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10.7 Lion allows multi-user remote computing - solipsist http://www.9to5mac.com/54102/10-7-lion-allows-multi-user-remote-computing?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+9To5Mac-MacAllDay+%289+to+5+Mac+-+Apple+Intelligence%29&utm_content=Google+Reader ====== iuguy It seems like Apple have discovered Terminal Services, or the basic networking functionality in X11. Hopefully it'll be much shinier than X11 and less restrictive than Remote Desktop Protocol. ~~~ JonnieCache I imagine it uses Apple Remote Desktop, which is apple's own version of RDP. I don't know much about it but it works pretty damn well for me. [https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Apple_remote_...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Apple_remote_desktop) ~~~ nettdata It's actually using a VNC based application, and uses the VNC protocol. I can "remote desktop" into my desktop using a simple VNC app on my iPad. It seems that they've provided the option of creating a new VNC server/desktop process when connecting in, rather than just attaching to the existing and current desktop. Very cool. ~~~ cookiecaper For the record, this has been a feature of VNC/X forever; in fact, it's harder to run VNC on an extant X session than it is to just start a new one specifically for VNC. It's just a little annoying when Apple finally integrates tech that's 20+ years old and gets heralded as being "ahead of the curve" or "very cool" for doing it. ~~~ nettdata Get pissy much? I consider it "very cool" in the sense that this is a cool feature that I finally get to use in the OS I prefer to work in. I don't care if it's been around for decades or done a thousand times before on other OS's, it's being done by them now, and I find it useful. I'd rather see them do stuff like this and be praised for it than do stuff like this and get shit on by people with the tiresome "it's about time" or "Linux had this a zillion years ago and did it better" crowd. ~~~ nettdata Actually, I won't have the same attitude... I'll be indifferent, and not comment at all, as I don't really care what Windows does. Even though I use it almost daily for various client work. When it comes right down to it, I don't buy into this whole OS religion thing. I've had more than a passing exposure to quite a few of them, and they all have/had their place. Case in point, I started my career on IBM 3081's and PDP-11's. I even have a full rack of gear in my home office that includes a bunch of boxes with various flavours of Linux installed, a Tadpole laptop running Solaris, an operational NeXT Cube, SGI and HP boxes running their Unix variants, a cluster of Sun Netras, and on and on. I've also got a few different laptops with Windows and Linux installed. And a couple of MacBook Pro's. They all have good features, and bad, but none of them have everything. Do I care what someone else uses? Nope. Do I care if they gush over it and think it's the coolest thing ever? Nope. Do I feel some overwhelming urge to "educate" them on why their choices are "wrong"? Nope. I just know what works for me, and am happy to discuss things with like-minded individuals. I'm not a fanboy, and I haven't drunk the Cool-Aid. I also don't think everyone who owns a Mac is like that either. Call me crazy, I guess. ~~~ gonzo Tadpole laptop? Really? Which one? I did the port of Slowaris to several of the SPARCbooks back when I worked there. (Started my career on a DEC-10, followed by a Vax 11/780, a couple 11/750s and a smattering of PDP-11s (11/44, 11/70)) Had Linux (and NeXTstep) running on an early Tadpole P1000 (100MHz Pentium laptop, it was the sh*t when it came out.) Mostly all Macs now. ~~~ nettdata It's an UltraBookIIe. Needed it when I provisioned 6 racks of Sun gear in an off-shore co-lo for a gaming company, and it was the easiest way to auto install/configure all the OS's and software into bare metal gear. Wasn't the fastest thing on the planet, but it worked really well. ~~~ gonzo Oh. That's the "other" Tadpole (previously RDI, who acquired Tadpole Technology, Plc in order to trade its stock.) ------ kaffeinecoma I'd like to see a remote login implementation for OSX that allows you to login remotely, and also adjusts the screen size to match that of the actual physical device you're on. The existing implementation of screen sharing is frustrating for me to use because I'm often remoting in from a 15" Macbook to a Macpro tower with two heads @ 1920x1200 each. So the options are scale to 1) down the display (slow, fuzzy) or 2) scroll all over the place. An ideal solution would be to let me log into a virtual display that matches the size of my physical remote terminal. In other words, make the server think it has a head the same size as the client. ------ voxcogitatio I'm glad to hear that they've catched up to the original UNIX. :) ~~~ yoda_sl I would rather say that it is more OS X returning back to its roots where NeXTStep/OpenStep use to have such capability when all the rendering was done with the PostScript built in server. These feature disappeared from OS X, so it is more like a welcome back with a user friendly UI. Back then you usually had to use some terminal command line to make ir happen. ~~~ prodigal_erik Amazing that this is the only comment so far that points out this wasn't even Not-Invented-Here Syndrome, because their own OS already had this feature (Display PostScript remoting) twenty years ago. At least until some architect marking their territory was allowed to wilfully break it and replace it with ... nothing. ------ emehrkay My job wants to use a third party product to do the exact same thing. <http://www.aquaconnect.net/mac-terminal-server.php> This is a great addition to the os. Imagine your house having one [desk|lap]top and a few tablets or phones. Hop on vnc on your docked tablet while someone is using the computer and you're as good as using the desktop. I see this as a move to push both os x and the i[pad|phone] as viable business devices. This is possible with windows right? I vaguely remember using remote desktop a few jobs ago, but I dont remember if it was one account logged in at a time. ~~~ seabee The server versions of Windows allow that, it's called Remote Desktop Services (or Terminal Services pre-2008). Way better than using VNC, probably because it hooks all the window control drawing on the server and does it on the client instead, rather than sending over raw bitmaps for buttons/textboxes etc. ------ pnathan Er, ssh? I don't see what the big deal is. I've been able to remotely ssh into my mac for years. ~~~ jasonlotito now imagine this at the gui level. imagine being on your mac, pick up your ipad, move to the next room, and swipe and have access to the same apps currently running. jut look at what apples been putting out the last few years. look at lions big features. full screen mode doesnt sound impressive. but that would make those apps much easier to use on the ipad. im nut saying this is all new stuff, rather, its going to be packaged by apple, and that is going to mean something. ~~~ pak If you want to do this right now, check out Screens for iPad. ~~~ jasonlotito Yeah, I've seen that before. I'm not talking about _just_ that. What I'm talking about is having the full screen mode Apple is developing will have support for turning the app into an iPad version with little effort. Basically, by following their API and implementing official full screen support, when the time comes to implement Mac to iPad support like I'm describing, instead of seeing the Mac's desktop, your seeing the application on your iPad in an "iPadified" version of the app. ------ guptaneil This is going to be absolutely perfect for educational use. Imagine a university computer lab that lets you remotely login from home after the lab has closed to access all the expensive, specialized software the school has already purchased. I know my university was trying to set something like this up, but couldn't find any user-friendly way of doing this. ~~~ jonknee I doubt there are a bunch of user accounts on a uni computer lab Mac, so this wouldn't be much different than regular screen sharing. It's also still a mess to choose which computer to try, doubly so if you're on an outside network. ~~~ akronim Mac OS X Server had (has?) decent support for proper accounts, with the client machines essentially just diskless terminals that boot from the server, and with all accounts on the server - called netboot. So not like screen sharing at all. This worked pretty well in a lab setup, but didn't support remote logins - this sounds much better. ~~~ jonknee The OP was talking about doing this so expensive university software... I'm going to go out on a limb here and state that it's just not going to work well when 100 students try and spin up instances of AutoCAD or Mathimatica on the same machine. ------ wangweij This is nothing special. Lion says it would include a server version of Mac OS X, and this is just a very basic function for any server OS. Although I haven't played with OS X server before, I'm quite sure this feature has been there for some time. ------ tjarratt The way I like to think of this feature is as a throwback to the days of "dumb" terminals that would connect to a server where you stored your files, account info, etc. "Back to Unix". ~~~ jacques_chester Why not? With HTTP we went back to the future vis-a-vis 3270. ------ tambourine_man If I understood it correctly, this has been possible for years in OSX. You just need to be “fast user switched out” instead of logged out: \- Log in with user A \- Fast User Switch to user B \- Log in to user A with VNC. It works just fine. ------ jasonlotito a lot of the comments are fairly shortsighted. i called this some time ago, and it makes sense. consider how mobile our live are right now. consider the wireless nature of everything. imagine having your computer be situated out of sigh, and your screen is mobile. your ipad and iphone connect to the same central hub. the computer becomes an appliance at home. just look at lion and the elements of ios its pulling in. now imagine apple making it easy to do all of this. airdrop, mobileme, app store, all of this are elements to a grand vision. ~~~ thefonz yes, and especially with rumors that iPhone 5 having NFC technology. Imagine being able to walk up to any mac and just swipe your iPhone and all your settings, bookmarks, etc. will just transfer over and you will be able to use it, just like you were infront of you mac at home. ------ jpr Is it just me or are 99% of tech "news" and "innovation" just reinvention of stuff already found in UNIX, Lisp etc. decades ago? ~~~ gvb It's not just you, Henry Spencer reportedly said it (first?) in 1987. "Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy#Quotes> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Spencer#cite_note-2> ~~~ thwarted He was just paraphrasing the bible: "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." -- Ecclesiastes 1:9

