Ask HN: Has anyone bootstrapped a business using services like Upworks? - <AUTHOR> I would like to go into consulting in a specific niche, but lack clients (currently working as software developer in a company).
There are related job offers at services like Upworks, where I could think make ~5000$/month (of course only if i get the jobs) which would be a lot of money in my current situation. However I read many horror-stories about Upworks, Toptal, Freelancer.com and related services, so I am hesitating.
Obviously I want to expand my field to direct customer interaction in the future, but short time it might be a decent idea?
Thank you for your insights and sry for my bad English, HN. <comment><USER3> I'm not a developer. I'm a writer.

I started to write a long-ish answer here, then decided to make it a blog post:

[http://digitalmicroenterprise.blogspot.com/2018/05/starting-...](http://digitalmicroenterprise.blogspot.com/2018/05/starting- with-service-as-way-to-learn.html)

Best.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Doreen, thanks for your input. By "service" you mean some of the popular middlemen mentioned in this thread? All the best for your endeavor!

<comment><USER3> Yes, a middleman. One of these services:

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JfNAbUX_lN9K3MCNHO15...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JfNAbUX_lN9K3MCNHO15GJtJ5qpk7H9Cl3xTBwv2FR8/htmlview)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't know where you are but typically you're better of contracting.

The typical situation is that employers need techies LOCALLY and can't find them in the sort of numbers they'd ideally want which drives rates up: +1 techie.

Issue with freelancing sites is that it flips the demand/supply around. The supply is global and outstrips demand (ie people actually compete for contracts): rates are driven down, +1 employer

IMO:

1\. Try and contract locally if the pay is best there. Further you'll be creating contacts to get you into new gigs.

2\. If that's not available look for remote positions direct with employers. If you're v good you might get one.

3\. If you can't do that consider a freelancing site but really all it'll be good for is portfolio . You'll probably find the "next step" remains just as far away if you already have s portfolio.

<comment><AUTHOR> > The typical situation is that employers need techies LOCALLY and can't find > them in the sort of numbers they'd ideally want which drives rates up: +1 > techie.

There are local jobs here, but they are mostly pretty standard and boring (small business web sites and marketing), which I am not really interested to do.

Although there is a lot of competition on freelancer.com et al. at least there _are_ jobs for most areas of expertise.

As mentioned, I am aware of the drawbacks (pay-cut by middleman, competition with a large pool of other workers), but it seems like a good idea to find your first clients.

Hopefully it is not bad reputation later on (this guy worked at Upworks) ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've also heard of good and bad stories about Upwork. I think it all depends on how you handle it yourself.

One of my good friends started his copywriting career on Upwork. First projects he did were extremely cheap, just getting some experience. However, he made sure he does the absolute best he can, with every project. So clients were happy and recommended him to other clients. My friend would be doubling his hourly rate pretty frequenly, and eventually stopped using Upwork altogether, because clients would contact him directly, by reference from his previous clients.

On the other hand, I know a person who's been copywriting on Upwork for seven years, and still has an hourly rate of 10 USD / hour, which is just ridiculous.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, this is uplifting information, and sounds like a good plan - <USER2> with low-paying jobs and be exceptional and then raise your rates and get first-hand clients.

How professional do they handle freelancer's and client's privacy? I will try to do my best but some things can and will go wrong. If things don't go well I don't want to loose my reputation because of some remote-work jobs site, because they or a client skrewed up.

<comment><USER5> I don't personally know enough about Upwork to answer that question.

I'm currently working as a developer consultant, and get all my clients from my previous work history. I used to work in an agency, building apps for many different clients, so now I've got a lot of connections in the industry.

<comment><AUTHOR> Has it been complex to sell your skills because of your previous employee? Did you just cold e-mail your previous contacts that you got while working or did they approach you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've hired a lot via UpWork and consider it the lesser of evils among these platforms. It is still all kinds of evil, though. I've heard it's at least as bad for the contractors.

<comment><USER7> I tend to hire off Freelancer. I haven't seen too much difference in people found. It seems more in the way of how you filter people as there is a bunch of poor performers.

I find Upwork seems to give people high summary ratings and when you look at their history and there is a bunch of bad reviews. There is something dodgy going on there which is a main reason I flipped to Freelancer. That and I thought it was good to support a company from my country.

<comment><USER6> The one or two times I've used Freelancer, the quality of the candidates was quite poor (at least what I was hiring for). But what really annoyed me was how conspicuously Freelancer nickle-and-dimes on fees for various things just to post the job.

<comment><AUTHOR> After evaluating both platforms in more detail I will probably start with freelancer.com as it is possible to have an arbitrary name (e.g. "elephantdesign") instead of real name only. This makes it simpler to tailor your profile to a specific niche in my opinion and seems more privacy aware. Obviously both platforms are pretty intrusive, but at least freelancer.com guard your real name.

However there seems to be an agency mode on Upworks which might be similar.

<comment><USER6> I may be alone in this but as the one doing the hiring I strongly prefer individual freelancers who use their real names. Fraud is a very real problem on these platforms.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


An alloy of iron and aluminium is as good as titanium, at a tenth of the cost - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21642107-alloy-iron-and-aluminium-good-titanium-tenth <comment><USER2> Cool, but I wonder about stiffness. When I was an aero engineer, we tended to use aluminum because most of our designs were limited by stiffness, not strength. Since aluminum is lighter than either steel or titanium, you can take advantage of geometry (which greatly impacts stiffness) without sacrificing weight. Strength was only rarely the bottleneck. Interestingly, the stiffness to weight ratio of aluminum, steel and titanium are all approximately equal.

We did occasionally use titanium, but usually some sort of steel was a better choice when strength was the issue. It's just the way it works out. It's also worth noting that for the work I did, cost was never an issue (NASA) - material costs were basically insignificant. We could use whatever we wanted.

<comment> at-fates-hands Just as an aside, when I was working at a bike shop, we had a guy come in and was looking for a road bike. After some small talk, he told me he owned a cryogenics lab and said they could freeze anything, including bike parts. Doing so, made them permanently in the range of 20-30% stiffer than the original material. Most guys at the shop thought about frames, cranksets, drivetrains, forks etc. Places on the bike which experience high levels of torsional flex and stress.

I'm wondering how many engineers ever thought about using cryogenics to enhance the stiffness properties of metals to achieve higher levels of performance.

The cost to do it was around $1,500 if I remember correctly. A pretty small fee to get what I'd consider a big gain in performance.

<comment><USER3> I don't have much experience with cryo treating, but heat treating to gain strength is quite commonly done, especially for metals that are too hard to work in their strongest state, or for metals that lose their heat treat when welded.

<comment><USER4> Here's a watch industry instance of cold hardening steel: [http://www.damaskousa.com/technology- watchcase.asp](http://www.damaskousa.com/technology-watchcase.asp)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 'As good as' is a silly phrase to use in metallurgy. Are we talking machinability, castability, tensile strength or hardness. Not to mention less obvious issues like food safety or resistance to corrosion?

There are very many alloys of both aluminium and steel all of which have there uses. To say this one is as good as titanium means very little.

<comment><USER6> The linked abstract is somewhat clearer:

[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v518/n7537/full/nature1...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v518/n7537/full/nature14144.html)

 _The specific tensile strength and ductility of the developed steel improve on those of the lightest and strongest metallic materials known, titanium alloys_

So presumably it is stronger and somewhat more workable than titanium.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Now that nature lets you read articles for free you can actually go and read the original paper.

In the paper the authors had to heat treat the steel at 900 °C for 15 mins to generate the microstructure that gave the properties they wanted.

So, what does welding do to the microstructure? Does this material need to be heat treated again at 900 °C after welding? Does the the hard-but-brittle B2 intermetallic reform in the HAZ?

