Paperspace – A full computer you can access from any web browser - <AUTHOR> https://paperspace.io <comment><USER2> I've done _A LOT_ of research and experimentation in this space over the course of the last 5-ish years, mainly out of sheer curiosity. This sounds very, very similar to something I prototyped a while back using x264 + Broadway.js (HTML5 video streaming with low latency is a non-starter).

I'm extremely curious, has Paperspace actually developed an entirely new video codec, encoder, and efficient JS decoder for this?

I'm a little confused by the statements so far (and the comments are flowing in, so apologies if this was addressed while I was typing): "we are using a video stream", "using a JS renderer", "building a streaming protocol", "using GPU tech originally developed for video game streaming", "a remote desktop protocol that could stream HD video"

So, is _just_ the streaming protocol you've developed and not the codec? In my expiriments, simply pushing out h264 NAL units over websockets and passing them to the decoder was a pretty solid start. Add a tiny layer of buffering over that and I imagine it'd be fairly stable. Ultimately, I backed away from h264 for licensing and performance issues.

Also, what's the transport into the browser? Websockets? WebRTC data channels? Have you encountered performance issues with Firefox not being able to handle websockets or data channels in web workers? (Which is seemingly coming in FF37.)

<comment><USER3> awesome questions! There will be tech blog deep dive that goes into more detail, but just to clarify things a bit we are using h264 as the underlying codec but the protocol is a combination things -- h264 packets over websockets is where we started too!

Usually you want a "reliable" transport (tcp) for handshake, some transfer, etc and then you can get away with a more fire-and-forget (udp) stream for everything else. We broker different connections for different scenarios. The web version is naturally limited to either webrtc or websockets but for the paperweight it didn't make sense to force a web paradigm (or full webbrowser just to access limited socket types) so we interface directly with the hardware.

Haven't encountered big problems with firefox, but browser inconsistencies are definitely something we spend a lot of time working through

<comment><USER4> how do you interface directly with the hardware?

<comment><USER5> Because Paperweight is the black circle hardware device they made to stream from Paperspace. There's no point to using a browser on it, just stream directly through the wifi/ethernet port using TCP/IP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yes its like renting a VPS with VNC or rdesktop. That's not the interesting part. The magic they claim is a low latency video transport to show you the screen on the remote.

You can web browse on a remote computer with VNC but you sure can't use photoshop. Even on 1GB/s with the remote right next to you. Its not the network in that case, VNC is just too slow with its screen scraping and reassembling. Rdesktop is better but it still hurts to use something like photoshop. Forget games.

Their entire product hinges on delivering that low latency video feed of the remote screen. None of the other features matter in comparison. They win if I can't tell its remote. Anything lesser...

<comment><USER7> I don't know what these guys are using, but there _is_ remote desktop technology out there that is fast enough to let me play games and watch videos on the server with minimal lag (so useable in fact, that I've been using my Mac mini that way through a Windows laptop for over a year now). I'm talking about NX¹ (specifically, I use NoMachine²).

――――――

¹ — [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NX_technology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NX_technology)

² — [https://www.nomachine.com/](https://www.nomachine.com/)

<comment><USER8> nx is the same as the most expensive tiers of vnc in my experience. my employer buys both.

but, people already forgot about OnLive? the company that streamed games in a way you could play multiplayer shoothers rendered in a server.

<comment><USER9> > people already forgot about OnLive

NVidia just announced today at the GDC they would be doing the same thing, at a premium cost, at full 1080p, 60 fps streaming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > The Professional tier is made for high-end 3D CAD, Creative Suite, GIS etc.

What I'd love is to use a virtual terminal that has every application possible pre-installed or available on demand and runs like a citrix application with payment by time/cpu or whatever makes sense.

So I want to use AutoCAD, I find it in the catalog of apps, use it for 20 minutes, pay 2 dollars or whatever. I want Visual Studio 2013, I find it in the catalog, use it for 2 hours, pay a dollar fifty.

Then all I need is a cheap laptop with a nice screen and I'm good for years and years.

<comment><USER11> What about sharing - heavy - files with coworkers not using this app? What about uploading files? It feels to me like working in a bubble... but maybe I'm wrong.

<comment><USER12> How about some sort of dropbox like syncing? Put your files in a shared dropbox folder, sync dropbox folder on remote VM, save your work on remote VM when done, changes get synced back to shared dropbox folder.

Obviously not perfect and obviously problematic if lots of people try working on the same file at the same time, but should solve at least some of the problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hi HN!

Founder here. We just announced Paperspace today and I'd be happy to answer any questions (technical or otherwise).

<comment><USER13> The copy on your website ranges for me from confusing to offputting. I'm not even sure exactly what you're selling after having looked at your site for two minutes. Maybe you sell virtual machines in a data center, accessible with vnc or rdp implemented in JS? And maybe an additional mini computer preconfigured to access that?

Note: The answers to that do not matter. What matters is that your website doesn't answer them and is in fact so vague that it triggers all of my mental fraud bells.

Edit:

Also small footnote. This is probably honest and well-meant, but it reads like snake-oil: "Your desktop is managed in a secure data center and we send you a fully-encrypted feed." Which data center? What does secure mean? What guarantee do i have about that security? What encryption are you using? What about the data i put on my VM, are you backing it up? Is it encrypted by default or can any paperspace employee read my diary on my cloud computer?

You need to answer them in that sentence but without links and/or footnotes to further explanations it's just meaningless and amounts to "Just trust us, ok?"

<comment><USER3> Apologies for the confusion (and yes, the website needs some love). To answer the questions, we are primarily building a streaming protocol that makes remote desktops usable for a broader range of applications (namely "media- rich" use cases like photoshop, CAD/CAM, etc)

Behind the scenes we are using GPU tech originally developed for video game streaming, but using it primarily as a way to send a vanilla desktop.

We are currently delivering this desktop to any webbrowser using a JS renderer. That said, we didn't want you to have to have an old machine to use this one, so thats where the paperweight comes in.

VDI/remote desktops have been around for a while but they are usually really poor quality/hard to setup/etc. So we are trying to wrap that all in a simple package.

<comment><USER13> Now that's a great explanation of what your company does!

That makes me really look forward to when i can use that technology to remotely access my own machines from my cellphone. :D

<comment><USER14> FWIW I already do this. It's not running a window manager, rather a command line, but it does what I need it to.

<comment><USER13> Oh yeah, i also already do VNC into my windows machines from my android phone. But i'd like some more advanced software for it. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So, a thin client connecting to a virtual machine under some other company's control? No, thanks.

The fact is, computers are plenty fast now, and can handle 90% of peoples' usage patterns (browsing reddit, watching cat videos) with ease. The last thing I want is to have a remote desktop that lags out whenever there's a network hiccup.

<comment><USER16> I'm sorry, is this a running joke on HN? The first reply is always some bland, obvious attack on whatever is posted. I mean, the fact that a streaming computer in the cloud is sensitive to network hiccups is so obvious to anyone who sees this it's not even a valid criticism.

<comment><USER15> Actually, I wasn't the first reply. TBH I was expecting this to be buried since I was so late to the party.

But regardless, my criticism is that slow speed in the hardware is rarely a problem these days. Almost every "slow computer" problem I've diagnosed in recent times (that hasn't been due to McAffee) has in fact just been a slow internet connection or a misconfigured router. When you're not a computer expert, it's hard to know why your Youtube video stutters.

So yes, they will probably get a lot of sign ups with a mantra of "faster", but IMO this isn't solving the actual problem that users tend to have with computer "slowness". In fact, it will only exacerbate it, although that might be good for pushing towards greater bandwidth.

I'm also not too keen on putting even more of my data on someone else's system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I thought OnLive and other thin client gaming services took a shot at latency, made some great achievements, but hit walls.[1-4] It seems hard to put a few miles between the game and the screen and keep response times natural.

Maybe 99.9% of computing doesn't need latency as low as FPS and fighters though. Maybe this is just taking OnLive[5] tech and making a really smooth remote desktop out of it. If so, I guess this kind of a shoot for the stars, land on the moon technology. I guess that's still pretty cool.

[1] [http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-onlive- lag-...](http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-onlive-lag-analysis) [2] [http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-face-off- ga...](http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-face-off-gaikai-vs- onlive) [3] [http://www.iis.sinica.edu.tw/~swc/onlive/onlive.html](http://www.iis.sinica.edu.tw/~swc/onlive/onlive.html) [4] [http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-onlive- boos...](http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-onlive-boosts-image- quality) [5] Or StreamMyGame or GaiKai or others. I gather there were a few different approaches to the problem, involving debates about whether datacenter placement or higher framerate rendering were more important. UPDATE: Ooh, DTE, I'd be really curious which of those approaches you thought were failures, assuming you studied competing services, or if you just harvested a few ideas from everybody.

