skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to validate people's willingness to buy without breaking promises?
I recently read an article [1] that was about how to validate a business idea on the cheap (both time and money). The article was well-written, and the business this individual started seems to be going well.

In a nutshell, the author was seeking to answer two questions. The first was trying to assess whether there was a potential market for the author's idea. The second question was seeking an answer was: "Will people pay enough to make this a meaningful business?" It is how the author goes about answering the second question that concerns me here.

The author put up a basic web page with a simple web site with a button to order the product in question. The button actually sent the potential customer into a purchase work-flow which ends up charging their credit card. The author follows-up with an email indicating that the product is not available and offers a full refund. Some "customers" request this, but the majority do not. Eventually, the author ends up refunding all of the "customers" since the author is not able to deliver on the promise of fulfilling the order in the time frame specified in the follow-up email. I do not think the author was intentionally misleading the "customers" on this point. I think the author did not realize how much work would be involved in actually fulfilling that promise. It comes out later in the article that an unspecified amount of money is spent over a time frame approaching a year before they were able to deliver on the initial promise. (I do not know whether the business was able to deliver on the promise to the original "customers".)

Is there a way to do an experiment on the cheap, that does reliably validate the business without misleading potential customers in the process?

[1] I debated about whether I should link to the article. I have decided not to. Really, this article could have been written (and has been written) by any number of folks about any number of businesses.
Whats even better is that the show was made in the '70s

Connections holds up really well and Burke's presentation is great.
The thing is, for the retrofit case ("current house") it's a different ballpark of complexity. The thing is, there's no technical question about Ph levels - ALL houses should be built to that standard. The challenge there is political.

The technical challenges are in retrofit.

You might find Energiesprong (http://energiesprong.nl/transitionzero/) of interest - basically factory manufactured walls with joinery, move to site, crane on.
This is brought to you by an intelligence community that thinks that using your AOL email address is good enough for classified information.
It's only ended on phones, they're going full steam on TV's, so actually its a fairly smart choice.
Launching and Selling My First Online Business
You should try
angel.co
linkedin.com
www.producthunt.com
www.venturebeat.com
www.techcrunch.com
False indignation is a poor way to arrive at the truth. "Insulting," "destroy," "abhorrent," etc. Sheer emotion.

You seem not to be familiar with Indian society at this moment in history. I won't trouble you with the details, since that might require setting aside one's ego for a moment. But for the sake of appealing to your strong sense of emotion, I'd like you envision a life where you live in abject, degrading poverty, you have no prospect of a better future, premarital sex and pornography are stigmatized, there are more men than women, prostitution is illegal, and there is essentially no realistic prospect you will ever have any consensual sexual encounter with a member of the opposite sex for the rest of your life. Maybe you'd feel slightly more like the feral dog than you do at the moment.

We are animals, in no way set apart from the other species. Those of us who exert "enough self-control every day not to destroy another person's bodily integrity" are merely lucky. To suggest otherwise simply reflects this profound, Utopian ignorance of the human condition that only the world's most pampered are privileged enough to relish without consequences.
I'm really surprised that CBS hasn't been called out for the behavior of download.com. They're a major news corporation that needs to maintain their reputation. I've never seen any news story questioning senior management as to the disreputable activities of CBS Interactive and it's subsidiaries like CNET and download.com.
The source title was good: "How Airbnb's Data hid the Facts in New York City". This is a damning article for AirBnB and they need to respond. Let's not try to hide it.
Do we have any evidence that it won't?

If you believe the Monsanto GM corn documentaries, releasing GM into the wild may have bad effects (intended or otherwise) outside the designated population. Plants are obviously not the same as insects, but I would prefer to err on the safe(r) side.

Edit: Also, a known bad is often better than an unknown.
Around the World in 60 Days: Getting Deep Speech to Work in Mandarin
PCMs are being used in the domestic market for DHW (domestic hot water) now. Interesting developments - the batteries tend to leak much less energy than standard water based hot water cylinders.
BBC Radio Four has a great set of audio documentary that they've released as podcasts under the title "Seriously".

This one is about the approx 1,500 audio cassette tapes found in the Bin Laden compound in 2002, and what was on them.

> In early 2002, following the fall of the Taliban, Osama Bin Laden's abandoned compound in the Afghan city of Kandahar was ransacked.

> Among the finds was a collection of more than 1500 audio cassettes featuring sermons, speeches, songs and candid recordings of Arab-Afghan fighters, recorded between the 1960s up until the 9/11 attacks.

But there are many documentaries and many of them are going to be of interest to HN.

The art of starcraft: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06r4gpd

Hippy Internet - the whole earth catalogue: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06rx8jc

(The Whole Earth Catalogue was amazing. I really miss that level of curation.)

The main page for the Seriously collection is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/8gfBTh59WxRB9Q2bd7s...
Is that because those studies are inherently wishy-washy, or as with many other scientific studies, the processes aren't actually detailed enough, or the code itself is missing?
Assuming your house is rentable and there's a liquid market for rentals in your neck of the woods - and that's an untenable assumption.

"Property can be rented for profit" and "Your specific property can be rented profit" are different assertions.
50+ Data Science and Machine Learning Cheat Sheets
US has more guns per capita than any other country. Rape is still common.
"Diminishing returns" for what?

PH is an extremely worthy initiative, but I can't help think it's ripe for a bit of disruption. The whole certification process adds needless cost to a build/retrofit and doesn't help with the perception of high performance homes being expensive.

There's no real reason PH has to be more expensive than anything else. Just that volume housebuilders won't be able to pay minimum wages to people they find on the street any more...
> Could be it never mattered before

If people could rent these properties before they were removed, how could it not matter?
Pretty sure improving the Issues system is a wontfix. :)
I guess you just confirmed my point.
Obviously the presence of guns is not the only variable that differs between the US and countries with lower rates of sexual assault.
Different countries, different markets, right? Most Germans don't have a CC (if so, then often only for vacation). Inside Germany, the preferred payment version is direct debit. For ecommerce usually paypal as well. Everybody has an EC card (=debit card) issued by their bank and uses that for paying without cash in shops. Even with a CC you wouldn't be able to pay in many of them.
Waiting for a particular person's attention is like overeating: it made sense in hunter-gatherer tribes, but it's not the best idea in modern cities.
Definitely worth checking out. They will be presenting at Software Circus London sometime soon we hope.
Intuitively the main problem is that the chance of the machine lying is enormously higher than the chance of the sun going nova. The result of combining them says essentially nothing about the latter anymore.

What's wrong is that it's a useless machine.
That's the crux of the issue. Vanguard Group presents itself as offering it's services at cost, when in fact it's a for-profit company. As a for-profit company, according the laws that stand today and if you believe the claims of the plaintiff, it has to offer it's services at a competitive market rate.

Of course, that doesn't mean it can't rebate the profit back to the funds which could then apply it as a fee rebate. That should be totally legal, as long as it pays taxes on the profit before it issues the rebate.

This whole territory has been explored before, by the way. Mutual insurance companies used to have this same problem, and eventually Congress just added another carveout to 501(c) and made the problem go away. That's the other alternative here, and it's definitely cleaner and probably better for society as a whole.
article assumes specs are known. they might be for some kind of brochureware but for any serious work they never are, and in business reqs change day to day. 60% of software features are never used - so that's 60% overspend right there. there's no reason not to do fixed cost agile (personally wouldn't do it any other way). trying to fix scope otoh is just bad business from the get go - a) you might have target outcomes but you don't know exactly what you're going to need to get there b) useful software tends to be ongoing in terms of reqs
Transitioning from Objective C to Swift Without Rewriting the Existing Code
It's called Shadowrun. You're living it. The only thing missing is corporation-states and those are coming fast.
I wonder what distribution their income from private users vs orgs vs enterprise looks like. It feels like they don't care overmuch about the two former.
>I heard about Orleans but how much is it in use internally at MS

They have a small game called Halo which uses it.
Custom-Made Voices for People Unable to Speak
The core principle built into our society is that a lot of people on earth must suffer and die so that the lucky few can live the prosperous lives we do. Just saying.

Admitting it is maybe not so popular.
People miss the point. Intelligence isn't a gift for most people it is just a curse that you have to over come.
Interesting, I'm going to look into this after work. I wonder if it teaches statistical theory and R or just the mechanics of R. Because the later would be much more useful.
use the Flag button on article's like this. If you see articles getting upvotes, and you read the article and think "this is a crappy, poorly written article and a waste of all of our time", Flag it.
Deutsche Bank is pretty expensive. The debit card (which is useless for shopping online, although most local online stores offer other alternatives to credit cards) is free for most people, and I think I pay about 20 EUR/year for my credit card. This is with another large bank.
Hammock Driven Development – Rich Hickey (video, 2010)
> It works as a vaccine against tribal thinking.

Yeah, well. About that... It might not be related but I have often been singled out because of strabism and I also developed a strong tendency to swim against the current in tribal settings (applause, talking about the movie we just saw when living the theater, political discussion). It's okay now, I know I have that tendency and watch out for it. Can't say for sure if it's related though.

Anyway. I would never fun of anyone based on their looks. This, I am pretty sure it's related. Although I have known some mean kid with deformities.
http://qr.ae/ROlwZp - I've found this answer on quora to be one of the best explanations as to why software estimates are so off.
Why the Internet of Things Hasn’t Gone Cellular Yet
I always thought that it was more about the difficulty of collecting winnings on the bet in the "sun actually gone nova" case. That holds not matter what the odds.
Real science is random, see No Method. When you make it a career that has requirements and expectations you set this sort of process to take place. Still even through this process, if enough people are doing it, there is bound to be some breakthrough science. But most of the people are wasting their time cooking data to make their careers go further, rather than make progress in science.
For my self recorded content I try to do it without any scripts, but if I find myself struggling I'll script out every single word. You should try that because the script helps a lot.

The only problem with a script is you need to become an actor because it's not easy to pull off reading from a script without sounding like it's a script.

Usually after a few takes with the script, I end up with like 80% scripted / 20% improvised. I'd like to eventually flip that to 20/80, but I know it'll take practice.
How I Turned My Passion for Surfing into a Rip Roaring Business
It teaches the language. It has been around for several years now. It is pretty use full for some people to get the syntax of R down. Some online classes even have it report to them for extra credit etc.

The more I use R the less I use of base and mostly use the Hadley Wickham Universe of dplyr, tidyr, ggplot/ggvis etc.. This teaches mostly base and not the functional programming parts (Boy do I HATE loops and R base has a great list system that people seem to ignore)
In the same spirit, it is mindblowing that some Android phones do not even have a flashlight app (I had a flashlight in my dumbphone 8 years ago), and the same applies - most flashlight apps need exorbitant permissions; I found [0] as the only one that doesn't need anything else than, well, camera and flashlight access.

I see Android as OS may not want to support it as some phones/tablets do not have physical flashlight. This would be a genuine occasion for vendors to provide something themselves which is not a bloated crapware, but not all of them do it.

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.snoopwall....
I do. It doesn't scale well, and that will slow down adoption.
Those versions of OS X aren't getting security updates from Apple either, which is (I believe) why Google is stopping too -- there is only so much they can do as the OS and system libraries start to fall behind.
Developers being treated as a cost centre rather than an essential part of the business. To be streamlined and offshored wherever possible.

This attitude is widespread in the corporation I work for. Race to the bottom is an apt description, in my opinion. (I am not the OP)
I'm a (german) DB customer as well, and I can't say I share a lot of these experiences.

> Buggy app and web interface, sometimes the login fails or hangs randomly

This never happened to me, maybe I'm just lucky. There used to be a problem with the web interface when you entered the banking system's URL without "https://" but that's not really the same.

> The way to authorise online transactions is with a piece of paper with 100 codes printed on it (TAN list)

I think the TAN list is just there to get you started (and for some technophobic Germans). I used it to set up SMS TANs immediately, and I think there is still an option for a dedicated TAN generator device (at least there used to be). Don't use the TAN list!

> Stupid useless cards. The default account (€5/month) comes with a card (EC Karte) that can only be used at German ATMs and in most German stores.

An EC Card is the thing you need to go shopping in Germany. It's entirely appropriate for this country, and contrary to what you claim it works just fine internationally (at least mine does). While it's true that some banks offer a separate VISA credit card, it shouldn't be a problem for you to get one elsewhere. As for VISA debit cards, I'm not sure if those even exist in Germany.
I guess I could plug a silly little script I wrote for GreaseMonkey which runs on facebook.com. I hated looking at the "Trending" and "Recommended Pages" sidebar so I axed them out in favor of random imgur images of your favorite subreddit. By default you'll get `/r/aww` but you can flip it with a fixed little box in the top right to whatever floats your boat.

Full disclaimer: I'm a horrid at javascript, and the result below is mainly due to a lot of copy paste from various internet sources.

https://gist.github.com/GrahamBlanshard/d7211436088e0159164a
What troubles me is that this is seen in many start-up/business circles as not only okay, but even a preferred method of idea validation. The original "customers" acted in good faith. The "business" was not forthcoming with the non-existence of the product (and my guess is the non-existence of the company). Since refunds were given, all is okay, many would say. I do not agree with this viewpoint.

In asking my question and relating the background, I am not seeking for folks to change my opinion of the ethics or to disparage anyone who disagrees with me. I am seeking to understand whether there is a way to experiment in a way that does not make promises that may or may not be kept. (Promises are broken, for example, when only a handful of people "purchase" the product, and the "business owner", therefore, chooses not to pursue the business, even if refunds are provided.)
The OpenAFM project: http://openafm.com/home-2/
That's not the policy.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:dang%20misleading%20or%...
Automating Static Analysis and Style Checks in Clojure
> It's not a bad thing to do a lot of estimating up front so the business can make an informed decision about whether it really wants to commit to the effort...

You're assuming the estimate is worth much. Which is what much of the industry is doubtful about. To underscore the point, most estimates are single values (eight months), not confidence intervals.

A better answer would be, "There is a 50% chance that we get it done between six and seven months from now, assuming requirements don't change."

...but even that assumes that all along the way, the project stakeholders are keeping in mind how many (how do you quantify?) requirements were added and discovered.
Totally privileged.
It's only useless 1/36 times ... if you ask it a few times you could make a reasonable inference.
aaaand.... patterns are bad?
> We do sometimes change titles from the original when the original title is egregious linkbait, or false.
Now available!

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-access-resources-in-a-v...
The problem isn't the legitimacy of Buzzfeed; it's that the low-quality content comes from the same domain as the high-quality stuff, and so if you do nothing to penalize that domain, you get cat pictures on the front page. It's not a moral judgement, but rather a practical measure.
"Frequentists vs. Bayesians"? The problem with this comic is that it paints statisticians as belonging to one of two opposing tribes, when really frequentist and Baysian statistics are two different methods in the toolbox of a competent statistician – which of them is the appropriate one depends on the circumstances and the problem at hand.

I'm not sure where this idea of an alleged divide comes from, but I think it might have to do with a certain small but vocal group on the Internet [1].

[1] cough Eliezer Yudkowsky cough
Eternal September. Rings a bell?
Analogies like "painting a room" are pretty useless because they are very misleading. Especially when it is an innovative product, a better analogy would be: "painting a room on Mars".

With software development, there are a lot more "unknown attributes" that determine the main part of the effort estimation unless it is a repetitive task.

So, a critical/skeptical engineer would always drive the customer nuts by asking questions nobody can know and the conclusion will end somewhere like it is not possible to give a upfront estimation and stop the project. Or the effort to give the estimation approaches the effort to develop.
We should equate encryption banning with antisemitism. That should help end politicians careers for attacking encryption as it does if they come out as big antisemitic. I am only half kidding.
Show HN: Getting Started with Rosalind and Python
I'm not particularly fan of this or similar practices because A) it's a bit morally grey to say the least, and B) you're not actually testing a business idea, you're simply testing how a product sounds.

A half decent example is Evernote (recent financial troubles aside). Imagine trying to cook up a super quick landing page for Evernote and then buying some adwords. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't get very far because who wants "Notetaking App #784" (which is about all the information you can give in such circumstances)?

Based on that you'd assume no one wants to pay for/download a note-taking app. Of course this is provably false as many people pay for myriad note-taking apps. Where's the discrepancy?

When you land on a products landing page there's far more than just product screenshots. There's also the impression created by the brand, one you've probably heard of before you got there. There's customer reviews, there's well thought out pricing designed to make you pay exactly what you can afford, there's a thousand techniques used to make sure they get the sale.

Effectively, I'd say it's very difficult to distill all this down into a quick experiment that proves anything.
Yup. Markdown is directly inspired by this _𝔞𝔫𝔠𝔦𝔢𝔫𝔱_ convention ;)
> ...customers that require pretty accurate (cost) estimates prior to even getting the contract.

If you require that accurate of an estimate, your business model cannot handle the risk of software development. Really, really wanting an accurate estimate does not make risk go away.
> Well whoever can hack your password, mobile TAN or TAN reader device will likely still not hack into your paper TAN list.

They are frequently hacked by phishing (intercepting the bank site, changing out the reciever and asking for the TAN code nevertheless). chipTAN for example works by optically transmitting the transaction details to a small handheld device with your banking card inserted, and the handheld device shows you the IBAN and amount... foolproof.

http://business.chip.de/bii/1/6/5/0/1/8/6/0/chipTAN_sparkass... for an example pic of such a handheld device.
Most people intuitively understand that a person with 25 points lower IQ than the average population is going to have unique problems and go through life in a slightly different path and order than the average. However, for some reason, this is not easily understood regarding people with 25 points over the average.

It's also a pattern on HN because it really is a rather new concept. In Sweden, the law that dictates that every child should have a education that match their ability came into reality 2010 (2010:800, 3§). Before that, the goal was to target the lowest common denominator that would create a passing grade for everyone. This meant that school material targeting IQ around 75 was also put in the hands of children with around IQ 125, and unsurprisingly, this caused problems with under-stimulation and children that go through school without any training in studying.
> I also think being on the receiving end of ostracism is valuable experience (but not for 8 years, a few months would suffice). It works as a vaccine against tribal thinking.

Peter Thiel said something about this once, speculating on why "disruptive" (pretty sure that was not the word he used) start-ups are disproportionally run by awkward social outsiders, and his theory is that "normal" kids instinctively seek validation from peers, and for these "disruptive" start-ups, they are saying that it's insane, it can't be done (go work in law/finance/management consulting instead). The awkward kids don't care (as much), and are therefore able to focus on actually doing it.