<comment><USER8> Interesting question, although I'm not sure it applies much in the real world. Aren't the welds themselves typically the weakest link in a build? Seems like the engineering tricks used to keep welds under stress from ripping apart would also benefit the affected metal in the HAZ.

<comment><USER3> Welds can be stronger than the HAZ. See this video from Lincoln Electric on welding chrome-moly: [http://youtu.be/W5dVAT9PTmw?t=7m53s](http://youtu.be/W5dVAT9PTmw?t=7m53s)

<comment><USER9> Yep! Generally if your weld breaks before the material in the HAZ it is considered a bad weld and certified welders working under structural standards are generally required to produce welds that are stronger than this.

(Not actually a certified welder right now, but I have a brief familiarity with the D1 structural standards as getting a cert is something I've looked into.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> >By manipulating the structure of steel on a nanometre scale, Dr Kim has produced a material which has the strength and the lightness of titanium alloys but will, when produced at scale, cost a tenth as much.

i wonder what if the same to be applied to titanium.

>Steel is useful because it is strong and cheap. But it is also heavy. It has, therefore, always been useless for applications such as aircraft.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan- Gurevich_MiG-25](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-25)

"The MiG-25 was constructed from 80% nickel steel alloy, 11% aluminium, and 9% titanium."

<comment><USER11> On the other hand, the Soviets managed to build a class of attack submarines using titanium hulls:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfa- class_submarine](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfa-class_submarine)

<comment><USER12> The _Sierra_ s also had titanium pressure hulls. Both classes suffered from major maintenance issues, though, because the titanium was prone to cracking from the severe pressure changes during dives. The Soviets switched back to steel for the _Akula_ class.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So the steel companies are finally getting scared enough to innovate. There are people trying to dramatically reduce the cost of titanium, Ford is dumping steel for aluminum, composites are even replacing aluminum in aircraft. Steel is starting to look like a relic of the 1700's rather than the great material it has been for so long.

When I worked in EVs, one of the old timers (a guy almost 80 years old) told me the best steel for the motors should have some Boron in it. Some particular alloy that would have lower core loss at higher frequencies. But none of the big steel companies were interested in making it for us. They just wanted to make what they make.

So even if it's not as great as it sounds, I'm glad somebody is doing something with steel.

<comment><USER14> There are lots of steel factories around the world. Some smaller ones have specialized in rarer steels.

<comment><USER15> As a materials engineer who works for a steel company (although my background is in blast furnaces and iron ore smelting - not micro alloying) maybe I can shed some light.

It largely comes down to enconomies of scale you can certainly make specialised grades of steel but often times it is not profitable to do so. Steelmaking is like most manufacturing process, cost decreases with scale. Usually the specialised grades simply aren't in high enough demand to recoup the costs involved in producing them.

For some grades the techniques to produce them are suitably differnt from standard grades that lines needs to be diverted and retooled to handle them, which impacts on yield and causes losses due to downtime etc. Not to mention many of the specialised alloying elements like Niobium etc. are also stupidly expensive. Buying these in small quanities is probably not ideal and I'd imagine its probably risky to buy in bulk because orders may not be filled quickly and business doesn't tend to like having capital tied up in raw material stockpiles.

Competition is also very fierce, for a while there has been an excess of steel capacity largely driven by rapid expansion of China's steelmaking capacity. So there is a lot of pressure on keeping operating costs per tonne low all of this kind of leads companies towards where the biggest returns are, which is producing the high volume steels at lowest cost. Thus most of research effort gets directed here as well. Thats not to say R&D isn't happening into specialised grades, its just not where the big payoffs are currently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Some data:

The yield strength of that new material is from about 1 GPa to 1.4 GPa, vs. 830 MPa for Ti6Al4V (Steel and Aluminium vary, depending on the alloy).

It has a density of 6.82 g/cm3, vs 4.43 for the titanium alloy, 7.85 for ordinary steel or 2.70 for 6061 Aluminium.

Apparently Ti6Al4V costs around $20/kg, so the new alloy would cost around $2/kg, vs. around $2.70/kg for 6061 Aluminium or $0.85/kg for cold-rolled steel.

Prices: [http://www.metalprices.com/metal/steel/steelbenchmarker- cold...](http://www.metalprices.com/metal/steel/steelbenchmarker-cold-rolled- coil-usa) [http://www.metalprices.com/metal/aluminum/aluminum-6061-extr...](http://www.metalprices.com/metal/aluminum/aluminum-6061-extrusion- billet-price) [http://www.metalprices.com/metal/titanium/titanium- ingot-6al...](http://www.metalprices.com/metal/titanium/titanium- ingot-6al-4v-usa)

As for the modulus of elasticity, it isn't mentioned in the article. The usual figure for steel is 210 GPa. The titanium alloy is around 114 GPa, and 6061 Aluminium is 69 GPa.

The low density is fairly big new. Compared to mild steel, you can have a 15% larger volume for the same weight, so you might be ahead on stiffness even if the MoE is smaller.

</comment><comment><USER17> Not a moment too soon for the Tall Tower Project. [http://hieroglyph.asu.edu/project/the-tall- tower/](http://hieroglyph.asu.edu/project/the-tall-tower/)

<comment><USER18> While it's undoubtedly very cool to build something very, very ... very, very tall, what would such a tower be used for?

<comment><USER19> What's the Eiffel Tower _for_? The Statue of Liberty? Nelson's Column? The St. Louis Gateway Arch?

They're symbols. They bring people together around a common talking point, to recognise and remember who we are and what we can do together.

If it really needs a purpose the Very Tall Tower could be an awesome base- jumping venue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It will be good if this is real. Nature articles about nanotechnology which claim "huge breakthrough to be commercialized real soon now" are all too frequent. Then we never hear about the technology again.

For aerospace, the big advantage of titanium is a high melting point. This material won't have that, which is probably why the authors talk about automotive applications. For automotive applications, a question is whether these new properties will survive ordinary manufacturing processes. Casting, probably not, but maybe the process can be applied to castings later as a heat-treating step. What about rolling and stamping?

<comment><USER21> In the original article they say they cold-roll, recrystallize, then strain harden. So definitely no casting, because the recrystallization is where the magic happens. Rolling and casting should be fine though. They say that the alloy is mostly compatible with current steel processing infrastructure, so it looks promising.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> With aircraft the basic issue is strength to weight, not just weight. If the material is stronger you can use less of it. The trend today is to make aircraft out of really strong fibres embedded in plastic.

<comment> Tuna-Fish The new material has the strength to weight of titanium.

<comment><USER23> Titanium is no better than aluminum. The reason they use titanium in aircraft is its ability to withstand heat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> daniel-levin Since the original paper is behind a paywall (at least for me), can anyone explain the specifics of what the researchers did to produce this new alloy?

>> Dr Kim and his colleagues have, however, found that a fifth ingredient, nickel, overcomes this problem.

I'd imagine that it didn't take a world-class team of scientists to have come up with the idea of alloying using nickel. There is no way materials scientists and metallurgists hadn't tried this by now, so what did they do differently?

<comment><USER21> Materials Science PhD student here, I'll do my best.

The morphology of the brittle B2-FeAl intermetallic compound is the key. In the conventional lightweight steel alloys, the B2 intermetallics make the alloy brittle (so they don't work harden very well), so in the past researchers optimized their alloys to avoid forming these intermetallics [0]. The nickel promotes the nucleation of the intermetallic particles during heat treatment [1], so that you get a more-or-less uniform distribution of many nanocrystalline B2 particles, instead of a smaller number of larger or more clustered B2 domains. The small B2 particles contribute to strain hardening by pinning dislocation motion, without reducing the ductility of the alloy.

From the Nature letter:

[0]: "One of the general concepts employed until now in the alloy design of Fe-Al-Mn-C-based, high-aluminium, low-density steel has been the suppression of 'brittle' intermetallic compound formation by stabilizing the 'ductile' austenite matrix."