The general economic importance of banks has been highly exaggerated - robg http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/10/opinion/10mulligan.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=all ====== jmtame "And second, the economy doesn’t really need saving. It’s stronger than we think." The first step is admitting there's a problem. ------ blakeweb I read this article, and two days ago listened to this podcast from 'this american life' on npr. This article's arguments doesn't stand up against the pretty convincing descriptions of what's actually going on from the corporate treasurers and banking industry folk interviewed in the podcast. You should make an hour and listen to it--it's fantastic. [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=3...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=365) ~~~ kylec If you liked that, you'll love Planet Money - a daily podcast created by the people that made the This American Life money program. <http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/> [http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_detail.php?siteId=944...](http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_detail.php?siteId=94411890) ------ mdasen To argue the opposite: The author suggests that other institutions (pensions, universities, etc.) bring investors together with savers. It's true, but not to the same extent. Banks are primary. Drying up a majority of the way that it happens will have a drastic effect despite the fact that other ways exist. The author argues that corporations get 25% of their investment funds from their own profits and that could go to 75% if they stopped paying dividends. The problem is that still leaves a 25% gap there which is sizable. Not only that, but profits don't help firms who are just starting up. I'm not all doom and gloom about the economy (even today), but I don't think the importance of banks is understated. The author is essentially arguing that if we scraped the bottom of the barrel, we could probably replicate what banks do (bringing investors and savers together) to a certain percentage. That's true, but what if your work just started paying you 50%. It might be hard to meet your next month's bills. ~~~ Prrometheus I haven't read the article, but a counter-point: Banks are much less important today than they used to be because there are so many more investment channels available. While regulation limits participation in these channels to the rich and well-lawyered, our economy is more redundant and diverse today than it has ever been. ~~~ fallentimes _there are so many more investment channels available_ This is exactly why banks spend significant more money on advertising (think WaMu pre-death) than they used to. It's also why they derive a higher percentage of revenue from fees. ------ markdionne International trade is dependent on Letters of Credit issued by banks: [http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2008/10/international- trade-s...](http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2008/10/international-trade- seizing-up-due-to.html) The shit will really hit the fan when your lights go out because your local power utility cannot get a shipment of fuel oil when no bank will guarantee their credit. ------ newt0311 "Although banks perform an essential economic function — bringing together investors and savers — they are not the only institutions that can do this. Pension funds, university endowments, venture capitalists and corporations all bring money to new investment projects without banks playing any essential role." Ummm... Pension funds invest in the stock market and they depend on banks to help themselves out. Same for univ. endowments and venture capitalists. Corporations still use banks to manage their cash flow and guess how they and everybody else flows their cash through? Banks!!! If anything, the importance of banks has been highly understated. PS. This does not imply the necessity of the bailout. The bailout is ultimately unnecessary. Wamu was still solvent from a cash flow perspective when the FDIC took over and even if some large institutions fail (as some already have), there are more than just three or four banks.

Ask HN: What to look out for when looking for a new apartment? - Wavum I&#x27;m looking a new apartment, what should I look out for to don&#x27;t fall in a money pitfall? ====== aphextim • How much is rent on 6 month lease vs 12 month or M2M. • 1 time Fees (Application, security deposit, etc.) • Reoccurring Fees (Parking, Trash etc.) • What utilities are included • What utilities are not included and who to go through to get them set up • What furniture/appliances are included if any • Anything else that is included or valuable to know • Method of payment (Do they do online re-occurring payments) • If you have pets make sure they are pet friendly, find out how much it costs and if they do damage the apartment does it effect the one time fee, security deposit or both. • Always check out the apartments in person, like Facebook profile pictures, pictures of apartments are always inflated to look better. These are just some things I would personally find out before moving based on past experiences. I am not a housing professional.

Ask HN: What to do when your once potential competitor becomes a real competitor - xoail I&#x27;ve had this idea for a SaaS based product and started working on it not too long ago (about 2 months in as solo founder&#x2F;dev moonlighting). Since it is for enterprise I figured getting a solid product that does one thing really well is more important than building MVPs of product features. I still have at lest 2 or 3 more months into development before I start selling version 1 of the product.<p>But now I see my potential competitor also rolling out the same product I am making. They have a $1b market cap, have a large customer base and I can imagine they would find it easy to sell it than I do. I was sure that this would happen some day but not so soon. Their offering seems good enough to entice customers. The only thing I can compete with them right now is Price. They charge a lot for their product and I can beat it by being a fraction of what they charge.<p>I am currently confused wether to continue building or give up and start-over on something else? ====== jonnathanson Don't compete on price, per se. Compete on value. Value is related to price, but it's not the same thing. Identify the customer segment(s) you believe you're building for, and that your competitors might not be -- either because they have to go broad, or because they're focused on a segment or two themselves. Then really nail the value prop and solution for the segments you're targeting. You'll probably want to price cheaper than the big guys, but it's not to position yourself as "basically the same thing, but less expensive." Instead, it's to position yourself as the simpler, easier, _case- specifically better_ solution for a certain type of customer. Patio11 puts it well, as usual. Especially this paragraph: _" Is their product generic? Make yours hyper-specific. Is their product hyper-customized? Make yours the 'It only does 10% of what the other guy does, but it is the right 10%, and it actually works out of the box.'"_ The good news is that $1B+ companies usually can't afford to target niches. Their divisions are expected to move the needle for, well, a $1B+ business. This puts enormous pressure on them to develop big, broad solutions that are maybe 75% adequate for as close to 100% of the market as they can reach. This is a strategic vulnerability that strongly favors the smaller player. It's one of the very few advantages a smaller player has in competition with a big player, particularly in the SaaS space. ~~~ gbrits "The good news is that $1B+ companies usually can't afford to target niches. Their divisions are expected to move the needle for, well, a $1B+ business. " 100% agreed. May I suggest OP to pick up "The Innovator's Dilemma / The Innovator's Solution", which really brings the point home on why targeting niches and/or 'lower' marketing segments can be a good strategy. ------ antaviana 1\. Open the hosts file on your computer 2\. Add the website of your competitor with some random IP address 3\. Go back to work with your product and talk to your potential customers ~~~ xoail lol. well said. ------ patio11 Can you walk me through the thought process of why a competitor existing means you abandon this idea? Are they so central to your industry that they can immediately lock up 100% of the market? Are they going to be cross-selling from something which is more widely distributed in your niche than say Quickbooks or Microsoft Office? Don't compete on price. Enterprise customers care about it a lot less than you do, and enterprise customers are not motivated to purchase by "We saved a few thousand bucks and I lost my job because the deployment blew up in our face." I'd be far more worried about that sales objection than the existence of a competitor. You can probably compete on many other axes. One of my competitors has 400 employees, at least 20 of whom answer phones with customer questions. I have 0 employees, intentionally don't have a routable phone number, and self-assess at mediocre in terms of responsiveness to email. And I win sales dogfights with that company, occasionally, because prospects believe I'll offer them better CS. (The winning argument, which I've stolen fragrantly from Jason Cohen, is "You can call them up at any hour, day or night, and instantly speak to someone who can't solve your problem. Or you can drop me an email, and it may take me two days to get to it, but your email will always be answered by the guy who built the system with his own hands. Your call who you want in charge of your questions when it is your business on the line.") There are other options, such as competing on market segmentation. Your competitor, for example, might serve primarily a healthcare market. If the same need exists outside of healthcare, you can target your marketing/development over there, and make a product which really sings for those other audiences. Is their product generic? Make yours hyper-specific. Is their product hyper-customized? Make yours the "It only does 10% of what the other guy does, but it is the right 10%, _and_ it actually works out of the box." How do they market/sell it? Is it one of those "Ask for a quote and we'll let you speak to a sales rep?" type of deals. Consider selling via a lower-touch sales model. Worse comes to worse, you learn why high-touch sales is so darn popular. Also, to impart on you as early as possible the Voice of Pained SaaS Founder Experience: pause building for a moment and verify that you can successfully sell this. If necessary, you can have mockups or a minimally functional prototype to support the sales conversation. There are many worthwhile SaaS products which cannot be sold by a single founder into particular enterprises, so knowing whether your product is saleable or not given your constraints is a useful sanity check on whether to spend the rest of the schedule building it out. Selling SaaS which doesn't exist is fairly straightforward. Find a customer. Ask them to buy it. Note why they tell you "No." Adjust until you have gotten a "Yes." Now, repeat at least 5 times. Then, finish building it. If you cannot find a customer, or you can find the customer but can't get the right decisionmaker internally to get the time of day, or your customer doesn't consider this a hair-on-fire priority, or your current conception of the product doesn't match things they budget for, or any of a thousand other things systematically happen to block sales, then building the software does not in itself cure those sales problems. Incidentally, the number of enterprise deals which you have to close to have a very good living as a solo founder is somewhere between one and twenty. Their billion dollar valuation might be sustained by a team of stab-their-own- mother-for-a-commission-check reps being fed the Glengarry leads from the best marketing operation in enterprise software, but even they don't win _every_ deal. Table scraps are delicious if the table is very big relative to the dog. ~~~ xoail I do not necessarily want to fight on the Price but that is the only variable I can think of and start attracting smaller customers (who cannot afford my competitors pricing structure). This competitor seems to have brought in all the bells and whistles alongside the core of the product. My plan was to only focus on core pieces and get to side features as I start getting customer interest. Besides that, the customers buying their flag-ship product will find it useful to buy this product alongside. They both will complement well. I do think their vision seems to be different from mine where they are focused on various categories and I am on one niche. Thanks for all the various options you've highlighted. I do feel compelled to try building out the core services to see if I can compete in certain markets. My biggest concern being unable to dedicate myself full-time unless it starts bringing in revenue I need to pay up for my bills. If you do not mind, I would like to send you a PM with info of my product site. ~~~ patio11 _I do not necessarily want to fight on the Price but that is the only variable I can think of and start attracting smaller customers (who cannot afford my competitors pricing structure)_ Going after people who are systematically excluded by a competitor is not necessarily "competing on price" even if you happen to have lower average account sizes as a result. That can work fairly well. My largest competitor basically tosses you from their sales process if your account is worth less than $1k a month. Most of my customers are worth <= $200. It isn't just a pricing decision, though -- it informs how I do sales (high-touch vs. low- touch), what markets they go after vs ones I go after (healthcare vs. a bit more eclectic for me), feature decisions, etc. Feel free to send me an email. If I don't get back to you, it wasn't anything you said, it was just my newborn daughter keeping me busy. ~~~ mailshanx Ohhh, hey Patrick, congratulations on a new addition to your family! :) I've been following your writing for quite a while now, and i love it :) Heartiest congratulations again :D ------ pinaceae Never compete on price in enterprise. You compete on value prop and ROI - it's the profit and/or savings using your product will bring that are relevant, not the pure license costs. Price also signals worth, you get what you pay for, etc. As for the competition - compete. Don't assume just because a large corp announces something their product will be good, useful, successful. Might just be programmed in Powerpoint for all you know. ~~~ GFischer "Never compete on price in enterprise" That's a pretty blanket statement. I work for a relatively large service company, and we're looking to make a big purchase (a replacement of the core system), and one of the main decision points is price, especially because there are orders of magnitude in difference between several competitors. In the market we're evaluating there are: \- a dominant, best of breed solution, which is priced out of the budget \- several good systems that can't compete with the dominant one and thus either compete on niches or price \- several decent systems by companies that serve a geographic region \- several small systems for niche companies. The price differences range from a 22.000 dollar quote to a seven million dollar quote (and both were tossed out). Between similarly-priced products, yes, price is not a factor. One point which might be of interest is that we're valuing the user experience a lot - our previous software "ticked all the boxes" feature-wise but is an unusable mess, and the best-rated product among the mid-sized ones also has the same problem (maybe designed to win feature-checkbox government or bigco contract bids). I only hope the people which will actually make the decision listen to the technical sides' arguments and don't go for the feature-rich but bad-UX solution (I also expect bad UX to be a proxy for yet-to-be-discovered hidden limitations). ------ nemanja One thing that helped me in the past is differentiating on how fast I could move the deployment / customization of our solution vs. a larger competitor. The service we offered was pretty complex in terms of business requirements (periodic, enterprise-wide, hierarchical data collection of say 10-15 schedules with workflows, status reporting, followups, etc) and it took our larger competitors ~2-3+ months to turn the deployment. One tactic I employed was to ask the prospect for an excel spreadsheets they used in the past and customize the system a bit before the presentation. This had a big wow factor since we already had something that looked familiar and was almost there, made my contacts look good in front of their bosses and eleviated most of the deployment risk (savvy clients really understood that most of the risk was in deployment). We were often able to commit to ~2 week deployment and that made a huge difference. We were winning really large accounts, too (Fortune 100s). Now, this may not scale, but that's a beauty of an early startup - you get to and should do things that may not ultimately scale and may win as a result of that. ------ ChrisNorstrom 1- The most important lessons learned from building are watching the product and yourself fail and remembering those lessons for next time. 2- You still haven't failed yet. You haven't launched yet. You haven't run out of money yet. Why would you quit? Don't you want to see how people respond to your product? 3- If you stop now your greatest competitor is you. Not the other guy. You'll just destroy your chance at money, growth, and learning some awesome lessons in launching a Saas. 4- If you quit you will have spent 2 months working on this for nothing. ~~~ personlurking What if you've spent x months focusing on the product instead of the business (ie, not seeing what potential customers think early on), get to roll-out point and hit a roadblock? A roadblock that lets you pause for a second to realize the product reach may be quite limited vs another path that you could've gone with from the start. This is my situation. As for your 4 points, I realize all of that now and totally agree with it, but I do wonder about the certainly larger market if I'd go down the other path now. ------ pbreit If you're already worried about competitors and looking to compete merely on price, I'm afraid you might not be cut out for this. For starters, I would highly doubt that you and this big company would be going after the same customers. It's relatively easy to find niches that big companies can't or don't want to serve. ~~~ xoail I see your point. My worry is mostly on the lines of wether I can fight with them as a solo founder working part-time on this. But on further analysis, I feel there is a chance of holding a good fight by focusing on certain niche markets as you've highlighted. ------ sumedh > or give up and start-over on something else? So what happens if you hit a similar problem when you start over on something else? ~~~ janson0 This is a great, short piece of advice. ------ gumby A couple of points: Find a vertical niche that you can dominate and build out from there. If it's a new area, or a relatively new area, your competitor can't build a product that will appeal to everyone. So you two may not even compete head to head for a while. And since you're small, you're probably more nimble and can make a better reputation. And you won't have to compete on price -- you might even be able to charge more than they can once you have a few customers. Once you start a company (assuming you do) you can offer stock that costs less for a larger stake in the company than your competitor could. The only people who want to work for Google or Facebook are those who work for the salary -- the stock is high priced and isn't going to go up by any appreciable multiple. So in addition to the fun and terror of working for a startup, you have something the other guy can't offer. ------ logn I recently chose an invoicing/payment provider. And also a gateway/merchant. For each of those there are at least 10 solid offerings in my price range. I ended up making my choices based on really specific features I preferred when anyone else looking at the situation would think they're all comparable. The world's a big place and people will choose you. Furthermore, sales is a powerful skill if used right and striking up an email conversation can be more persuasive than a bullet list of features or meeting some price-point. And when you're building you're product from scratch you're in a great position to add features based on initial feedback and build the product that at least a small set of users really want. I think solo technical founders have an enormous advantage here as there's no obstacle to reform the product in an early stage. ------ tomasien It's unlikely that a competitor with only a $1bn market cap building a similar product to you will be the reason you are or aren't successful unless they're OTHER product makes their new, more similar to yours offering more valuable by extension. Unless you're certain that their product will be much better than yours no matter what and they've gotten it exactly right, just learn from them and keep going. However I should reiterate: if you think their product is perfect or close, don't keep going. I've seen people do this and there's no point - you've lost the passion for the project at that point because you'll just stare at their product and wish your product could be like that. You won't think critically and differentiate, you'll just try to catch up. ------ drawkbox It is good to be aware of competition but if you constantly compare yourself to others you will either be too good or not good enough, which leads to laziness and chasing the leader respectively. Being first is nice but just the fact that there is competition is some validation that the service is needed. Better to compete early rather than when it is a commodity down the line. Being early but not first does have some advantages as it is market research. The "Google wasn't the first search engine" line of thought. ------ geoffbrown2014 The bells and whistles comment struck a chord with me. That can be a tremendous advantage to you if the company bundles all those features. Go talk to customers and find out how many of the features they actually use. If they only use 15-20 percent of the features then focus on that small subset of features and do it better than the big guy. If the majority of users use the majority of the product then I think you will have an uphill battle. Think about your customers not your competitors. ------ rational-future FWIW I personally don't buy any products or services for my business, that are backed by a one man company. The risk that you may get sick or bored or bought out or hit by a bus, etc. is too high. If you're not a sales ninja, you'll have to finish building the product, before you get any sales. Contact your competitor competitors, see if they'll be interested in cooperating. ~~~ patio11 One can very easily check whether one's target customers are averse to dealing with a one-man shop. Ask them to buy your thing. If they don't ask "Are you a one-man shop?", they are not averse to dealing with one-man shops. A surprising number of enterprise customers are not averse to dealing with one-man shops. It blows my mind at least once a week. Supposing that a customer does give you the one-man shop objection, you don't say "Oh rats, well, good luck then." You summon your founder gumption and say "Sure thing, I understand that you want to buy this software but have understandable reservations about dealing with a one-man company. What can we do to fix this? Help me understand this a bit more -- is this coming from you? From other stakeholders? Corporate policy? You had a bad experience once?" After probing for the nature of the objection, you can offer solutions to it. You might go out of business: I've answered this before. "I've been in business since 2006 and profitable every year since then. Nobody knows what the future holds, but I'm cautiously optimistic. I'd hate to get a real job." You might get hit by a bus: "I certainly hope I don't get hit by a bus but I'll be extra careful crossing streets, just for you! _pause for laughter_ No, seriously speaking, I totally understand how you guys need business continuity for core services. What if we had a written business continuity plan? Would that help? I can have lawyers and a well-regarded tech firm get one together for us as soon as you get me a LOI." We need code escrow: "Who is your preferred vendor for code escrow? Great, we'd be happy to work with them. Tabling that issue for a moment, is there anything else you need from me, or can we proceed to the next step?" You could break stuff: "We carry an industry-standard Errors and Omissions insurance policy in the amount of $1 million. The insurance company was happy to write this policy because we take steps like X, Y, Z to make sure that we don't break stuff. Does $1 million sound adequate?" -> "Great then, we're covered." or "Interesting. Help me understand how you're arriving at your number for how much is at stake here. I'd be happy to quote you for services commensurate with the value you get out of our system, and we'll only move forward if I can get our insurance underwriter to approve that level of coverage." ~~~ raffi I am a one-man shop and sell software in the enterprise space. I also have competitors and while I see my product as very different, a lot of my work goes into educating my market about why. Most of my customers are household names and they're not averse to dealing with my one-man shop. It doesn't even come up. Their staff wants my software and they work their process to buy it. That's it. I have not had to answer any of these objections (thankfully). I'd probably pass on the customer if they came up. ------ moubarak Like patio said, don't compete on price. Later you will find out your product is worth what your competitor is charging and you'll feel bad about it. Most importantly, your competitor might have many employees, but be sure that the team working on that specific product is small. This is exactly the mentality that Steve Wozniak had when Apple first started. ------ shuzchen You should definitely continue with your product, and you've now got a big stamp of product validation in terms of a huge company putting resources into the same market. To be clear, you should still do your own validation study (get your own product in front of customers) but I see this as good news that confirms you're heading in the right direction. ------ MalcolmDiggs You've lost First-Mover Advantage, that's all. I'm sure your business model was premised on more than simply doing something first, wasn't it? ------ mstanley if there are no competitors, there likely is no market. ideas are rarely unique (and even when unique, are quickly imitated). execution is everything. don't see increased competition as a bad thing. Rather, view it as confirmation you are onto something. keep going. be prepared to fight. and do it better. ------ pknerd You have more freedom to iterate your product than them :-)

Mailchimp down - daveytea https://longreply.com/r/9ca73be4 ====== iratedev Thanks for posting this. Better than, you know, the Twitter post that is already posted.

UberVU (the conversation tracking engine) just launched the public API today - mg1313 http://developer.ubervu.com/ ====== ldeva I think Backtype has already one...but this is interesting to see how it evolves. I know uberVU and Disqus partnered and powers now the conversation tracking on Mashable. Let's see what Artiklz.com will respond (another competitor)... ~~~ omakase Yes, our API is live and documented here: <http://www.backtype.com/developers/comments-connect> Also here's a great app that was built by a user of our API: <http://convotrack.com/I1>

Misskey, a decentralized microblogging platform with ActivityPub support - l2dy https://github.com/syuilo/misskey ====== tree_of_item Is this just a fork of Mastodon? ~~~ l2dy No, it's a separate project that got ActivityPub support this year.

$1,200 a month, privacy not included - 0wl3x https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/05/success/podshare-co-living/index.html ====== deogeo > Stephen T. Johnson, the 27-year-old founder of FlipMass, an advertising > company for Instagram influencers Advertising, extortionate rents, middle-men, 'analytics'... the sheer number of layers of parasitism in San Francisco is hard to comprehend. 9 times out of 10, these 'tech' companies are a net drain on society. ------ not_a_cop75 Call me crazy, but is it possible CNN wants to further legitimatize high rents in large cities? Every big news service works for some billionaire it seems, and none are even tongue in cheek self critical anymore, or so it seems. ------ freewilly1040 Interesting that the founder’s elevator speech included nostalgia for late period USSR... I cringed a bit at that. ~~~ pmiller2 Where did you see that? ~~~ freewilly1040 It's in the first minute of the video

Show HN: Oorja, OSS video/voice chat app with realtime collaborative features - akshayKMR https://github.com/akshayKMR/oorja ====== akshayKMR I'd recommend you use Chrome on desktop for trying out the app. Cheers!

Ask HN: Made for Adsense (MFA) Sites - naithemilkman It's hard to get the skinny on exactly how viable this business model still is considering the amount of outdated information on google.<p>Does anyone currently operate an MFA site(s)? Can you do an AMA? Is it still a realistic business model if you're just looking to generate say 1-2K per month? ====== atgm If Google doesn't screw you over and shut down your account for some reason without telling you why or giving you someone to talk to, then yes, you should be in the clear. I'm just in the bitter, vocal minority here, though. ~~~ naithemilkman So you're operated MFA sites before? How was it? Do tell! ~~~ atgm I tried operating a normal site using AdSense; it got a decent amount of traffic before Google killed my AdSense account. I never got any of the money out of it, Google never responded. This was about six, seven years ago now. To this day, I am unable to use AdSense. ~~~ naithemilkman Can you not just re-make a new google account with a different credit card? ------ Ataraxy Don't build a business on top of a sand castle. ~~~ naithemilkman Maybe don't build a long term business on top of a sand castle

Warren’s Antitrust Proposal: Break Up Big Tech or Just Regulate It Better? - howard941 https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/04/warrens-antitrust-proposal-should-we-break-up-big-tech-or-just-regulate-it-better.html ====== blackflame7000 I’ll take Big Tech over Big Govt any day because one doesn't have a fleet of attack drones ~~~ used2code "Big Tech" knows where we live, owns "our" data. "They" don't need attack drones, maybe? The real point to be made, imo, is that busting up the Big Bell into the Baby Bells, and so on, did not really address the issue: regionality does not provide for "competitive markets", multiplicity of players in the field is what makes for "choice" and "competition", and keeps folks honest, we have to hope. Therefore, anti-trust could be about enhancing entrances and exits (startups, refinancings/redirections, retirements), or changes in management, i.e., effective "regulation" could be more like "market development" or influence, rather than "being a lid on the jar", "turd in the punch bowl", mostly a tariffing and acquisitions/merger blocker or allower. If Big Tech and Big Govt want to smooth the path into the future together, without taking individual political freedoms away from folks, that is definitely possible, given the motivation and will to make that happen. Without the motivation and will, it's not going to happen, no matter how possible it is. There's a lot of societal level contributions that "Big Tech" has not figured out how to build and maintain, such as the appropriate freedom of speech while also providing privacy and safety online. There's simply a lot to be "regulated" or defined as a requirement of "Big Tech" by society. The Amish and their careful approach to technology bears review and some amount of emulation, as I see it. ymmv. Thanks for reading. ------ raven105x The best part of an emergent global economy is that any single government can only over-reach so much before the country's GDP plummets in the global ranking, leading to revolution or collapse.

Ivy.FM - Grails Based New Online Music Service - accavdar http://ivy.fm/ ====== azauskas Thank you. It looks fine to discover music. ~~~ accavdar Great. Enjoy it. :)

Docker is in trouble - artsyca https://www.zdnet.com/article/docker-is-in-deep-trouble/ ====== mikece So who is the most likely buyer: Google, Amazon, Microsoft, or IBM? Or Oracle?? ~~~ mister_hn I think RedHat will do, probably ~~~ CrankyBear Red Hat's already replaced Docker's functionality with podman and buildah in RHEL 8. Technically, there's no reason for them to buy Docker. ------ artsyca I'm utterly tired of the way tech executives are dressing nowadays; this audience clearly doesn't believe it matters in the slightest, but I'm challenging anyone to come up with some inkling of why it actually might -- ~~~ artsyca Let me give you an argument from a functionalist perspective, as a designer -- If you're never going to wear a necktie, why bother ever wearing a collared shirt? The collar is in place to hold the tie, you don't need a tie, you don't need a collar, so don't wear one ~~~ flukus Pragmatic answer: because it crosses some threshold where it's deemed I'm dressed appropriately at work and a normal shirt wouldn't. > The collar is in place to hold the tie, you don't need a tie, you don't need > a collar, so don't wear one A collar can also be popped to provide extra shade to the neck, it has it's own functionality independent of the tie. I'm not sure if these execs are getting enough sun that it matters, but I certainly do.

The Four Painters: A Video Work Created with Deep Learning - noradaiko http://odoruinu.net/blog/2015/12/23/the-four-painters-a-video-work-created-with-deep-learning/ ====== psycr I produced something similar to this shortly after the release of [https://github.com/karpathy/char-rnn](https://github.com/karpathy/char-rnn): [http://i.imgur.com/rb0GJvQ.gifv](http://i.imgur.com/rb0GJvQ.gifv) Basically, you create a video, dump the video's frames with ffmpeg, run each frame through the RNN, and stitch them back together. It took me several hours to produce just ten seconds of video. Unfortunately, unless you have a Titan X GPU the max size of each image is quite small (certainly less than 1080p), which may be why the frames in this video are split into four quadrants. ~~~ binarymax Nice result! About 5 years ago, I did the same technique of frame dump->process->join but with a custom algorithm instead of a NN for the process stage. A more manual effort to tweak the filter, but it was fun and came out nice. I got a new GPU recently and have been doing mostly text RNN these days, but it's fun to look back on this occasionally: [http://binarymax.com/reality_remix.html](http://binarymax.com/reality_remix.html) ------ pavlov Something about the current deep learning hype reminds me of fractals and cellular automata back in the day. They're all very important and useful scientific advances that can be used to produce visuals that seem to automatically create something strikingly natural. This seems to make people kind of overreach about exactly how much of nature can be represented by this one method alone. The world is probably not a fractal, the universe is probably not a cellular automaton, and the mind is probably not a "deep learning system" either (of the specific type currently implied by the term). ~~~ cscurmudgeon Deep learning shines when there is a lot of data and computation power. A lot of important problems don't have that much data and there are much better algorithms right now for those problems [1]. Deep learning is definitely faddish though it has its uses. [1] [http://www.sciencemag.org/content/350/6266/1332.full.pdf](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/350/6266/1332.full.pdf) ------ OvidStavrica The trouble with neural networks is that they're just good enough to keep us from continuing to question our assumptions about human intelligence. A thousand years ago, even Ptolemy's geocentric model was good enough. After all, it offered an effective means for simulating and predicting planet movement and solar eclipses. But it was complex. It took men of "great learning" to understand the solar system according to Ptolemy's model --something that most current grade schoolers understand intuitively. In all likelihood, concepts like string theory and neural networks are comparable traps for us today. This is not a pleasant thought. So we're not motivated to search for better alternatives until the current model evidences an insurmountable flaw. I'm not saying that string theory or the neural network approach is wrong. Obviously it's not. Just remember that Ptolemy's model wasn't wrong either, at least with regard to the moon. ~~~ dragonwriter > Just remember that Ptolemy's model wasn't wrong either, at least with regard > to the moon. Yes, it was, even with regard to the moon. Though, since the Earth-Moon barycenter is within the Earth, it may have managed to be _tolerably wrong_ with regard to the Earth-Moon system. But, still wrong. ------ SCAQTony I am making jellyfish, lily pads, whales and flowers via Fractal Flame software. All expressionistic and/or impressionistic. [samples: [https://twitter.com/SCAQTony/media](https://twitter.com/SCAQTony/media) ] However, there is something about digital that degrades the art by allowing it to be massed produced. One print is equal to another and therefore it almost becomes trash. Example: Imagine an original Mickey Mouse drawing versus a rendering of Woody and Buzz from Toy Story? ~~~ themodelplumber As a fractal artist myself as well, I've been ranting about this to myself lately. I've been thinking that the problem is inherent to algorithmic art in particular; I guess I can actually see some worth in renderings of e.g. Pixar characters, but maybe that's because I have kids who appreciate them, or because I've browsed Pixar art books. What I've noticed is that in order to make fractal art that typical art gallery-types find worth their time, you have to take on a kind of Simon Cowell role and inject your own intuition or library of culturally-attuned sensation memories into the creation phase, turning it into more of an audition phase. "This one just sucks...this one is OK...this one needs a little tweak and it'd look great, kind of like a rainy summer day." In order to make your product useful to other humans, you have to typologize, sometimes really brutally, and especially moreso since your computer can just keep pumping this stuff out. If you go the other way and shun the story, shun the critique, and say "typology is for the closed-minded," you can end up in scientism, completely free of such hyperbolic typology but lacking a compelling presentation of a set of convergences. Lacking a story, lacking any depth with which humans really identify. No matter how much machinery goes into computing scientific results, the results are still somewhere along a normal curve, and unfortunately that's not super useful to humans. But psychologically we find extreme typologies very useful. As a group, we'd rather say "ooh, a sports car" or "oh wow, dripping ice cream!" than "oh, it's a blob that could be any number of things." At its most vain, the typology-free approach can end up as a sort of pornography, an obsession with process to the exclusion of context, and to the deep satisfaction of barely anybody. That's why I really get frustrated with fractal art or generative art. After a point I have to put on my designer hat, and I might as well have painted the thing from scratch anyway. Or I might as well have used the software more like an artist would use Alchemy, as a sort of imagination cue. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYYSxZZzgjc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYYSxZZzgjc) ~~~ SCAQTony I am going straight to the public - I am also going to diversify (Catwoman panting in the works). Going to rent a gallery, have a party, get photos of people staring at a few giant Chromaluxe prints on aluminum and then set up a site. The art will feature anchoring pricing: 60'x80" limited edition Chromaluxe prints for $4,000 or a 24x36" lithograph for $35. Hoping I sell 10-posters a month of each. I wish you well. ~~~ themodelplumber Hey, I really appreciate you sharing that. Those seem like great ideas to me. Best of luck to you as you get that into motion! ------ jameshart Would be more interesting to apply this photo transformation given, as an input, not only the painting the artist produced but also a photograph of the thing the artist was trying to represent. Otherwise all you are doing is recreating the artist's visual tools, not the way the artist translates what they see into the visual palette. But then, if you tell the algorithm that _The Scream_ is just a painting of a man on a bridge... you're not going to get a very good result. ------ soperj Does anyone have any idea the style of painting that he was actually doing? (In the first one) ~~~ sp332 It looks like colored paper covered with black pigment, then then black was scraped away to make the lines. ~~~ soperj thanks.

USB Type-C and power delivery 101 – Ports and connections - neverminder http://www.embedded.com/design/power-optimization/4458380/USB-Type-C-and-power-delivery-101-----Ports-and-connections ====== dheera Sow now I have devices of all of these varieties: \- Mini-USB (stupid bike lights ...) \- normal Micro-USB (battery packs, smartwatch, flashlight) \- Qualcomm™ Quick© Charge® 2.0 that heats up and drains its batteries if plugged into a non-QC charger (phone) \- Qualcomm™ Quick© Charge® 3.0 that refuses to charge in a QC 2.0 charger but will charge in a non-QC charger (battery pack) \- low-voltage USB-C that my high-voltage USB-C adapter refuses to charge (another phone) \- high-voltage USB-C that won't accept low voltage USB-C (laptop) Travelling has officially become a bag full of AC adapters and wire mess again. I miss the barrel connectors of the old days. They came in far fewer varieties than these silly USB connectors. And the USB connectors break if you smack the cable by accident. The other day I had a USB-C socket that got snapped right off the PCB because the protruding cable bumped into something. Who designed these things?! Connectors being torqued off PCBs was nearly unheard-of 15 years ago. ~~~ neverminder In my opinion some kind of standard is better than no standard. Now is an unavoidable transitional period and if all goes well within a few years most of portable devices will charge through USB Type-C by default. I don't agree with Qualcomm's approach, but it's always like that when some major standard is emerging - big players will at least try to pull some proprietary crap. I am an early adopter of USB Type-C charging and I've selected my devices with that in mind, so for me it works flawlessly. I have a laptop Chromebook Pixel LS (2015) and a phone Nexus 6P. I can charge the phone with laptop's charger (it has variable voltage) and vice versa. The only difference obviously is that laptop charges considerably slower with phone charger, but I can plug it from either side, which for laptop users is very convenient. When was the last time you could do that with a barrel connector? ~~~ lojack > if all goes well within a few years most of portable devices will charge > through USB Type-C by default I feel like I've heard this one before. If history repeats itself in a few years there will be a new standard that does something better and 30% of manufacturers will switch to that. ------ gumby Power delivery is great, but the terrible error in USB Type C has come in their adoption of the IETF's dictum that one should be liberal in what one accepts and strict in what one generates. What this means is that the consumer has no idea if their cable will "work". If you plug a slow cable between two Type-C devices that support thunderbolt, data will still flow, perhaps at USB 2 speeds. Power may only trickle through a cable between a powerful power supply and a laptop that needs it (A good outcome, in that it reduces fire, but still...). That video device may never connect even though it's plugged in. Etc They should have put some shape or color or other coding requirement on the cable overmoulds and outlets. At least in the old days you could mostly tell visually and geometrically if you had the right data cable. ------ metaphor SBU1, SBU2... _le sigh_. Such a disappointment that despite USB-IF continuing to make their specs (and then some) openly accessible to the public, VESA has placed anything relevant to modern DisplayPort behind a $10k/annum corporate paywall, then proceeds to rub salt in the wound by teasing non-members with less than a handful for purchase[1], e.g. $350 for the latest DSC. [1] [https://www.vesa.org/store/](https://www.vesa.org/store/) ~~~ IgorPartola Can you elaborate on what you mean?

Former MCC Inmate: There’s ‘No Way’ Jeffrey Epstein Killed Himself - michalu https://nypost.com/2019/08/10/former-mcc-inmate-theres-no-way-jeffrey-epstein-killed-himself/ ====== thaumasiotes _My youngest son was forced to leave this country because of this Solozzo business._ _All right. I have to make arrangements to bring him back here safely, cleared of all these false charges._ _But I 'm a superstitious man. And if some unlucky accident should befall him, if he should get shot in the head by a police officer. Or if he should hang himself in his jail cell. Or if he's struck by a bolt of lightning. Then I'm going to blame some of the people in this room. And that I do not forgive._

32-way Raspberry Pi cluster - Luyt http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/20/32_way_raspebrry_pi_cluster/ ====== Luyt PDF with technical details and some nice pics at: <http://coen.boisestate.edu/ece/files/2013/05/Rasp.-Pi.pdf> ~~~ Spur It's not only fast but he pimped it up like a casemodder on a LAN party!

The Computer for the 21st Century (1991) - t0dd http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/SciAmDraft3.html ====== bhauer _Pads differ from conventional portable computers in one crucial way. Whereas portable computers go everywhere with their owners, the pad that must be carried from place to place is a failure. Pads are intended to be "scrap computers" (analogous to scrap paper) that can be grabbed and used anywhere; they have no individualized identity or importance._ That sounds eerily appealing. It speaks to my preference for a multi-device lifestyle where portable devices are but terminals to my network of applications running on my singular compute host. And yet, that's nothing quite like that today. Today, despite my desire to buy what I call a "subservient tablet," [1] I have no such option. Instead, tablets are first- order computers on their own right, adding to the number of devices in my life that want constant attention. I find it a shame that in the real present-day, we're off on this curious tangent where every device has to stand on its own as a silo of computing. In fact, it's a shame many of the concepts described in this article from 1991 still don't exist. Most notably, I am especially interested in large form- factor displays. [1] [http://tiamat.tsotech.com/microsoft](http://tiamat.tsotech.com/microsoft) ------ rootbear Mark Weiser was a professor of mine at the University of Maryland before he went to PARC. It was an awful tragedy that he died at such a young age (46). With the rise of tablets and small, powerful computers like the Raspberry Pi and the Arduino, I'm often reminded of his ideas about ubiquitous computing. He'd be having a ball today with all of the power one can now get in such tiny, efficient packages. It would be great if more of his UC ideas were to get into the mainstream of computing.

Ask HN Mac users: Do you use an antivirus ? - ssn If yes, which?<p>Please see instead: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=933172 ====== jacquesm try <http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll> ------ charlesmarshall No, but more techy people will tend not to download / install / give passwords to "dodgy" applications ------ maudineormsby No, and I don't use AV on my Windows machine either. Never had a problem with either. ------ st3fan No, of course not. What would be the point? ------ ssn Yes [which?] ------ ssn No