<comment><USER18> nVidia has had a service superior to OnLive called Grid which is going to be made publicly available in the near future. They claim ~150ms of lag.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I am very excited about this, however I found the copy on the website to be extremely confusing. Here is what I think is going on, would love confirmation/clarification:

* Paperspace is running some sort of super low-latency system to serve me a VM in my web browser * The paperweight is a computer that runs such a web browser so I can attach it anywhere I have a monitor (like a raspberry pi?)

<comment><USER3> We are updating the site to be more clear, so thanks for the feedback!

And you are correct. We provide you a desktop OS that we deliver directly to a web browser. Unlike traditional remote desktop protocols (i.e. maybe you have VPNed into your work computer from home, for example) we are developing a high-performance streaming protocol that makes this machine feel like its right in front of you.

<comment><USER20> I might just be dumb, but I was having trouble understanding what the purpose of the Paperweight was. The above comment sorted me out, but I didn't get that understanding from your site.

Again though, I might just be dumb.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What are the advantages to this over something like Amazon Workspaces? With that I can use a thin client, ipad / android apps, desktop apps, etc.. We can use AD, NAT, images or none of it.

It looks awesome, but I can't think of a recent time when I had access to a modern browser only. Does it have a good support for tablet access / extra controls?

<comment><USER3> great questions! amazon workspaces is conceptually very similar but implemented very differently. A few key differences: 1. they focus pretty exclusively on enterprise and the tooling around configuring, monitoring, and backing up AWS is not something you can jump right in to as a non-technical person. 2. we

With paperspace, we want to provide the power of cloud computing with a really foolproof access layer. i.e. you go to our website, click a button and a new machine is provisioned for you with all the tricky stuff worked out. In the case the paperweight, using it requires almost no configuration at all. you plug it in and it connects to your desktop in the cloud.

<comment><USER4> what kinda of graphics card do you have? possible to play games with this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> As far as I can tell, Paperspace is a hosted VNC+VPS esque service wrapped in a friendly user interface? Seems nifty.

Anyways, the intro video is easily one of the more amusing ones I've seen in a long time. Props.

<comment><USER14> I feel like the music built up some tension that never got released.

I can feel it in my head, it's like I'm "in battle" in a video game or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> So this is basically OnLive but "consumerized" (as they are focusing on enterprise these days it seems).

Even your line "using GPU tech originally developed for video game streaming" makes me think you've actually licensed or are a subsidiary of OnLive.

</comment><comment><USER24> I love this idea. I'm very tempted to pre-order but the lack of a pricing page keeps away from pulling my wallet out.

Here is one use I'm really interested in. I'd love to get this for my father who is not very computer literate and needs a lot of help with it. He doesn't have strong security concerns because he only uses it for email and basic card games. Unfortunately I live hundreds of miles away and have a difficult time doing remote support for him. With this device+service it cleans up the clutter on his desk, and I hope allows for us both to connect to the VPS even though I don't have the paperweight. This way I can help him when he needs it and I can connect with ease.

<comment><USER25> I don't think doing that is pretty hard with today's technologies. I do the same to my father using a free version of TeamViewer and setting unattended access on his machine. I can access his machine whenever I want, fix things and close the session. I don't need anything more than that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Who remembers Sun Microsystems (now Oracle) Sun Ray's [1]? I worked for Sun (UK) in 2005 and they used them for all their employees. I never understood why they didn't sell them to schools and enterprise. Maybe they tried but couldn't.

I really liked the true hot-desking. Find a desk anywhere (even another building) stick your badge into one of the thin clients and you had your entire desktop.

You could also use USB thumb drives and it would work as expected.

My manager had a Sun-ray in his house. He also used to go abroad to the other Sun offices and would just carry on with his session like nothing changed.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray)

edit: added url

</comment><comment><USER27> This looks pretty awesome.

What if I muck up my space, can I go back to a fresh install? Which flavor of linux?

Where are my files stored? Say I want to take those files on the plane with me and work from my laptop, will I need something like Dropbox/OneDrive/SpiderOak?

Liked the video as well.

<comment><USER28> Paperspace founder here. We offer an instant rollback to a safe state which is a neat thing that VMs can do that regular computers can't (or at least don't do very well). Everything is stored in the cloud so have your entire desktop available to you at all times meaning you wouldn't need to transfer your stuff to a cloud storage service. It's actually just like cloud storage but with the added benefit of having your whole operating system (apps, settings, shortcuts) on the go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> For people doubting if this will work, check out OnLive[1], you can try game demo's for free, the experience was very good for me

[1][https://games.onlive.com/](https://games.onlive.com/)

</comment><comment><USER30> With minimum speed of 15mbps to access, it's like impossible for students in developing country which i think they more need service like this for study, research, etc.

For example in Indonesia, in my campus internet speed is only about 3-4mbps.

Scaling infrastructure is hard, i think the future of service similar to paperspace is not a bunch of feature that they offer, but it's more about how they can optimize data compression to deliver full of experience with low internet speed. That's the key to own big market.

<comment><USER31> I live in Silicon Valley and even I don't get 15mbps with my home Internet, which I pay $40/month for (which illustrates how bad the Internet situation is in the US as well).

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Cool! I've worked with similar technologies in the past. Most common issues are with peripherals and web browsing (sticky frames) in enterprise environments. Ncomputing came closest to what I was looking for. Integrates perfectly with printers, scanners, barcode scanners, usb sticks, audio etc. Small-form factor with wiFi (not all models) and you are able to host the instances right in your DC or LAN.

</comment><comment><USER33> I've been interested in full operating systems implemented /in/ the browser for a while (rather than access remotely).

The Linux in Javascript demo seemed like a neat demo:

[http://bellard.org/jslinux/](http://bellard.org/jslinux/)

But I think it would be neat to create an in browser operating system that forwards traffic via a Websockets proxy.

That's partly what prompted me to create minaterm:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9137496](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9137496) ([https://www.minaterm.com](https://www.minaterm.com)).

Which is a full ssh client implemented in Javascript. It creates complete ssh sessions in the browser and then uses a TCP proxy on the server to connect to the target server.

This was kind of a tech demo as a first step to implementing a complete OS in the browser. I can see that you could have encrypted drive images that the browser would download and launch (based on a user supplied password which never hits the server). It seems like a neat idea, though I'm not exactly sure what the practical applications are! :)

<comment><USER34> Sure you can run a full operating system in Javascript, how about DOS/Windows 3.1 ?:

[http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4546](http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4546)

<comment><USER33> Sure, I linked to a in browser Linux emulation too. But both I think Windows isn't really what you want, and the Linux emulation has no network access.

They both also rely on emulating an x86 system. I think what might be interesting is something that creates an in browser process model, possibly POSIX compliant. To which you could target applications, critically I think they'd need network access.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> VNC between two machines 2 feet apart, connected through gigabit ethernet, has noticeable latency. I'll be impressed if Paperspace doesn't.

<comment><USER36> I don't know why that would be true. x264 was getting sub-10ms latency (one- way) back in 2010. [http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/249](http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/249)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> As much I understand, the service (not the device) is not generally available?

When will it be ready? When will it be possible to use it from other countries (other than US)?

The service as such is very interesting, for example, when I want to have quick access to a Linux/Windows desktop with a particular OS without the need to install on real iron.

Depends of course on the pricing. The idea sounds really neat!

<comment><USER38> Ability to select a region in a specific country would be key.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I already use this with Splashtop. I have a beast computer connected to a 100Mbps network offsite and connect to it via my budget laptop.

Really neat, but not suitable for games due to the slight but noticable delay.

However, it kicks ass to have 2 computers at the same time, if one starts lagging I just go to the other one. Similarly, I can download heavy files or encode video on one of them while working on the other. I also can do all downloading on the offsite computer to keep my slower home network in top shape.

The good thing about Splashtop though is that it doesn't work like a video stream. Instead it only updates the parts of the screen that has changed. Meaning I can use Splashtop for chatting/surfing with almost no download bandwidth required locally. It also works great for HD streaming though.

</comment><comment><USER40> What is the longer term target market?

Is this designed to compete with thin client offerings from the big boys when it comes to larger installs?

One big advantage for something like microsoft remote desktop services is ability to throw a beefy server into an existing infra with aging desktops and use them as thin clients/dumb terminals.

I can see an advantage of this as being able to take just that box when i travel, plug it into any random machine, and get an instant resume of my previous desktop session over VPN... but this makes it oh-so-close to Windows To Go?