[1]: "To expand the stability domain of B2 above the recrystallization temperature (normally, 800–900 °C) of deformed austenite, the alloying recipe of an austenitic low-density steel was modified by adding 5 weight per cent nickel (Ni), which is one of the most effective elements for forming B2 with aluminium."

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Made me think of Rearden metal from Atlas Shrugged

<comment><USER25> Yes, me too. As I recall, Rearden metal was about 10x as strong as the competitors'.

I guess Rearden was based on real life Andrew Carnegie who helped ignite the use of steel for construction ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Carnegie](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Carnegie)).

I assume Ayn Rand based all her characters on former industry giants (railroads, steel, oil).

<comment><USER26> One can only imagine the fun she would have had with a main character based on Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos!

<comment><USER27> Don't know why you are being downvoted, these guys are notable for being perceived as not giving fig for what other people thought, and being successful doing it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> >An alloy of iron, aluminium and carbon (steel's other essential ingredient) is too brittle to be useful. Adding manganese helps a bit, but not enough for aluminium-steel to be used in vehicles.

>Dr Kim and his colleagues have, however, found that a fifth ingredient, nickel, overcomes this problem.

As far as I know turbine blades are typically made of iron-nickel alloys. What is the new part of this discovery?

</comment><comment><USER28> Every year I am reading these kinds of articles, keep thinking we are going to have amazing materials in 5 years.

<comment><USER29> This one has a major steel company planning to start production in one year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Which is all great but as far as I'm aware one of the major reasons for titanium's use was its high melting point. Nothing is said of how this compares here.

</comment><comment><USER3> Has anyone tried a titanium-iron-nickel alloy?

I would have thought every alloy combination would have been tried by now, but I guess there's still new things to be learned.

</comment><comment><USER31> This, if it works, is worth quite literally millions as times as much as another "social network" or stupid app, but I'll wager the team aren't "acqui- hired" for $19Bn.

<comment><USER32> I'm interested in where you came up with the "literal" worth comparison.

Perhaps what you meant to say is that, "I personally feel that this new steel alloy is worth more than whatsapp, and, I would be personally prepared to pay at a valuation of 1 million times greater than the whatsappp valuation. So, going back in time, if I had a choice of owning 10% of whatsapp for a $10,000 investment (valuing whatsapp at $100K), or 0.00001% of the company producing this alloy (valuing it at $100B, or 1 million times as much as whatsapp, I would take the 0.00001% for my $10,000 instead of the 10% share of whatsapp for $10,000).

Is that literally how you feel?

<comment><USER33> Welcome to this year edition of the Galactic _HyperBowl_. Whether from the mountains of Deneb Drei, Vega Primo red glow, Jupi II clouds or the Green Fields of Durulis, don't miss the titans of the HNFL fighting for the most coveted sport trophy of the universe (Special discount for believers of the Chutch of TFA). Access available to Lusus game fields — this year hosting planet — from the WorldWeb (free FarCasting for Gold Card owners), or full immersion SensoDive(tm) to experience the game As-If-You-Were-There. Contact our representatives for exclusive access to (TC secured) transmission feeds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Rearden metal?)</comment>


Airbnb quietly shut down a top host amid scathing reviews but guest were to stay - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/airbnb-montreal-aj-host-suspended-accounts-1.5252233 <comment><USER2> The title understates the issue (and has typos, but whatever). It's not just that Airbnb didn't do anything for the guests they knew where doomed by their booking with a scummy operator[1].

It's that it was so easy for the scummy operator to just move over to another account, and that obviously fake -- even duplicate! -- reviews persisted while real ones didn't.

[1] I don't say "host" because this guy ran so many properties he wasn't really a host in any capacity.

<comment><USER3> Yup. Major "yikes" situation here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can someone explain to me why I, a hypothetical traveller, would choose to stay in someone's Airbnb instead of a similarly priced hotel? I simply don't understand the attraction. I've only heard negative things about Airbnb, their business practices, dishonest hosts/listings, etc. At least with a hotel there is some semblance of responsibility. If you walk into your hotel room and there is a big pile of dog shit on the mattress, they'll give you a new room or send some staff up to remedy the situation. Why would I ever want to bunk in Joe Shmoe's bedroom?

<comment><USER5> 1\. You get better value for your money on an Airbnb if the Airbnb is honest and good. Stick with ones with high ratings and many reviews, and talk to your host if there is a problem.

2\. Price. We've hosted via Airbnb for a year. We rent out a room and bathroom for $30 a night. It takes us a half hour to flip the room, plus an occasional outlay of supplies like soap, etc., so this is a good investment for me. You won't find that price anywhere in or near the major city closest to me.

<comment><USER6> >1\. You get better value for your money on an Airbnb if the Airbnb is honest and good. Stick with ones with high ratings and many reviews, and talk to your host if there is a problem.

Sure, the issue is the _if_ (which should be guaranteed by Airbnb and isn't).

>2\. Price. We've hosted via Airbnb for a year. We rent out a room and bathroom for $30 a night. It takes us a half hour to flip the room, plus an occasional outlay of supplies like soap, etc., so this is a good investment for me. You won't find that price anywhere in or near the major city closest to me.

Your case is the "right" way, you have a spare room in your house and you rent it, but a large part of Airbnb accomodations (even the good ones) are _like_ the ones described in the article, a self-standing apartment (actually - if it is good - more suitable to a family than a hotel room) _somewhere_ you never meet the host, not when you arrive (either combination lock with code sent via text or physical keys in a box with a combination lock) not when you go away, if you have an issue of any kind during the night, let's say that the electricity goes off or there is no water all you have is a mobile phone number (and it has to be seen if anyone will answer your call).

For domestic travels (and with a car) you still have some ways out in case of issues (an hotel nearby, if any), but think of an international travel (in a country you don't speak the local language) and with no available infividual means of transportation ...

<comment><USER7> > Sure, the issue is the if (which should be guaranteed by Airbnb and isn't).

But in a hotel you're guaranteed a good experience? I've personally had much better luck with AirBnB than with hotels, in the same price range.

<comment><USER6> >But in a hotel you're guaranteed a good experience?

Usually, yes, and, additionally, you are going in a place that is surely registered with the local authorities, has been licensed to host you, follows a number of Laws (regarding - among the others - size of the rooms, safety, hygiene, preparation of food, etc.) that is human-presided and that has a lot to loose if it gets a "bad name".

Obviously if you are in the _same_ price range, you are going to (you choose) a "better" AirBnb or a "worse" hotel.

A hotel has - again obviously - much higher running costs than a rented room in a house or than an apartment, as hotels tend to have personnel and pay them.

Conversely - viceversa - an AirBnB run "as a hotel" \- has even greater costs (no economy of scale)than a hotel, only very often the owners (at least here, Italy) are not very good at math and if they operate according to the Law, once they have paid costs, commissions and taxes they find out they gave essentially invested a lot of money with very little return.

One or two spare rooms (like the one the parent poster described) inside one own's apartement and run by the family is what an Airbnb should be (but often isn't).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Either my parser is broken or this headline is... "Airbnb quietly shut down a top host amid scathing reviews but guest were to stay"?

<comment><USER2> It should be "guests"; full title from link is: "Airbnb quietly shut down a top host amid scathing reviews, but hundreds of guests were left to stay with him". The dropped plural throws the whole thing off.</comment></comment>


It's no wonder they don't trust us - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/12/its-no-wonder-they-dont-trust-you.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Fsethsmainblog+%28Seth%27s+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER3> I wonder why consumers put up with all the add-on crap that comes with a Windows PC. I guess maybe they just don't know any other real choices exist?

