that's right or not, but ultimately its their decision.

<comment><USER20> Obviously its their decision but its a good discussion point all the same :-)

I understand that it's out of their hands once they sell it but if somebody made a good offer to buy the piece of tech then I (emphasis on the "I") would accept. The actions of the buyer doesn't dent their reputation IMHO as its no longer their product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The most charitable explanation for this seems to be that they don't want to damage their brand by having a less-than-perfect product. Fine. So "spin it off", give it a new name, and then ignore it while it continues to generate revenue for years and years.

They're dramatically underestimating how much the average user dislikes change. It doesn't matter if Campaign Monitor is better -- some of your users would have gladly stuck with the old way simply because it's the old way, and they were probably pissed they had to learn something new.

Letting the product coast isn't cheating your users. It's simply offering them one more option.

</comment><comment><USER23> Why not just sell it instead or am I missing something? The post was very vague on this point.

<comment><AUTHOR> We will elaborate on why we did not sell in another post - it's a good question, with an important set of reasons. Thanks for the push.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Reminds me that there's a good failure and a bad failure. A good failure is over and you move on, hopefully with some learned lessons. While a bad failure is doing _just_ well enough to be kept 'ticking over', and you're stuck working on something you don't really believe in.

</comment><comment><USER25> Profitable or no, profit is really irrelevant in this situation. If my company is making $100K/year and I only spend $25K on myself and I'm the sole employee, then technically my company is "profitable," but it's essentially invisible in the market.

This is what drives me nuts about the "I bootstrapped my company to profitability and success!" blog posts, because in most instances, the owner is making $50K/year and can't afford to hire anyone else.

I'd be interested in seeing what their top line numbers looked like, as that'd give an indicator of their overall market penetration, and true success.

This is why companies that do $750MM in revenue per year, but report an annual loss are still hugely successful, because $750MM is a ton of money!

</comment><comment><USER26> I wonder if wildbit considered selling the product to someone who could give it some love?

Perhaps it could have been similar to this recent story: [http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2012/01/25/the-inside-story- of-...](http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2012/01/25/the-inside-story-of-a-small- startup-acquisition-part-1/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Can this company even be trusted now? Are they going to shut down Beanstalk and Postmask when they get bored of those services, even if they are profitable? This is absurd.

<comment><USER28> I hadn't considered it from this point of view. Although a tad extreme, as they did mention partnering with Campaign Monitor to aid the move for customers, I can imagine I might have been a bit miffed to see a service I regularly use be shut down.

It would be interesting to here some ex-customer perspectives on this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Background: I'm friends with the owners of Wildbit, and have watched the journey they took that led to shutting down Newsberry. Several times, over a couple bottles of wine, my husband and I advised them to "just shut it down"! Because my husband & I run a very similar business, and we understand what it's like.

Here's the thing about the comments on this article, here on HN: of the people saying it was a mistake, that the article was misleading, etc, etc: How many of them have a profitable business with a team of any size, and multiple products?

That's the hidden problem with HN: with a few notable exceptions, everybody here is an Monday morning quarterback.

There is NOTHING more draining than to keep a product running "because it's just profitable enough." Or worse, because you feel guilty about shutting it down, because you feel like you're going to let down your customers.

There's nothing more divisive than a redheaded stepchild product.

There's nothing more wasteful than a distraction to you & your team.

Running 2 products is not simply double the work than running 1. Running 3 products is not simply 50% more than running 2.

When one runs a successful business oneself, one knows this implicitly.

But when you haven't, then you are likely to look at this kind of story and go "WTF? They just threw away $75k/year? But they could have spent 1 day a week on fixing it and making it more profitable! They could have hired a part-time designer!"

But this is just a lament wrapped up in logical, impartial language - <USER2> still a lament, which is really saying "WTF? I could use $75k/year! How could they possibly throw that away? WASTEFUL. SHAMEFUL."

Which is, really, totally understandable. Until you run a business of this scale, it's hard to imagine how $75k/yr in profit could be a millstone around your neck instead of something to celebrate. However, that does not good business advice make, and one must always consider the source & experience of the person dispensing it.

<comment><USER26> A lot of good points here.

Perhaps I should grow a thicker skin, but as a father of two redhead children I found the use of the expression "redhead stepchild" offensive. Mostly because I'd hate them to read something like that and think that there is something wrong with them.

I know it's meant to be a funny expression, and it's cool to make fun of redheads and all (isn't it great to find a minority that is ok to publicly ridicule without having to think about issues like racism), but perhaps the joke is getting not funny anymore...

or maybe I need to have a coffee and lighten up?

<comment><USER29> You need to have a coffee and lighten up. Nobody is making fun of redheads.

1\. Lots of people think redheads are sexy.