Most importantly, what is the monthly cost of the actual VPC (not the hardware)? Its not listed anywhere on the site that i could find. What would you do better than Azure, Amazon VPC, rackspace, or multiple others?

</comment><comment><USER41> So after reading the page I can buy your computer to keep at home which can then connect me to a virtual machine in the cloud? As I was reading I kept feeling like I had to buy that $50 machine to do this but it sounds like I don't.

<comment><USER3> (apologies for the confusion -- we are working now on reworking the homepage with more info)

just to clarify: the paperweight is completely optional. The primary interface for paperspace right now is a web browser but if you want an inexpensive device to act as a dedicated terminal, you can buy the paperweight.

<comment><USER42> Is it a USB boot drive or a little micro PC that plugs into a monitor?

It would be nice to have a cheap "disposable laptop" that works off a cloud- desktop that you don't need to worry about losing or breaking. People don't buy laptops because they're slow anymore, but because they're physically worn out!

The equivalent of a cheap Chromebook that's like a real desktop with lots of power and runs Windows games and real applications!

In the future, I wonder how you could implement a cloud-desktop that's zero- knowledge a la SpiderOak. That would be the ultimate secure workstation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> So 30+ years later, we've rediscovered the dumb terminal. Interesting.

It's a neat little service/gizmo. I'd like to see an honest assessment of Paperspace's weaknesses. I doubt it will handle most games at all well, for example. That's okay, not everyone needs or wants that, but it's still an important point. I see that they do mention sensitivity to connection speed, which is good ("For the best experience we recommend >15Mbps download speed and less than 60 ms of latency"), but that's going to affect a lot of people's use cases.

<comment><USER44> The loss of which I've bemoaned for about 30+ years. This, or something very like, it is exactly what I want going forward. My biggest concern would the fate of my virtual computer should the provider go belly up. Without providing for that contingency I'd be really hesitant to put all my eggs in the basket.

<comment><USER43> I'm awfully leery of giving someone else total control over my computer for any reason. Take the security concerns over Dropbox and cloud storage and multiply them by 10. Convenience is great, but I'm not sure it's worth the prospect of willingly handing someone else complete observation and control over my entire computer and everything I do with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> You really should send vectors, not video stream. It'll allow to keep bandwidth requirements low for most of the office workflow. Of course watching video on youtube require sending video stream and that's where you embed H.264 stream, but not everywhere. AFAIK Windows RDP works closely with the operating system to allow it to send only vector primitives instead of raw bitmaps. You can't stream lossless 4k retina video and anything other is a compromise for many people.

</comment><comment><USER46> So it's a pre-configured VPS and a little physical VNC device?

<comment><USER47> The team actually built their own streaming tech from scratch so it works quite a bit better than VNC.

<comment><USER3> Yea, so VNC is really versatile but not very performant. We set out to build a remote desktop protocol that could stream HD video streams and which would make doing things like high-end graphics and other media-rich applications possible.

On a more technical level, VNC sends block of pixels whereas we are using a video stream.

<comment><USER48> So, like existing products like ThinLinc? Which can stream HD1080 over 8Mbps connection? Doesn't seem like you actually provide some new product...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> This would be useful in places with notoriously bad internet connections. When I was in China a couple years ago, even getting a reliable connection was a stretch, let alone being able to use it for something other than transfer of small plaintext.

I set up a box back at home and was able to use my 60MB connection by just transferring I/O via something like VNC or LogMeIn. I can see this being valuable for users in countries with subpar internet connectivity.

<comment><USER28> Thanks for the typo catch... Great use-case btw, it's surprising how well virtual desktops can perform on slow connections. I'm from the east coast but work in Mountain View now and I stream my desktop from Virginia everyday for work. Right now in fact haha.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I can definitely see this work in an office environment. Working remote, collaborating and sharing could be easier. But a lot of companies might actually demand on-premise setups though.

When I'm using AWS here in India, with my server there in the US, I face a clear lag. And that too in the terminal. I've seen browser testing tools like BrowserStack lag. I'm curious how Paperspace tackles this. And I sincerely hope they open source their wizardry!

<comment><USER51> It's pretty hard to get past the speed of light. I assume that as demand grows for their service internationally they'd have to distribute data centers around the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I used to work at Amazon Web Services, and before I left I worked on a demo for their Amazon AppStream product. It licensed the PC-over-IP protocol [http://www.teradici.com/pcoip-technology](http://www.teradici.com/pcoip- technology)

From what I know, Paperspace can't be successful without a heavy dose of similar technology.

Did they develop something meaningful? Or do they just assume that it's going to work without it?

</comment><comment><USER39> I already use this with Splashtop. I have a beast computer connected to a 100Mbps network offsite and connects to it via my budget laptop.

Really neat, but not suitable for games due to the slight but noticable delay.

However, it kicks ass to have 2 computers at the same time, if one starts lagging I just go to the other. Similarly, I can download Heavy files on the offsite computer while keeping my laptop and slower home Connection free.

</comment><comment><USER53> Been waiting for this and I'll sign up the second it's available. When might that be?

Use case: As I write this, my computer is rendering a 4 minute video in the background. For the next hour, my computer is near useless and I've got a hundred of these to go.

I'd love to be able to set it to remote render on a super-computer and close the tab. And, I may never have to upgrade my computer again!

<comment><USER54> I think what you need is not a "fast streamed remote host" but a renderfarm subscription. Of course I'm not sure if there are video render farms out there.

<comment><USER54> Sorry, I missed the point about creating huge raw video files on the cloud.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> This is amazing! I have been waiting a long time for something like this.

I can't even begin to imagine the uses that this will have.

</comment><comment><USER56> I prefer to use Linux on my machines, but need to use a Windows machine for various tasks such as CAD/CAM. I'd pre-order now if I had some idea of monthly pricing. There's a big difference between £5/month for a Windows VPS that can run SolidWorks and £50/month.

</comment><comment><USER57> Nicely done, very slick, you have nailed a lot of the pain points of VDI. Shameless plug but at leostreamdesktops.com and leostream.com we have been in the VDI market for over a decade with a MSP and enterprise focus. Good luck on the venture, these are exciting times for VDI!

</comment><comment><USER58> This tech is what many of us have expected to become the "norm," but I still think most of us would prefer having our own toys under our own beds.

That being said, if they have nailed this, I see an acquisition in the very near future. This could be an incredibly profitable concept.

</comment><comment><USER59> I was using an aws GPU (nvidia grid) instance at spot pricing for a while to use as a remote desktop. It was nifty but ultimately the GPU instance would need to be an order of magnitude more powerful than my laptop to really make it worth while

</comment><comment><USER60> Very interesting idea when I finally saw Paperweight in the video. I pre- ordered. But are you publicizing the tilt amount, how much you've raised of it, or what the timeline is on actually shipping out devices?

</comment><comment><USER44> Will there be any way to connect local USB peripherals (like phones, audio interfaces, game controllers, etc.) either to the Paperweight (better named the Puck) or to a local computer for service by the remote one?

</comment><comment><USER61> A suggestion, on the pop-up after clicking pre-order from the nav-bar, add somewhere what is to be pre-ordered. I was confused a bit, but then see it's on the CTA container. Awesome looking product, good luck!

</comment><comment><USER62> This seems like a complete homerun for small to medium sized businesses like the one I'm working in now, provided that's a major focus and their specific needs are met (monitoring, backup, security).

<comment><USER3> Absolutely. If you are a very large company (lets say >500 people) then you can buy some expensive and complicated tools from the big guys to handle this kind of thing. We are trying to wrap the hard parts of administering desktops into a really easy interface so that i.e. redundant and regula backups are no longer a big worry

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> What is low monthly cost mean? $10/month would be low for someone, expensive for others. Why not at least give the figure or even ballpark figure? (or at least in comparative terms - a cup of coffee...)

<comment><USER64> The video says "You can start using Paperspace for about $10/month."

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> What is the low monthly fee? Couldn't find that info on the website.

<comment><USER66> I think the video mentions ~$10/month

<comment><USER65> Thanks. Was looking at the text

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Found a typo: [https://paperspace.io/enterprise](https://paperspace.io/enterprise)

Paperspace replaces hight upfront infrastructure costs with low monthly payments.

</comment><comment><USER67> Cute branding, but your market for the desktop thin-client will be companies looking for VDI and I doubt you'll get very far selling them something called a "paperweight".

</comment><comment><USER68> Well, probably not _any_ web browser: I'm thinking that elinks is definitely out, maybe conkeror will work and maybe it won't. It'd be interesting if surf did…

</comment><comment><USER69> But if I have a browser, I have a computer. And if I have a computer.. can I not RDC/VNC? I am honestly trying to question the punchline and not being sarcastic.