It's been many years since I setup a commercial Windows-based machine (and the non-commercial installs I've done have mostly been for VMs for testing purposes). But, I remember those machines from Dell having a ton of random extraneous crap already loaded. Crap icons all over the desktop. Crap-ware that auto-launched and made the system tray area extend 1/4 of the way across the taskbar, and so on. Completely ridiculous.

I bought a new iMac for my wife a couple of weeks ago. Took it out of the box, turned it on, and it was (as usual) a smooth and sane experience.

Don't get me wrong, it's not that I an totally anti-Microsoft, or completely Apple fan-boy. I just choose to use and buy the product that offers the best experience for my money, and Microsoft hasn't been part of that equation for a very long time now.

<comment><USER4> I knew somebody would mention Apple. Sadly, Apple is not that much better - after all, you are almost forced to register with Apple (iTunes, MobileMe, etc) to reap the full benefits. In fact with my Mac I just gave in and registered, which I always managed to avoid with other PCs.

It's just that they limit themselves to Apple products, and Apple fans cherish that rather than being annoyed by it.

Try installing iTunes on Windows, and you get lots of crap along with it, too (Quicktime, some Apple Software updater background thread, iPod connector background process even if you don't have an iPod, Bayonet-Networking or what it is called, and so on). Really, they are NOT better here.

Besides, I've had very good experiences with Dell. At least they still provide the install disk for Windows. Maybe it depends on whether you buy from the consumer or the business lines, though. If there really is any pollution, the first step should be reinstalling the OS from scratch, without all the crapware (but as I said, I didn't have to do that with my Dell purchases so far).

<comment><USER3> MobileMe? Really? I've never registered for that, and I don't think I'm benefit deficient.

iTunes, only if you have an iPod, and I think most people recognize what they are opting in to if you go down that road. (Is the Zune any better in that regard?).

I've bought Dell and HP home and corporate desktop machines (again, though not in the last few years). Both were burdened with a lot of pre-installed junk. If I have to reinstall the OS on a new PC, I think that is sort of a non-win.

I suppose it is a matter of perspective, but the Apple machines I've purchased have not come burdened with a ton of 3rd party crap, and have not made removal of what IS installed (iWork as an example) overly difficult if you choose to do so.

<comment><USER4> I haven't registered with MobileMe either, it was just an example that Apple DOES try to push things on you.

And you mention the difference: one is 3rd party stuff, Apple pushes Apple. It still pushes.

Again it is the useless comparison between "Apple" and "PCs". There are bad PC vendors and, OK, less bad PC vendors. Shop smart, and you don't have to put up with preinstalled crapware. Not even with Dell.

"Overly difficult" is entirely in the eye of the beholder...

<comment><USER5> Does "Shop Smart" mean "Reinstall the OS from Scratch?"

 _Apple pushes Apple. It still pushes_

Difference between Apple and Dell: Apple prompts you fewer times, doesn't try to make you feel insecure about opting out, and looks respectable throughout the whole experience. Last time I set up a PC, it was like passing an aisle of carnival hawkers.

<comment><USER6> In many ways it's more irritating when it happens with Apple software because they have set expectations about usability higher.

I _know_ I'm going to need to zap a new PC, so it doesn't bother me so much. Compare to OS X where I was promised a good experience.

I can't even do a clean install of OS X as the junk is baked into the operating system.

<comment><USER7> _I _know_ I'm going to need to zap a new PC_

This would seem to support the article's thesis of degradation of trust.

Still, I would say that the ability, let alone expectation, to reinstall an OS, marks you as being more technically apt than the average user.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Are there any PC brands out there that (default to) selling clean systems? In the last years I only had one shocking encouter with a HP laptop (Compaq brand) and don't really know what the others are doing. I know that my good old ThinkPad came (five years ago) in a pretty clean state (but I found all the custom stuff - special buttons HUD, trackpad confuguration and so on - <USER2> be not very polished.)

It's really a shame. The hardware is not so bad. Build quality is ok (ThinkPads: great!). The price is great. I would feel only a bit terrible if I were forced to switch my MBP with a HP laptop based on hardware alone. It's the software. Yeah, you can solve all this. But that's something annoying I want to avoid. And that is worth quite a bit of money.

<comment><USER4> I've had good experiences with Dell, but it might depend on the category you buy from. I've only bought from business selection so far. Also you might have to uncheck some things in the order dialog.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sounds like you setup a system using the disk that came with it. Big mistake. Try using an actual Windows disc from Microsoft, and you won't have any of that crap. I think it's pretty obvious that Microsoft gets a lot of flack for evils perpetuated by the PC manufacturers.

And do I need to mention Ubuntu, etc.?

<comment><USER3> The Windows OS is often greatly discounted when purchased with the hardware, pre-installed.

How do you "use an actual Windows disc from Microsoft" to reinstall without incurring additional license fees and hassles (IME, the OEM license keys you get with a Dell box won't let you register a generic Windows install)?

<comment><USER4> All the Dells I recently had came with proper OS installation disks that did not come with other crap. Possibly you would have to check "give me the CD" when ordering the PC, though.

I also so far had no problem installing said OS on other PCs, but mileages may vary (so many different versions of Windows floating around).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was talking to a comedy writer friend of mine and he reckons the way that the world has been makes both humour and establishing a relationship really, really easy. The trick is just to be honest. Honesty is now so refreshing (in a world of "spin") it becomes both hilarious and endearing.

</comment><comment><USER11> Why doesn't someone just make: "A PC that doesn't suck"? Give me a beautiful PC in a small form factor with the parts I've requested and with a nice big monitor. Also give me support that feels personal. Install Windows clean with the OEM version. That's it.

As far as apps? Partner with base shield or just make an online app store where people can download what they want.

PCs are a commodity item now. Shoes are a commodity item. Do to the PC Market what Zappos did to shoes. Good service and a clean experience.

<comment><USER12> The problem with that from a support point of view is that there are _a lot_ more things that can go wrong with a computer than a pair of shoes. Also it costs a lot more to do something like send the customer a new product under suspicious circumstances just to keep them happy and loyal. While PCs can be considered commodity at this point, the wholesale cost is still more than the wholesale cost of a pair of shoes.

Update: Not to mention that I doubt that Zappos has to custom-build shoes (and the labor costs associated with that), though I've never done business with Zappos so I can't say that definitively.

<comment><USER11> You don't have to translate tit for tat what Zappos does. Both businesses are different at a more granular level, but great service is a universal language. I know the guy at the local PC store on a first name basis. Why can't I have that same relationship with my PC vendor and not deal with yet another call center that is overseas?

Why do I have to deal with 100 fucking SKUs at DELL that all have some random numbers? You know how Steve Jobs decided the Mac product lineup? A 2x2 grid: columns for desktop+laptop and rows for consumer+pro. Don't blame Microsoft so much. Blame the OEMs.

<comment><USER12> > _Don't blame Microsoft so much. Blame the OEMs._

I'm not blaming Microsoft for anything. In general computers have more points of failure, which means more support calls.

While having a simpler line-up prevents you from overloading the customers with too much choice, you also end up in the boat where people will go elsewhere if one of your pre-built machines isn't exactly what they want. Apple has people griping about this stuff all the time, but people that want the 'Mac Experience' can't really go to Dell to get it. As far as a generic PC goes, they _can_ just hop over to Dell to get it. Though I guess you could get around this by offering customization options that Apple doesn't have, but then you run into additional labor costs (which a larger competitor like Dell might be able to cut significantly).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 I recently bought a Sony Vaio and while there were a number of pre-installed offers (from Sony itself or for Norton software), overall I was surprised that it wasn't worse. If I recall correctly it only came with:

      30 day nagware trial of Norton Antivirus
      30 day trial of MS Office

It might be a sad statement that I expected more crap. On the other hand, I was also very pleasantly surprised that it came with Google Chrome pre- installed.

