Apple Plans to Release a Cellular-Capable Watch to Break iPhone Ties - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-04/apple-said-to-ready-cellular-capable-watch-to-break-iphone-ties <comment><USER2> If you could make calls, respond to messages (any platform), play music from a major music service, and stay up-to-date with the most important notifications, you could basically untether yourself from your phone completely. This would be a real game-changer from a personal health standpoint. People are losing their minds with the current smartphone pandemic. I, personally, would welcome this change. It seems like an easier path toward device freedom. Since you wear it, it would feel like you've freed yourself from a screen (for the most part).

<comment><USER3> A real game changer like the watches Samsung has been making for years that already do these things?

<comment><USER4> Samsung makes nothing, and has never made anything, remotely close to this.

<comment><USER5> The Samsung Gear S accepted a 3G Nano-SIM:

[http://www.samsung.com/us/support/answer/ANS00037221/](http://www.samsung.com/us/support/answer/ANS00037221/)

The Gear S2 3G has an eSIM for 3G. No phone required.

Many Chinese Android watches have offered direct cell connectivity for a couple of years now, as does the LG Watch Urbane 2nd Ed LTE ( Android Wear ).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love my S2, but I have a hard time seeing why I should pay the cell phone company $120/yr to connect my watch. I don't go without my phone and I don't think this would change that.

For people who want to run and listen to Spotify this may be great.

But that stupid cell company fee will keep me away. Just like it keeps me off cellular iPads.

<comment><USER7> What if it could pair with air pods and function as a proper phone?

<comment><USER8> It might function as a proper _phone_ , but it can't function as a proper _smartphone_ , because you need a real screen for that.

<comment><USER9> What you're implying is that blind people can't properly use a smartphone, which I believe is false.

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure what the grandparent was implying, but there's definitely a major benefit for larger screen sizes, even for those that are completely blind. iOS voiceover and other accessibility UI affordances are much more difficult to implement on the watch form factor, where a very small amount of content can be 'active' at a time.

There are some interesting startups targeting the possibilities here, but right now, smart watches provide a less capable experience for _everyone_ right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm hoping that in 10-15 years, existing smartphones with giant screens will seem like a thing of the past, and that we'd have tiny devices that look "dumb" for a third person from 2017, but are much smarter and have AR capabilities just like we've seen in Sci-Fi movies and video games for a long time.

We don't need large screens to consume more content - we need content to look larger and more content to be seen _in our eyes._ I see wearables (watches, combined with earphones, and eyewear of some kind) becoming independent of a smartphone as one step forward in this evolution.

<comment><USER12> All this is possible now, the big thing holding back this sort of approach, and many other tech advances is batteries. Once we can get batteries with 10x current energy density, the game really will change. Smart Eyewear becomes actually feasible, as do many other form factors. I'm interested in this potential Apple device, but given the current model only really lasts a day, I'm not not sure how they plan to integrate radios and maintain that, and the form factor.

<comment><USER11> In my observation, promises of battery energy density exploding way beyond current designs still seem a long way away for mass produced gadgets. The "attack", if you will, has to be from both sides - higher energy density of batteries (allowing them to be smaller), as well as lower energy consumption by the gadgets. The latter gets easier when you don't have to power a large screen and (comparatively) large speakers. I have a stronger belief in the latter than in the former for the next two decades.

Another possibility for low energy devices is to have them use energy from outside the physical batteries in them. They could be light powered and use ambient light (for powering the gadget and recharging batteries), kind of like "solar powered" calculators that we've had for decades (that could be used for hours and still work with very less ambient light). The batteries would then act more like stand-in backups when ambient light isn't enough. This would require great gains in low energy processing (so I'm not comparing a calculator with a smartphone here). But I'm guessing this will also be an approach that'd be tried while we're on the way to getting significantly higher battery energy densities.

Whoever gets to do eyewear with AR without it looking dorky and without it being bulky will be the pioneer in making it widespread. These cannot be like how the Apple Watch is today, requiring an almost daily recharge when the device is no longer worn. The bigger challenge for Apple, as the devices become more feature rich, would be to continue keeping as much computation as possible on-device for enhancing privacy (and using differential privacy wherever apt), instead of offloading it to the cloud like its competitors look at things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is all great.

In the short term, the sticking point is the cell contract.

If there is a reasonable add-on price to your existing phone rate, this is going to catch on. The more reasonable the rate, the quicker it will catch on.

Longer-term, the standalone service contract (Watch-only, no phone) will become more significant. People don't have an intrinsic urge to carry a rectilinear slab in their pocket... they have an intrinsic urge to communicate with each other. As a watch form-factor becomes more convenient, they will happily switch, in droves.

<comment><USER14> I would love to drop the smart phone from every hour of my waking life but limited text input capabilities would be a major sticking point for me.

<comment><USER13> The voice dictation works well. It uses an internet connection, but i suppose you often need that anyway when you're inputting text.

The finger handwriting works reasonably well too. It's slow though, at least for me, so better for short messages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There are plenty of instances where I might want directions while I'm on a run, but there is no way I'm paying $10 a month to add the device to my plan. Hopefully it is just shared data with my phone plan. We'll see what the carriers do, but I think it will make or break it for a lot of people.

<comment><USER16> $10/month to no longer need my phone for map my run and Spotify? That's worth $120/yr to me

<comment><USER17> You don't need that if you preload the music and just use the series 2 gps.

<comment><USER16> I honestly dont know if I have any music on my computer. I use Spotify for probably ~10 hours/day. (Work, Gym, Commute)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Maybe if Apple wins their fight with Qualcomm we'll start seeing cellular connectivity in more of their products. I personally have no interest in a cellular-capable Apple Watch, but I would be very interested in a cellular- capable MacBook.

<comment> amiga-workbench They had a 3G macbook prototype years ago, never went with it.

The integrated 3G & GPS in my ThinkPad is very convenient.

<comment><USER6> I imagine the all metal cases make it quite difficult (ignoring all other factors).

<comment><USER19> A black shinny ceramic casing would solve it.

<comment> amiga-workbench And would make me more likely to buy one.

The silver is too sterile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Connecting the dots, if Airpods are successful in adoption, this could answer the awkward "You'd look silly holding a watch up to your ear" argument, same with "It's inconvenient to plug a 3.5mm plug into a watch". Maybe this is one motivating factor in Apple's decision to remove it the 3.5mm port from the iPhone?

</comment><comment><USER21> Battery life. That's going to be the limitation.

</comment><comment><USER22> An Apple Watch as a kind of iPhone Lite, not supplementing your phone but actually replacing it, could be an attractive option for a lot of people. Most of my extended family members don't use any apps, don't use their phones for e-mail. They do use the camera though, so that alone might be enough to keep them from switching.

<comment><USER23> A camera in the Apple Watch seems like low hanging fruit. I wouldn't be suprised if the next iteration has one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is a disappointing development, because it means they are moving in the wrong direction on the biggest weakness of the Apple Watch: the watch is embarrassingly thick and heavy for an Apple product.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is exactly what I want.

Calls, Messages, Email, and Siri with voice to command short replies.

Map directions, Apple Pay, and Car2Go and I'd be set.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'd rather have the glucose monitoring

</comment><comment><USER27> They should put the battery in the watch band.

(Or do something else to make the watchband more useful. Antennas maybe?)

<comment><USER28> An antenna would not surprise me. There already seems to be a small contact patch on the bands that makes them snap into place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is the only way I would buy one

</comment><comment><USER30> Cool. I'll be able to replace my laptop and cell phone with an iPad and a watch!

</comment><comment><USER31> Probably free data as long as you have an Apple Music sub, or something like that.

</comment><comment><USER32> Could the Apple Watch use WiFi provided by a phone's personal hotspot?

<comment><USER33> You mean the same phone, or a different phone?