</comment><comment><USER70> Are you guys supporting multiple regions? Let's say I start my day in Asia then fly to the US, would I be able to access my stuff using the nearest server?

</comment><comment><USER71> Yeah sure, with all the privacy concerns today let's just put every data about you in the hands of a company and trust them to be secure ...

</comment><comment><USER72> This is something I'd expect Amazon to make...or at least take a very close look at as they push towards the cloud (EC2, AWS, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER73> I would really be interested in trying the experience before I pay, as well as understanding what the capabilities of the machine are

</comment><comment><USER74> Is it much faster than GUACAMOLE over RDP/VNC?

[http://guac-dev.org/](http://guac-dev.org/)

(Click for streaming DEMO)

</comment><comment><USER75> Does Paperspace Inc. have access to the unencrypted data? i.e. does user data sit unencrypted on Paperspace's servers?

</comment><comment><USER76> Somewhat off-topic, but it's kind of disappointing that the intro video doesn't play on my copy of Firefox nightly on Linux -- Kickstarter videos play fine, since it seems like they provide a webm video.

Error says:

Awww, snap!

This video can't be played with your current setup.

I _could_ open up Chrome or Opera to play the video, but that's too much friction for something I might not care too much about.

It _looks_ like Vimeo -- I wonder if they let you know how many people tried to view the video but couldn't.

</comment><comment><USER77> The audio track in the video is painfully noisy and clicky... maybe it's over compressed? Please fix.

</comment><comment><USER78> so all of the obvious questions have been asked, but if I hear the video right, we're talking about $10/month? Last I checked, Amazons own Workspaces product starts around $35/month, just no cool hardware interface, or fancy streaming optimization.

</comment><comment><USER79> I have two questions:

1\. Did Sandwich make your promo video? 2\. What desktop resolutions do you support?

</comment><comment><USER80> Holy crap - I was just fantasizing about a service like this two days ago.

Cant wait to try it out!

</comment><comment><USER81> So, how is this different than using RDP or VNC to connect to my PC?

</comment><comment><USER82> A chromebook competitor?

<comment><USER44> A Chromebook adjunct. A way to get Windows and its apps on the Chromebook. The lack (or difficulty) thereof is what stands between me and owning one.

I'm considering teaching, selling and supporting Chromebooks and the people using them in "old folks homes" (as we called them long, long ago) as an inexpensive and low skill entry to the internet. Some potential clients will have enough experience that they will require Windows access. If (and it is a bit hard to determine from the site) Windows machines with persistence can be created that problem is solved.

Have you looked at the issue of migration from an existing Windows home system into one of yours? Were that made relatively easy it would be a huge benefit. Perhaps a partnership with Laplink and their PCmover would benefit both you and them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> Are you using Docker or CoreOS in your architecture??

</comment><comment><USER84> seems like a great idea - but isn't the term 'paperweight' slang for bricked hardware that the magic smoke has escaped from?

</comment><comment><USER85> Will the paperweight support multiple monitors?

</comment><comment><USER86> How is this different than just renting a VPS?

<comment><USER87> They designed their own protocol for a much better experience. Read their comments!

</comment></comment><comment> r-u-serious Does it say what the computer is full with? I would probably be not that interested if it is bees. In contrast, if it is dark chocolate, I would be very interested.

</comment><comment> X-combinator Put simply it's a Great idea!

</comment><comment><USER88> Does not work in ANY web browser:

1) it requires internet connection.

2) it requires JS and graphical browser. Links console browser for example does not work.

<comment><USER89> No need to state the obvious :) Otherwise I would also add: you need a monitor to use it.

<comment><USER88> It is not that obvious. I use text terminal to access other computers every day. I also use Links (text only browser) every day.

<comment><USER90> If you use links every day then you are not the target market for basically anything. Sorry :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> Are you useing Docker or CoreOS??

</comment><comment><USER91> what operating systems will it support out of the box?

<comment><USER46> Linux and Windows.

 _We're starting off with Windows and Linux options for now but plan to offer more operating systems in the future._

<comment><USER92> Can I store the state of my machine, or do I only get one instance/snapshot at a get go? What if the machine gets corrupted? What kind of backups?

<comment><USER28> Paperspace founder here. You can take snapshots at any time and we offer an instant rollback to a safe state in the event something happened. One of the neat benefits of virtual machines over traditional desktops.

<comment><USER93> What version of windows are you running in this VM?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER94> Cool.

</comment><comment><USER95> Lag, NSA, Games. Enough said?

</comment><comment><USER96> So, you mean like Unix/Linux/BSD always has?</comment>


Salesforce.com: Putting Lipstick on a Pig - <AUTHOR> http://seekingalpha.com/article/271139-salesforce-com-putting-lipstick-on-a-pig

<comment><USER2> God bless the accountants. This reminds me of a great quote by Warren Buffett:

"If stock options aren't a form of compensation, what are they? If compensation isn't an expense, what is it? And, if expenses shouldn't go into the calculation of earnings, where in the world do they go?"

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> DHH says: "Much more brutal takedown of $CRM than I could ever do."

</comment><comment><USER3> On the other hand, GAAP requirements cause a rapidly growing company's income to be reduced due to its own stock price fluctuations:

1) The cost of the issued option must include time value of the stock. If a company's stock becomes more volatile, for whatever reason, their GAAP income appears to be reduced.

2) If a company's stock rises, the options vesting appear to be worth more and more. In other words, the mere act of the stock price rising depresses income.

</comment><comment><USER4> Why did he ignore the other $71 million? That's a fair chunk.

The non-GAAP estimate excludes the effects of stock-based compensation expense, expected to be approximately $238 million, amortization of purchased intangibles related to acquisitions, expected to be approximately $60 million, and non-cash interest expense related to the convertible senior notes, expected to be approximately $11 million.

<comment><USER5> $60MM is non-recurring acquisition expense - capital expenditure is an asset - and therefore not an 'expense' this year.

In his intro his statement that there is a problem with 'convertible bonds' refers to this $11MM non-cash interest expense on the convertible senior notes. On the convertible notes, the accrued 'non-cash interest expense' (which is not an expense (: ) will eventually convert to stock and dilute stock holders.

The stock-based compensation is now $117MM and doubles to $238MM next year and is a huge hit on their earnings, current and future. Compared to the pitiful $11MM 'non-cash interest expense' which is not an expense :).

<comment><USER4> Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Unsure why this is hacker news?

<comment><USER7> Unsure why you used a question mark?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> So many undefined acronyms. So little context. So many numbers thrown out for no apparent reason.

He's clearly upset with something and thinks he has an important point to make. But he makes no attempt to explain what he's upset about or make that point in a way that anybody but him can parse.

I'm going to cast my vote for the most poorly written HN submission yet this year.

<comment><USER5> I actually found this quite well reasoned and the acronyms are pretty common in any financial analysis. Must read for anyone investing in the market to see how companies cheat!

tl;dr

If Salesforce(ticker: CRM) is paying execs in stock, it should count as an expense and they have a loss this year. CRM is cheating by showing earnings based on non-standard accounting (leaving out stock compensation) when it suits them, while touting earnings based on standard accounting when it doesn't!

GAAP - Generally Accepted Accounting Principles - stock compensation should be accounted as expense.

non-GAAP - our own set of accounting principles, which we stick to every year. Allows us to 'leave out' stock compensation, increasing the earnings per share (EPS) while leaving out the dilution that takes place!

Also note, they give stock based compensation of $117MM this year & expect to give out DOUBLE next year - $238MM! So on a non-GAAP basis next year if they double their earnings, on a GAAP basis they will _still_ be only breakeven!

<comment><USER8> Thanks for the translation.

The thing that pushed my buttons about that article is that he could have included a single sentence at the beginning that brought his readers up to speed on what he was talking about. You've done an excellent job of doing just that.

On the other hand, finding the context and definitions you gave would take maybe 10 minutes of Googling and tracking down other articles about the company in hopes of finding out what they're doing wrong. That's a lot to invest before I even get a chance to read the first sentence of this article.

It's like you're sitting in your office sipping your morning coffee, when a disgruntled employee bursts in and launches off on a tirade starting with the words "And another thing..."

Clearly he's been thinking a lot about this, possibly discussing it with other people, but he hasn't with _me_ , his boss (or his reader in the case of the article). The correct response in these situations is along the lines of "Whoa, hang on a second. Let's take a step back and start at the beginning. Now, what is on your mind?"

Keep that in mind when writing, and you'll write better. Even if you think your target audience is fully up to speed, spend a few words to make sure.