<comment><USER4> So does Google Chrome include the Google Spybar? Because there would be your answer... In any case it seems likely that Google paid for Chrome on Vaio.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> One way I have found to get around this is to buy from "small business" sections rather than "home" sections. You're far less likely to have to deal with any random 3rd party crap installed when you order from Dell's Small Business area.</comment>


SketchUp to BIM Model - <AUTHOR> http://www.bimhub.com/3dconvert-sketchup-to-bim-model.html In the digital world, constructing a building requires sophisticated technology that combines the benefits of high-resolution designs with effective project management tools. <comment><USER2> This video is an advertisement.</comment>


Indian Government Repeals Articles 370 and 35A, Bifurcates Kashmir - <AUTHOR> https://www.news18.com/news/india/kashmir-live-updates-jammu-and-kashmir-tension-article-370-article-35a-narendra-modi-amit-shah-srinagar-2258121.html <comment><USER2> People are making this too big an issue. It's about Indian Kashmir. Currently rest of the country can't buy land there, can't invest etc. How's that good for integration.

With 370 gone. Rest of India will be able to invest in Kashmir (Indian Kashmir).

Edit:

I gathered more information. This is quite beneficial for Kashmiris. Like really beneficial. Some of their new rights

\- RTI (Right to Information)

\- State elections every 5 years

\- Reservations for minorities

\- Special oversight and power of President in case of emergency

Not to mention biggest benefit would be investment from everywhere that will flourish the people.

<comment><USER3> The issue is with the manner in which this was done. How do you think cutting off the entirety of Kashmir from internet, and making tourists/pilgrims evacuate the valley looks like?

This just resembles a coup. The people of Kashmir are unable to voice their opinions.

<comment><USER4> This makes no sense. The people of Michigan don't get to unilaterally veto Federal laws. Federal laws are set at the federal level and as a result are dependent on the will of the entire country, even if the impact is only on a certain part of the country.

When the US President declares a federal emergency in a certain part of the country that part does not get veto rights over the decision.

Now, I don't know if the actual revocation of the law in question was done legally, (although further down some 'constitutional expert' says it's completely legal and no one appears to be claiming otherwise) but assuming it was, this is nothing like a coup and is in fact the cornerstone of a federal democracy where certain powers are provided to the federal government, which are based on the will of the entire country rather than just a state or province.

<comment><USER3> Except the special status of Kashmir is laid down in the Constitution of India; with the provision that any change to that effect should be mutually agreed on.

To expand; India has the concept of "Union Territories" where the some matters like law and order (and others, I'm not an expert) which are usually State matters are controlled by the Central (Federal) government;

What's been done here is the effective equivalent of taking any already well- established state (say Maharashtra) with an elected legislature and converting it into a Union Territory; thereby stripping the State of a lot of power.

<comment><USER5> > _the special status of Kashmir is laid down in the Constitution of India; > with the provision that any change to that effect should be mutually agreed > on_

Wikipedia says Article 35A "was added to the Constitution through a Presidential Order" [1] via powers granted by Article 370 [2].

I am unfamiliar with the Indian Constitution. But 370(3) gives the President the unilateral right to "by public notification, declare that [Article 370] shall cease to be operative" pending only "the recommendation of the Constituent Assembly of the State" [2]. (Recommendation, not consent.)

There is no requirement for mutual agreement. Article 370, and thus 35A, are wholly executive prerogatives.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_35A_of_the_Constitutio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_35A_of_the_Constitution_of_India)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_370_of_the_Constitutio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_370_of_the_Constitution_of_India)

<comment><USER3> You are probably correct; IANAL and have only a cursory knowledge of the matter.

But I don't believe any recommendation from the Constituent Assembly was received to the best of my knowledge.

<comment><USER5> > _I don 't believe any recommendation from the Constituent Assembly was > received to the best of my knowledge_

The Constituent Assembly provided its recommendation in the 1950s [1]. (I think this is where Article 35A came from.) The Assembly doesn't appear to have convened since 1954. It thus makes sense to interpret the recommendation requirement in 370(3) as a prohibition on the Indian President cancelling Article 370 before the Assembly had a chance to make its circa 1954 recommendations.

(Surprisingly, one of those changes was not a mutuality requirement on termination of the Article.)

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constituent_Assembly_of_Jammu_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constituent_Assembly_of_Jammu_and_Kashmir)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The article in [0] contains a very clear explanation of how the government was able to do this.

While it's technically legal, Article 370 had a provision that required the "recommendation from the Constituent Assembly of Jammu and Kashmir". But by imposing president's (central) rule, they were able to bypass this provision and abrogate the article unilaterally.

[0] [https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other- states/explaine...](https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other- states/explained-how-the-status-of-jammu-and-kashmir-is-being- changed/article28822866.ece)

</comment><comment><USER7> I have travelled to India often but I don't understand Indian politics enough. So if someone here can help me with these questions, I'll appreciate it!

* What does it mean for Lakadh to not have a legislature? Does it mean that this province cannot have elected local leaders?

* Why are the prominent politicians under house arrest? What is their offence?

* Why were these two articles repealed?

<comment><USER8> I only speak of what I know (which may not be correct)

* What does it mean for Lakadh to not have a legislature? Does it mean that this province cannot have elect local leaders?

> I think this means that they will not have legislative power in the > government (aka similar to USVI or Puerto Rico in the US)

* Why are the prominent politicians under house arrest? What is their offence?

> I believe this is mostly to silence them to not agitate people. Also, these > articles are widely misused and politicians amassed a lot of land since no > outsiders can hold land in the area.

* Why were these two articles repealed?

> This is partly for political as well as some economical. Since no one can > own a property or land in Jammy & Kashmir other than its residents, economy > growth is much smaller in Kasmir than the rest of India and it helps boost > Kasmir's economy. The political reason might be that the BJP government > wants more power in the area.

<comment><USER9> > I think this means that they will not have legislative power in the > government (aka similar to USVI or Puerto Rico in the US)

This is incorrect. Not having a legislature here means not having a state legislature. They will still have an elected representative in the national parliament, unlike Puerto Rico, or even Washington DC. Perhaps Washington DC would be the most apt comparison, as in the national government governing a province.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just laying down what happened:

Central Government amended Article 367 of the Constitution to add new interpretations, by which the Presidential order to abrogate Article 370 and 35A becomes valid.

Basically, the Central Government brought in an amendment, asked the Governor of the State (appointed by the Central Government), who then recommended the President for the same and he just signed it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_370_of_the_Constitutio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_370_of_the_Constitution_of_India#Presidential_Order)

> The presidential order also added new "interpretations" to the Article 367 > of the Constitution. By the new interpretation, the phrase "[Governor of the > State] acting on the advice of the Council of Ministers of the State for the > time being in office" is to be understood simply as the Governor of the > State. All references to the State Government shall mean the Governor. The > reference to the "Constituent Assembly" has also been amended to mean the > "Legislative Assembly of the State"

[https://www.telegraphindia.com/india/double-strike- president...](https://www.telegraphindia.com/india/double-strike-president- signs-order-scrapping-article-370-bill-moved-to-make-jammu-and-kashmir-union- territory/cid/1695881)

> To article 367, there shall be added the following clause, namely:—

"(4) For the purposes of this Constitution as it applies in relation to the State of Jammu and Kashmir—

(a) references to this Constitution or to the provisions thereof shall be construed as references to the Constitution or the provisions thereof as applied in relation to the said State;

(b) references to the person for the time being recognized by the President on the recommendation of the Legislative Assembly of the State as the Sadar-i- Riyasat of Jammu and Kashmir, acting on the advice of the Council of Ministers of the State for the time being in office, shall be construed as references to the Governor of Jammu and Kashmir;

(c) references to the Government of the said State shall be construed as including references to the Governor of Jammu and Kashmir acting on the advice of his Council of Ministers; and

(d) in proviso to clause (3) of article 370 of this Constitution, the expression "Constituent Assembly of the State referred to in clause (2)" shall read "Legislative Assembly of the State"."