The Apple Watch already can and does use WiFi and will connect to existing configured access points:

[http://www.iphonehacks.com/2015/05/how-to-ensure-apple- watch...](http://www.iphonehacks.com/2015/05/how-to-ensure-apple-watch-is- connected-to-a-wi-fi-network.html)

Presumably if you tethered your personal phone to a second phone, then the apple watch could and would also connect directly to that second phone's WiFi hotspot without your personal phone present.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Then finally a smartwatch will make sense!

</comment><comment><USER35> Thus making carriers even stronger.

</comment><comment><USER36> The only company that has a greater advantage at this game is Amazon's Echo. Echo is like a smartphone without a screen. It is the future of smart phones. And because it has a headstart on the voice game, an Echo watch would probably be the next best thing.

An Apple Watch with a small screen is a misfire and a watch that works standalone is somewhat missing the point. Watches were supposed to be remote control devices for our phones. Nothing else. This move feels like a cheap limited feature phone, not the future.

Edit: Maybe I am missing the point. Imagine a standalone watch that broadcasts wifi signal. Now imagine a thin ipod touch on the other hand piggybacking on the watch. That would be like reimagining the future.</comment>


Greenspun: Ruby on Rails and the importance of being stupid - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2009/05/18/ruby-on-rails-and-the-importance-of-being-stupid/http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2009/05/18/ruby-on-rails-and-the-importance-of-being-stupid/

<comment><USER2> This has been posted, and the link doesn't work ;-)

I tried finding a report button but no luck.</comment>


The Interim Operating System - <AUTHOR> http://interim.mntmn.com <comment><USER2> From the GitHub README:

Interim

Interim OS is a radical new operating system with a focus on minimalism. It steals conceptually from Lisp machines (language-based kernel) and Plan 9 (everything is a file system). It boots to a JITting Lisp-like REPL and offers the programmer/user the system's resources as filesystems.

Interim runs on:

      Raspberry Pi 2 (Broadcom VideoCore4/ARMv7, Bare Metal)
      Olimex Olinuxino (Freescale IMX233/ARMv5, Bare Metal)
      ARM5+ Linux (Hosted)
      Intel/AMD x64 Linux (Hosted)

<comment><USER3> > Interim OS is a radical new operating system with a focus on minimalism. It > steals conceptually from Lisp machines (language-based kernel)

These two concepts being so close together ("minimalism" and "Lisp") is practically an oxymoron, as far as Common Belief Structures go.

Minimalism is 6502 machine code as written by someone who honestly believes assemblers make code go slower. Don't you know that? /s

Meanwhile, this:

> It boots to a JITting Lisp-like REPL

... is basically Dalvik/Android. It's what we run on our phones, except our phones use Java, not Lisp, because Lisp Is Slow. Dogma. Can't challenge it. People look at you funny.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi, author here. Thank you all for the positive feedback. This motivates me a lot to seriously continue this project. I have a port to i386 (bare metal) in the pipeline and a lot of clean-up to do. Also, I'd be glad to hear your ideas for areas of use / improvements, what traps not to fall into et cetera. Cheers!

<comment><USER4> Just wanted to express my deep admiration for your work. All the best in completing the work. (Loved the writeup, too.)

<comment><USER5> yeah, he is kinda awesome indeed :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Paper here: [http://dump.mntmn.com/interim- paper/](http://dump.mntmn.com/interim-paper/)

This seems motivated similarly to the OS Alan Kay's Viewpoints Research Institute is working on -- an OS a single person can comprehend.

</comment><comment><USER7> I really enjoyed reading the paper.

The author's focus is in the right place (IMO).

Technical ability is perhaps common but having the right focus is, sadly, rare. It's the difference between someone who says they could do or did something many years ago versus the the person who actually does it, _now_, when it is sorely needed.

Computing today is in dire need of _true_ minimalism, IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER8> This looks absolutely awesome. It is the kind of software I thought the RPi was originally going to ship with.

<comment><USER9> If it had something like that out of the box, I'd get an RPi 2 today.

<comment><USER5> Creating the RPi 2 SD card is really not hard, you can just download the .tgz from the website. I do not think that the RPi ships with a default OS anyways?!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The is the operating system that I always wanted to make, without having the time or talent to pull it off. Just wonderful.

</comment><comment><USER11> One thing seems off in that description: If the end of the list is represented as pointer to pair of nils then the last element of a list cannot contain nil. The traditional LISP representation is simply a nil pointer for end. '() is nil (NULL in C.)

<comment><USER12> I don't immediately see why he is not just using NULL for nil but Interim is nonetheless more conventional than it may seem. It does use nil for '() (see [1]) and it evaluates (car nil) to nil and (cdr nil) to nil just like Common Lisp does. The last element of a list may be nil because list elements always appear in car positions whereas it is always the cdr position that one checks to identify the end of the list. If you walk a list without checking for nil, then you will appear to find a list that ends with an unending sequence of nil elements (as is the tradition!). For example, try (third nil) in Common Lisp; you will see a result of nil and no error.

[1] [https://github.com/mntmn/interim/blob/master/sledge/alloc.c#...](https://github.com/mntmn/interim/blob/master/sledge/alloc.c#L301)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nitpicking: it's a VPU which runs the bootstrap blob, not the QPU (the latter is well documented and fairly open, unlike the former).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for that correction, will look into it and correct.

<comment><USER13> Btw., VPU had been reverse-engineered to a degree, should be sort of possible to roll out your own bootstrap now: [https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv](https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Related, but much much less complete: [https://github.com/nathell/lithium](https://github.com/nathell/lithium)

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool! I'll check that out. Funny, I also read "An Incremental Approach to Compiler Construction" once.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> There are plans to incorporate a GUI or the keyboard focus is exclusive?

</comment><comment><USER5> Do you already support the Raspberry's GPIOs or do you plan to do so?

<comment><AUTHOR> Support is planned!

<comment><USER5> That is very nice! I guess that will be a filesystem interface?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> why do you have more pictures of your weird keyboard than screenshots from the device?

who photographs lcds honestly

<comment><USER17> because the device is a RaspberryPI built into the keyboard?

<comment><USER16> 'built in' meaning screwed onto a piece of plastic?

wow such hacker</comment></comment></comment>


Table tennis: incredible shot at Japan Open – BBC Sport [video] - <AUTHOR> http://m.bbc.co.uk/sport/table-tennis/36574009 <comment><AUTHOR> I shared this not because of the shot but the Frenchmans reaction. Sportsman like and appreciative of the skill and luck needed to make the recovery - <USER2> great moment for both players</comment>


How (and Why) to Use Game Mechanics to Power Your Business - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2010/07/13/game-mechanics-business/

<comment><USER2> I see this as part of the reaction to the "don't make you user's think" design that has permeated the last 5 years or so on the web. Game mechanics are an interesting way to have more complex applications that don't scare users off and even encourage them to think and participate. They require careful balance and use to not swing into other weird places, but the fact that they can go there (addictive, purely rewards based actions) are testament to their power. It's amazing how many people I talk to through IActionable that get it wrong and had initially planned to create systems that could have really hurt their applications in the long run.

I think the educational aspects of game mechanics can be a big thing and is probably one of the more overlooked benefits in the face of other great benefits like retention and engagement.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Your THAC0 for getting a raise is 13!"</comment>


CyanogenMod 12 nightlies available - <AUTHOR> http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/the-l-is-for-lollipop <comment><USER2> SlimRom's another nice ROM that has Lollipop support. I'm using it on my 2 year old Galaxy tab 2 and apart from a few minor bugs, it's running fine. SlimRom supports a good number of devices too(most samsung devices and almost all flagships), although not as many as Cyanogen.

<comment><USER3> I used to use it on an S1 to get something not 2.3 that wasn't terribly performing

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really wish there was a project that provided AOSP builds with no modifications apart from enabling root (which is just a configuration setting), without Play and all the other proprietary stuff, and with the option of providing OTA updates.

Basically I can compile AOSP myself, but I don't want to. I want OTA updates, I don't care about any "enhancements" Cyanogen added, and I'm happy with OSS apps in F-Droid instead of Play.