<comment><USER9> To be fair, Seeking Alpha is a (great) Stock Market & Finance website. That would be like criticizing the CLANG at Google post that's currently on the front page because the average person that stumbled on it wouldn't have a clue what it all meant.

The only problem was that it was submitted to HN, which is not a finance- oriented website.

<comment><USER8> Not true. I don't know anything about compilers or C++ in general, but I was able to read that entire CLANG post and understand what it was talking about.

It's actually a good example of a technical article intended for a technical audience yet written to be understandable by a lay person.

<comment><USER9> You're a programmer. In discussions about programming--even an unfamiliar language--you are not a "Lay Person."

I hope you can see the flaw in your analogy here. The CLANG article didn't include a sentence at the top telling you what a compiler is, what a pointer is, etc. You knew because you were part of the target audeience: people with programming knowledge.

The Seeking Alpha article target audience was: People who are active investors and interested/knowledgeable wrt finance.

Normally I wouldn't waste my time with comments like this but you said it's the worst submission to HN all year! And in reality, it's a very informative article that just happened to be using jargon you're unfamiliar with.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Building Street Fighter II in Ruby [video] - <AUTHOR> http://nikolay.rocks/2015-06-16-building-streetfighter

<comment><USER2> It is really fun to see games coded in a language you know (and is not used for gamedev) -- completely new way of programming/thinking.

There is another great video similar to this of Tom Dalling coding a flappy bird clone using Gosu:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtIlyU2Br3o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtIlyU2Br3o)

<comment><USER3> That is how C and Pascal got to displace Assembly, and C++ eventually displaced C in game development.

By having devs that instead of following "it cannot be done", persisted and eventually were able to release something in those languages that others wanted to play.

Having watched this cycle a few times, I always look forward to see higher level programming languages used in broader contexts.

However for game development, maybe Crystal instead of Ruby would still be a better option, in terms of raw performance and distribution.

<comment><AUTHOR> considering rubymotion, i think ruby is still a feasible option though

<comment><USER3> Yes, assuming something similar ever becomes available outside the Apple world. AFAIK they only focus on those systems.

But yeah, I imagine compiling Ruby is not much dissimilar than compiling Dylan.

<comment><USER4> I don't know Dylan, but compiling Ruby is a nightmare. As such it's also a fun challenge (working on "as static as possible" Ruby compiler).

Actually, compiling Ruby is not _that_ bad, horrible grammar (from the perspective of having to write a parser - as a _user_ o the language I like it) notwithstanding.

Compiling Ruby into _efficient_ code is a nightmare.

The problem is largely that there's a total lack of delineation of application read/load time and runtime, coupled with the ease of being able to mutate the object model.

E.g. in theory on return from any method statement the entire world might have been transformed. 2 + 2 = 4 one moment, only for 2 + 2 to have side effects and return 5 the next...

The "quick and dirty" way of compiling Ruby is to accept that you'll need expensive dynamic message call invocations all over the place.

Optimizing beyond that is a lot of work to ensure you can handle it when people start playing silly games. The jRuby Truffle backend is probably the best bet at the moment (Chris Seaton who did the initial work on that is on HN). If I ever get that far with mine, I'll be stealing lots of ideas fro there...

<comment><USER3> Dylan is a Lisp with Algol like syntax targeted for systems programming with a REPL, AOT compiler and IDE like environment.

So what you are telling about Ruby is also an issue in Dylan, given its Lisp heritage and flexibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very cool!

It's actually stunningly common to use high-level languages with managed run- times in games these days. Most indie and small-studio games we play today were built using one engine or another. The graphics pipeline in Unity, Gamemaker, etc might be heavily optimized but the majority of the game is written in an interpreted or managed language run-time like Lua or C#.

You can write 3D simulations with a decent frame-rate in Python. You just need a lot of help with the "hot" spots be calling out to C and C++ libraries for support. I've been experimenting with writing little 3D engines in Cython + Python + SDL2. It does end up taking a load more memory and performance can drop drastically if you're not consciously thinking about your data-flow. The trick I've found is to avoid most of the features that make Python great in those critical sections... plain old data structures, weak references, pack your data together and transform it once (ie: avoid copies).

However it's great for prototyping and toying with new ideas. Python is vastly more forgiving when you don't know up-front how you're going to structure your data flows.

But in the end I just end up going back to C99 at some point anyway.

Writing games in Ruby shouldn't be weird. It's cool.

</comment><comment><USER6> Very cool Nikolay. I also dig the git-wayback machine briefly showcased.

[https://github.com/MadRabbit/git-wayback- machine](https://github.com/MadRabbit/git-wayback-machine)

<comment><USER7> thanks for the find, tried it found a bug and fixed it too :)

<comment><AUTHOR> hey Senthil, thanks for the fix! just rolled out a new version to rubygems :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Fantastic tutorial, I really like his presentation style of progressively walking through the commits. Great work.

</comment><comment><USER9> Do you have plan to add the code when 2 players hit each other?

<comment><USER10> I was just gonna say; the starting portion is to get something displayed, next step is collision detection and the victory conditions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Cool stuff! Coding attack sequences, combos and reading commands like quarter- circles is a fun exercise, too. You have to balance between precision and ease of use.

Interesting strategies arise when this glitches:

[http://wiki.shoryuken.com/E._Honda_(ST)#Stored_Oicho](http://wiki.shoryuken.com/E._Honda_\(ST\)#Stored_Oicho) (Street fighter 2)

</comment><comment><USER12> Very cool and readable.

For something even cooler (but less readable) here is SF alpha, in js: [https://github.com/gamedev8/js-sfa](https://github.com/gamedev8/js-sfa) (very faithful to the SF alpha game mechanics)

<comment><USER13> this game feels nothing like street fighter alpha to anyone who has played sf competitively. it might look like it though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I used to be a die hard fan of this game in my early teenage days and now Ruby is my most favorite. It would be a lot of fun building this game and connecting to some of my old memories. Thanks Nikolay.

<comment><AUTHOR> hey, no problem. send me a pull request! ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Awesome! Please finish this up I have always been so intrigued on game design, especially fighting games.

</comment><comment><USER16> Hey Nikolay, now write it in Bash!

<comment><USER17> Bash would be really painful :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> good watch

i liked the explanation of reducing draw() to 1 sprite per call and the little formula that went along with it; ive never seen that. make a video about just tricks used in the industry!

</comment><comment><USER19> Very cool! Well done Nikolay. Cheers!

</comment><comment><USER20> Very cool, thanks for sharing! :)

</comment><comment><USER21> this is very awesome, big fan of the presentation technique

</comment><comment><USER22> the link is dead

<comment><USER23> Works here (tm).

Releated links which may work for you if the article link is still dead:

[https://youtu.be/_whiCEywodw](https://youtu.be/_whiCEywodw) [https://github.com/MadRabbit/ruby-fighter](https://github.com/MadRabbit/ruby- fighter)</comment></comment>


WTFPL - Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License - <AUTHOR> http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/ <comment><USER2> Similar: <http://tunes.org/legalese/bugroff.html></comment>


Apple patent filing looks a lot like Microsoft Surface - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekwire.com/2012/apple-patent-filing-lot-microsoft-surface/

<comment><AUTHOR> Apple applied for the patent on Aug. 11, 2011, which suggests that they've been working on this for a while. At the very least, it means that there shouldn't be any Patent obstacles to them rolling out a keyboard-cover on the iPad if they choose to do so. Still smells like "Patenting ideas" to me - though there are some good ideas (Using the flip side as a solar cell array is an obvious one)</comment>


Is the Better Business Bureau a protection racket? - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2277100/

<comment><USER2> It's a cheap way for businesses to avoid litigation and bad publicity. Pay the fee, get a sticker to put on your door or website, and hope that most people think it's a mark of trust or quality. When consumers do complain, get them to vent on an online complaint form, provide some minimal mediation service, and hopefully the consumer won't take it any further.

I followed the complaint process for the southern New England BBB about five years ago for a local car dealership and BBB member (the complaint concerned misleading advertising). I discovered that the complaint was erased from the BBB database for the dealership a few months after the process ended (it was supposed to stay up for three years). I told the BBB about it, they added it back again, but a year later it was again removed.

Makes me wonder that the problem the LATimes identified (accredited businesses having more complaints but higher "grades") might actually be worse than described in the article.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've gotten a telemarketer call from the BBB here in Southern California recently and it reeked of the worst things Yelp is accused of.

They led off with a yarn about how they had heard from consumers looking for information about my business. Uh huh. Pull the other one...

</comment><comment><USER4> My sister works for a small company and dealt with the BBB. This article is on par with their experience. Because they were a small company, they decided not to get involved with the BBB. Only then did they realize that if you do not you start out with a bad mark if someone looks up your company. I believe she said a "C-" was given to them by not being a member of the BBB. The only way to resolve this was to become a member. Talk about racketeering.

<comment><USER5> My wife works for a large company that is in a similar situation. They are not a member of the BBB (thus not accredited) and there is one complaint on the BBB that was filed 3 years ago. This single complaint gives them a D- rating. A newly formed competitor of theirs, less than 2 years old, became a member of the BBB from the get go and is heavily promoting the fact that they have an A+ and the company my wife works for doesn't. The BBB wants approx $16,000 for them to become accredited. Unless they pay, they can't increase their rating to anything decent, even if they work with the BBB to resolve that single complaint from 3 years ago. It's pretty bogus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> i've talked to small business owners about the BBB in the past, just in incidental conversation, and they all used the exact same words to describe it: "protection racket".

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd say they were similar to the credit ratings agencies* in the obvious conflict of interest in taking payments from the entities whose creditworthiness they "objectively" rate, except a little more willing to give A+ ratings to entities that don't even exist and rebill scammers. They're a non-profit, so there's probably nobody raking in particularly large sums of cash from their shady or sloppy ratings, but it would be daft to rely on them.

*who, if there was any justice in the world, would have become the first casualties of the credit crunch, along with their business model

<comment><USER8> _They're a non-profit, so there's probably nobody raking in particularly large sums of cash from their shady or sloppy ratings, but it would be daft to rely on them._

Unfortunately, "non-profit" doesn't really rule out financial corruption. And financial corruption isn't necessary for organizations to act this way--the natural tendency of any organization or institution to perpetuate its own existence is probably enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Same with the BCSA (British Computer Software Alliance) they do audits on your software licenses and then offer you 'membership' which includes special priced deals to handle any 'accidental licensing mistakes'</comment>


The New Plagiarism - <AUTHOR> http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=3sb7fgmhd1qszg1g6tgbtjx5kj95v8ny <comment><USER2> "The New Plagiarism" is the plague of the sense of entitlement.

If you are able to duplicate someone else's work, does it become yours? Schools teach us no; we could be expelled. Fair enough.

If you make minor edits to someone else's work, does it become yours? Apparently so. The author's experience tells us that we can certainly make the claim that the piece is "public", and that annecdotes were "borrowed", but only borrowed as much from the original as it borrowed from everyone else.

We live in a society where the gatherer becomes the discoverer, the sponsor becomes the artist, and the investors become the founders. If they've had a finger in that pie, it's their pie.

Is this not another sign of our society's bloated sense of entitlement and ingratitude?

</comment><comment><USER3> This also illustrates how difficult it can be to judge the validity of information on the internet. Information is getting distorted and twisted in a complex game of chinese telephone, and defining authority and truth are left largely to Google. How often do you check other pages after you find an answer on Google (especially if its a Wikipedia page)?

</comment><comment><USER4> This article also shows just where we (non-journalists) stand on the food chain compared to those with direct access to the mass media machines. We are _nothing_. There is no mechanism whereby a blogger can force an establishment journalist to give credit where credit is due. The legal system will not help you. Sue, and you will be fought vigorously, and exhaust whatever meager savings you might have on legal fees - with no guarantee of a win.

They have the real power and they know it. If you, an outsider, have some insight which the mainstream press considers valuable (a great rarity!), it will be stolen and attributed to a "respectable" figure. And there won't be a thing you can do about it.

<comment><USER5> i can't tell how much of what you wrote is intended as hyperbole, but assuming you were straightforward in your intent, i believe you're overreaching. it isn't easy for outsiders to break into the mainstream media, but it happens.

recent examples of this would be nate silver and rachel maddow, but there are plenty more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't think any external observer would try to argue that this wasn't plagiarism. The newspaper just has a vested interest in defending itself from such a serious accusation.

</comment><comment><USER7> Not asking permission or evening linking to a source for your information is, at least, a discoverable faux pas which can easily lead to some nasty public backlash. If the internet had no memory whatsoever (caches, search engines, archive.org, etc.) then I can only imagine the insane plagiarism that would follow.

</comment><comment><USER8> Who cares who came up with what? Eventually that'll be too hard and pointless to keep track of anyway.

<comment><USER9> The point isn't that we need to know who came up with what, it's that we need to know the justification for their assertion.

If it becomes common knowledge that "the Republican party lost their way after 2000", people will stop backing up the statement. As time goes on, nobody will know why "Republicans lost their way after 2000". In the future, careful historians will want to know who first made the assertion so that they can understand where this general knowledge came from.

<comment><USER8> I get it--as it gets impossible to find out who came up with what, content creators are an indirect casualty but historians are a direct one because that's their actual job! That's sort of funny. I guess they'll have to use fancy statistical analysis like everyone else now.

<comment><USER10> Well, historians work with primary and secondary sources. The internet collectively hoards and archives insane amounts of information, so it's a lot to dig through, but sources are often still there somewhere, and they are often copied verbatim.

A big part of history has always been gathering and interpreting sources, to figure out the validity of assertions like that (whether contemporary or retroactive). Hearsay and speculation are nothing new. As the article notes, history isn't about reciting names and dates, it's about making a case to support or refute an interpretation of what happened, based on available evidence.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


CIA (In-Q-Tel) stakes a claim in MongoDB - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/data/in-q-tel-stakes-a-claim-in-mongodb-invests-in-10gen/ <comment><USER2> And cue the HN bashing in 3,2,1 ...</comment>


Top 5 CSS tutorials and tools for beginner CSS - <AUTHOR> http://dignol.org/top-css-tutorials-and-tools-for-beginner-css/ <comment><AUTHOR> Indeed a great article:)</comment>


What I Learned Selling a Software Business - <AUTHOR> https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/selling_software_business <comment><USER2> FEI still has the original listing on their site:

Yearly revenue - $31,000

Yearly net profit - $19,000

Asking price - $57,000 SOLD

It's fascinating what a small amount of money we're ultimately talking about vs. the influence of the "cult of Bingo Card Creator fans" on HN - which I am card carrying member of.

(1) [http://feinternational.com/buy-a-website/3745-software- busin...](http://feinternational.com/buy-a-website/3745-software-business-in- education-niche-25k-gross-mo)

<comment><USER3> Could someone write an article about Patrick McKenzie's appeal and techniques on marketing to the HN community? :)

And by marketing, I mean getting their attention and building a brand, not money.

<comment><USER4> BCC was originally a bit of a purple cow, which is interesting to the HN community because it overlaps programming/business but different than the vast majority of what is on HN because it's the aggressively un-startup startup. Publishing sales numbers before that was common probably helped a non-zero amount, too.

Many HNers feel a sense of personal investment in me, because HN has been my home-away-from-home for ~7 years now and I am a "local boy who made good."

I write decently and have a strong written voice which people like.

A relatively small fraction of what I write is immediately useful to people.

Also: I write _a lot_. My published output is something on the order of ~3 million words, roughly ~2 million of which are on HN. (Give or take 500k or so. It's been a while since I ran the script and I don't have a few hours to wait before bed.) That's roughly Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Game of Thrones... combined.

There: that's the whole secret. Use these dark magicks responsibly.

<comment><USER5> That's... prolific. On a _very_ unrelated note, are you the same patio11 who was a parli debater a while back? I've seen your username across HN before but never drew that connection until now. Assuming that's the case, I've got a really embarrassing question for you.

I remember reading a comment of yours on Net Benefits years ago on critiques (I think it was about how some critiques more or less used the subject as a one-dimensional cutout to haul out in the middle of rounds and stick back in the box when done) and you talked about a Japanese phrase that meant something along the lines of "wallflower" (?) in that context.

I searched for that comment a few times, but never could find it again. It drove me up a wall in a few rounds because it was always on the tip of my tongue but I couldn't remember. Then it didn't matter after my school decided to screw up our debate program, but it was one of those dumb little things that continued to bug me. Any chance you remember what I'm talking about, now that the annoying itch to know has come back? :)

<comment><USER4> Wow, that's a blast from the past. Yep, that is indeed me. I don't remember the specific post about kritiks, but the word I probably used was "sakura" in the sense of "a human prop."

Sakura are, in the Japanese theatre tradition, confederates who you place in the audience with instructions to be vocally demonstrative at particular points in the play. This is to get the rest of the audience to join in. They're not actors but they are deployed to make the actors look good.