</comment><comment><USER11> They plan to use illegal means to cease its operation. According to Article 370 in constitution:

Notwithstanding anything in the foregoing provisions of this article, the President may, by public notification, declare that this article shall cease to be operative or shall be operative only with such exceptions and modifications and from such date as he may specify: Provided that the recommendation of the Constituent Assembly of the State referred to in clause (2) shall be necessary before the President issues such a notification.

There is no 'Provided that the recommendation of the Constituent Assembly of the State referred to'

</comment><comment><USER12> So, India's at war with Pakistan now? That seems pretty terrible.

<comment><USER13> Nope! No war. India just taking care of its INTERNAL matters.

<comment><USER14> "Taking care of internal matters" is a great new euphemism.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there a search for Facebook posts? - <AUTHOR>

Goal: Find relevant posts by my fb friends by keyword (i.e. everyone who's posted on a specific topic)
I vaguely remember FB used to allow users to search for public and friends' posts via graph search, but seems it's been disabled.
Does anything exist today that accomplishes that goal? <comment><USER2> I agree with goal , there is always search for blogs ,articles , educational materials, jobs on the facebook provided on relevant groups and communities .</comment>


Homebrew silicon - Jeri Ellsworth's inverter - <AUTHOR> http://vimeo.com/channels/26257

<comment><AUTHOR> Also on flicker: [http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeriellsworth/sets/721576071614...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeriellsworth/sets/72157607161498665/)

Note the SEM in her basement (and parts for a focused ion beam.)

</comment><comment><USER2> Yeah, Jeri Ellsworth has her own Wikipedia entry by the way. Very prolific engineer, with sometimes odd sense of humor.</comment>


Bill Gates has donated over $36,854,000,000 in his lifetime - <AUTHOR> http://www.youhavetocit.com/2012/04/bill-gates-had-donated-over-36854000000.html?m=1

<comment><USER2> Damn it, we just went over this article on HN a few days ago. The numbers are wrong, and if you correct the male circumcision number to 18.5 million rather than billion, the total drops by half.

See previous submission: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5191094>

<comment><USER3> First I've seen this, but that donation jumped out at me immediately. How could a male circumcision program possibly use all of $18 billion?! 18 million makes much more sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the Gates Foundation is doing some amazing work.

But, uh, this blog post doesn't seem very well researched. It lists $18.5 _billion_ for male circumcision in Africa, when the correct number is $18.5 _million_. Kinda makes me question the other numbers.

<comment><USER5> I imagine the $18.5 billion on male circumcision is wrong, but you are also wrong:

[http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Grants-2008/Pages/Population-...](http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Grants-2008/Pages/Population- Services-International-OPP50748.aspx)

That's a single $50 million grant. Back out, create a search for Africa+HIV and you immediately see hundreds of millions of grants, so I imagine the bulk of the misstatement is from conflating HIV programs with those only targeting male circumcision.

<http://www.gatesfoundation.org/grants/Pages/search.aspx>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can someone please change the title to say "has donated", since "had donated" implies he is dead. Or that the took the money back.

<comment><USER7> That's not what the pluperfect tense implies in English. It simply means _something that took place prior to a moment in the past_ [1]. There is still some ambiguity that could lead a reader to infer that Gates is finished donating money.

[1]<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_aspect#English>

<comment><USER8> >It simply means something that took place prior to a moment in the past

True, but that implies that there exists such a moment with particular significance. Otherwise, you wouldn't use that tense. In other words, it leaves you thinking Bill Gates donated 36 billion dollars before X, where X is his death, an alien invasion, the collapse of the dollar, etc.

I don't know if there is a rule of thumb as to what tense to use, but "had donated" in this context feels plain wrong. That kind of dissonance is captured perfectly by this Mitch Hedberg quote:

>I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to, too.

<comment><USER7> Like I said, "had donated" is ambiguous, however, inferring that this must mean Bill Gates either died or gave the donated money back is more than a bit of a stretch.

<comment><USER9> Well, yes, it's a bitch of a stretch because of our context, still the phrase is ambiguous, so it's better with 'has'

The phrase certainly can be fixed if it refers to some event like 'Bill Gates had donated 36 billion before he left Microsoft'

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Gates' donations are invested in problems that should have been dealt with by governments, whose tax money is spent instead on the semi-corrupt self interests of their leaders and their business cronies,[0] an economic-social structure which contributed much to the way in which Gates and other Global business billionaires have made their fortune. It's a twisted system, and conscience-cleansing philantropy by its current and past players only brings back a small portion of what should have been invested in the first place.

[0] [http://www.wikileaks- forum.com/index.php/topic,5320.msg22368...](http://www.wikileaks- forum.com/index.php/topic,5320.msg22368.html?PHPSESSID=cmt3mngc4m6lkgh9vreoum17b4#msg22368)

<comment><USER11> Conscience cleaning philanthropy, because he is responsible for so many deaths! Come on, this makes us sound silly.

<comment><USER12> Microsoft clippy? Windows XP update auto-restarts? The Microsoft Genuine Premium Plus Advantage Home Starter Business Pro Certified Product Activator? The Zune?

 _Are these not some of the greatest atrocities afflicted on mankind?_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Even if you don't like Windows, you've got to admit that Gates is a good guy.

<comment><USER14> Indeed - or at least he's become one. Something good did come out of Windows after all...

<comment><USER6> Windows has been a good product for the average user since 1995, and has been great since Windows 7; it's just their business practices that were a problem. And to be honest, they were hardly the worst offender there either.

<comment><USER15> _it's just their business practices that were a problem_

Yes, agree. But everything is relative, right. All of a sudden the stuff they were doing doesn't seem that evil, and the hip kids from the block are suing the pants off everyone else that comes to play in their playground.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is a bad way to measure philanthropy, and I think Bill Gates would agree.

Anyone can dump money on a problem. But Bill Gates's money is still finite, and he has tried to make his money be the most efficient at solving given problems. He measures the stuff he does and sometimes finds out he goofed.

I'm not exaggerating when I say he's likely one of the top 5 people in the world at knowing how to spend billions of dollars to help people, because he has the most motivation of anyone in the world to know how to best spend billions of dollars.

<comment><USER17> Not anyone can dump money on a problem. You have to have the money first.

To be clear, though, I really respect the Gates foundation's philanthropy philosophy. They are about achieving quantified results rather than just doing something trendy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The Gates Foundation has a trust endowment of $36 billion. Through June 30, 2012 it has made grants of $25 billion. Warren Buffet and others have contributed.

[http://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/Pages/foundation- fact-s...](http://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/Pages/foundation-fact- sheet.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER19> Unlike most super billionaires, Gates is actually actively spending the bulk of his wealth while he's still alive. Genuine philanthropy.

<comment><USER20> He and Buffett seem to share a skepticism of setting in motion a large charitable foundation that will outlive them. Hence, Gates wants to directly oversee the spending, and spend it at a high enough rate that it uses up most of the money in his lifetime, rather than setting something up in a will. Buffett even conditioned his recurring donation to the Gates Foundation on Bill or Melinda Gates still being alive and in control of the Foundation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is a dupe. And the numbers are wrong.

EDIT: Found it <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5191094>

</comment><comment><USER22> How much of the Money donated by B&M Gates Foundation is Bill's personal money vs Money raised from donors? Not trying to diminish his donations, just genuinely curious how much money foundations like that raise form outside donors.

<comment><USER20> Depends on how you count. The endowment is mainly (all?) Gates's money, but a substantial proportion of the annual spending is funded by Buffett. That's because, rather than donate money to the Foundation outright, Buffett set up a recurring-donation program structured in a way so it feeds directly into the Foundation's annual program spending.

For 2011, it looks like the Foundation spent $3.4 billion total, of which the annual installment of Buffett's donation accounted for $1.5 billion, so a little under half.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't want to suggest that this has not been a good thing overall, but donations of this sort are a highly political act, and can't escape being in spite of any intention.

An interesting (I found) examination of the the effects of such a volume of donation coming from a single organisation can be found here:

[http://newint.org/features/2012/04/01/bill-gates- charitable-...](http://newint.org/features/2012/04/01/bill-gates-charitable- giving-ethics/)

Again, not saying it's not a net good, just that it's perhaps not a perfect model to pursue either.

</comment><comment><USER24> Haha - see the comments on the page. I have no idea where their weird twisted logic is derived from. I would much rather see the redistributive efforts occur through the Foundation than let it run through a public choice theory test.

</comment><comment><USER25> "had"?

</comment><comment><USER26> At least he has and hasn't just pledged to like most politician scum.

</comment><comment><USER27> He donated most of the money to his charity, which he controls.

<comment><USER28> ...which then donates money to philanthropic causes</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you validate something you've made is something people want? - <AUTHOR>

I've been through this countless times. I throw together an awesome side project. People tell me they like it. But it dies off. Sometimes I think "maybe this wasn't something they really wanted?", but other times I find competing products doing the exact same thing and think "man, people do want this".<p>How do you really validate what you've made is something people really want? I guess I would like to know what are methods/hacks of accurately determining this? <comment><USER2> Well you're talking about two related but different pieces of data:

1\. Demand/Market for a solution to a given problem

2\. How well you've achieved product-market-fit with your particular solution.

Determining #1 is fairly straightforward:

A. Google searches for a given query (unmet need)

B. Chatter about that problem or other solutions (buzz)

C. Competitors selling products in that vertical (precedent)

D. Competitors bidding on keywords related to that vertical

Determining #2 is harder / more nuanced; and to a certain extent is a fruitless endeavor until you've hit significant sample sizes. The first 10 people you try to sell might say no, that doesn't mean the product is wrong for the market; that could just be random chance. The only sure-fire way to test product-market fit is to get your product in front of a statistically significant number of users, and see if they bite.

I use the term "bite" because I don't mean "convert". Optimizing your conversion process (getting users to actually sign up / purchase, etc) takes time and that comes later. In the beginning all you need to test is if they care about your product at all (are engaged when presented the idea). That's where the field of engagement analytics comes into play, and that's a big subject...but hopefully I've pointed you in a useful direction.

</comment><comment><USER3> Competition is excellent validation. If there are competing products that have been around for a while and appear to have a budget (are they spending on advertising?), then people want the thing your product does.

Now all you've got to do is figure out how to out-compete the competition enough to capture a financially significant chunk of the pie.

</comment><comment><USER4> a) solve a problem you have or people you know have, the closer you are to the problem the better

b) find more people with the same problem

There's lots of ways to get traffic -

\- if you're lucky industry communities and forums you can post on, people asking on twitter, that kind of stuff

\- get press, and not particularly press because you're a startup, go to the news sites and blogs that specifically cover your industry

\- adwords, facebook etc advertising

\- content marketing like Digital Ocean's giant archive of everything you will ever need to do or install on a web server, that is going to send high quality traffic to their website for years but takes a long time to do

\- content marketing about being a startup or developer, I dislike this because the traffic's usually untargeted and it's specifically exploiting us

</comment><comment><USER5> Try selling it? There is another bit of activation energy between someone liking it and pulling out there wallets.

I had one phone call where I described my idea to gauge interest, and the guy tried to forward me to his purchaser straight away. Had to explain I hadn't a product yet.

</comment><comment><USER6> > How do you really validate what you've made is something people really want?

Market research. There are several ways to decide which project to start next. One way is to ask yourself what sounds fun. Another way is to find out what people need. If the point is to make money, the latter approach has it all over the former.</comment>


I ate at a restaurant for the first time since March - <AUTHOR> https://www.tampabay.com/arts-entertainment/food/2020/05/05/i-ate-a-restaurant-for-the-first-time-since-march-were-a-long-way-from-normal/ <comment><USER2> > For me, loving restaurants is about all the stuff that surrounds the thing > on your plate. It's the buzz and hum of a busy dining room. It's the > friendly banter with bartenders and servers. It's celebrating milestones > with friends and family.

I feel this. It's honestly what I miss the most about normal life. Going and getting some tacos and a margarita after a stressful day at work. That kind of thing. It's weird, the small but all-encompassing emotional toll it takes to not have that outlet available to unwind. It's like I just can't _quite_ exhale all the way.

All this is to say: simply opening places back up right now won't restore the thing that moves me to go out to them. The inability to fully relax still permeates every corner of life, even if the risk has decreased a bit.</comment>


Researchers Announce Advance in Image-Recognition Software - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/18/science/researchers-announce-breakthrough-in-content-recognition-software.html <comment><USER2> Hi all, I'm the author on the Stanford article, so I can answer any more detailed/technical questions. The article doesn't mention this, but closely related work I've only very recently become aware of (if anyone is interested) are additionally:

From UofT: [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1411.2539v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1411.2539v1.pdf)

From Baidu/UCLA: [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.1090v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.1090v1.pdf)

From Google: [http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2014/11/a-picture-is- wort...](http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2014/11/a-picture-is-worth- thousand-coherent.html)

From Stanford (our work): [http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/deepimagesent/](http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/deepimagesent/)

Edit: And seemingly also from Berkeley [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1411.4389v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1411.4389v1.pdf)

At least from my perspective, the main motivation behind this work is in thinking of natural language as a rich label space. As humans, we've very successfully used language for communication and knowledge representation, and I think our algorithms should do the same. This also enables much more straightforward I/O interactions between a human and machine because humans speak text fluently. They don't speak a set of arbitrarily devised and assigned labels.

So the hope is that in the future you can, for example, search your photos based on text queries, or ask the computer questions about images, and get answers back in natural language. There's a lot of exciting work to be done!

<comment><USER3> I don't understand why you are doing this and I don't understand why other people in this thread are praising you.

I understand that this problem is interesting to work on but seriously, this is obviously going to fall into the hands of people who are going to use it to make the world worse. If you don't think computer vision is going to be used to kill people and to take away freedom you are lying to yourself.

For every positive use this could have there are far worse negative uses and it is so clear that they will happen.

There are so many other fields you could work in that make use of machine learning algorithms. Why would you work to advance a field that has so many obviously evil applications that will definitely happen.

<comment><USER4> The main application of computer vision is robotics and automation.

If you don't like war or mass surveillance, stop voting for it. It's like blaming the Wright brothers for the city bombings of world war II.

Do you really believe if these researches didn't work on it, the technology just wouldn't be invented at all?

And I think the military applications are sort of overstated. We already have drones and effective mass surveillance. Machine vision can help, but it doesn't make or break it.

<comment><USER3> Mass surveillance is almost worthless without computers to monitor all of the video/audio feeds. You would need to have like a million people listening to the feeds and even then you wouldn't be able to monitor like 99% of the data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Direct link to the paper, "Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptions": [http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/deepimagesent/devisag...](http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/deepimagesent/devisagen.pdf)

Some impressive examples of what the algorithm can do: [http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/deepimagesent/](http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/deepimagesent/)

Relevant xkcd: [http://xkcd.com/1425/](http://xkcd.com/1425/)

<comment><USER6> Flickr's response to the xkcd: [https://code.flickr.net/2014/10/20/introducing-flickr- park-o...](https://code.flickr.net/2014/10/20/introducing-flickr-park-or- bird/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A bit more info: [https://plus.google.com/118227548810368513262/posts/KjUwmgHa...](https://plus.google.com/118227548810368513262/posts/KjUwmgHaRSi)

The examples of incorrect captions at [http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2014/11/a-picture-is- wort...](http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2014/11/a-picture-is-worth- thousand-coherent.html) are particularly interesting.

</comment><comment><USER8> So what does it say when it is shown Rorschach's test? It's supposed to represent different shapes to different people, what does this machine have in mind?:)

</comment><comment><USER9> Presumably most of the images on the internet could be captioned "A cat" :-) This is really impressive research though, lots of applications in even mundane things like figuring out streetview images. The really interesting test will be with Google Image search where the auto-caption text is more accurate than the image description.

</comment><comment><USER10> I suspect that regardless of how far this technology advances, doctors will still be manually reading X-rays and MRIs for decades to come--and of course, in the US, collecting obscene salaries for doing so.

Sure, they may adopt the technology to make their diagnoses more accurate, but they will still demand that they have final say and that the law effectively make them its gatekeepers.

Even if these systems prove more accurate, doctors will still fear-monger (successfully) about the danger of trusting algorithms and stress the need for competent, highly-educated MDs being involved at every step along the way.

Medicine will be the last field automated.

<comment><USER11> Until we have _Elysium_ -style re-atomization machines that magically heal people, I'm perfectly happy having a doctor in the loop.

<comment><USER12> I'd go it a different way. As long as having a doctor in the loop doesn't harm outcomes, I'm happy having one in the loop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Looks like the Toronto group have been working on something very similar as well: [http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/1411.2539](http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/1411.2539)

Has anybody been able to find the Google paper? The article says it's on arxiv, but I can't seem to find it there. All that seems to be published so far is this blog post: [http://googleresearch.blogspot.be/2014/11/a-picture- is-worth...](http://googleresearch.blogspot.be/2014/11/a-picture-is-worth- thousand-coherent.html)

<comment><USER14> Just went out: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1411.4555](http://arxiv.org/abs/1411.4555)

<comment><USER15> I'm curious to hear your thoughts about learning object saliency from these datasets. Most human generated images have built-in biases toward framing things humans care about, and all of the captions will reflect the relative importance (to humans) of pictured objects.

Captioning images, for humans, is a subset of a much more general skill set. Humans can scan a broad visual scene for salient components, focus on those while ignoring non-salient objects, and then organize their thoughts about what has been seen in such a way as to produce an extremely low dimensional description of the scene (a descriptive sentence.)

Human's also have the advantage of immediate feedback to their generated descriptions from peers or parents.

I haven't seen much work that has attempted to tackle datasets that aren't pre-framed by humans, or ones that try to scale reinforcement learning. I'd love to hear your thoughts or get suggested reading if any pops to mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Machine vision is advancing rapidly. This year the imageNet machine vision challenge winner got 6.7% top-5 classification error. 2013 was 11%, 2012 was 15%. And since there is an upper limit of 0% and each percentage point is exponentially harder than the last, this is actually better than exponential. It's also estimated to be about human level, at least on that specific competition. And that required a human to practice and spend lots of time looking for similar images to match the image.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm enormously impressed, amazed that this works. I'm reading the papers to understand how they do it.

Phase I is segmenting the image into rectangular regions which contain an "object". That's done using the approach in this paper.

[http://koen.me/research/pub/uijlings- ijcv2013-draft.pdf](http://koen.me/research/pub/uijlings-ijcv2013-draft.pdf)

The regions can overlap, and one region can be completely contained in another. Regions found may turn out to be useless, so the goal is to find too many, rather than too few. That part is reasonably straightforward, and you can see how well it's working visually.

Phase II is described in this paper:

[http://arxiv.org/pdf/1311.2524v5.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1311.2524v5.pdf)

Each rectangular region is rescaled into a 277 x 277 pixel square.

Then they apply a convolutional neural network to each square:

"We extract a 4096-dimensional feature vector from each region proposal using the Caffe implementation of the CNN described by Krizhevsky et al. Features are computed by forward propagating a mean-subtracted RGB image through five convolutional layers and two fully connected layers."

So now they have a 4K vector of values for each region. I thought CNNs had to be trained, but what would you train this against? The 4K vector has no explicit meaning yet.

Phase III, in the same paper, uses a manually tagged training set and a support vector machine to try to train a model of those 4K feature vectors. The output of this is a set of tags for each region, each with a probability. This seems to be a straightforward machine learning system.

The new Stanford paper takes that data and, using training data from captioned images, turns those tags into sentences. (I'm more interested in the object recognition part than the natural language part, so it's the upstream steps I'm trying to understand.)

I'm amazed that this works, and have no clue how one debugs such a thing. None of this is all that big in terms of lines of code, but it's not at all clear what will work.

There's been a lot of progress in the last few years.

<comment><USER17> Check out bohm's idea on the issue:

Bohm's basic assumption is that "elementary particles are actually systems of extremely complicated internal structure, acting essentially as amplifiers of information contained in a quantum wave." As a consequence, he has evolved a new and controversial theory of the universe. A new model of reality that Bohm calls the "Implicate Order."

The theory of the Implicate Order contains an ultra-holistic cosmic view; it connects everything with everything else. In principle, any individual element could reveal "detailed information about every other element in the universe." The central underlying theme of Bohm's theory is the "unbroken wholeness of the totality of existence as an undivided flowing movement without borders."

[http://www.scienceandnonduality.com/david-bohm-implicate- ord...](http://www.scienceandnonduality.com/david-bohm-implicate-order-and- holomovement/)

[http://www.fromquarkstoquasars.com/david-bohm-and-the- hologr...](http://www.fromquarkstoquasars.com/david-bohm-and-the-holographic- universe/)

<comment><USER16> The above reply seems to be to the wrong article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A browser extension that uses this to fill in missing image alt text could be really useful for the vision impaired.

</comment><comment><USER19> Great work! I'm a novice in the field of image recognition but do you think that using neural networks to represent both the text and image features in an h-dimensional embedding space could be extended to additional features like sound, or touch or images in other spectra like infra red? For example could we do better image recognition if there was also sound input from the scene or infra red in addition to visual spectra? It seems naively like lots of input data could be processed and then compared in this way. Thanks for taking the time to share your work and results.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm impressed - I didn't even notice the Frisbee in the first picture myself.

This one was funny though...

Human: "A green monster kite soaring in a sunny sky." Computer model: "A man flying through the air while riding a snowboard."

</comment><comment><USER12> I can't help but think it would be hilarious to drop some classic "photo bomb" situations in these algorithms to see how the computer interprets them versus a human.

</comment><comment><USER21> The natural language stuff is cool, but I really hope people are working on getting structured data out of things like this. Having that coupled with reliable recognition from smartphone-quality or even CCTV-quality images will be a game-changer in terms of smart sensors and security.

<comment><USER22> _...in terms of smart sensors and security._

Or perhaps, "in terms of the rapidly closing vice of state-sponsored dystopian surveillance?" Dense, authoritarian and technocratic cities like London, Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea's will be some of the first to suffer under the all-seeing eye of omnipresent computer-annotated, database-retained vision. Corporate cubicle workers will slip further apart from the masses in to the corporate acultural dystopias predicted by science fiction... and in the case of those already _housed_ by their employer (eg. many in South Korean 'chebol' megacorps), who's to say residential zone behavioural profiling will not begin in earnest?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> An important milestone in the area of image processing and Natural Language Generation. I am really looking forward to the details of your work as it is quite related to my research area.

</comment><comment><USER24> Out of curiosity, how well would these model work on computer generated graphics (say Skyrim)?

My gut feeling says it will work but I am curious if the model need to be trained separately for those.

</comment><comment><USER25> That is very impressive, congrats.

</comment><comment><USER26> Google GLASS might finally become useful. Image -> text -> speech. Hugely beneficial to the visually impaired. I can also see applications in physical security and law enforcement.</comment>