Am I alone in this?

<comment><USER5> Replicant, perhaps? [http://www.replicant.us/](http://www.replicant.us/)

But without the proprietary drivers, not much of the hardware will be functioning. No GPS, no 3D acceleration and no hardware video codecs.

<comment><USER4> I don't mind the proprietary drivers and firmwares. (Actually, I do, but I'm realistic and know that the completely open source phone won't happen ever, so I just accepted it.) What I'm after is stock AOSP (with binary blobs, if no other options exists), with root access, and without the proprietary Google apps (not because of their proprietary nature, but because they are of absolutely no use to me, I'm happy with the open source equivalents). Replicant tries to clone the proprietary bits, but that's not what I'm after.

I'm only after convenience. As I said, I can compile AOSP, but I don't want to invest in this maintenance work at all. I just want a plain Android that can update itself. Basically the only thing I'm after is OTA updates to stock AOSP. I don't care about modifications, new features, or more free drivers. If such a project ever appears, I'll be the first to donate. I would even pay for a subscription to such a service.

<comment><USER6> That is what CyanogenMod is... AOSP (+drivers) with a few tweaks/addons (that can be disabled), root, no Gapps, and gets OTA updates.

There are some ROMs out there that are closer to AOSP but normally have limited phone support and no OTA updates.

I doubt anyone would go to the trouble of creating a Android ROM for different phones and not tweak anything on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm kind of surprised that the Nexus 5 (hammerhead) isn't in the first batch of devices, since it's the last Nexus device that was released without Lollipop, and stock Lollipop has been available on the Nexus 5 for a while.

It's especially weird, since the Nexus 4 (mako) _is_ in the first batch of devices. I'd expect the more recent and more up-to-date devices to be easier to port, and also a higher priority.

That said, this has taken a lot less long than I'd feared, so I'm pretty excited to see this! Privacy Guard alone is worth the switch to Cyanogenmod[0], in addition to a number of other tweaks that CM allows.

[0] Yes, it's available on rooted non-CM devices, but it's much cleaner when it's integrated into the ROM.

</comment><comment><USER8> It makes me sad every time I see a new CyanogenMod release, that I seem to have picked the single Samsung device that is locked down more than any other (AT&T Galaxy S4). If someone knows a trick to getting a custom ROM loaded on this device, please let me know. I've tried the "SafeStrap" method with no success. It seems like the XDA community has moved on from this device as well...

<comment><USER9> You can call your carrier and request they unlock the device('s bootloader). There are also a few services that you can send some information to that will unlock it for a small fee.

These sorts of shenanigans are a big part of why I haven't had any desire to switch from my S3, since even with the neat specs, you could hardly call swapping performance, personal control, and extensive added functionality for bloatware and unalterable permanently out of date OS versions an "upgrade".

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Damn that's quick! These guys are fast.

<comment><USER11> Not sure if sarcastic, LG G3 already has 5.0.1 released.

<comment><USER12> Pretty fast considering the amount of hardware being targeted and the amount of enhancements above and beyond stock Android that they are supporting. I mean, they're bringing Lollipop to HTC's flagship device (m8) before HTC is (if you don't count the "Developer Edition").

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Putting some nightly fun on the bacon!

<comment><USER14> Please share - I'm waiting for that as well (another bacon owner)

Especially the unlock/lock features of Lollipop are interesting: Don't lock it near my laptop/car etc. or let me unlock it with my yubikey.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The G2 has no active maintainer (Ricardo Cerqueira / arcee / rmcc) and is still running with a modem and kernel corresponding to the Jelly Bean version. The current maintainer has lots of patches waiting to be reviewed in the Gerrit and is ignoring them.

If the current management model of CM allows this to happen, it can be safely assumed the quality of this ROM leaves a lot to be desired.

<comment><USER16> The support of a single device reflects the quality of the project overall?

<comment><USER15> When it's one of the most sold phones, yes.

<comment><USER6> Irreverent... What don't you understand about the maintainers are volunteers?

<comment><USER15> He got lots of LG phones as a compromise that he would develop for them... so...

<comment><USER6> Who is giving this person these phones?

<comment><USER15> I can't remember well, this was like 2 years ago, or even more, but I think it was LG, as part of their compromise with the developers, or God knows what.

<comment><USER6> No, LG is probably not giving phones to someone to develop a custom ROM. Even if a person was given a G2 I am sure by now they have a newer phone so it would not really be much of an incentive.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Secor: A service persisting Kafka logs to S3, GCS and Azure Blob Storage - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pinterest/secor <comment><USER2> I love this. This is a property already baked into another messaging queuing system called Pulsar and I've thought about writing my own for internal use (maybe to be open-sourced). The only quirk that I see is this link in the project description readme:

> it is guaranteed that each message will be saved in exactly one S3 file

This can get expensive. Specifically a 1-to-1 write per message with S3 (or any cloud storage provider) gets expensive very, very quickly. Further, when reading from cloud storage, you've got to read one message (object) at a time which adds up as well. I'm not talking about egress bandwidth either, I'm talking about S3 PUT/GET operations. I'd love to see some kind of batching operation that takes groups of messages (perhaps configurable time/size limits?) and writes them as a blog to cloud storage.

<comment><USER3> It's not a 1:1 write per message, it relies on Kafka offset guarantees to batch messages into S3 at a configurable threshold, 256MB per S3 object is common.

<comment><USER2> Oh! That's awesome. The way that sentence is written is a little tricky to parse, but the behavior of a batching lots of messages (configurable 256MB+ chunks) is exactly what I'm hoping for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've wondered for a while now why there isn't something like a cross between Kafka (durable queue broker) and Datomic (a "database" partitioned into storage chunks, where each chunk canonically lives in object storage and is only _cached_ by the instances doing the queries.)

I'd love to see a queuing infrastructure that consists of two parallel clusters, running on the same machines:

• a set of _write nodes_ , which each "own" partitions on a topic (in the sense of being that partition's sole writer); where a write-node receives writes to its partition until it fills up a chunk, at which point it shoves the chunk into object storage;

• a set of _read nodes_ , which serve _reads_ and/or _streaming subscription requests_ by 1. streaming archival data by retrieving chunks from object storage into a read-node-local MRU-on-disk-pressure cache; and then 2. once the read stream "catches up" to the end of the archival data, it would switch to proxying to the relevant write-node, which would serve the query/stream from its uncommitted chunk.

\-----

I feel like this queue architecture would be useful for all sorts of things, at least for my own use-cases. Especially because it'd scale perfectly-well _down_ to running one read-node and one write-node on one machine, while still being able to make durability guarantees about the _committed_ data. (The durability of _uncommitted_ data, I don't much need to worry much about, personally.)

Is there anything like this on the market?

<comment><USER5> Maybe Pulsar gets close. Your general question regarding Kafka reminds me of this: [https://medium.com/@rad_g/the-case-for-kafka-cold- storage-32...](https://medium.com/@rad_g/the-case-for-kafka-cold- storage-32929d0a57b2)

I've written that.

Edit: kafka jira did not get far: [https://issues.apache.org/jira/plugins/servlet/mobile#issue/...](https://issues.apache.org/jira/plugins/servlet/mobile#issue/KAFKA-3726)

<comment><USER6> Confluent actually has released "tiered storage" which appears to be a similar feature to what Pulsar has. [https://www.confluent.io/blog/infinite-kafka- storage-in-conf...](https://www.confluent.io/blog/infinite-kafka-storage-in- confluent-platform/)

It's still up in the air as to whether this feature will make its way into the open-source Kafka though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been following this project for a long time, but I have to ask what are the advantages over using Kafka Connect Sinks?

[https://docs.confluent.io/current/connect/kafka- connect-s3/i...](https://docs.confluent.io/current/connect/kafka- connect-s3/index.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like the S3 connector was released in 2017. So if you wanted this functionality before then, secor was a good option: [https://www.confluent.io/blog/apache-kafka-to- amazon-s3-exac...](https://www.confluent.io/blog/apache-kafka-to- amazon-s3-exactly-once)

It also supports going to other cloud object stores (other than S3).

<comment><USER7> Yup, there was definitely a reason to consider Secor before 2017. Part of the reason I'm familiar with Secor in the first place.

Just to be clear, there are dozens of Kafka Connect Sinks and Sources, and finding Kafka Connect Sinks for other blob storage solutions should be easy. If you can't the KC framework makes it pretty easy to develop your own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> At prior company we used Secor to backup Kafka topics to S3 and would use to replay/reingest data with success. If I were to reimplement Kafka somewhere new it would definitely be one of my "Go to Production" requirements.

</comment><comment><USER9> We've used this at Patreon to get data from our various sources in the application to Redshift. We've since replaced this with Kinesis Firehose

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you still using kafka? Does Kinesis Firehose read from Kafka?

<comment><USER7> No. If you want to use Firehose, you need to transfer data from Kafka to Kinesis first. You can probably use one of many Kafka Connect Sinks for this. Eg: [https://github.com/awslabs/kinesis-kafka- connector](https://github.com/awslabs/kinesis-kafka-connector)

At that point, might as well set up a Kafka Connect cluster with a Kafka Connect Sink, and dump to S3 yourself.

<comment><USER10> Why not go whole-hog and use Kinesis Streams and eliminate Kafka altogether?

<comment><USER7> Not sure if you're being factitious, but it sounded like parent's data was already in Kafka.

But you're right, no reason not to start with kinesis in the first place, especially with all the AWS options around it including Kinesis Analytics (Streaming "SQL"), Flink (supported by AWS now) or plain old EMR (Spark, Flink, etc...).

There is a lot of work that goes into maintaining your own Kafka ecosystem, even if you use Confluent, Lenses, etc...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I also used FluentD for this. Basically we alredy had fluentd, and fluentd can output to anything, not just S3.</comment>


How SysAdmins Devalue Themselves - <AUTHOR> http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/4/200166-how-sysadmins-devalue-themselves/fulltext <comment><AUTHOR> Non-paywalled link: [http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2891413](http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2891413)

Sorry, I did not realize (being within a university network) that the link I submitted was under a paywall.

</comment><comment><USER2> Sad it's paywalled.

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2891413](http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2891413)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How can I estimate traffic for a future event? - <AUTHOR>

I run a website that, to date, has had very low traffic, fewer than 1k uniques / day. I expect a Fortune 500 company to link to the site via their Facebook page within a day or two. How can I estimate how much traffic will be generated?<p>Thanks, all. <comment><USER2> There's a few ways I've gone about doing this in the past:

\- Find out if they've ever done something similar in the past and see if you can get performance numbers on that post.

\- Ask around and see if you can get some good Facebook click data numbers for the type of post you expect to get. These vary greatly depending on the brand but you can usually use engagement (comments and likes on individual posts) to see if different user groups are going to perform similarly.

\- Do some basic back of the envelope math. Look at how many likes they have, likes per post. What percentage are going to click on your link?

Your best bet is usually the first one. Similar campaigns on the same page are going to offer you the best insight. Although, I've found that social media tends to fail to meet my expectations time and time again in situations like this. Depending on the company, you might not push that far past 1k/day.

Either way, good luck.

</comment><comment><USER3> You can not accurately estimate how much network traffic will be generated. There is nothing from stopping it from becoming immediately viral. Sites have had hundreds of thousands of visitors increases daily. Be prepared. Host the static on s3 etc... Engineer for it.

Varnish: <https://www.varnish-cache.org/> A decent primer.

Failover database servers? Auto scaling on amazon?

A Fortune 500 is a big deal. Don't worry. This is a good kind problem to be having. Regardless, the exposure will continue and be referenceable which is great for your site.

</comment><comment><USER4> You can guess, maxmcd gave some suggestions, but you can't really estimate. My web site has been shown on two national TV shows and I can tell you from experience that so many variables come into play that you can't even estimate the order of magnitude of traffic. With the cost of web servers as they are now, just prepare for the biggest amount of traffic you can imagine, overkill is better than under.

</comment><comment><USER5> Does facebook have activity monitors of any sort? Can you ask them how many people visit the page directly or view their news feed items?

</comment><comment><USER6> Let us know how it goes! What's the website?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your suggestions, all. Our traffic roughly doubled, which didn't cause any strain on our infrastructure.

For the curious, the site is <http://betterific.com>, which was linked from <http://facebook.com/arbys>, marking our first big partnership. After endless market surveys about what your customers want, Betterific tells you why.</comment></comment>


Messages and notifications without intermediaries via JSON - <AUTHOR> https://refl.me <comment><AUTHOR> An easy and secure way to receive messages and notifications (native) directly from web services to your mobile device using only JSON.

Full documentation for developers and all features: [https://refl.me/docs](https://refl.me/docs)</comment>


Rand Paul Plans to Filibuster Patriot Act - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/11/rand-paul-filibuster-patriot-act_n_7258460.html <comment><USER2> Ron Wyden, too:

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/10/ron-wyden-nsa- surve...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/10/ron-wyden-nsa- surveillance_n_7251562.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I hope he reads the Declaration of Independence for 72 hours.

<comment><USER4> I would like him to read a redacted/revised version of the Declaration, and the Bill of Rights, where all the parts that are no longer effectively followed are altered accordingly.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Growing Trees – Learn Ecology in VR - <AUTHOR> https://kosmosschool.com/class/growing-trees/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm one of the co-founders of Kosmos School. Growing Trees is our second class (the first one is Intro to Rockets). We provide LIVE science classes - instead of meeting with a teacher in a physical building, students meet in small groups in our VR app.

It's a great environment to teach. It allows us to do cool stuff that aren't possible in the real world and deliver a lot of "AHA" moments for our students.</comment>


Say Hello to Netbot (new App.net client from the creators of Tweetbot) - <AUTHOR> http://tapbots.com/blog/news/say-hello-to-netbot

<comment><USER2> With Droplr support like Tapbots has with Tweetbot, this is the App for me. nice.</comment>


Ask HN: Where am I going wrong? - <AUTHOR> I keep building startups and side projects, and they keep failing. Initially I was doing it to make money, now I'd just be grateful if anyone used any of the stuff I build. My first project launched in 2003. It was a competitor to bunk1.com but I couldn't get any camps to sign up to it because I was crap at sales. Since then I've spent untold numbers of hours building various projects. Some, where I was in between jobs would be full time efforts. Others would be done evenings and weekends but still consume nearly all my free time.
There's something about the idea of running my own software business that appeals to me in a way I can't describe.  Now, 15 years later I have nothing to show for it. I can live with the fact that my projects have never made money but it hurts to think I've put so much effort into something nobody wants.
I used to have a "build it and they'll come" mentality but I learned about lean startups and started validating ideas. Now I try to make sure there is at least some interest in what I'm building and then mention in in related forums, groups etc I usually get a positive response but this never translates into traction.
I often see 'Show HN' posts blowing up and sometimes I don't understand how they get as many votes as they do. After 15 years I feel like I've exhausted every resource and I'm just not cut out for this.
Where am I going wrong HN? <comment><USER3> Market > Marketing > Design > Code.

I suspect you might get the code part right and fall short on at least one of the other three.

For help with the marketing part, you might want to consider my book (the second edition just came out in beta): [https://pragprog.com/book/actb2/technical-blogging-second- ed...](https://pragprog.com/book/actb2/technical-blogging-second-edition)

I understand the desire to remain anonymous here, but if you email me with some details, I can give you more specific pointers.

</comment><comment><USER4> Well I'm 30 and I've "wasted" countless hours in projects as well that didn't give me any money back. I've started coding websites since I was 10, with the idea of making money and turning into a successful entrepreneur. Today, I write code for a living in a company. Those "wasted" hours definitely made me a very very competitive person in the job market, I bet that if did all those things you mention, that will be the case as well.

That doesn't mean I'm not successful. It just didn't work out and it is normal. For every billionaire, there is a lot of people like us.