<comment><USER5> Ha, same for me. It's crazy to think about how much time debate took up back then. Blast from the past is right. Anyhow, thanks for the explanation. I liked the analogy back then, and I still do now that I know the term :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just wanted to quote this:

"I'm told, against my expectations, that BCC was impressively well-documented by the standards of other businesses its size. This implies that many people are running their small projects in even more of a cowboy fashion than I do, for example by not having dedicated books for the business. If this describes you, God help you. At a minimum, get your books for the last year done professionally — whatever you spend on bookkeepers/accountants will be a pittance next to the time saved and additional valuation captured."

Even if you're not selling, getting this done will save a lot of headaches the road... Dedicated books for the business is a MUST. I know a lot of small businesses where this is not done religiously and it always comes back to bite the owner in the ass...

EDIT: By the way, I was curious so I just took a look at the BCC site, the blog is timing out...

<comment><USER7> I regularly see companies (i.e. P&L, Balance sheets, technology spend, etc) in the small/mid cap space (EBITDA of anywhere between $500k-$10M) and you'd be amazed at how poorly documented businesses are that still are able to generate serious profits.

<comment><USER8> "There's no problem that sales can't solve."

Well, except if you want to sell your company at some point in the future or actually have some idea of COGS or know how you are actually doing.

<comment><USER9> If the books aren't done properly, and you want to sell, but still can demonstrate profitability, there will be someone who will buy at some price.

Money can solve also the problem where you can pay someone to go through your accounts etc, and make the books from ground up. Of course it is going to be expensive, and you need a good accountant for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This time Patrick's summary of Bingo Card Creator does not look rosy at all.

All facts are still the same, but the overall impression of BCC now is that it is a small, declining and time-consuming business. Patrick himself actually struggles with money, like all of us.

Patrick definitely has (had?) the power of optimistic spin in his stories.

<comment><USER11> Patrick struggles with money? What's your source for that? Last I recall he was writing about how he did consulting gigs making tens of thousands of dollars a week.

<comment><USER12> I don't recall the blog post, but when Patrick switched from consulting to appointment reminder only, he had a sudden cash crunch due to an (unexpected tax bill?) and suffered a major health crisis. That wasn't that long ago.

I think the consulting gigs were not constant. Those were the high points. He had a high income, just not so high as if you multiply $15,000 * 52.

I'm writing this as a fan of Patrick's. Just clarifying your answer based on my recollection of his writings. It's pretty plausible he didn't have a massive savings buffer.

Speaking as an entrepreneur, there's always conflict between saving money vs. investing more of it in businesses. I imagine a lot of value is locked up in appointment reminder. This last paragraph is entirely speculation and not based on anything I remember Patrick writing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Back in the day someone won a Nobel Prize for pointing out that, if a > population of goods has unknown potentially costly problems, and there is no > way to determine which particular instances of the goods have the problesms, > the market will penalize all goods in that population. The canonical example > is used cars.

George Akerlof and "The Market for Lemons": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Akerlof](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Akerlof)

<comment><USER14> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> | Selling BCC was going to pay for living expenses while we built Starfighter's first game (Stockfighter) and also pay for some development work to assist with the sale of my other SaaS business, Appointment Reminder.

^^ - you're selling AR as well? Last presentation was showing that to be a profit machine? Would love to learn about the reasoning behind that decision!

<comment><USER4> AR is modestly successful, but needs to buy three things at the moment: my family's living expenses, my attention (via hiring reasonably complete replacements for me), and my contribution to Starfighter. It can afford roughly one of them.

"Why sell AR?" is pretty straightforward: I'm CEO of Starfighter. I signed up for 5~10 years of my life building stock exchanges and getting devs better jobs, and that's _more than enough work_. It does not need to be interrupted by e.g. dealing with the Lithuanian hacker ring which found a novel way to route calls to Caribbean phone sex numbers. (A great story for another day.)

<comment><USER16> This suggests that StarFighter has some cash that is being used to keep you afloat. I don't expect you to disclose, but I'm guessing there's a silent partner or maybe just some ex-Matasano money floating things. Cool!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm spending this year packaging up my current business to make it as attractive as possible to potential buyers.

This talks a lot about the process, but what are some things people like us can do to maximize their return on such a sale?

<comment><USER4> Grow revenue via any legitimate means. Cancel any expenses that aren't required to run the businesses (SaaS accounts you keep around "in case I get around to it", etc). Obsessively document everything you do for the business; get as much as possible outsourced to people following the procedures you've written up, ideally without spending too much money on this.

Get your ducks in a row on numbers, most importantly the financials (bookkeeping bookkeeping bookkeeping) but also classic (SaaS?) analytics numbers like number of trials, conversion rate, churn rate, etc. Historical numbers and numbers segmented per traffic source/vintage are good things to have, too. Bonus points if these are pointing in the right direction over time.

In more detail: [http://feinternational.com/blog/saas-metrics-how-to-value- sa...](http://feinternational.com/blog/saas-metrics-how-to-value-saas- business/)

I might also add "Negotiate the sales price, even if the buyer and/or broker does not want to negotiate the sales price."

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I got in touch with FEI about selling one of my web businesses and they couldn't help due to our UK focus. Sucks for us, I've heard good things about them.

Can anybody recommend a broker that assists UK based and focussed web businesses?

<comment><USER19> Hi Simon,

Sorry we couldn't help - our focus tends to be on businesses that are primarily US focused with their customer base (although our sellers are based all over the world). Not aware of any established UK brokers who focus on web businesses - there isn't a huge market with UK buyers for online businesses so not overly attractive to enter.

Thomas (from FE International)

<comment><USER20> lol... didn't know the "I" in FEI stood for "International" until this comment talking about how you are US-focused :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> >migrate all of my email in Google Apps for Work (oh God, don't ever do this)

Yeah... I have a non-trivial number of purchased Android apps on my Google Apps for Work account ($6AUD/month) and there's no published way to move apps to a "normal" Google account.

I'd probably be paying Google forever if I had business dependencies hanging off that account (but I set it up when custom domains were "free").

</comment><comment><USER21> >Accordingly, I decided to retroactively cut her in for 5% of the business. Props to Pepper for accommodating this request, as it is somewhat non- standard. ("Can you invoice me a substantial amount of money and promise me that you will pay a particular employee of yours a bonus of the same amount, net only of taxes?" "We can do that.")

Businesses exist that are this cool? Where do I find them?

</comment><comment><USER22> "People try to buy software businesses with "no money down." ("Will you loan me the entire purchase price of the business? I'll pay you back over the next 3 years. Promise!")"

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>----

While I see why you would have run away from that particular structure, I'm curious as to how flexible you might have been from a straight lump sum structure

If I was buy a business like this, willing to accept $X as money down, some % percentage of revenue for Y months, until you were paid Z amount, with some contingencies built in would look pretty attractive

a sellers willingness to agree to terms like that would send a pretty strong signal that they weren't selling a lemon

as a buyer, I'd be willing to commit to a Z price significantly higher than what I'd be willing to commit as a lump sum up front

if the seller believed in the business, (and I guess were able to substantiate that I had enough ability no to drive the business into the ground) it seems like such a structure would net the seller more as well

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----

I'd love to hear your thoughts about how receptive you might have been to an offer like that

<comment><USER23> I would expect that it isn't so much about the direct financial tradeoffs so much as the question of - will you actually continue to pay on the loan agreement, and what are my realistic options if you decide not to?

The first would require quite a lot of expensive, invasive due diligence on your ability to pay that people selling software businesses don't care to perform or pay somebody else to perform.

The second is likely to be lousy. Options are likely to be to file a lawsuit, which is expensive, and try to collect if you win, which may or may not be possible, and is almost certainly very time-consuming.

If you're selling a software business, you're mostly likely doing it because you don't want to bother with it anymore. You are very unlikely to suddenly decide you want to start up what is effectively a bank for one guy. I'd tell anyone who says they can't afford a lump sum to try to get a loan from an actual bank, because I have no interest in pretending to be one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think one of the big things about BCC isn't how much (or how little) money he made but how well documented the process was. We've all seen plenty of projects do 10k months but not many of them are sustainable or so well documented in a blog.

</comment><comment><USER25> great

</comment><comment><USER26> (2015)

<comment><USER27> This essay was published like 17 minutes ago :)

<comment><USER26> I could have _sworn_ I had read this post before, but googling doesn't show any strings from it showing up anywhere else.

It's always disconcerting to get slapped in the face with clear evidence of a memory error. Did I combine [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9589223](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9589223) and [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/12/22/kalzumeus-software- year-...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/12/22/kalzumeus-software-year-in- review-2014/) somehow? Who knows.

<comment><USER10> You could predict many of these things described in this post from other Patrick's posts and comments.

Other "I sold my SaaS business" stories discussed on HN in the past could make Déjà vu impression too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Such a long article but no mention of how much he sold it for.