2\. The implication of "redheaded stepchild" is that "it's obviously not your kid" or possibly even a bastard.

3\. I'm fat, and a Rails developer, and I don't get my knickers in a twist every time somebody makes the "fat models" metaphor about good MVC design.

No offense, but your sensitivity to your kids' redheadedness is far more likely to make them think it's a bad thing than some random colloquial phrase.

<comment><USER26> No offense taken. I'm actually not sensitive about their red hair, I love it and the hair of their very sexy redhead mother.

I guess I must have misnderstood the colloquialism as I read it as similar humor to this [http://smh.drive.com.au/governments-dont-be-a-dickhead- campa...](http://smh.drive.com.au/governments-dont-be-a-dickhead-campaign- takes-aim-at-gingers-emos-20100329-r7gr.html)

<comment><USER26> [http://m.urbandictionary.com/#define?term=red%20headed%20ste...](http://m.urbandictionary.com/#define?term=red%20headed%20stepchild)

You are right, the "redheaded" part of the phrase is simply meant to imply the child is obviously not a legitimate child of the parent (who is assumed to be a non-redhead). So I was way off base, my apologies.

That's what you get for posting immediately after learning your flight has been delayed two hours :-(

<comment><USER29> S'ok.

The point of "redheaded stepchild" is that nobody loves it cuz it's not THEIR baby. Making it the perfect metaphor for this product. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Hello from Philadelphia! I live and work quite near you, in center city. My economics and motives are likely rather different from yours, and/or from what you are used to seeing in most other people. Let me know the next time you feel like throwing away a project which might, in the right hands, still be viable. One man's trash is another man's treasure.

NOTE TO SELF: New startup idea: Create a Craigslist for no-longer-wanted, about-to-be-defunct startups. Woot!

<comment><USER31> flippa.com is basically that, sort of.

<comment><USER32> Flippa signal to noise is pretty low. Maybe something more "curated" and targeted directly to HN would be better.

<comment><USER33> I don't think that's a real problem; you don't page through all 1800 listings to look for something to buy. You add a couple filters and get exactly what you want. Heck, if you wanted to find Newsberry, just click "High End" in the main menu and sort by price -- it would have been right there on page one. Any custom set of filters/searches can be saved and turned into a daily e-mail alert, too.

<comment><USER32> > Any custom set of filters/searches can be saved and turned into a daily > e-mail alert, too.

I did not know about that. Thanks.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Designing C# 7 [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/presentations/design-c-sharp-7 <comment><USER2> I really wonder, as an OOP developer should I move to functional programming or not.

<comment><USER3> I would definitely consider it if the IDE tooling was stronger. Visual Studio and F# is ok, but not nearly as strong as for C#.

<comment><USER4> One my active questions in this area is "does FP need an IDE as much as OOP?" I don't know. When done properly FP decomposes into smaller, easier to thing about functions. They often get glued together in a piper->filter way. As a result, the glue logic doesn't really require much introspection.

Where an IDE could be helpful is in refactoring and code generation. If your code does't require much generation due to its simplicity, you might need half-an-IDE. If you can get decent refactoring by having higher-level functions as the default, maybe you end only needing a quarter of an IDE?

That's why I keep bouncing between LightTable and Counterclockwise (nope hate IntelliJ and Cursives, but that is a taste thing). I'm more comfortable with Eclipse than Light Table. I just don't know how much of it I need.

One caveat is debugging. I do fallback on that. I think that might be a sign of me failing to breakdown my code into isolated units. Regardless, I haven't figured out how to do debugging in LightTable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It would be fantastic if C# could see language support for channels sooner than 8. I've done quite a bit in Go and C# async/await and find channels much nicer to work with than BlockingCollections and the like..

</comment><comment><USER6> Still no signs of understanding the value of static metaprogramming. C# used to be promising.

<comment><USER7> Could you elaborate on what you mean by "static metaprogramming" ? Google isn't helping me here.

Perhaps an example of a program or language that does this.

I see you talk about Lisp and ML a lot - are you referring to macros(1) to extend the language?

1) [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/267862/what-makes-lisp- ma...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/267862/what-makes-lisp-macros-so- special)

<comment><USER8> I think he's talking about C++ templates.

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

<comment><USER7> Is C++ template metaprogramming really the most desirable feature to add to the C# programming language? I really hope not.

I occasionally wish there were ways to get at the compiler features that add "yield return" and "async ... await" to the C# language and use them for your own extensions, but the hacks that make c++ templates turing-complete definitely don't seem to be a desirable way to do it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Multitaskers perform much worse on cognitive and memory tasks - <AUTHOR> http://chronicle.com/article/Scholars-Turn-Their-Attention/63746/

<comment><USER2> Interesting. I don't think I agree with this example, though:

 _He might, for example, ask students to recite the letters A through J as fast as possible, and then the numbers 1 through 10. Each of those tasks typically takes around two seconds. Then he asks them to interweave the two recitations as fast as they can: "A, 1, B, 2," and so on. Does that take four seconds? No, it typically requires 15 to 20 seconds, and even then many students make mistakes._

That's not a fair comparison. When I quickly recite the numbers from 1-10, I'm not figuring out which number comes next each time, I'm reciting an incredibly well-rehearsed script I have memorized. Same with the letters.

I _could_ memorize the sequence A-1-B-2-... Then I bet I would be able to recite it in 4 seconds.

To better capture the "switching time" that purports to demonstrate, you'd need to interleave two tasks which each require that kind of "next step" generation. e.g. Time someone giving every other letter and the square numbers, for instance.

It's pretty easy to determine the sequence for each of those, and it's unlikely that someone's memorized the whole thing already.

</comment><comment><USER3> _I don't want to see them taking notes. I want to see them paying attention to me._

This is something I recall knowing intuitively (and, by high school, explicitly): intensity in note-taking is inversely proportional to information absorption during lectures.

I'm pleased to see research on this, since I've remained curious as to whether this is innate to the individual or merely follows behavior.

<comment><USER4> My own survey of medical students suggests this is exactly opposite of truth: note-taking was strongly correlated with improved performance, and the class note-takers, the ones who compiled "official" notes for noteservice were the best prepared, while the consumers of noteservice actually fell below the median. Suggesting that if medical students were self-interested and well informed, then noteservice would be untenable.

<comment><USER3> I think you and the previous commenter have mistaken "note taking at all" with what I actually said, which was "note taking intensity."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is something I realized about myself a long time ago. I've met several people (mostly women, for what it's worth) who swear they get more done when they multitask. I don't believe them.

I drew this on my whiteboard a long time ago to describe how I felt about it. <http://www.flickr.com/photos/timothymorgan/62139938/>

</comment><comment><USER6> However, strong multi-taskers also tend to draw many people into their activities. When (resulting) failure calls for accountability, "everyone" was involved and the (perceived) blame quotient is not high enough for any individual to effect real change.

An anecdotal observation, but a general experience of mine in corporate life.

Sometimes, it's actually the "hero" who tackles a problem single-handedly, who fare worst. Because blame can easily be apportioned to him or her in great measure, whether deserved or not.

Isolation is often the kiss of death in such environments.

[/cynicism]</comment>


Ash HN: what cloudformation tool editor are you using? - <AUTHOR>

TL;DR: looked for a tool, found none, should I create one or is there any I could already use?
My common use case for which i don't have a perfect tool is:
a. i have tens of active cloudformation stacks b. i want to update a stack c. i want to see (with 100% accuracy):
   1. which resources will be updated
   2. which resources will be created
   3. which resources will be deleted
The way i do it now: - have templates versioned on git - execute `aws cloudformation update` and blindly trust that no other changes have been performed between my updates. - (some other tweaks too long to describe here)
What tools are you using? I feel like creating one, but i cannot be the first one bumping into this (i might do it wrong - that's also a possibility). <comment><USER2> I'm still using the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse, not perfect but (at least) it has a few bindigs to AWS services.

Million dollar tip: Just wait next re:invent before start to develop anything :)</comment>


Show HN: A simple webapp that recommends HN stories to HN users - <AUTHOR> http://hnfy.herokuapp.com <comment><USER2> This doesn't work that great in my opinion...

Have you seen: [https://hnprofile.com/](https://hnprofile.com/)

It's a bit different, but if you can identify what a user is interested in - you could do a good recommendation

<comment><AUTHOR> That's okay :)

It started as an experiment and the initial results convinced me to make an app out of it rather than letting it be an experiment. I believe it's not possible to make a good recommendation system in general, with the limited data available about the community users. Using the HN API, I could only find user's submissions and comments (upvotes are private, thus limiting the amount of useful data). I ended up using only the submissions to determine user's topics of interest.

<comment><USER2> > I believe it's not possible to make a good recommendation system in general

It's definitely possible, however it would be limited to a subset of users (probably need 10 or 20 comments). When you limit it to submissions the number of words in a title is limited, and often not associated with the actual content itself.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've currently set 20 to be the minimum number of submissions required. Lowering that limit would only result in random recommendations. Wouldn't it be hard for even a human to properly tell what someone might be interested in by looking at just 4-5 submissions they've made?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The crisis game we're all playing - <AUTHOR> http://www.michaelalanmiller.com/?p=627

<comment><USER2> > Environmental degradation is largely a function of population growth... I > have no doubt the earth's population can balloon to 12 or even 15 billion - > for a while...

According to a various gov/UN reports, population will peak between 2050-2075 somewhere in the neighborhood of 9 billion.</comment>