I would also ignore the comments about not being good at selling etc, building products and making a lot of money has a lot of luck involved. There are things we can definitely keep improving, but that in my opinion, isn't what is going to get us what we want. There is a good amount of randomness and luck in this process. A lot of people are working hard, that doesn't mean a thing. Only a few can succeed.

We're just "test subjects" in this world. Don't take this too seriously as some type of failure. Just use your skills you got to make a living and if you are willing, make more products, or give up, it doesn't matter, really. And chill.

Thanks for everything that you have built that didn't work out.

<comment> open-source-ux _" There is a good amount of randomness and luck in this process."_

I agree with this. Just take a look at 'Show HN' \- there are many excellent projects that get no traction at all. And then there a few lucky ones that suddenly take-off. There's no "wisdom of the crowds" moment that propels one project to success over another because it's more worthy or excellent - <USER2> really is random in so many cases. But rather than see that as a negative, take comfort from the fact that everyone is in the same boat. Plus, the fact that the original poster actually built these projects is an impressive feat in itself. Many of us never even get beyond the 'idea-in-our-head' stage.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, people need to be more chill about that

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Don't waste your time building out the technology or product first. You'll just end up with months of work down the drain, and nothing at all to show for it.

What you need to do is sell the idea of your product first. Get guaranteed customers, which means, they need to put cold hard cash on the line. Putting out a survey to garner interest is fun to do, but you'll never really know until you actually get a person to part with their money.

Once you have your first foundational customers, whether this be individual people or businesses, then start going 100% on the product itself.

<comment><USER6> I keep hearing this advice on HN, and I still don't believe it. Who is going to pay me for software that doesn't exist yet? Can you give me some real examples of this working? Also, how is this not literally fraud?

edit: Do you mean you get them to commit to paying you when a product is ready?

<comment><USER7> If you build your product on top of existing tech (i.e. open source stacks) then that removes a lot of risk for the client (assuming they are smart enough to even care about that). The trick then is doing this in such a way that you retain ownership, instead of it being a freelance thing.

Companies are willing to do this because they get 100% input on the product direction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > It was a competitor to bunk1.com but I couldn't get any camps to sign up to > it because I was crap at sales.

So you just stopped there? Moved onto coding something else, because rather than get better at something you're crap at, it's comforting to do something you're good at (more coding)

There's your problem.

</comment><comment><USER9> Maybe pick something that is easier to sell. The bunk1.com idea has two problems I see immediately: 1) You have to reach the camp decision makers, which is a very small population and not necessarily available directly from a contact email/number. 2) The value proposition is not obvious to the decision maker. The last point is an important distinction, as its obviously valuable to the parents. The app does not necessarily provide a reason for a parent to choose one camp for another, nor does it give the camp decision maker a "win" at her job. Actually it could be negative - it could just be more work and compliance risk.

So actually I think the sale here is harder than it might have seemed, though obviously someone was able to do it.

</comment><comment><USER10> Stop building and start selling. Sell before you build.

<comment><USER11> As someone who would like to start touching my toes in whole this exercise on day, how do I sell before creating the product-- like should I demo things made up of mockups?

And where do I sell it? I don't think (if it's a SASS) people at online communities welcome a product which isn't built yet and they couldn't try.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> You've not gone wrong, you just haven't succeeded _yet_. My advice would be to widen your vision a bit, stay positive, don't give up, and most importantly, and be open to other opportunities to fulfill the same goal of a successful business.

Would running a different kind of successful business be as fulfilling? While I shared the same vision as you approximately 5 years ago (starting a SaaS business), ultimately that particular goal didn't work out. But pursuing that goal did open many doors for me as well as teach me a whole lot about business and how to negotiate. Fast forward through years of attempts at making the company successful, I now run a small consultancy that I consider extremely successful. I owe this directly to my initial goal of starting a SaaS business. Had I not pursued that goal, I believe my consultancy would not exist.

"There are many ways of going forward, but only one way of standing still." -FDR

</comment><comment><USER13> Can you find a SaaS successful SaaS founders or preferable a SaaS sales person close to you, that you could learn from cause it seems your problem is sales and not really SaaS.

I was once in your shoes building SaaS project that never amounted to much, what changed well I got into yc startup school last year and while my startup failed I learnt a lot from fellow startup schoolers when it came to sales, things like; b2b and b2c SaaS require different sales approach, cold outreach bring in 3% of all SaaS sales,and so on. And then I joined Facebook SaaS groups, which where filled with successful SaaS founders, where I am learning a lot from, I even found founder mentors there, who are now mentoring me through my recent SaaS project that is accomplishing results my other SaaS projects never could. There are so many variables involved in building a successfull SaaS project, so many in fact that it is a fallacy to think you can optimize them all by yourself, best approach is to find someone who has already optimized most of these variables and learn from them.

SaasGrowthHacks is a particularly good Facebook group you can join, it is a closed group by the way.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm facing the same experience. I see how it's exhausting and depressive the feel of "failure". I quit my first job trying to clone some successful idea to run it in my country with no background in marketing or business. I was driven by dreams and hoped to be independent but there was no business vision. After two years, i returned to work with other companies, but i continue to work in side projects. I think the worst error that we made is the pursuit of "perfection", trying to do what big sass companies does with hundred of engineers. Big companies fail and fail a lot but they can surpass that by other resources. To summarize, i think the lean startup is the basic of any business (in software and all other business fields), it consists on building an "ugly" solution ( for a real problem) first than sell it and than continue till perfection. We can learn a lot from yahoo and nokia ...

</comment><comment><USER15> The whole 'sell before you build' theme is plastered all over this thread, as I expected. I _think_ this originates from the whole lean/MVP school of thought but is sold in threads like these as though you can just create a 'coming soon' page with email sign up, wait for 1000 emails and then write your first line of code. In reality it is about building _only_ what's necessary for a minimum viable product then ship and only add features which are demanded of you (i.e. adding value not speculating and building stuff no- one cares about). This does require _some_ work/thought/assumptions up-front. It's not as easy as people make it out to be!

</comment><comment><USER16> Sounds like you have developed some great product development skills in your time spent and learned about what doesn't work for building a business. Now it's time to fill that gap. Some questions to focus on for now are:

* Who are the people I want to serve?

* How do I find out what problems they have that I can help?

* How do I reach them?

* What can create to help them solve their problems?

* How do I get them to see me and my products as the solution to their problems?

* How do I become trustworthy enough in their eyes to try my products?

You can learn how to do a lot of this yourself and there are many courses out there like 30x500 that can help. As an alternative, you might want to find and partner with a good 'Business Guy' who can bring the audience while you build the product.

</comment><comment><USER17> Here is a post from someone else, tell me what you would tell the guy:

> I keep having ideas for startups and side projects and while I'm great at > sales and build a ton of traction and people aching to use the app... I > can't build it - because I'm crap at programming.

So, what would you suggest he do?

</comment><comment> super-serial I'm in a very similar position and since I also suck at sales I choose B2C over B2B. Selling to businesses directly is hard. Why not first sell to consumers, then have an "enterprise version" if it catches on?

So for example for your campground app - why not first solve problems of individuals going to the camp? It could be as simple as a public map tool where people could put/share markers for different resources on the map... then after you provide value for free, offer premium services. I haven't been successful either so maybe this is horrible advice, but that's basically how I try to solve the problem of sucking at marketing/sales. (do marketing through engineering)

</comment><comment><USER18> I have been through the same. I originally had a site to sell shell gifts back in 2003. I sold one necklace for $12 and that was it. I even tried selling in person at stores, but had no luck.

The best income I had was building websites early on and I made a few thousand doing that on the side. I have for the last 7 years been trying to make something, but have not had much success. Build it and they will come has been a failure for me.

I am trying to use some of the methods Pat Flynn talks about in his book Will It Fly. Look for the audience first, the one that has an existing problem.

