halfeatenpie
This isn't to discount policies or decisions based on the energy transition scenarios used here, I mean we need more and more effort to curb our GHG emissions, but I would advise against interpreting this dataset in this manner.
I love this as a product. I've used similar products/competitors that are much more feature rich and at my consulting firm we have our own group of internal tooling that pretty much does very similar things but we don't have to pay or outsource to another entity.
If I may add a few points of suggestions.
1. I need to understand the level of uncertainty this methodology brings or else it's not really useful for me.
2. The pricing is not competitive. You're asking someone to pay for an analysis that's freely available or with "lower grade of data". Most places want higher number of sites to understand what the level of risk is. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just needs to be "good enough" to make decisions (the pareto front problem). Your product looks cool but isn't answering the "why pay for it when I can get a good enough solution for free" argument. Unless your methodology is really compelling and/or is peer reviewed, it's going to be hard for us to justify paying for this product. If I'm going to pay for a flood analysis, I'm not going to pay for extreme precipitation but I'd rather pay (or do pay) https://fathom.global and Paul Bates' people for their flood data directly.
3. Climate Change is a major factor and it's impacting many larger organization's decision process. The White Paper glosses over climate change as follow guidance from IPCC Atlas. If you can include AR6 projections and show the relative change/difference or something more on top of this then I can see more of a reason to use the product. But if it's just an extreme precipitation analysis with no climate change (or hand-wavy climate change), it's hard for us to justify the charge.
I have a lot more suggestions but these are the top 3 that I can recommend.
I'm interested in hearing how this product continues to mature and grow! This is pretty cool.
1. How much benefit will we get? 2. Will this benefit be higher than the cost of purchasing this right now? 3. What other alternatives will satisfy our needs?
For most of these solutions, the answers are:
1. A lot. We need computing power to perform these analysis faster and to be competitive. 2. Yes, as continuing to innovate in this space will keep us competitive and give our scientists the resources to remain productive. 3. AWS/GCP/Azure are alternatives sure, but then (the rate at which Meta probably uses these resources) it probably cost them less to build this out than to pay AWS/GCP/Azure for access to these hardware.
Granted it's probably not at this scale, but it gives you access to a ton of resources.
I think it's definitely an interesting approach to community creation and engaging with your audience. What I'm still trying to learn and understand is where it's going, as I don't think I use it enough yet to fully see the "road to monetization, profitability, and sustainability" of the platform. I kind of wish room discovery was a bit easier beyond the network-based approach that they're using, but I'm just being nitpicky now.
You're trying to sell someone that your idea is right, but having the desktop experience be a bit difficult (and putting it on the end user to deal with it) doesn't really help you in communicating your points. It also makes it harder for them to digest your content, therefore people might just skip over it.
But again, it's a personal blog so all these decisions are up to you and your liking!
It's a battle of endurance, not wits anymore. Things are hard, shit sucks. Find a support network with other graduate students, find new and creative ways to continue to be engaging (at one point in my PhD I was literally sitting on a camping chair with my laptop in the middle of the woods trying to write my thesis).
I am literally in my last year (hopefully) of my PhD and the final stretch is pretty much that. I was thriving earlier in my degree and right now I just want out. I wouldn't have survived so far if I didn't have my cohort of students and friends to support me (and for lack of a better reason, helping me complain a bit).
Don't work on the project more than you have to. Focus on what's important for your degree, the critical path. People will always want more from you the more you give. Take care of yourself first.
I'd suggest a good alternative is to just stick with Google Calendar/Microsoft Outlook and/or WorldTimeBuddy.
If you want to watch it sure. If not then that's fine. But he doesn't have to streamline anything and that might be his loss, but in the end it's his channel to do what he wishes.
One thing that really stands out to me is the change in our land use/environmental changes over time. You can even see the different reservoir levels for various years and can "guesstimate" what year certain droughts were.
I'm sure there's some amazing ideas to use this tool, I'm just excited about it.
Glad you've already working with some people in academia! I'm familiar with UW's Civil Engineering department and they have some great faculty members there who are very competent in what they do. That's awesome to hear!
As someone who is in academia currently, I can understand the hesitation. I'd like to clarify that I'm not suggesting you join academia, but simply use it as a vehicle to help with the initial networking of business partners and maybe use that as a resource to grow and get your "business-side" help that you're looking for. Basically a jumping off point. If you're already coordinating with a faculty member there, I'm sure they're more than happy to work with you.
Many universities also have technology transfer offices (moving the technology developed in-house/university level to industry) that might be able to support your aspirations. While their support is assuming that your technology is an IP from the University, they're very nice people and I think it might be useful to setup a meeting with them and chat with them regarding what advice they can offer. Also, they're incentivized to support students and the local community. To put it frankly, they're not there to screw you and aren't incentivized to. Universities recognize there are a ton of technical founders out there who are missing the business counterparts. While the university system (in my opinion) is slow to accommodate these needs, there are still initiatives and programs out there on the university's side that I think you can tap into.
One thing I've previously gotten support from is the I-Corps (Innovation Corps) program funded by NSF ([1] for National level and [2] for UW Level) which is targeted at technical founders who need a "bootcamp" on the business side. This includes building a business model, financial model, and also giving you access to potential investors. It won't replace someone who is experienced in business, but it'll give you the fundamental skills and initial knowledge to understand more of what you're looking for (at least for me). It also does come with $$$ but it's not a lot (and the money they do provide is mostly spent during the two months bootcamp trying to get customer surveys). By the way, while these programs are rooted in academia, they're open to everyone. You don't need to be affiliated with an institution to get these grants.
The meet and greet are perfect! I think Seattle is probably the perfect place for this type of work! From talking with colleagues here (this was before COVID), I heard the City of Seattle is very welcoming of new ideas and are happy to prototype new transportation technology. Not sure if things have changed, but I really like your application. It's fantastic.
Outside of academia, there are also programs that are available to get you started off the ground. VentureWell (office is in Massachusetts but I believe they have a nation-wide scope) has an E-team program [3] that's basically similar to NSF's I-Corps program but with different funding sources.
I really appreciate what you've done so far. It was one of the few things on Hacker News that I actually stopped scrolling and looked in-depth on. I wish I could throw my hat in the ring. I hope it continues to grow and I'd be happy to keep an eye on it!
Don
[1] https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/i-corps/ [2] https://comotion.uw.edu/what-we-do/icorps-grants/ [3] https://venturewell.org/e-team-grant-program/
Out of curiosity, how would this work in regards to the character limitations (160 characters I think?) in SMS? What if they're large responses? Is there a hard limit on the total number of text messages sent per request?
I saw your work on Hacker News last year and I forwarded it to a colleague of mine working in the academic side of Transportation Engineering. They found your work interesting and complemented on your visualizations.
If I could suggest something, it might be useful to reach out to professors at your local university whose research interests coincides with your software's application (you can shop around as well).
They can probably help you with the following:
1. Provide cutting-edge technology and ideas related to transportation engineering
2. Offer a method/connection to the local DOT or other agencies who may be interested in this as a decision support system (DSS).
3. Maybe even find a partner or... (and I think this might be a better option) help you establish a steering committee or a group of advisors who can then make recommendations to supplement your skillsets.
You might even be able to temporarily support your open source model through grant funding and application to different "cutting-edge" applied projects and, if you can, develop those technology in a generalizable way (a framework) to be used as a shiny feature for your application. Grow it up to be a one-stop-shop with the latest and greatest.
I'd be happy to discuss a bit more to help you navigate these waters.
Cheers,
Don
P.S. regarding finding a partner for the business side, what might be useful is to reach out to the local universities in your area and see if their business college/program has a "founders meet-and-greet" program. At our current institution we have programs in place to connect founders with a business counterpart which has resulted in establishing some growing companies. In addition, you can probably take this opportunity to network with a few professors and (as an advisor) be willing to put their name to the product for technical knowledge/support.
I think I'll be going for the 5, but the 4a does give me a pause. If I use it for another 3 years, I think buying the 5 is the better choice.
Watching it from the outside, I'd say after a while it became "the ideas are decent/worth looking into, but I already have too much on my plate right now that I can't pursue any of it" and the aspiration to follow through is pretty much gone. I think monetizing based on that (and making it worth the time investment) is the big egg we all want to crack.
Anyways props for you for running it for so long! I saw the email and appreciate you taking us on your journey through the lifecycle of it.
We won't be factoring privacy, working with a big company, or other concerns in this thought. We will only focus on the numbers.
Lets look at email/productivity market real quick.
Google's base package is 6 dollars a month per user with all the backups, support, and infrastructure in place (realistically, you'll want the 12 dollars a month package).
Since email is critical infrastructure (I believe it's one of the most critical elements of a business), lets say two DigitalOcean VPSes at 6 dollars a month each (one primary, one failover) with a license of HostinaBox/Vesta/Whatever Open Source Solution you use with DigitalOcean's backups enabled. Not the "best" design but something I'd say is OK and within scope for a small business. That's 12 dollars a month base costs + your consulting time for a sizeable capacity.
For a small business of 1 person, they get a better deal by just going with Google. Google has their applications and softwares easily integrated with their other services, comes with their productivity suite (GSuite == Google Docs, Drive, etc.), and as a small business who is probably risk adverse in their decisions when it comes to these things, feel more comfortable working with Google.
For a small business of 5 people, I'd say it's still more worth it for them to use Google as that's 30 dollars a month (most consultants charge more than that an hour). If they hire a consultant and if the poo hits the fan, then they'll be paying a consultant money to execute the disaster recovery plan. Even if you did take them on as a client, that's a maximum of 18 dollars a month you get to keep (assuming no issues/errors happen).
For a small business of 50 people, then now it gets to an interesting territory. However, for 50 people I'd change up the base server/system configuration to have higher capacity, more fault tolerant, and resilient under disaster scenarios (which would increase base operating costs).
I'd say this really depends on marginal benefits and based really on relationships established with your clients. In the end, you can probably make some $$$ but your time and effort might be spent on more productive and lucritive tasks. This is also assuming that the self-hosted OSS software is of quality that the clients will be happy with. I'd argue Google's mail offering may have annoying/restrictive spam policies and be frustrating at times, but they have a high quality product made at an affordable price point. The variation in quality of OSS products concerns me as well as developers who are probably overworked and underpaid for their contributions asked to make changes to support clients they're not directly paid by.
As a risk averse business, I'd rather rest my eggs in the Google/Microsoft/whoever basket and directly work with the "entity" that maintains the codebase (or has the talent/expertise on-hand to make adjustments) rather than a middle intermediary of equal level but, in the end, is subject to the decisions and leadership of the OSS product.
Now take this to another step and say you build a consulting company that handles all of these as a one-stop-shop? Well... Then I don't see anything new service/model here than what a local IT consultant company can offer.
So to really make this work I'd say a shop that automates these deployments on-demand and offers a large selection of applications to use is probably the best step forward. Even then, I don't really see the viability of this on a funding perspective except for scaling. In the end in my perspective, the opportunity is there but it'd be hard to do it right. Also funding the developers of the software you're making money off of would be great, but that's a whole nother thing (and I can squabble about that for hours).
Quick plug: two very good friends of mine are in the process of tackling a similar issue via their venture[0]. I am a customer of theirs but have been friends with them even before this venture. Really recommend their product as an affordable and reliable product that "just works".
[0]: https://mxroute.com/
Pretty much the argument of using apply vs for loops. Most of the time, apply is going to be significantly more computationally efficient. However, some people think of the problem in different context than others, and if it works for them then it works.
I understand what the author is stating, but I just feel like this is from inexperience with R and ignoring the vast amount of packages available within it that are specifically targeted at data science. There are some valid issues and criticisms of R, but I think this article only focuses on the application of R in a single context. A significant portion of data science is about cleaning the data and an entire suite of packages known as tidyverse solves these problems (for me anyways) while also being very simple and easy to understand. I mean tidyverse supports piping, which is exactly what this article is saying to use.
Obviously your mileage may vary, but this post irks me the wrong way.
It's a new topic that's only really taken shape and impact in the last two decades!
I'm aware that NAWPA post wasn't entire serious, but the thing is that similar to how people were investing in companies during the .com bubble that had no clear monotization plan, Water also went through a similar phase. Municipal water and irrigated water are very different topics I agree, but from the direction I work in we look at them in a similar light. There's another project our organization is involved in that is focusing on investments in dam infrastructure in Africa to help deliver water for farmland irrigation. The specific context is different, but water is water, and the issue with quantity and transportation is present (and common) on both sides.
Again, do what you want or believe what you want, but the reality of the situation is there.
Water is a basic human right. In most countries, water is a public good that the government subsidizes and, to some extent, the market is adjusted to allow vulnerable households to afford the resource as well. If we have a 100% free market-based solution then in many locations the poor and underprivileged have a considerably less access to this vital resource (some won't get any). An example of this can be seen in India. Many districts there suffer from intermittent water supply (where the local piped water comes at irregular intervals instead of continuously). These people might not be able to shower regularly and they aren't given a schedule of when the water will come, so they can't schedule their day or week. Many of these people might even have to leave work for a day (losing that income and economic productivity) and jump out to fill up their water tanks in their homes. As they don't know when the water comes (no regular scheduling), this uncertainty can be nerve racking and (even if you're trying to stretch it out to last) may not be enough to last your family until the next "supply". In these cases, you call in a water tanker to refill your tank but even then you don't know if it'll come.
On the tanker truck company's side, they don't want irregular domestic clients, they want more regular commercial clients (because the total customer value is much higher, you get more money from those clients than a household that needs a one-offer). So those companies aren't really incentivized to service residential clients. So if another call comes in, those commercial clients would take higher priority than those vulnerable households.
Those solutions don't really help this problem, and this problem is just going to grow for the foreseeable future. Not exactly what I'm talking about, but IWA recently published an article about how many cities are shifting from 24/7 to intermittent water supply solutions [0], and if this becomes irregular and the system starts to fail, then this will just keep that problem growing. One of the projects I'm involved in works on trying to solve this exact problem and we recently got some support from the US National Science Foundation as well as the Gates Foundation. However, there's still a long way to go. (Sidebar: Anyone want to give us more funding or help? Send me a message!)
[0]: https://iwa-network.org/running-out-of-water-cities-shifting...
While we're the oldest engineering discipline, remember that even until around the 80s people didn't think or know about groundwater contamination. They've always thought that sticking contaminated water back into the ground would filter it naturally like magic. In the late 80s more and more people started to understand that's not how it works. Even then, these policies and ideas are still in the process of being accepted in developing countries almost 40 years later and even then "what else can we do? My son needs water now and he could get hit by a car tomorrow so this is a problem I'll deal with later."
The problem (as the article states) is that the issue is so distributed. We're talking about traditionally individualized solutions for a problem that needs a more coordinated solution. However, noone is willing to pay for that or considers other investments as "more critical" than major water projects (also many environmental groups aren't as risk averse as water utilities). I mean the biggest cost in water isn't the actual product but the transportation costs. We have water, we just don't have enough funds to deliver them everywhere in a sustainable manner at a price that people are willing to pay.
NAWPA idea was conceived even before we understood our environment. It's the wrong solution. I mean even 10 years ago we had a landmark article that changed the paradigm of how we decide policy and build infrastructure[0]. I'd never take NAWPA for anything now than the "grandiose-ness of the 50s", especially since that was during a "water resources renaissance" in the United States where even crazy ideas were taken seriously.
[0] https://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/CLEE/Milly_2008_Science_S...
What's important is that Excel gives you access to the computing power of modern technology with a lower barrier-of-entry/knowledge. That's one of the most valuable things that many people fail to understand. Not everyone is a programmer and for a lack of a better term, "doesn't really care about UTF-8 and just want the calculations to work". Also, in many cases Enterprise IT in critical infrastructures are resistant to supporting R or Python due to their security models (firewall rules prevents install.packages('tidyverse') for example).
This is what makes us specialists and someone they bring on board to help them out and explain to them about what the "best-use-case" is, and then watch as people try to cram a square peg into a round hole.