<comment><USER18> $57,000 SOLD

See [http://feinternational.com/buy-a-website/3745-software- busin...](http://feinternational.com/buy-a-website/3745-software-busin..).

<comment><USER29> I might be wrong, but I don't think that means that it was sold for 57k, only that it was the asking price.

<comment> shawn-furyan That's true but the article does mention how most of the things that impact price went in patio11's favor. One can reasonably infer that if the seller feels everything went in his favor at the end of the process that he wasn't bullied too far off of his asking price.

He does also mention how one seller tried to demand a 40% discount at close, and that the broker had a better deal waiting in the wings. So we can have a pretty high degree of certainty that the sale price was between $28,500 and $57,000, likely closer to $57k.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Co-Founder Myth: Why You Might Not Need One - <AUTHOR> http://foundersblock.com/articles/the-co-founder-myth/ <comment><USER2> It's great to read a counter argument to the prevailing wisdom, with data to back it up. I've often thought that the argument that "if you can't find at least one person to join you, then your idea (or you) must not be that great" was a little disingenuous. That statement makes sense in certain contexts, such as when someone has just graduated from university and is living rent free in their parent's basement (it is assumed that their potential co- founders are in a similar situation). It makes less sense when a person is working 9-5 and has a mortgage. It turns out that individuals who are willing to burn the midnight oil for months or years after getting off work because they are passionate about an idea are quite rare. The likelihood of finding a similar individual to partner with within their network of friends, and who will contribute at a commensurate level, is diminishingly small. Perpetuating the above idea does this group a disservice. Instead of rooting for them we are, in essence, saying, "there's something wrong with you or your idea" per se if you're a single founder.

<comment><USER3> Also, how easy a company is to pitch (and therefore find another to join you) is absolutely irrelevant to how good the idea is. If there's a relation, it's most likely inverse -- unless you mean by "good idea", "able to get further funding." (Pets.com was easy to pitch, Google not so much.)

I'm a sole founder. I progress for the same reason I breathe; there's no "not breathing." And because I'm a sole founder, nothing can stop me. No co-founder issues, no arguing. The worst I face is that I can be slowed down. Nothing can stop me.

<comment><USER4> I see your point, but I would disagree that Google wasn't an easy pitch. Example: "We're the best search engine. If we're better than everyone else and easier to use, more people will use us. We'll use those eyeballs to make money."

<comment><USER3> Ah, but there were many search engines touting themselves as better. Better won't cut it. Google was so much better that people were willing to switch from Yahoo and the others, and that's an empty pitch. You would have to back that up, and to back it up means already having achieved your goal. Of the two, in my opinion, pets.com had the better pitch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I had the same bad experience with a cofounder explained in the article, some years ago.

I started a little company in my city with what I believed was a close friend. I had a job and I was still at university, while he didn't and had a wife and a newborn daughter, so I thought he was committed enough. I was wrong because he had backing from his parents that are quite wealthy.

After some months in which I was the only one that made some work (website design), bringing some money in the company while he was losing time with the excuses like "I'm not ready and I don't want to ruin the company reputation (he was the sales guy), he decided that it was better to split our paths. I "sold" my part of the company to him and after one year he closed it full of debts.

From then on I always found myself in a better position doing things alone. They say that the weight is to much to endure for one single founder, but I don't think so. I was always able to endure everything. If you have friends or relatives or a partner in your life, you are never alone. If you need their support, it does not matter if they are in your venture or not.

<comment><USER6> _If you have friends or relatives or a partner in your life, you are never alone._

Yes! I don't think this is said enough.

I was having this exact chat with my wife last night. I'm working as a freelancer while building a startup and she's supporting me 100%. What were talking about is how a husband-wife team would look to potential investors when clearly one person is doing the most of the visible work, but couldn't do as much without the other. And one thing that came up is equity and how that could play out.

I wish I had a good answer.

<comment><USER7> This is a topic we should discuss more on HN. Both my wife and myself are currently working on an evening MBA program. People are shocked that we are able to do it at the same time, take classes together, etc. I don't understand, because I find that we end up supporting each other, motivating each other, etc.

Along the same lines, I would definitely love to run a company with my wife one day. Most people I meet are aghast when I suggest running a company with a spouse. Is this idea really that rare?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comments, guys. I'm definitely interested in exploring co- founder relationships further. Seems to me that bringing on a "good friend" as a co-founder is a treacherous path (either take off or crash and burn), but most husband/wife, brother/sister, and very very best friends co-founder relationships seem to work out. Perhaps the extreme closeness allows the parties to communicate more openly, be more committed, or better understand and accommodate each others' weaknesses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is an "outside" versus "inside" question. From the outside, a team with 2 or 3 is going to be a stronger team than just a person. But this is just a wide generalization, made by folks trying to find patterns. Startups happen in Silicon Valley, by teams of young 20-somethings with more dreams than brains. Most fail, and some change the world.

But there are a lot of guys making money trading collectible buttons on E-bay or some such. And although some folks don't call these a startup, in my mind any business you can scale to a large degree from nothing is a startup. And since we don't have to have the overhead, many former small business ideas are actually startups. In your unique case, being a sole founder might work better.

I tend to think that in the 20-30 age range, you need a cofounder. The team needs breadth of experience and long hours. The coolest startups have the biggest impact, so you have a lot of work to do! Plus 3 people working together are about ten times as effective as one person.

Somewhere between 30 and 40 it probably starts making more sense to go it alone. You know the ropes (hopefully), you're more likely to be playing a safer game, you're going to leverage. Also, oddly enough, under 17 or so is probably single-cofounder territory also.

I can't get past the enormous opportunities colleges offer to get to know closely a group of people over several years. These relationships can be invaluable with startups.

But I think that the conventional wisdom that startups have some certain shape or fit comes a lot more from the social nature of the startup community. VCs and the other hangers-on are always trying to make generalizations, always looking for boxes to put people in. How many single-founder startups are out there, bootstrapping, running under the radar, doing very well? Probably ten for every hotshot team that gets funded.

That's just a guess, and my opinion, and my opinion doesn't matter. If the sole-founder movement is true, it'll happen with or without us encouraging or acknowledging it. And if it's not true, no amount of pontificating and blustering will make it so.

But I'd bet on it.

</comment><comment><USER9> It is comforting to see some positive stats on one founder startups, it is not easy to find a co-founder that's just as passionate about the product as I'm. I am a firm believer that small team work best! Being a single founder company is very easy to get derailed and overwhelmed, I guess that's why some of the most successful entrepreneurs I see has got amazing focus to deliver and follow through.

</comment><comment><USER10> Interesting to see the data on this. From a personal perspective, I would just add (as someone who has founded a company with one co-founder but not taken funding) that you should not underestimate the value of the support in taking decisions etc. that come from having someone with you who is equally invested (in an emotional sense rather than just a financial sense).

</comment><comment><USER11> As a single founder I can confirm that I have a massive amount of freedom, agility, and efficiency. Minimized need to spend time communicating or convincing or debating. My think-do loop and action latency are minimized. I'm allowed to act on and leverage any and all insights I may have. Minimized bureaucracy and paperwork. Minimized chance that somebody else can fuck me over or let me down. Is it perfect? No. You lose some things but I think what you gain is much more important at the earliest stages of a business, especially when small or prerevenue.

Talking with others is good. Drawing on other's talents is good, but ideally it's done in a tactical way where you're still in control and can make the ultimate yes/no decisons to go forward, and retain ability to pivot. And yes, single founder prob most feasible when you have biz skills and tech skills (enough). If not, co-founders look more attractive.

<comment><AUTHOR> The entrepreneurs I talked to who were successful in a single founder role were either building low-tech consumer-facing web businesses, or had awesome tech skills and were able to bring on supplementary help at lower equity divisions to be treated like co-founders, but without the hefty equity split. After all, these extra team members were brought on after the companies typically got a bit of buzz and traction, so they had reduced risk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If I were looking to invest in a startup, especially one by college kids, I can see the preference to having 2-3 cofounders. Because it reduces my risk as an investor in the case where one guy gets hit by a bus, and ensures that the cofounders have somebody they can ask for advice who is intimately knowledgable about and vested in the success of their venture WITHOUT necessarily having to lean on me, the investor, all the time -- because my time is finite and to further increase my success chances and happiness I want to spend time on many ventures, plus family and friends and life chores.

As an entrepreneur my bias is to single founder, precisely because that also reduces my risk. and maximizes my time efficiency.

Summary: which number is best depends on your role, whether you are the entrepreneur or merely the outside investor.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point about being hit by a bus. Key man risk is something I neglected to discuss in the article.</comment></comment>