</comment><comment><USER19> I just wanted you to know you are not alone in trying and feeling like you haven't succeeded. At the end of the day I've tried to realize that the things I have pursued and will continue to pursue will hopefully have some intrinsic value to them that allows me to be ok with the failure. Most likely you have to push harder when marketing and selling. At least that is what I tell myself with the current project that I am working on.

</comment><comment><USER20> Maybe you aren't cut out for it as you say? I have a sideline I would have liked to have been a business but it remains a sideline and I'm ok with that.

Sometimes we believe we can achieve anything we want. This is compounded by reading and listening to all the hero stories online.

I would say do nothing in this space for a while and let your thoughts get themselves in order.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'd say that SaaS just is a lot harder than we often expect and that more than 50% of the effort is not product related.

It's like building a car that has amazing peripherals but no engine each time and wondering why it doesn't go.

Unfortunately product in reality is moreso the peripheral and less so the engine.

Didn't build it and they still came is a thing.

Build it and they didn't come is a thing.

</comment><comment><USER22> What kind of sales and marketing research are you doing? Are you working on that aspect of the businesses as hard as you are the software product? Can you afford to seek out people whose products seem to be selling and apprentice yourself to them?

</comment><comment><USER23> Definetely recognize this. But there are tons of articles describing the "get your first users" get your "first prototype" like the sam altmans ... something playbook. Read that?

</comment><comment><USER24> Someone buys Upvotes to their posts. You can check a website as upvote.club. So, I assume that sometimes people buy rating to get more traffic to their website.

</comment><comment><USER25> Team up with a good ux designer so that you can wireframe/prototype your idea before you spend any development time. I'd love to help - www.andyphil.com

</comment><comment><USER26> The main thing you've gained is sharpening a lot of skills. You can run your own software business if you want to. You're learning the hard way. Life is a good teacher with reflection, albeit unpleasant sometimes.

Validate even MORE about the problem, AND the solution, before building out the solution in a substantial way, or at all. Is the problem clear to the people who have it, and one of their top priorities? Find out by communicating with them, ideally in person, but video chat works and written forms if that's all that is possible. If a competitor exists, great! What's the value proposition of your similar product/service? Why is it so good someone who uses another should switch, or what makes it compelling for someone who is evaluating your product/service?

Instead of positive interest, how many people will sign up in a form you link them to, or a landing page? How many will give their email or some contact information so that you contact them when your thing launches? How many say "I have $x and I will pay you that right now if you make this problem go away!"? How many people will read your blog post about how frustrating a certain problem is? Saying "Yeah, I hate that problem", but not being willing to do anything else. That might a dead end.

Another strategy is to build something that solves your own problem. Minimally, it will be useful to you. If it's useful to you, you won't be putting "effort into something nobody wants". If you have the problem, there's a good chance others do, too, and they may be willing to use and/or pay for your solution. Alternatively, after validating the problem and a potential solution, you can build something for someone you're close to that solves their problem. A spouse, family member, good friend, etc. Small frequent feedback loops, and empathy, are key here.

Another shortcut to running your own software business is starting a software consultancy. You can even do this while you have a day job, by hiring other people to do parts of it, or with smaller projects. If you have many of a similar type of customer (law offices, realtors, whatever), you can find the right product that applies to many of them, while being paid to build other things for your client, or this product itself. This is a traditional approach to bootstrapping a software product, and lots of other people have written or spoken about the it and its trade offs.

What succeeds on 'Show HN' and Product Hunt and similar things isn't predictable. It also doesn't lead to instant success, product usage, or paying customers. It's nice I would imagine, people have shown what it meant in terms of visitors and traction, but it's a blip in the life of a product. Having customers that use your product and pay you money would be better, and it's a bit more in your control.

Here's a good link about validating without spending money or building anything: [https://www.startupgrind.com/blog/the-startup-framework- to-v...](https://www.startupgrind.com/blog/the-startup-framework-to-validate- your-idea-before-you-spend-1/)</comment>


Show HN: Kiwichat – group chat of people who are within 1 mile - <AUTHOR> http://www.kiwichat.co

<comment><USER2> I feel like there is definitely something in this basic idea. Although I'm not sure that a rigid 1 mile boundary really makes a whole lot of sense. I'll explain:

I feel like the experience you get with an app like, say, tinder, which lets a user chat to attractive people locally, is really quite an incredible proposition. In tinder's case the hook is that you are chatting to, and then hopefully meeting with, a slice of the local population that you find attractive and that also find you attractive. You both find each other attractive - so you have that in common.

What I find myself hankering after more and more though is a service that lets you discover a slice of the local population with which you have other things in common. Not a dating app, but rather an app where I could chat about a topic I'm interested in (technology, hockey, model trains, tiddlywinks, you name it) with people who are also interested in that topic and then hopefully connect and meet up with those people who all happen to live fairly locally.

Hacker News for instance is great for tech chat, but as someone who lives a long long way from SV I find that it's much tougher to actually MEET people who share my interest in tech. There are tech events going on around where I live, but it's still an intimidating prospect showing up to some niche interest event when you haven't met or chatted to anyone there before. Technology is big interest of mine, so in the end I did seek out events and other ways to connect to like-minded people. But I have a much less active interest in, say, sailing. It wouldn't normally occur to me to go seek out a sailing club or a sailing meetup of some kind locally, but I might still like to chat about it. And chatting about it with similarly interested people nearby might lead me eventually to go along to such an event and meet new friends and try new experiences.

I feel like Kiwichat goes some way towards implementing that vision, but I just signed in, and my one mile radius shows no chats nearby. I live in Edinburgh, in Scotland, which isn't always the first city to bustle with new technology, but it's maybe 5 or 10 miles in diameter, and I have no way of knowing if someone else in Edinburgh is using this site, but from a location only a couple of miles away. Maybe I'm missing out on some new connection, or experience, all because I couldn't put my radius up to a level that makes sense for me personally.

I feel like this is close to the app I really want. Closer than anything I've seen so far, but still sadly quite a way off. It says on your landing page that it's for "events, meetups, or just chatting with people nearby e.g. students in your campus". If you're at an event or meetup then you are already most of the way there and you are probably talking in person. If you're on a small campus then this might serve the need I'm looking for. But if your campus is big and spread out (like mine was at university), or you live in a small city or town and want to chat to people that you could easily meet, then it's just not serving that need... Yet.

In terms of execution though it looks great, the sign in experience is pretty much flawless. Congrats on your launch.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wrote the exact same thing about 3 years ago, according to HN timestamps: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2102790](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2102790)

I also had an arbitrary chat radius, initially. After feedback and testing, I made it so that the radius shrank as more people were online. So, if 1 person was on the site the radius was non-existent - it'd show the next few people regardless of location. As enough people opened the website, the radius would begin to shrink based on your own location to include at least 1 other person as close to you as possible, down to a minimum of like 20 miles. This way, if 10 people were online in San Francisco, but I was building the thing in Dallas, then I could at least join in the discussion in San Francisco until more people in Dallas joined in.

Looking back, to call my old thing a start-up in that post was hilarious. I also learned that my concept, being real-time location-based ephemeral anonymous chat (buzzwords jeez), has a severe chicken and egg problem. It's damn near impossible to reach critical mass for long enough for the chat radiuses to create any opportunity for local discussion. I also learned that it really needed to be a native mobile app, instead of a website. Only tech savvy people really knew what was going on, in regards to enabling location services in browsers.

In the end, I had wished I just made some sort of non-realtime location-based tagging service, instead. Instead of real-time chat, just have location-based notes that you can leave somewhere in a very small precise proximity. That way there's no need for a critical mass of users all at the same time.

Edit: it looks like by the time I posted it to HN even, I had began changing to the non-real-time version. it originally was purely real-time chat. the code is on github: [https://github.com/ryancole/geohello.com](https://github.com/ryancole/geohello.com)

</comment><comment><USER4> Tried it for me. No-one online now. Another idea: Chat-room with the nearest 100 people. Scales up and down.

