What Elm and Haskell are teaching mainstream JS [video] - <AUTHOR> http://begriffs.com/posts/2015-11-30-functional-front-end-coding.html <comment><USER2> Elm is definitely a very interesting language. I would recommend the following if anyone is interested in seriously learning it:

[https://pragmaticstudio.com/elm](https://pragmaticstudio.com/elm)

<comment><USER3> And for Redux, the creator (Dan Abramov) recently released a bunch of tutorial videos for free on egghead.io:

[https://egghead.io/lessons/javascript-redux-the-single- immut...](https://egghead.io/lessons/javascript-redux-the-single-immutable- state-tree)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a year-deep front end developer, I have recently taken a strong interest in functional programming principles and am trying to learn their use-cases.

Does anyone have ideas for small projects I can complete that will really drive home the importance/benefits of functional programming?

<comment><USER3> The main benefit of Elm and Redux is the simplicity of their core abstraction: that your app is just a reducing function over a stream of events from the outside world including game ticks, mouse clicks, <input> field changes, etc.

For example, a counter that increments per click:

        initApp = { counter: 0 };
        stepApp = (action, oldApp) => oldApp.counter + 1;
        viewApp = (app) => `<p>Clicks so far: ${app.counter}</p>`;

        currentApp = reduce(stepApp, initApp, mouseClicks);
        currentHtml = map(viewApp, currentApp);

This makes it really easy to inspect, test, and reason about what's actually happening and why since every change to your app had to be caused by an event that triggered a step from oldApp to newApp. Redux and I think Elm come with a debugger that even prints out `{action}, {oldState}, {newState}`. Makes it really easy to get a reading on things.

Though it's possibly hard to appreciate this until you've battled it out in the trenches with an abstraction that isn't so simple, especially on a large, complex app.

I personally found Redux (w/ React) immediately accessible and think it's a good place to start, especially if you're already coming from React or you want to reap the benefits without leaving Javascript. I'd feel really comfortable using Redux on any team project that was already using React and some other Flux'y implementation.

I've also been learning Elm this past week though it's taking me far longer to become productive since there are fewer resources and I have no ML experience. I've managed to create a simple Spreeder.com-style speed-reader ([https://www.danneu.com/elm-speed-reader/](https://www.danneu.com/elm-speed- reader/)), and if you look at the source code ([https://github.com/danneu/elm- speed-reader/blob/master/Machi...](https://github.com/danneu/elm-speed- reader/blob/master/Machine.elm#L70)), you can see that it's not much different from the counter-app example I pitched above where the `update` function reduces across a stream of actions including button clicks and the tick. (Disclaimer: I'm an Elm noob)

<comment><USER5> I agree, this is one of Elm's main draws. PureScript has a library for this style of FRP ([https://github.com/bodil/purescript- signal](https://github.com/bodil/purescript-signal)). From the documentation, Elm signals are like a process network ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kahn_process_networks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kahn_process_networks)).

In my experience I've been able to model any conceivable interactions with a website using this model.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [http://www.purescript.org/](http://www.purescript.org/)

Worth mentioning when talking about this topic. Purescript is a Haskell like language that was designed for the frontend. I'm surprised as it seems like the presenter doesn't even know about purescript.

<comment><USER7> PureScript is mentioned on one of his slides.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reading the site's description of the video, it's more like "how languages like Haskell and Elm are informing the design of Javascript libraries like Redux". So it's not so much Elm and Haskell TEACHING "mainstream" JS (whatever that is) but one library merely taking hints from other programming domains that are relevant to the particular use case it's trying to cover.

<comment><USER9> On a podcast interview, the author of Redux mentions learning about Elm until later, so it's more like "some libraries have converged on similar design principles".

<comment><USER10> So, that's sort of true, but sort of not. Dan (author of Redux) has said that he read the Elm Architecture document before creating Redux, and didn't fully understand it. But he believes that it did influence the design of Redux.

> JAMISON: So had you played with or heard of ELM beforehand or did you just > realize the parallels afterwards?

> DAN: Yeah. There's been this, I'm feeling guilty about it because I had this > Twitter exchange with Evan. Evan was a bit uncomfortable with me not > mentioning Elm as much as he thought I should. I felt that yeah, he's > probably right because I read about Elm a few times before actually creating > Redux. I'm not sure if… when you get inspired by something but don't fully > understand it and later you kind of reproduce it but you don't really get > this connection and you only get it later. So I think that's kind of what > happened because I distinctly remember reading about ELM architecture but I > was thrown out by the syntax, so I didn't fully understand what's going on > there. Later after some initial iterations of Redux, Andrew Clark actually > showed me how it's similar to Elm if we changed some things. We did change > them.

> Yes, I have not actually played with Elm yet. I've seen other people playing > with it. I've seen some demos but I have not actually played with it myself. > I really want to but I'm stuck in maintaining and GitHub issues and I can't > find the time. I don't know. Maybe I'm just afraid it's going to be so > awesome that I'll just try the JavaScript development.

Source: [https://devchat.tv/js-jabber/179-jsj-redux-and-react-with- da...](https://devchat.tv/js-jabber/179-jsj-redux-and-react-with-dan-abramov)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Some developers are taking a really "creative" interpretation of the lessons of functional programming. I am currently dealing with a codebase (CoffeeScript) full of:

        _.reduce some_array, (result_array, object) ->
          ...
          result_array.push xyz
          ...
          return result_array
        , []

<comment><USER12> In a lot of languages, stdlibs, what have you, map is implemented in terms of a reduce like this.

In a non-lazy language, this kind of a reduce is usually necessary when you want to omit an item efficiently from the resultant array - map does not offer a way to do this.

<comment><USER11> Did you miss the explicit side-effects in the code above? This isn't like a map/filter in terms of fold, it is a very stupid way of writing a 'for' loop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's nice that JS devs are continuing to discover functional programming techniques, but it irks me a little that this is considered to be some sort of new development. JS has always attracted SICP-inspired programmers because of its strong resemblance to Scheme.

Doug Crockford popularised prototypical inheritance and function programming techniques in JS on his blog nearly 10 years ago.

KnockoutJS has been around for a similar amount of time and data flow was a big part of its design. React and Elm are evolutions of design that has been a part of front-end dev for a long time.

<comment><USER14> As a recovering schemer, I often heard how Javascript is very closely related to Scheme, but I've never really seen the resemblance. Granted, both languages possess:

* Dynamic Typing * Garbage Collection * First Class Functions

However, Python also meets those requirements. Now, looking at it from the Scheme perspective, Python is missing

* Tail Recursion * Macros * Continuations * Concise Language Spec

However, Javascript is also missing those same factors (though I might be wrong about the tail recursion). Yet, I rarely hear of Python described as an infix version of Scheme, yet I often hear that remark about Javascript.

I really want to like Javascript and I already do like Scheme, so I have a vested interest in seeing the connection, but I'm still missing something. What's the strong resemblance between Scheme and Javascript?

<comment><USER15> JavaScript's scoping is much friendlier for creating closures than Python's:

        def why_is_scoping_hard():
            n = 4
            def print_n():
                print n
            def modify_n(new_value):
                n = new_value
                print n
            return [print_n, modify_n]

        >>> print_n, modify_n = why_is_scoping_hard()
        >>> print_n()
        4
        >>> modify_n(7)
        7
        >>> print_n()
        4

When you assign to a variable it is automatically created in the local scope, shadowing a variable with the same name from an outer scope. If you don't assign to it, you get the value from the outer scope. If you try to print it, but then assign to it later, the print call raises an error.

<comment><USER16> Note - in python3 variable shadowing is much more controllable - in your example having modify_n look like:

        def modify_n(new_value):
           nonlocal n

(and of course the print x -> print(x) changes), will result in 4,7,7</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Group of Distant Black Holes Are Mysteriously Aligned - <AUTHOR> http://news.discovery.com/space/astronomy/bizarre-group-of-distant-black-holes-are-mysteriously-aligned-160412.htm <comment><USER2> My first thought on seeing the image in the article was "do the black holes form the EURion constellation?"

</comment><comment><USER3> Is this statistically significant? Some black holes will be somewhat aligned by chance.</comment>


Ask HN: What to do with a business I no longer want? - <AUTHOR> I bootstrapped an e-commerce business many years ago and it has always been just myself.  It is in a niche I no longer care about and have little desire to keep operating it.  It has always been profitable enough to keep it going, but not profitable enough to scale it or bring on employees.
I offered it to people in my network, then listed it with a broker, but did not result in a sale.  The business is not complicated but also not a simple SaaS or FBA that most buyers seem to want.  A fair valuation is likely high five-figures.
What have others done in this scenario?  While it is running I don't have much time to work on something new/different and I feel it would be a shame to shut down a profitable and established business, but there is also opportunity cost for me to keep running it. <comment><USER2> Offer it up for a share of future profits, a leveraged buyout financed by you. For instance, you value it at say $60K because it makes $30k profit a year. Hand it off to someone to run with the agreement that they pay you 100% of the current profits for two years. The buyer tries to double the profits so they make money too during those years. You keep the domain registration until the terms of the agreement are fulfilled.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. I've considered scenarios like that, but it is still mostly a question of finding a new owner regardless of cash at closing or financing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'll take a peak if you're looking to sell. shoot me a dm on twitter @jppope?

<comment><AUTHOR> My throwaway email is in my profile. I can send more details through that.

<comment><USER3> okie dokie. I'll email you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have been looking for a business to buy. going to email you.</comment>


'World's first personal jetpack' flies around the Statue of Liberty - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/world-s-first-personal-jetpack-flies-around-the-statue-of-liberty-a6728571.html <comment><USER2> There's a really old iteration of similar functionality that I think has the potential to be quite a bit superior: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJARrc40imk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJARrc40imk)

After researching it, the main problem with the flying pulpit design was it required quite a bit of pilot skill, and since helicopters solved the same problems in many cases anyway, the device never really got used. Nowadays though, we've got the tech needed to switch to a fly by wire system that relies on computing to maintain a stable flight profile.

</comment><comment><USER3> I looked around briefly, but couldn't find anything specific on how this works; I found mostly other articles about this video and pictures of other test flights.

Is anyone familiar with how this is powered, how safe it's likely to be, and how close to production it really is?

Homepage: [http://jetpackaviation.com/](http://jetpackaviation.com/)</comment>


I write fake online reviews - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-47952165 <comment><USER2> I write no reviews at all. Also, take no customer service surveys. Why provide free services to billionaires?

Let amazon hire a product review staff. Let Verizon supervisors monitor the quality of the phone staff. Let uber hire secret shoppers.

These companies are all exploiting your good will to enrich themselves.

<comment><USER3> >Why provide free services to billionaires?

Also why I never saw the point of sites like quora. Why are all these "subject matter experts" spending countless hours writing free content for a platform that is ultimately locked in and going to either a) Be infested with ads or b) Going to charge money (like the publishers' racket in scientific publishing).

<comment> Joe-Z At least for Quora (or rather StackOverflow for me) I could understand it as satisfying a need to be in a community of experts and exchange ideas on more fringe topics. Also it's probably a good thing to put on your resume if you have amassed sufficient fake internet points ;)

Amazon reviews however... you're just a drop in the ocean and there's certainly no community. Thus you'd have to pay me if you want me to engage in this.

<comment><USER4> It could also be used to improve your technical writing abilities. Doesn't really matter that you have submitted review number 5397, the effort that you put into writing a persuasive argument is valuable to you in itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I tend to ignore good reviews and rely on bad ones mostly to make my decisions. Will also never leave a good review when I'm satisfied, they are indistinguishable from fake ones anyway, I tend to rather just leave bad reviews when I'm not satisfied.

<comment><USER6> The problem is that bad reviews can be just as fake as good ones, as they could be written by the product's competitors.

Also, if a product is popular enough, odds are that even with a great product there'll be a small fraction of people who'll just happen to get a dud, while most of the rest will be satisfied.

Because of this, I tend to read both good and bad reviews, and give more weight to the longer reviews that go in to great detail about the product and why they rated it the way they did, with comparisons to other products being especially helpful. Also helpful are reviews by professionals who really know the field thoroughly. Unfortunately, such reviews are rare.

I also look at the ratio of good reviews to bad reviews, and look for products with many reviews, though on Amazon this strategy is not quite as effective these days as it once was. One of the big problems with Amazon's model is that it seems that most people buy the products shown on the first page or two of search results. Products on later pages might be just as good or even better, but they may never get bought or reviewed because they weren't on the first couple of pages.

<comment> saiya-jin For me, it's the 4-star and 3-star reviews, and distribution of them compared to the rest (this can be gamed though). I see no reason that somebody would pay for 4 or 3 star reviews, and also competition would pay for 1 or 2 star ones instead. Primitive logic, but worked +-OK for me even on Amazon.

<comment><USER7> The chap on BBC radio yesterday said that he deliberately gave lower marks (4 star) than 5 because of exactly that - it looked too obvious. He also said that some of the products that he was paid to review he didn't even use (hemorrhoid cream being one item).

I have also noticed the tit-for-tat reviews on Amazon between competitors. Its quite common on the cheaper products, in my experience. I've bought one or two awful things due to being caught by fake reviews, but I do tend to go back and leave a dreadful review.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Positive reviews are not very informative.

What I find more informative is bad reviews that get an answer from the seller/company. I guess these interactions will be faked in the next iteration of reviewogenesis.

<comment><USER9> Fake reviews are a game of cat and mouse. If writing good ones for their own products no longer works, they'll start writing bad ones for competing products.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm starting to recognise that the Internet —despite all its potential benefits— is a platform to streamline the process of lying to each other. