FetLife Announcement - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/FFSQUML9 <comment><USER2> The problem with major Credit Card companies is that they're all American and that the US of A is incredibly moralistic. For the sake of convenience, I'm considering PayPal to be part of the same club of moralistic knobs.

It's virtually impossible to set up any kind of online shop without accepting one or more of PayPal, MasterCard, Visa or AmEx. As soon as you accept money for anything one of these FOUR(!) financial behemoths objects to, you're out of luck. You'll be forced to stop using them, and as soon as you do you'll see your revenue drop dramatically.

And why? All because a couple of old men in suits think that they know what's "acceptable". Nevermind the legalities. PayPal makes it impossible to sell pornography, which is perfectly legal in large parts of the civilized world.

<comment><USER3> It's not just moralistic. Porn sites have crazy high fraud rates that make them very unpalatable from a business perspective.

<comment><USER4> If that logic was the case, they'd simply have a fraud metric that if you exceeded you'd have your account disabled.

As someone who works at a company where we literally have thieves testing cards on our site on a daily basis, any site that accepts credit cards has a high rate of frauds as thieves test cards. Somehow, we manage not to pass these cards to credit card processors (and no, I don't mean we use Stripe. I mean we have our own in-house anti-fraud process since we deal with the processors through a merchant account at a major bank like FL does). Porn companies have filtering in place as well for the same reason.

It would be a solid metric instead of "morality" if the cause was what you believe it to be.

<comment><USER5> Do you have a large percentage of people who legitimately buy stuff from your website later claim they didn't? This is not your standard fraud model: with porn you see a remarkably large amount of "oh shit, someone (usually my significant other with whom I share my finances) just saw this charge on my card, which is totally not OK for whatever reason, so I guess my best strategy here is to totally disavow the charge and pretend it was credit card fraud".

A second issue porn has which most websites do not is related: customers actively do not want their statement to accurately state from whom they purchased the product, lest someone sees exactly what their fetish is simply from reading the credit card report. This drastically increases the chargeback rate from people who legitimately do not remember what they bought and do not recognize the charge (particularly if the service uses subscriptions).

If you want to accept payments for porn, you need a fundamentally different fraud model than for a standard website, no matter how weirdly digital or in high demand: this is not about scammers or about black card fraud, this is about basic lies and deceipt. I see no real reason to claim PayPal _must_ go out of their way to support this.

A company which has is CCBill. They sign you up as a "high risk" Visa card merchant (which is an upstream notion supported by Visa), and then are much more hands on in the checkout process than a normal credit card processor, with a website people can use to look up and manage their subscriptions to websites (so like, imagine if all Stripe purchases required you to use their web form, showing up on the customer statement as only "Stripe", and if the customer could then go directly to stripe.com, enter their credit card details, see they had a subscription with you, and cancel it; to be explicit: PayPal does not have these restrictions, even though they might seem similar to you).

(To note: it _does_ bother me somewhat that PayPal doesn't go out of their way to support some of this stuff, but as long as the actual credit card processing firms support it and there exist banks willing to allow it, I don't get pissed off about it as it is totally possible for you to do it yourself... it isn't like you are locked out of the actual network effect of credit cards, which is what is important; and given that there even exist easy well- supported full solutions out there like CCBill, it barely seems like a problem.)

<comment><USER4> > A company which has is CCBill. They sign you up as a "high risk" Visa card > merchant (which is an upstream notion supported by Visa), and then are much > more hands on in the checkout process than a normal credit card processor, > with a website people can use to look up their subscriptions to websites (so > like, imagine if all Stripe purchases required you to use their web form and > then showed up on the customer statement as only "Stripe", and if the > customer could then go directly to stripe.com, enter their credit card > details, see they had a subscription with you, and cancel it; to be > explicit: PayPal does not have these restrictions, even though they might > seem similar to you).

> (To note: it does bother me somewhat that PayPal doesn't go out of their way > to support some of this stuff, but as long as the actual credit card > processing firms support it and there exist banks willing to allow it, I > don't get pissed off about it as it is totally possible for you to do it > yourself... it isn't like you are locked out of the actual network effect of > credit cards, which is what is important; and given that there even exist > easy well-supported full solutions out there like CCBill, it barely seems > like a problem.)

[http://pandorablake.com/blog/2013/05/censored-by- ccbill/](http://pandorablake.com/blog/2013/05/censored-by-ccbill/)

> CCBill noted, "It is a violation of CCBill's AUP to reference 'force' in > this context as it implies a non-consensual situation (fantasy or non- > fantasy). In order to be compliant with CCBill's AUP, please ensure all > references to forced acts are removed."

[http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-secret-censorship-of- on...](http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-secret-censorship-of-online-porn)

> The posting or display of any image or wording depicting or related to > extreme violence, incest, snuff, scat or the elimination of any bodily waste > on another person, mutilation, or rape anywhere on the site in a sexual or > erotic manner, including the URL and meta tags.

 __The censorship guidelines they are applying are literally those of CCBill as per their terms of service: __

[https://www.ccbill.com/cs/client/policies/ccbill/acceptable_...](https://www.ccbill.com/cs/client/policies/ccbill/acceptable_use.html)

You can read that there. Its in section 3.

\---

> Do you have a large percentage of people who legitimately buy stuff from > your website later claim they didn't?

Do you not understand that chargeback rates are a calculable, actionable metric? Or was my reference to the fact I thought worked in comparable businesses not an obvious enough hint that I've worked for both physical goods and ummm digital products of an intimate nature?

There is no real legitimate reason for their behavior not being modeled entirely on actionable metrics visible to both parties. Worse, they know and anyone who has dealt with the credit card processing on the merchant end knows it. Its purely, at this point, little more than a political issue being wielded where laws are unpopular.

> This is not your standard fraud model: with porn you see a remarkably large > amount of "oh shit, someone (usually my significant other with whom I share > my finances) just saw this charge on my card, which is totally not OK for > whatever reason, so I guess my best strategy here is to totally disavow the > charge and pretend it was credit card fraud".

You think people don't do this shit with lingerie, sex toys, and anything else along those lines that might indicate an affair. K.

Every other non-credit-card-company pulls the products I've worked with based on return/chargeback metrics that discriminate this problem with perfect ease and shove the full cost on to me. So do credit card companies by the way for anything that don't deem "immoral" in case you were wondering.

The metrics exist, they simply _do not_ use them for this purpose when they target things in this manner.

\---

> A second issue porn has which most websites do not is related: customers > actively do not want their statement to accurately state from whom they > purchased the product, lest someone sees exactly what their fetish is simply > from reading the credit card report. This drastically increases the > chargeback rate from people who legitimately do not remember what they > bought (particularly if the service uses subscriptions).

Yeah. that isn't just a porn thing. Its anything potentially sexual, including lingerie. Please let me know when the credit card companies start banning places like Victoria Secret. The difference here is lingerie is too "mainstream" for that to be a viable target. And if you think companies like Amazon doesn't pull lingerie for high rates of returns, claims of "defects", and/or chargebacks, you've never tried to sell the stuff. This stuff has an operational cost but for purely digital goods (porn) its quite a bit cheaper as well.

[http://www.bedroomjoys.com/discreet-billing- shipping/](http://www.bedroomjoys.com/discreet-billing-shipping/)

> For your privacy and protection when you place your order with > BedroomJoys.com your credit card will be charged by Ryhma LLC and your order > will be displayed on your credit card statement as Ryhma LLC.

[https://www.girlielingerie.com/help-faq](https://www.girlielingerie.com/help- faq)

> We do not include our name on packaging and/or shipping labels, discreet > plain package displaying only "GL" and no reference to lingerie anywhere. > Discreet billing displaying only "GL" and no reference to lingerie anywhere.

\---

> If you want to accept payments for porn, you need a fundamentally different > fraud model than for a standard website, no matter how weirdly digital or in > high demand: this is not about scammers or about black card fraud, this is > about basic lies and deceipt. I see no real reason to claim PayPal must go > out of their way to support this.

I'm talking about merchant accounts with a real bank and/or dealing directly with credit card companies. The banks aren't the ones that place pressure on these people. Its Visa and Mastercard and so forth. Fetlife wasn't operating through Paypal but through something like you suggest and has used CCBill in the past and the consent/non-consent definition is part of how CCBill operates.

\---

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Two or three big players in the credit card market can effectively shutdown a business.

Honest question: do we need better enforcement for the First Amendment rights in the current digital era? Shop owners cannot decide who enters in their shop, should digital service providers be allowed to discriminate?

The same happens when someone is banned from Facebook and Twitter: of course there are other options, but he won't be able to reach 95% of the Internet audience.

Edit: maybe should've spoken about a "different, active enforcement" rather than "better enforcement".

<comment><USER7> _Two or three big players in the credit card market can effectively shutdown a business._

Which is just the tip of the iceberg as to why the idea of a cashless society is so terrifying.

 _Shop owners cannot decide who enters in their shop, should digital service providers be allowed to discriminate?_

Oddly enough, if you belong to a group or political faction that is highly reviled, they certainly can.

Remember when a Wal-Mart refused to provide a birthday cake for a child whose name was "Adolph Hitler Campbell"?

<comment><USER8> Re: right to refuse service [http://www.legalmatch.com/law- library/article/restaurants-ri...](http://www.legalmatch.com/law- library/article/restaurants-right-to-refuse-service.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If there was ever a use for [insert favorite crypto currency here] gaining adoption, the killer feature is that payments can't be halted or frozen to accounts.

It sounds like they got hit by people who were unaware of what FetLife is following due diligence in processing card transactions. As far as I can discern, it's just a social network with a darker focus, which led to an overreaction from a card network.

<comment><USER10> The the post lies this answer:

Why haven't you embraced Bitcoin to get away from the restrictions of the banks / credit card companies? - @Eibon

Answer:

We used to accept bitcoins through Coinbase. They dropped us a year ago because we are a kinky site. No joke.

If a Bitcoin site wants to accept credit cards, then they have to adhere to rules set forth by the credit card companies.

Yes, there are other options, and we are going to look into them, but options like Bitcoin are a nice to have and not currently a viable replacement for being able to accept credit and debit cards on FetLife, no matter how much one might want to believe otherwise.

When we offered Bitcoin as an option, it was responsible for less than 0.1% of our daily transactions.

<comment><USER11> Still don't see why they can't just accept bitcoin. Buying BTC via credit card is trivial via Coinbase (and they won't ban customers), and while they won't get 100%, they're much more likely to get quite a bit more than 0.1% even if BTC is the only payment option.

<comment><USER12> If it is provable that Coinbase is being used as a means of bypassing VISA et al's restrictions on sites like FetLife, what is stop VISA et al doing the same to Coinbase?

<comment><USER13> You can already proxy around the CC companies in all too many ways. Buy gift cards, cash cards, heck, prepaid VISA cards for example.

They're not going to bother going after this kind of thing, they'd lose money over it. It doesn't make sense from a financial perspective.

<comment><USER12> Ah. It turns out FetLife were also banned from Coinbase because Coinbase doesn't want to be cut off as a result.

<comment><USER11> But that's the great thing about BTC... all you need to accept them is a computer, and all you need to know when you got some is an ISP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> We need more sex positivity in this world. While I agree that some of the contents of Fetlife was objectionable from a legal standpoint the owners did a good job at getting rid of those things.

I think the objection today has mostly to do with the fact that they want to tell us what we do in our bedrooms.

<comment><USER15> > I think the objection today has mostly to do with the fact that they want to > tell us what we do in our bedrooms.

Yeah we already see the first signs with Trump defunding abortion organizations. However I don't believe Trump to be behind this, much more Mike Pence.

And I'm really, really afraid that someone will either successfully impeach, maim or kill Trump - because then Mike Pence will succeed him, without anyone to check his powers, given that he'll have the entire extremist religious people in the GOP behind him.

<comment><USER16> I live in Indiana, and I've been living under a Pence government with a Republican supermajority for the last 4 years. It's better than Trump. Yeah, Pence picks ridiculous fights that cost the state a lot of money and he's a socially regressive person who wants to impose his views on everyone, but he's not an unhinged, unstable narcissist. He doesn't make all of his policy within minutes of it being shown on a cable newscast. I'll be able to sleep at night when Trump is replaced by Pence.

<comment><USER15> Trump isn't that unstable, I believe. He's just blindly following the call of profit (except the pussy-grabbing and sexual assault stuff). Most of the decisions of him and his team up to now can be classified as "will make Donald Trump or his team money in some weird way".

And I believe that this will land him in jail or impeachment more sooner than later.

<comment><USER16> Trump responds to stories from cable news by making policy on the fly. Trump called the director of the National Parks system to tell him to produce pictures that show more people at the inauguration. Trump sent Sean Spicer out in front of the press to lie about the size of his inauguration crowd. None of these make him money, and they show instability at a level that makes me uncomfortable in the White House.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> But note that it has been suggested that this is actually an internal political purge with the payment processors and politicians as convenient red herrings: [http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/01/23/links-117-inaugurl- addr...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/01/23/links-117-inaugurl- address/#comment-457123)

</comment><comment><USER18> I am a member of the FetLife community as well as an HN reader. First, let me clear up some misconceptions about FetLife that people on here may have.

It's not a porn site, or at least not primarily a porn site. The UX is a lot closer to that of Facebook but specifically for kinky people. If you go to a kink conference and meet someone, they will likely ask for your FL name to connect with you (incidentally Twitter is the other popular mechanism for communicating with fellow kinksters).

FL has a subscription model, and the main benefit you get out of that is the ability to view other members' posted media better. There is a section of the site called Kinky & Popular which is similar to Reddit's front page. Since people can Love (e.g. like/heart/etc.) their friends' pictures and videos, some become popular and land on this front page. Viewing more than the top 200 or watching the videos requires a subscription of $5/month. This section is dominated by media of pretty, skinny, submissive women, and can be seen as having porn-like content. Note that what ends up here is purely moderated by the community and is not promoted by the FL staff. The people whose media ends up here do not get paid for it.

FL until recently has had a very loose content policy. Things like blood play, consensual non-consent, rape fantasies were all allowed. Illegal things were not: no underage media, no snuff, etc. But people were free to discuss their fantasies, their kinks, etc. without much restriction. Whether you agree or disagree with stuff that gets someone off, you were free to discuss what you want and fantasize about what you want, as long as what you are posting violates no US laws.

FL serves an important purpose to our community: it is a place to share events and local community knowledge, to keep up with people, and importantly to identify abusers. This is the main benefit I see in it and it would be the biggest loss if FL went under.

These latest developments have obviously put a damper on things at FL. They have contacted several groups that are able to advocate for them and give advice, and even the EFL at one point was involved. However, the outlook is bleak. Sadly, the community is not united in supporting FL due to seemingly arbitrary content restrictions, and FL is unable to provide a reasonable level of service without those. If someone knows a way to help this community, please post it here and I'll do my best to point it out to the powers that be there. I am not affiliated with the FL staff, just a user, but they do talk to the community freely and frequently.

<comment><USER19> >and even the EFL at one point was involved

I think you mean the EFF (the Electronic Frontier Foundation).

<comment><USER18> Yes. Typo. Old thread now, but yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There are things that, in the interest of global freedom, need to be taken out of the hands of corporations and government, permanently, forever. The transfer of value is definitely one of them.

<comment><USER21> Erm, VISA, Mastercard, American Express, and Paypal are not US Government. They're private companies.

Visa, Mastercard, and AmEx are doing this on behalf of their own internal policies. Welcome to the free market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This has more front-loaded backstory than a recipe post at Pioneer Woman Cooks, but it sounds like a harbinger for Puritan effects on commerce. Who could be next on the list of these card companies? The cannabis world already has their own troubles, so maybe the ratchet will next tighten on them. That a criteria for canceling an account can be "Illegal or immoral," like those are synonyms, is telling.

<comment><USER15> > The cannabis world already has their own troubles, so maybe the ratchet will > next tighten on them

IIRC cannabis merchants can't even open bank accounts, much less accept credit cards. The only way that they can be annoyed further is by restricting the amount of cash they can hold in the store - which actually would make sense, given that a pot stop filled to the brim with cash is a prime target for gangsters.

<comment><USER23> You're correct. AFAIK all those pot shops in Colorado for instance are cash based only. And have vaults built to store all their cash because the banks won't touch it. There was an episode on Vice TV that touched on this I believe.

<comment><USER24> There was an amusing tidbit in CNN's High Profits (I think it was) where the Colorado tax department was having to put on extra security because the pot shops were having to pay their taxes by physically handing over bags of cash.

<comment><USER23> Yeah! It's absolutely crazy!!

When legalization gets to my state I hope I have the foresight to have the planning and financing in place to be the first dispensary to open here. These things are just redonculous cash cows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This may be naive or old fashioned, but could they take checks? Can banks refuse to cash checks based on "morals"?

<comment><USER26> Yes, but how much business would they lose?

<comment><USER25> I'm sure some, but if even half the people who subscribed by card sent in checks, it's better than nothing.

<comment><USER27> Half would be a miracle, with that level of friction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Why not Bitpay? I'm not associated with them, and have never been on the merchant side of the transaction, but it seems like a 'safe' bitcoin option. And based on my quick read of their merchant TOS[0] bitpay shouldn't (in theory) have an issue with the nature of FetLife's business.

As an aside, it's fun to watch a bunch of old, technically-illiterate and conservative financiers unknowingly sow yet another little seed of their own destruction. I guess being at the top of the heap can make one feel invulnerable...

[0] [https://bitpay.com/about/terms#merchant](https://bitpay.com/about/terms#merchant)

<comment><USER18> They did try Coinbase before and said that it accounted for less than 0.1% of their transaction volume. People just don't use BitCoin enough. I imagine if it was a higher percentage, you could make the case that switching to BTC-only would drive it higher, but at such minimal numbers, staking your entire business on it seems like a bad risk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I started hearing about this several days ago via a subreddit. There had been some confusion//discussion about what was going on regarding the group deletions.

I'm glad to get more of the story.

</comment><comment><USER30> At least in europe wire transfer via SEPA should be a viable alternative.

<comment><USER31> Banks in the EU would just close their accounts.

<comment><USER30> But there are a lot more choices than just 4 payment processors.

<comment><USER31> True but look at the Bitcoin exchanges in the UK for example. You can hop between 12 banks and each one will close your account until none are left.

Doesn't bode well for the stability of the business.

We need a payment system which isn't Visa/Mastercard and preferably not US based.

Honestly, China Union Pay might just say yes to the business that those decline. If only they break into the international markets better...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Thank HN: You guys helped me land my dream job. - <AUTHOR> I wanted to send out a quick letter of appreciation to the HN community for helping me make a connection with an awesome company, who later made me an offer, which I happily accepted.
Last month, I posted my resume on the "Who wants to be hired?" thread [1], and was contacted by several companies, many of which were relevant to what I was looking for, both in a company and in a position.
After a few rounds of interviews, one of those companies, Kaggle [2], decided to make me an offer, and within a couple of days, I accepted. Not only do I get to work with an awesome team on a great product, but I get to do it all from home. And, I get to travel to the great San Francisco a few times a year and meet face-to-face with the folks I will be working with.
My last day with my previous company was Friday, and I will be joining Kaggle two weeks from today. I will be spending this time off building my dream setup in my new office upstairs.
The main reason I posted this was just as a thanks to those that allowed that thread, and those that helped keep the thread active.
The secondary reason was to hopefully hear some success stories others may have had from the thread.
The third reason was to let others know that the thread was successful, and that I see value in it as a recurring whoishiring thread, benefiting others in the HN community looking for a good fit.
The fourth reason was to encourage those of you looking to get hired to post in this month's thread [3], as it may very well help connect you with your next opportunity.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7685170
[2] https://www.kaggle.com
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7833250 <comment><USER2> When I saw Jerad's post on Hacker News, he looked like a good fit for a developer role at Kaggle. Our team interviewed him remotely and I met him in person and verified that he has the talent, curiosity, and life-long interest in software development that'll make him a great addition. We're really excited to bring him aboard.

Thanks HN for helping us make a rare find!

P.S. If you're into machine learning and/or have an interest in developing a great site for a community (like Jerad), we're always looking for more to join us: [http://www.kaggle.com/careers](http://www.kaggle.com/careers)

<comment><USER3> Jerad's a great dev and a great person. You guys did well!

<comment><USER4> Oh, nice -- until I saw your comment I wasn't aware Jerad was a Louisville local! Congrats Jerad, and congratulations to Kaggle!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Congrats! I'm a former Kaggle employee and it is an incredible place to work.

<comment><USER6> That's the best kind of endorsement any company can get. Kudos for taking the time out to say something positive about a former employer, normally whenever people make an effort to talk about former employers it is only in a negative sense.

<comment><USER7> For immediate happiness, I find the direct manager more important than the company. Besides my current employer, I recommend anyone work for Jonathan Clay or Mark Fussell if you ever get the chance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I had a similar experience. I thought "eh, why not?" and got a surprising number of high quality leads. I started a remote working contract for a group in London on the 12th and it's been working quite well.

</comment><comment><USER9> Congratulations! Work hard, and remember this if you ever find yourself going through a rough patch or taking things for granted. Kick butt!

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely good advice, thanks. It'll be nice to have this to remember this opportunity, for sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had kind of the opposite experience; interviewed one or more times with a bunch of the "Who's hiring" companies and only one had the decency to send an email with an update; the others went into radio silence.

<comment><USER11> Me too. There were a few "Who's Hiring" companies where I went through multiple interviews- I even got a verbal offer from one- only for the companies to just stop responding to me.

<comment><USER10> In a strange way this makes me feel a bit better (so it's not just me). If there was no downside I'll publicly shame these companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I agree that the Who Wants To Be Hired thread is valuable and helpful. I was a bit late to the party, but I still had 4 companies and 2 recruiters contact me, one of which turned into an on-site interview at a YC company. I would definitely love to see this thread continue to be posted every month.

</comment><comment><USER13> I too was impressed by the response from posting on that thread. I had recently moved to Germany to be closer to my partner and got spotted by a company that was really interesting to me (MenschDanke [0]). Had a few interviews, met the team and all that went well and I start working on Monday :)

[0]: [http://www.menschdanke.de/](http://www.menschdanke.de/) This thread should definitely be continued!

</comment><comment><USER14> I too had a good experience and had the opportunity to speak with many interesting people... however the only thing lacking was the visibility of my preferences. I wasn't surprised that the majority of people who contacted me were from SF but everyone who had seemed oblivious to the fact that I'm based in Canada, not interested in relocating, but love to work remotely.

If we do another thread I will certainly try again (still looking).

<comment> k-mcgrady Did you put your location and whether you working looking remote or on site work on your post or did they ignore that?

<comment><USER14> I did and it seems to have been ignored or missed by plenty of folks.

<comment><USER15> Can someone do another "who wants to be hired?" thread

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> First off, Congrats!

Secondly, I didn't know those things actually worked so I never bothered posting so good to see that they do.

<comment><USER17> Me too. Now I'm tempted to post one too, although I'm more of a sys-admin type person and not really a developer (though I am learning!).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Really happy for you Jared! I'm a full-stack Rails dev in Boston and posted in the new "Who's Looking?" thread. Wish me luck.

</comment><comment><USER19> Congratulations! It's good to see people getting results from the "Who wants to be hired?" threads!

</comment><comment><USER20> Is there any threads for people located in Europe only, Switzerland more precisely? ps. It's hard to find skilled people & vice-versa so this could really help

<comment><AUTHOR> None of the whoishiring threads are location specific, but if you're open to remote, these may help you find a good remote fit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Congratulations! Kaggle sounds like a wonderful place to work.

</comment><comment><USER22> Hope the dream continues when you actually start working. :)

</comment><comment><USER23> Congratulations! I found my dream job in IRC. It's always the unusual places you find your dream job. Kaggle looks very interesting.

Good luck to both you.

</comment><comment><USER24> Wow, congrats! Like a few people on this thread, I wasn't aware these actually paid off. Well done on landing an awesome job.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'll have to give the 'Who Wants to Be Hired' thread a try when it comes up again.

Thanks for sharing your story! Very motivating!

</comment><comment><USER26> Congrats Jerad!

P.S. Kaggle sounds like a great place to work - Just out of curiosity do you know if Kaggle is looking for any front-end devs.? :)

</comment><comment><USER27> Congrats. It's encouraging to hear of a jobs postings that really do work.

</comment><comment><USER28> Congrats! Lets hope more people land their dream job via HN.

</comment><comment><USER29> Great post! And congratulations. Hope it goes well!

</comment><comment><USER30> gratz on the job.

did you ever implement the 'bells' system for the animal crossing site? That idea intrigued me as a workaround for ad blockers.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's been slow, but it's promised for the next release (after the current one we're working on, which should release in the next few weeks). I will admit we've not handled it very well, as far as timing, as we talked about it way too early.

But it's at the top of the list following this release, so nothing else will get updated without the Bells shop being implemented, however long it takes us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Congratulation! Kaggle is my dream company too : )

</comment><comment><USER32> Congrats and good luck at the new job!

</comment><comment><USER15> Congrats. This is the best use of HN!

</comment><comment><USER33> Congratulations! Good Luck at Kaggle.

</comment><comment><USER34> Well done and congratulations!

</comment><comment><USER35> Congratulations.. Awesome...

</comment><comment><USER36> This is awesome. Well done!

</comment><comment><USER37> Very cool and congrats!

</comment><comment><USER38> congratulations! Kaggle is a great company!

</comment><comment><USER39> Many Congrats.

</comment><comment><USER40> congrats! :D

</comment><comment><USER41> Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER42> Congratulations. It takes a lot of courage to put yourself out there like that.

</comment><comment><USER43> Interesting that this thread has gained so much traction. I created an "Ask HN" submission this morning asking about people's experiences with the monthly "Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?" threads, which got ignored and promptly burried!

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7832404](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7832404)

<comment><USER44> Probably because the idea for this thread was given the official go-ahead by dang [0]

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7682938](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7682938))

<comment><USER43> I don't see what that has to do with the impact on my thread...?

The freelancing threads ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7162201](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7162201), [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5803767](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5803767), etc) are popular, appear to be well-received and reliably receive a number of up-votes.

For some reason, me asking for people's experiences in that thread is attracting a number of down-votes. Odd.</comment></comment></comment>


How to Get Upvoted on Hacker News - <AUTHOR> https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-get-upvoted-on-hacker-news-692360e85ef8 <comment><USER2> Must we gameify everything? Reverse engineering serendipity is such a miserable way to think/exist.

<comment><USER3> My gut reaction was: Please keep the karma farming to Reddit - if you must...

Though, the article is actually pretty interesting and points people in the direction of the type of mindset that is appreciated and promoted on HackerNews - being a maker, and having a curious personality (and sharing it here).

I think the info in this article _could_ be gamified a bit, but really, it's usually pretty obvious if someone is sharing something out of genuine interest in it. It's pretty hard to pretend to be nerding out about a more efficient algorithm or how to hack together a programmable mirror.

<comment><USER4> > being a maker, and having a curious personality

aka "participate in the site" (via show and ask)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The easiest way is to just email and ask if a story is a good fit.

I don't think that will scale, but if a story is legitimately interesting and your email is short, you might find it's given preference.

The full-time goal of HN is to stay interesting at every timestep. A lot of the reason people's interesting stories don't get upvoted is that there are so many interesting stories to talk about each day, and there are 30 slots on the front page. Interesting _discussions_ also take time to foster, so you have to give content a little bit of time to accumulate well-written comments, which necessarily appear 30 minutes to several hours after hitting the front page.

Ultimately it's an interesting intellectual exercise to analyze HN like this, but probably not too useful. The data hides the underlying fact that HN is fine-tuned to be interesting. Just be interesting, and eventually you'll get a slot. It's as easy and as hard as that.

<comment><USER6> Email who?

<comment><USER7> There's a link in the footer.

<comment><USER6> I didn't realize parent meant email the site admins. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Relevant - Effects of title length on upvotes gained by a [Reddit] post:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/durndj/eff...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/durndj/effects_of_title_length_oc/?limit=500)

<comment><USER9> And the per-subreddit version: [https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/duub8p/ave...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/duub8p/average_reddit_submission_score_by_title_length/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There are times of high usage as evident from analysis of front page, and new page postings, let this read as "more users on the board make more votes possible for any one comment or submission".

Be genuine. find things that are interesting to you, and are willing to discuss with others.

HN is like the digital/intellectual version of walking into a fitness club and seeing the different levels of expertise and the specialty activities, with volunteer training coaches. Posts of tabloid-like prurient interest, or gratuitously illicit content usually dont do well on HN

<comment><USER11> Agree. Low quality stories won't make the front page, but as someone else commented, there are many competing high quality stories. And what I find really fascinating is the extent to which randomness impacts the success of a particular story. I may get to posting this at one point, but I have simulated and fitted that first distribution of scores in the article with only 3 parameters: rate of story posting, likelihood of upvote and number of readers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Shorter answer: go with the flow, drop your personal opinion and if you disagree with someone - remain silent.

</comment><comment><USER13> Seems to be working, congrats! :)

<comment><USER14> I claim that pretty much any post with "Hacker News" in the title will attract attention. And after all, attention from others what we all want, right? (I'm too lazy to verify this, but at least it sounds plausible.)

<comment><USER11> OP here, very true. There is a section on that towards the end of the (too lengthy) article. Posts referencing HN have an average 50% higher score.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I note this was posted around noon pacific on a weekend.

</comment><comment><USER15> What is karma even for? Why should anyone collect as many karma as possible?</comment>


Ask HN: Can You Start Coding at 25 and Still Be the Top Coder in a Decade? - <AUTHOR> If someone picks coding at 25 and puts in his best effort for a decade, can he reach the coding skills of the top 1% programmers? <comment><USER2> Nope, because unlike the 15-24's, you're old enough to realize you're not in the 1% because you never will be. My recommendation? Lie.

</comment><comment><USER3> Please define your success style. There are versatile programmers who can handle all the stack and mentor others, developer who deliver overly great products even under constraints, programmers who make lots of money, and specialists who are a point of reference for a specific technology. There also are very good all-around developers like John Carmack who also made lots of money... But also Thompson and Ritchie fall in the 1% for sure in my opinion. If you have the problem solving and algorythmic skills you need to be a good developer, age is not really important.

</comment><comment><USER4> Like winning a lottery, or reaching Olympic 100m standard; some can, 99% won't.

</comment><comment><USER5> Absolutely, ten years is plenty of time to be in the top 1%, which I take to mean deep knowledge of several technologies, strong analytical/debugging skills, ability to add to and innovate with cutting edge technologies, and preference to get stuff done without fuss or muss.</comment>


Show HN: Cornea AI – Using Deep Learning to Predict Photo Popularity - <AUTHOR> https://cornea.ai/ <comment><USER2> This is very interesting. I cannot stop thinking that this is the logical next step of social media, or if you want to make the circle a bit bigger - photography; or even bigger - self representation.

People strive to be perceived in a certain light and be approved for this egocentric perception of oneself. First it started with favorable pictures that you deemed fitting. Then along came filters, which "enhance" certain features of your pictures. Now Cornea AI - which guesses the approval rate of your pictures.

I somehow find it beautiful. But then again I feel a bit sad that humans have come thus far...

<comment><AUTHOR> You summarised our vision very well, we want to democratise creativity so you never have to guess what will work on social media

<comment><USER3> I'm sorry but what does this have to do with democratization?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Could you plug this into one of those image generation algorithms and generate a potentially popular image from scratch?

Side note: I can imagine high speed ad networks in the future using this to deliver custom images in real time to users based on their profiles. Tweaked of course based on the interests of their extended network and the likelihood of going viral within that network.

<comment><USER5> Hi, That can be done, but image generation algorithms require a bit more time to be good enough for such a thing. Two major bottlenecks (I am assuming you are talking about GANs) are: 1\. The algorithms are still not too good for hi res images. 2\. The algorithms work very well on images where fine grained features are not that important. (For example images of nature), but they introduce unwanted features otherwise (Eyes looking other ways etc.). We might be all ready by next ICLR/NIPS though, cannot say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very interesting. Can you please talk about the algorithm you use to predict the popularity score .

<comment><AUTHOR> A neural network has been trained to differentiate between popular and non- popular images and give like scores. This network was optimised to understand the features that made a photo popular on social media. Part of the work was inspired by Karpathy's blog on selfie ([http://karpathy.github.io/2015/10/25/selfie/](http://karpathy.github.io/2015/10/25/selfie/)). However, our algorithm works on different type of images and not just selfies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe someone should do an app that writes facebook posts for you, predicting what will be the most popular.

Or Reddit -- since the populaity of all Reddit posts is known it would be a good training set for such an AI :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely! With visual content being predicted for popularity, a model can be made which produces quality content based on the training data of existing popular content from different sources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting technology, not much of a photo person but would like to know how are you building the dataset considering there are so many different types of images that can trend at any point of time?

</comment><comment><USER9> Score seems to work on some images but did not work on my dog's photo - how do you guys evaluate the accuracy?

<comment><AUTHOR> We have trained our model on public photos which were popular/trending at some point of time. We fed these images to a deep CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) which started to recognise features that made photos popular. What we realise in the process that these features do change with time so we have added a temporal component to our training set to ensure our model is relevant. It is currently optimised more for human photos and travel images so maybe in our next iteration, we can predict pets photos as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Do you consider a simple web interface where I can upload a photo?

<comment><AUTHOR> As of now, the focus is only on the mobile apps. Though,in future we are planning to release an API with a web demo for the same.</comment></comment>


SSD Streaming at Last.fm - <AUTHOR> http://blog.last.fm/2009/12/14/launching-xbox-part-2-ssd-streaming

<comment><USER2> I'm a little confused as to the actual problem being solved here.

For SSDs there is essentially no seek penalty, so random read and sequential read performance are essentially the same. Spinning hard drives, because of the seek penalty, have pretty poor random read performance but fairly good sequential read.

Surely, for a streaming application, it should be sequential read that is the key requirement?

You can predict with a very high degree of accuracy what piece of data you'll be requiring in the near future, at which point the seek can be scheduled well in advance.

This, of course, assumes your data is laid out in a sane fashion and you're not blindly jumping all over the disks.

Strikes me that last.fm could potentially do with looking at approaches like Facebook's Haystack where they put considerable time in to minimising the amount of IOPS required to pull an image off of the disk.

<comment><AUTHOR> Last.fm does progressive streaming, not HTTP downloads.

i.e. it reads 16KB of one track, sends it to one user, then 16KB of the next track, sends it to the next user, etc. Then after 1 second it goes through and does the whole thing again.

This is a massively seek-heavy operation.

<comment><USER3> Only when implemented naively. Why not transfer the whole 5-10MB file at once into a buffer somewhere (on-box, in a proxy, whatever) and then stream from there? DRAM is vastly cheaper than trying to get a seek-heavy architecture to scale on seek-limited devices.

But then, moving to flash is sort of a complicated version of the same solution...

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not a complicated version of the same solution - it's cheaper version of the same solution. As expensive as flash is, it's still cheaper than the equivalent amount of RAM.

<comment><USER3> Cheaper to buy as a part, not cheaper to implement. Given that last.fm has a bunch of boxes with the data already on them, replacing them all with SSD versions sounds like a _more_ expensive solution than a bunch of buffering proxies to me.

And in any case, I said "complicated", not "cheaper", and I'll stand by that. Complexity has costs all by itself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Run-of-the-mill caching proxies are no good in front of a distributed progressive streaming system such as this, because they would have to be modified to stream progressively and also to authenticate requests, which would increase the complexity far more than the comparatively minor changes Last.fm had to make to MogileFS.

So I say it's cheaper and less complex.

<comment><USER3> Huh? I'm all but certain that a default squid install would work fine. "Progressive streaming" at the server side generally doesn't require any configuration at all in TCP -- the client reads what it wants, the buffers fill up, and the transmission stalls on a missing ACK. And the authentication layer is almost certainly downstream of the backend storage anyway, so I'm not sure how that would matter.

Swapping hardware is a _really_ expensive expensive change in the IT world, significantly more so than deploying new hardware on an existing infrastructure. That you somehow think otherwise is surprising to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Has anyone tried this with a local caching file system like OpenAFS? I've always wanted to but AFS is a PITA to get setup.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is the type of stuff I love to read about. Thanks for posting it.</comment>


Anthony Bourdain–'As Honest and Fearless in His Words as He Was in His Travels' - <AUTHOR> https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/06/08/anthony-bourdain-honest-and-fearless-his-words-he-was-his-travels-dead-61-apparent <comment><AUTHOR> _The willingness of people to not see what is plainly apparent, right there, enormous and frankly, hideous. Unfortunately, we live in a world where it 's nearly impossible to even describe reality much less deal with it. It's utterly heartbreaking._

</comment><comment><USER2> The media is really going crazy for this suicidal, mentally ill man. Calling him Fearless and "loved life" is remarkably tone deaf.

Why blame the victim? I blame those around him.</comment>


30 Weeks of Game Development - <AUTHOR> http://www.uberent.com/outlandgames/2013/03/08/30-weeks-of-development/ <comment><USER2> Awesome, thanks for posting!

It's interesting how the core game was basically finished very early on (week twelve or so), and then the rest of it was "just" polish. So in this case, the proverbial last 20% are really 60% of the work.

<comment><USER3> I would say polish/bug fixing should be closer to 50% than 20%.

<comment><USER4> I usually call it the first 90% and the second 90%.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great insight into the effort needed to build a game. I'm counting 19 man months of work. With an average yearly salary of $80'000 and a sales price of $0.99 the game needs to sell roughly 180'000 copies to pay for development.

<comment><USER6> I think they will have in-game purchases, like coins etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great work guys! I am writing a game with my friends on our spare time and we have kept all the builds since the beginning so we could document it's progress with a video as well. Glad to see that people respond well to this. Wish you the best of luck!

</comment><comment><USER8> Congrats! Can you elaborate on this point?

        Despite being an iOS game 95% of development was done on PC.

Was it a C++/OpenGL game that had a small iOS AppDelegate / GLKit / UIKit / etc scaffold?

<comment><USER9> You nailed it. Almost entirely C++/OpenGL with platform specific code only as necessary. I count 7 iOS specific files and they're all fairly small. What you mentioned plus interfaces for analytics, in-app purchases, game center, and profiles.

<comment><USER10> >Almost entirely C++/OpenGL with platform specific code only as necessary.

Well, I'm looking forward to seeing you in the next Humble Bundle, then. :-)

Could you elaborate on your use of analytics: how did you handle pre-release testing and what were you most surprised to learn from the data?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Could you explain, "Despite being an iOS game 95% of development was done on PC."? Don't you need to do iOS development on a Mac?

<comment><USER9> Sure. Right now our custom tech supports Windows, OS X, Linux, and iOS. I'm most comfortable in windows so that was my personal preference. That plus the Visual Studio debugger kicks the bajeezus out of Xcode for C++.

Some features could only be worked on through OS X. Gamecenter leaderboards, in app purchases, analytics, and some UI bits. Some of those don't even work in the simulator and require an actual device.

The windows build was missing a handful of features but none of them matter for development. No full screen, no settings, hard coded resolution config, incomplete UI, etc.

<comment><USER12> In the screenshot below it looks like you used SublimeText instead of Visual Studio. Does it have benefits for CPP dev ?

[https://outland-live.s3-us- west-2.amazonaws.com/media/downlo...](https://outland-live.s3-us- west-2.amazonaws.com/media/downloads/30weeksOfOutland.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Very cool, again thanks for sharing. I actually liked the credits snippet as well, mostly because I didn't see anyone who didn't belong there. Software Engineer, art, effects, animation and sound. Not sure what VO is.

But seems like you guys run a lean operation - and I love that. That's what most teams should be.

<comment><AUTHOR> VO is voice over (the announcer). Uber Entertainment definitely runs a lean operation, with everyone wearing multiple hats. In fact, the person responsible for VO in the game happens to double as our office manager. You can check out some of the other stuff we do at <http://www.uberent.com/>

<comment><USER13> That voice over was AMAZING - and as such is a skillset of it's own. I respect that.

I happy you guys don't got "game designers" who happen to be idea guys in disguise.

Keep it up, I'll pay for your stuff just because of that. The quality is just a bonus.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great job on the game, out of curiosity why did it take 3 submissions before it finally went on the app store?

<comment><USER15> From reddit's r/gamedev post:

"We missed a checkbox one time for IAP and a restore purchases button the second time."

Link: [http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/19vli0/30_weeks_of_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/19vli0/30_weeks_of_game_development/c8s3mza)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I learn something from this: to make your character look like it's standing (instead of floating) you just need to tilt the floor a bit :P

<comment><USER17> Where did you see that?

<comment><USER16> Compare 0:36 and 1:30.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Congrats, thanks for sharing this.

As a game dev myself, I'd definitely love to hear more about the custom engine you used and why you chose it over the other options on the market (like Unity, which you mentioned).

<comment><USER9> It's the same engine as our much larger game, Planetary Annihilation. <http://www.uberent.com/pa/> PA needs it's own engine as no off the shelf option is sufficient for it's needs.

Outland Games is a _much_ simpler game, but the PA engine is modular enough that we could scale down to mobile. The upside is that a lot of the work for Outland Games will carry forward with the engine and help future projects (including PA).

<comment><USER19> I'm on the PA Kickstarter. Looking forward to playing the finished product!

<comment><USER20> Aren't we all? :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Congratulation on this writeup (and video), this is amazing

Care to share how the team was built etc? Who's on contract, who's on the business, how did you get people to wear multiple hats?

I would have gone the way of building it on the PC and later porting it to iOS (or whatever you want) probably using SDL, oh well =)

</comment><comment><USER22> Looks awesome.

Curious if you are the developer? If so, did you pay your help (graphics, sound, etc) or were they volunteers?

If so, how much should one budget to hire people for that end?

</comment><comment><USER23> Looks great. I'd love to give it a go but I don't own an iDevice. Are there plans to release to other platforms such as Android?

</comment><comment><USER24> Just curious, when you started what was the original pitch that you had for what the game would be?

</comment><comment><USER25> Out of interest - did you feel the sale bump after publishing the blog post and sharing it around?

</comment><comment><USER26> Hm... it wouldn't let me purchase on my iPad 1: says it requires a camera. :(

<comment><USER27> That's probably done to prevent iPad 1 owners from purchasing the game. Besides requiring iOS 6.0, requiring a camera is currently the only way to exclude the first-generation iPad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> How many people worked on this? What roles did they play?

<comment><USER29> You can see who worked on it on the bottom of this image: [https://outland- live.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/media/downlo...](https://outland-live.s3-us- west-2.amazonaws.com/media/downloads/30weeksOfOutland.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Nice work. Good game. Solid graphics.

</comment><comment><USER31> very cool. thanks for sharing</comment>


Python *Args and **Kwargs Made Easy - <AUTHOR> https://www.pythoncheatsheet.org/blog/python-easy-args-kwargs <comment><USER2> Thank you, I used to get scared looking at those * s and * * s and why are they called args & kwargs which sound like particles in high energy physics :)</comment>


BattleBots Is Back - <AUTHOR> http://www.battlebots.com/BattleBots.com/Home/Home.html <comment><USER2> Years ago I attended the last two BattleBots tapings on Treasure Island. Words fail me when I try to describe how much fun it is to watch BattleBots live.

I had never seen the TV show when I bought my first BattleBots tickets (while randomly browsing Craigslist). After getting home from the live version, I tried to watch the show a little. I can't stand the TV version. It bore the same relationship to the actual event that a QVC infomercial about Matchbox cars does to a real Corvette.

The one drawback of BattleBots (specifically) is that it appears to threaten to consume all of the builders' money and then come back for more. After a while, watching high-performance motor controllers get bounced off the Plexiglas, one after another, can start to make you wince. It might be cheaper to just buy a lawnmower and push it back and forth over a big stack of $5 bills. If I were actually going to build a bot I might choose to enter a competition where more of the pieces make it back home intact.

UPDATE: On the other hand, it's undeniable that watching things catch fire, get mangled, or be sacrificed in bold gambits is part of the fun.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is great news. It seemed like BattleBots was just a couple years too early for its time. With the wide availability of Lego NXT, Arduino, and an overall "hardware hacking" ethos permeating tech culture this could catch on in a much bigger way. Best of luck to them!

<comment><USER4> Battlebots didn't end because it was ahead of its time. In my opinion, Battlebots ended because the ruleset created an optimal robot ("spin as much of your mass as possible as fast as possible and hit the other robot before they do the same") and it became boring to watch the two resulting fights: "Optimal robot utterly destroys non-optimal robot in one blow" and "two optimal robots charge directly at each other and in one blow the match is resolved". Note the "one blow" in both descriptions... which of course is not to say it was "one blow" in literally every fight, but it often was.

If they're going to succeed, they're going to have to tune the rules better, but that causes its own problems as people start to feel Battlebots is stacking the deck against effective robots... which is in fact exactly what they are doing, after all. Maybe if they are open about what they are doing and tune the rules carefully after each competition, they can keep the fun factor up, but no matter how you slice it, they walk a delicate line between actually effective robots and interesting-to-watch robots.

I don't know that there have been any terribly interesting technological advances that would change the equation about whether Battlebots is "ahead of its time". Under the scenario in question, putting any sort of clever logic on board of any kind (autonomous or human-assisted) is just adding a complicated part that will die on the first blow, so where a lot of the advances have occurred isn't really relevant to Battlebots.

<comment><USER5> Yeah I'd like to see them climb in sophistication, be autonomous too; maybe make them find each other on a lumpy battlefield, via vision or something. CPU power has gotten much cheaper since the last time they were current. It was just hardware.

You (or at least I, rather) want the competition to be in brain power or behavior rather than just gimmicky hardware. It risks not being as popular but, /simulated/ robots could have unlimited hardware and computation power. If you got interesting behaviors like stalking, maybe decoying, whatever. You could at least render the fight beautifully, to make up partially for the lack of it being real. The sophistication of the hardware would be unlimited, you could have one roll up in a ball or otherwise change shape. And, that would be /some/ platform for botmaking. I think the physics models are powerful enough to model damage. Dayam, someone should do this.

<comment><USER4> "You (or at least I, rather) want the competition to be in brain power or behavior rather than just gimmicky hardware."

To be honest, I don't really care. They need to embrace the fact that it's a show, an artificial competition where rule #1 is "the fights must be interesting to human beings" and #2 is "the fight must be fair in the sense that everybody knew this year's rules at the same time and everybody is working under the same rules". How they get there is up to them.

I think to fit into their original niche, they need to be real, physical robots for most people to care, and unfortunately given the nature of the competition it seems unlikely that autonomous logic is going to play a big role.

Although one thought did occur to me that I feel stupid for not realizing before. I am very skeptical of the ability of complicated circuitry to survive on the robot itself, but of course there's no reason not to put the logic up there with the human, getting remote sensor data and issuing commands. _Duh!_ Now we're cooking with fire. Full autonomy still seems like asking for trouble but I often thought some computer-aided targeting assistance could have been helpful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> They need to lift the size restriction, and make a fully autonomous category. I want to see the DARPA Grand Challenge entrants try to destroy each other.

Of course, they'd need to increase the size of the purse. They could possibly be solved with bigger venues and more expensive tickets. The marginal cost of a robot car is probably around $175K, depending on the sensors. It would be fun to make active sensor denial weapons, to blind lasers or cameras.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Unfortunately, the April 2009 event will not be open to the public. However, future events will be. Keep checking the website for future details."

Does anybody know how to get tickets?

<comment><USER7> There's also robogames:

<http://www.robogames.net/></comment></comment>


Hello fax: the friendliest full fax alternative Ive seen so far - <AUTHOR> https://www.hellofax.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Note: this is not my web site/company. I've been looking for fax alternatives for a client. Efax.com's web site wouldn't even load to let me pay for a trial (!) and other options just weren't as easy to use or didn't provide a full feature set.</comment>


When Polymorphism Fails   - <AUTHOR> http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/when-polymorphism-fails

<comment><USER2> _You get the easy part: you need to decide what classes Willie is to construct the tree with._ ... _I won't give away the answer, but a Standard Bad Solution involves the use of a switch or case statment (or just good old-fashioned cascaded-ifs). A Slightly Better Solution involves using a table of function pointers, and the Probably Best Solution involves using polymorphism._

If the requirement was to show which _classes_ should be used and the result is a series of conditionals or function pointers (even if they are wrapped in a single "operator" class), I'd say the requirements _have not_ been met. To me, "classes" implies doing it with a class hierarchy or polymorphism.

</comment><comment><USER3> That example of coding an elfLikesMe attribute for 150 monster types, why to code it at all? My first hunch would be to use SQL table for monster attributes, then adding new attribute would be equivalent to adding a new SQL field, or table?</comment>


Why are ugly websites so successful? - <AUTHOR> http://giraffeforum.com/wordpress/2012/02/12/why-are-ugly-websites-so-successful/ <comment><USER2> I think ugly websites do well is because the focus of the site is the content. The quality of the content draws people to return to the website. Craig's list is a great example of this. It doesn't look that great but it gets the job done.

</comment><comment><USER3> Some reasons:

\- They are simple

\- Basic font faces that look like a magazine or newspaper seems approachable to basic users

\- It's easy to take part in the content (consume) rather than interact.

\- Basic layouts seem more approachable to interact with (prgmr.com vs rackspace.com)</comment>


Tiobe Index for May 2020: May Headline: Programming language C is back in the n - <AUTHOR> https://web.archive.org/web/20200503005803/https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ <comment><USER2> Why is the link to webarchive instead of a direct link to Tiobe? ([https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/](https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/))

<comment><USER3> Tiobe page changes over time.

<comment><USER2> Ah, how stupid of me, that's true ;-)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the impact of opening FB and Twitter offices in Vancouver? - <AUTHOR>

How will the opening of new Facebook and Twitter offices in Vancouver, Canada affect the city and will it affect the Bay Area (i.e. recruitment of Canadians)? <comment><USER2> One of the reasons the big SF/Valley companies are opening Canadian offices is that even Canada's most expensive cities (Toronto, Vancouver) are a relative bargain. Engineering salaries are lower, rents are cheaper, and government money is plentiful (SRED, etc).

I think it will do two things to Vancouver's startup ecosystem. In the short term it will be painful as you lose talent to the better funded new competition. In the long term it is a win as the big companies validate the Vancouver 'brand', increasing exposure and attracting new investment.</comment>


Ask HN: An HN idea exchange?  - <AUTHOR>

I bet lots of us have a ton of ideas that we think are pretty good but don't have the time to build and develop.<p>If you've got some good ideas that you don't mind giving away, post them here. If you see an idea you would like to build, it would be cool if you mentioned it in the thread; that way like-minded people who might otherwise not meet have a chance to work with each other. <comment><AUTHOR> I'll get started with a couple of ideas of my own:

1\. A site where a developer can do some basic domain modeling, select a database type, programming language and framework, and the site will generate a compressed file (zip or tar) that contains the wired up site with all the basic CRUD forms. Premium options could include authentication being built in to the apps, or reporting suites, or all sorts of extra features.

2\. A better way to find breaking news that actually has significance. The big news sites have decided that celebrity divorces are equally as important as earthquakes that cause massive casualties, so following breaking news through them has become an enormous waste of time. Find a way to determine if breaking news is actually news by way of real-time search through things like twitter. Make it configurable so that users can specify what sort of news categories they're interested in (finance, world news, US news, politics, etc).

<comment><USER2> Is number two solved by BNO news?

<comment><AUTHOR> It looks like it may be; is there a way for an ordinary citizen to get alerts via Twitter or email?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> OK here's one that I was thinking of. A hardware compatibility website that lists replacement products, specifically outdated ones that were replaced by newer versions. Some context, about a month ago I was trying to replace a broken garage door opener for a sear's garage door. Well, the Sears line is no longer available and now it is Craftsman. I asked an employee if the new craftsman opener it would be functional, but it was ultimately left up to a crapshoot on if it would work or not. Something like this would be useful for me.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think online job sites suck and there has to be a better way. Linkedin is doing a better job, but it doesn't seem to have cracked the puzzle just yet. The job postings on HN are a great example, need to figure a way to transfer the networking/community aspect along with the up/down review aspect for jobs and job seekers. Anyone else interested in discussing the idea further, msg me at pjharrin [at] gmail . c0m

</comment><comment><USER5> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=798009>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=848186>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1120629>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks - your post today was actually what made me think about posting this :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You're asking for a Hacker News version of this:

<http://www.halfbakery.com/>

<http://www.halfbakery.com/category/Computer>

<comment><AUTHOR> The problem I have with halfbakery is that a significant portion of the ideas are there as ideas that people thought were funny and submitted for a laugh; not so much ideas that people thought could actually turn into something bigger.</comment></comment>