<comment><USER5> This one could have legs. Nearest X number of people gets around the 'this app is a desert' feeling - even if only 100 people are online globally, you've still got a full application!

<comment><USER6> I feel this results in some obvious paradoxes when considering how the room morphs over time.

One (contrived) paradox: 99 people in the world online in San Francisco and 1 online in London. One more person in San Francisco joins. Do the previous 99 SFers suddenly find they are talking to the new SFer and not the Londoner? Who does the Londoner see they are talking to?

Another (very contrived) paradox: 100 people are logged in who are all located on the edge of a perfect circle. One more person logs in who is located directly at the center of the circle. It's clear who is closest to each of 100 original people (presumably the person on the opposite side of the circle is 'swapped') resulting in each of the 100 original people now talking with the center person, but the center person can not be talking to all 100 people and there is no distance-based criteria for determining which of the 100 to not talk with.

These seem like contrived examples, but as soon as the total user count is greater than the 'nearest X' count they must be addressed. A solution would be fascinating, I don't see a clear one!

<comment><USER7> Yeah that situation brings up the possibility of a user being able to talk to people who cannot talk back to them. Not idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> rkuykendall-com Older submission, 34 days ago, 43 comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7525066](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7525066)

If anyone wants to try this with people, type "Columbia University" as the location. I'll try to stay there all day.

Welcome back, tomd3v! I see you solved the bug where anyone could rooms by URL. Unfortunately, that bug was also the only feature that let anyone use this for chat. Instead of fixing it, you should have spent time on some of the features suggested in that thread. It's already clear you're just going to get the same feedback again this time.

</comment><comment><USER8> There is no way someone is using this app a mile around me!

I think 1 mile is too small of a distance, I would make it 5 or 10 miles.

Or do something based on location, if you are in SF or Manhattan, make it 1 mile, otherwise make it 10.

<comment><USER9> Yeah I agree. Living in a not so dense city, I knew that I wasn't going to find any matches with just a mile radius.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Already been done, Messaging within a 1 mile radius

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/popcorn- messaging/id71841670...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/popcorn- messaging/id718416705?mt=8)

</comment><comment><USER11> I like this idea, the UI is fast and nice to use.

I built something similar. The idea was to be able to play multiplayer games with people nearby. My motivation was simply to enable face to face two player games as the easiest option. The trickiest part, which I never coded up, was to be able to include people who are further away if there is no-one nearby, otherwise the game became unplayable without a cooperating partner.

I think this family of ideas, connecting to nearby people easily, has real legs.

Code lives on here.

[https://github.com/fmstephe/location_server](https://github.com/fmstephe/location_server)

Comes with a built in tankwars multiplayer demo. Alas the URL to the demo no longer works as I shut down the server that was running it. If anyone wants to try it out I would happily get it running again.

Edit: Are you a New Zealander? I am from NZ myself, always keen to hear from Kiwi hackers.

</comment><comment><USER12> 15 years too late, Caramail was doing the same in france since 1997 ([http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/CaraMail](http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/CaraMail))

This is the type of thing where people will show up, see that their room is empty (if you're not just searching for "San francisco") and leave, unfortunately

<comment><USER13> I too feel that the market has spoken on this: see [http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/meetro](http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/meetro) and many others that failed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Cool idea. I started work on something similar, but after some planning I felt like I was basically writing an IRC chat from the ground up and things like tinychat can (kind of) already do this. In the end it seemed like a lot of work for a very iffy project, especially if I wanted it to get popular.

</comment><comment><USER15> Reminds me of Popcorn app. This looks like a very similar idea but for the web.

</comment><comment><USER16> Very nice. I did something similar to test out Meteor.js, but it's much less polished than yours.

[http://mapchat.meteor.com/](http://mapchat.meteor.com/)

</comment><comment><USER17> I see one of these pop up every so often and always get disappointed when there is no one in my area. I wonder if this sort of thing might work better if it connected you with the N closest users? Another option would be to create spatial clusters using something like k-means clustering[1].

[1] [http://scikit- learn.org/stable/auto_examples/cluster/plot_km...](http://scikit- learn.org/stable/auto_examples/cluster/plot_kmeans_digits.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> I agree that the 1 mile is too rigid. There are only going to be about 3,000 people within a mile radius of me (~1K/sq mile) whereas in Manhattan you would expect around 210,000 (~70K people/sq mile). To get a similar expectation, I would need a radius of about 8 miles. Though of course, as I expand the radius to the south near NYC the population density gets a bit higher, and as I expand my radius to the north it gets lower and 8 miles is enough to bring about changes.

<comment><USER19> Here in Bangalore, I believe 1 mile would be a joke.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Love the idea. Wish the radius was wider. There aren't any chats near me, and I'm in a densely populated area.

Since you're taking people's location, be sure to include a water-tight privacy policy that keeps 3rd parties from accessing location data.

But since you'd have access to the location, it'd make an easy sell for targeted advertising. But please, try to think of other ways to make money. Everyone's sick of ads.

</comment><comment><USER21> Well to me a way around this could be to leave user bread crumbs. For example if its not an extremely populated area when a user leaves the area, a message could say user "johns" was here 10 mins ago. contact him with a PM or something.

That way you know that users are in the area using the app and may come back.

</comment><comment><USER22> Without critical mass, this becomes an asynchronous, location-based messaging tool, similar to what foursquare is kind of about. However you could use this tool/tech to geotag areas, spontaneously create chats for events like conferences, or even for emergencies like Mountain View Puma.

</comment><comment><USER23> Hmm, the name is confusingly similar to Kiwi IRC[0], which was what I was expecting when I saw this link.

(Full disclosure: I am one of the developers of Kiwi IRC)

[0] [https://kiwiirc.com/](https://kiwiirc.com/)

<comment><USER24> It's cute that you're both naming your products after New Zealand's national bird.

Both of your products sound like dating sites dedicated to meeting New Zealanders. That's....a niche market.

Kiwi != kiwifruit, if you talk if eating a nice juicy kiwi in the rest of the world you're either salacious, a cannibal, or undertaking some kind of illegal feast (main course: roast bald eagle perhaps)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Created a room with a buddy and we are unable to see each others messages. [http://kiwichat.co/chat/64847ffc5a39545ff8748377250b09](http://kiwichat.co/chat/64847ffc5a39545ff8748377250b09)

</comment><comment><USER26> Nice execution, but I would add an overview over all currently active chat locations.

</comment><comment><USER27> Very well done.

Any background on how this is built? E.g. chat engine etc?

</comment><comment><USER28> The people in my 1-mile radius aren't the same people that are in their 1-mile radius, so everyone would see a fractured group conversation with a bunch of out-of-context responses.

<comment><USER29> Nope, you just see different chat rooms. Then you can join a chat room, and everyone sees the same messages. Great solution to the problem, IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I've been trying the somewhat similar Yik Yak (mobile app) for about two weeks. It had flood of college students home for the summer so I assume it's taken off at colleges.

</comment><comment><USER31> I was hanging out in Oakland for 45 minutes and didn't see another person come by -- I was expecting the Bay Area would have the densest group of people trying this out.

</comment><comment><USER32> Previous Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7525066](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7525066)

</comment><comment><USER33> In it's current form this doesn't work because chat requires almost immediate feedback.

</comment><comment><USER34> Im seeing "database problem" just fyi.

</comment><comment><USER35> One what?</comment>


Ask HN: Just want to make $1,000/mo from my SaaS, competing on price? - <AUTHOR>

I aspire to be an actor, and I need a flexible job so I can audition anytime. I decided to start an SaaS startup. I'm currently a server at a restaurant, and the scheduling process is terrible -- excel sheets, manual paper schedules, etc. So I believe I can build a scheduling app that works and that restaurants actually use.
The market seems pretty saturated/crowded with little to no differentiation. In fact, it seems almost as if they're just competing on who has more features. As a solo founder who's just building a lifestyle startup, I don't want to go down the features route.
I plan to differentiate based mainly on ease of use (intuitive design, less irrelevant features that just simply don't apply to smaller restaurants) and price. Competitors now average $30/mo. I'd undercut them and take $20/mo for a simpler, no-bells-and-whistles solution.
There has to be an underserved market segment of really small restaurants (<10 employees) that would use my site instead, I believe. Or is this wishful thinking?
PS I once started an SaaS site that made about $1,300/mo at its peak, way less now though due to my disinterest (I took a year-long road trip, did loads of random stuff, had a YouTube career, wrote a book, etc. etc.). <comment><USER2> _the scheduling process is terrible -- excel sheets, manual paper schedules, etc_

Excel and paper might be terrible to you, but you're a tech minded entreprenuer so what it feels like to you is essentially irrelevant. The person who needs to think Excel and paper are terrible is _your customer_. The two important things are: Do Excel and paper have a fundamental disadvantage compared to a SaaS solution that people would be willing to pay for, and would people be willing to pay $<price> in order to get that advantage? It's definitely possible that the answer to those questions is a resounding 'YES!' _to you_ , but you need to ask people who would pay for your product those questions rather than believing you already know the answer. Research your market.

As for competing on price, I wouldn't. You competitors will just discount their products if you take any significant market share. They've picked a price they believe people will pay, really there's (probably) nothing stopping them charging $1/month.

(Note: My startup competed with Excel. What we built was definitely better than Excel for the problem we were tackling. But ultimately most of our potential customers thought the pain was quite trivial (despite losing $thousands on projects due to it) so no one bought in. Excel was _good enough_ and effectively free because everyone already has it. $20/month is a heck of a lot more than $0/month.)

<comment><AUTHOR> I certainly cannot compete on features, and saying that I'll compete on "design"/"ease-of-use" is trivial; it's the execution that's hard. I could target only restaurants, and customize my entire software for it to serve it better, but there are already solutions out there doing it to appeal more to the restaurateurs.

In other words, I don't know what my competitive advantage will be should I decide to enter this market, yet I know this market pretty well based on my first-hand experiences.

<comment><USER3> First, a quick anecdotal story. Recently, an entrepreneur came to me and said he had a solution for a particular market he had worked in for years, inventory management software. His daughter had recently started a small business and was using spreadsheets and paper to keep track of inventory. He started looking around and many other small businesses were doing the same. There were solutions that were out there, everything from spreadsheet templates, to iPhone apps, to access databases that could help these small business owners but they didn't use them. It was obvious that these solutions weren't easy to use, weren't what the small business owners wanted, and weren't working. So he built an amazing, simple, attractive solution using his decades of industry experience. I am not sarcastic when I say his solution was, honestly, pretty nice, and better than the rest of the market.

He came to me because it wasn't selling. In fact, he decided after some time to put it on a freemium model. Even the basic, absolutely free edition had almost no users. Why? Was it not working as intended? Did he have bugs? Was it slow?

Well, no. It was a great piece of software. The market didn't want it though. It turns out that spreadsheets and paper work well for small businesses looking to track a certain amount of inventory. If they get big enough to need more than they want something more than this guy was offering. There was literally no market for the software he built. He had no competitive advantage because the market didn't see a need for a solution. Some lower level employees of small businesses might have wanted his software, but the owners, the people paying the bills, didn't see the need and didn't care. Spreadsheets and paper just worked. End of story.

I'm not trying to discourage you from entrepreneurship at all. However, not all businesses work. You can attempt to compete on price, but that almost never works. As others have said, your competition will smash you on price. You can compete on features. But you have to ask yourself, why aren't businesses using the competition now? If it turns out that it is because they just don't want a technical solution, or because they don't believe they have a problem, then you are in a position where you have to win on educating a market, and that is a costly and formidable issue. Maybe instead you'd like to try to pull customers away from existing solutions, not onboard customers who aren't using a solution. Well, is the time and effort worth it to switch from an existing solution to your solution for $10 in monthly savings? I doubt it. Finally, remember that there are other costs to onboarding customers. If you have to spend an hour on the phone with each customer each week for a $20 monthly fee, just remember how much you are really making.

Sorry, I realize that doesn't help you to solve your problem or find your competitive advantage. Sometimes, there is no competitive advantage.

<comment><USER4> Amazing anecdote/post there.

To me, the biggest take-away is: confirm the market before you build. So instead of just coming up with a legitimately good idea and then going to work, set up the marketing material first to measure hits, or talk to people in industry and see if they _would_ pay $x/month if such a thing existed.

This is even pre-minimum viable product level, this is putting feelers out to see if the MVP is worthwhile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> When people are competing on price, the products are fungible...one scheduling app is as good as another. When competing on price against pencil and paper then you'll probably need to _pay_ your customers, since

       paper + pencil ≅ $0.00

There once was a Steve Martin bit about doing one show for 1000 people for $1000 a ticket [or something like that] and then retiring. 20 restaurants at $50 a month would get you to $1000. Supporting those 20 customers will almost certainly be less effort than 50 customers @ $20/month.

That said, I suspect the reason scheduling wait staff is such a mess is that wait staff are people and hence unpredictable, unreliable, opinionated and moody. On top of that, the ideal scheduling solution from the scheduler's point of view is almost certainly an automatic tool, but that requires all those _people_ on the wait staff to enter accurate information...and the odds of that happening in the average ten staff restaurant that's looking for a solution is probably zero.

Finally, it is probably the case that scheduling by paper and pencil or excel requires zero cash directly. The manager is on salary and does the scheduling in slack times and Excel is already a sunk cost. Again, even a $10/month SAAS is competing with zero.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER6> Someone with a very similar profile asked a very similar question 6 months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9117728](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9117728)

Maybe someone should start a business aimed at actors starting SaaS companies.

<comment><USER6> Actually, now that I read that original comment from 6 months ago, I believe you may be the same person. Both posts use the word disinterest(ed) in a way that used to be considered incorrect. Disinterested ~= unbiased. Uninterested = 'not interested'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think that segment of really small restaurants of less than 10 employees wouldn't be facing a problem of scheduling processes to such a degree that they would be willing to pay. First, the lower number of employees reduce the need for such an app, and second, smaller restaurants are less likely to pay for services when they're operating on lower margins.

Best of luck though, and good luck with your aspirations to become an actor. :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Disclaimer: I work at one of said scheduling startups.

I don't want you to think I'm deterring you purposefully, but one hint is that scheduling alone is just not lucrative enough for your goals.

Talk to a few merchants & you will find that restaurants with < 10 employees are going to fight tooth & nail for free features. They are operating on very tight margins and they are not going to pay much for this, if anything at all.

On top of that, the types of businesses/restaurants that will pay $50-100 p/m require a complicated set of features that would be too much for a one-person lifestyle SaaS.

I'd suggest you look to models like Zenefits', who entirely make their revenue from health insurance brokerage.

</comment><comment><USER9> As you've pointed out yourself, it's a massively saturated market with new startups seemingly launching every month, and yet most restaurants still survive quite happily on Excel and paper, and are certainly not the easiest businesses to sell to. I'm not sure that a 33% price cut is going to change that. Getting those 500 customers isn't beyond the realms of possibility, but it probably involves an awful lot of work relative to getting 500 customers to spend $20 per month on something else.

I'd be tempted to double down on your old site, unless the reason for the dropoff is that you've upset a very small vertical or been overtaken by vastly superior competition.

</comment><comment><USER10> One question: do you hear your non-tech colleagues (and in particular, your boss) complaining about the scheduling process?

If so, you may be onto something. If not, step #1 before writing a line of code is to sit your boss (if possible) down for lunch (you're buying) and get him to tell you as much as possible about all the things in the business that don't work. Either that list will include your scheduling issue - in which case start work - or it may have other problems which could be a better target for your SaaS work.

Just like in film and theater, doing thorough pre-production can really save you a lot of cash, time, effort, and eventual flops, in post :)

</comment><comment><USER11> What was the $1,300/mo SaaS. Maybe start that baby up again?</comment>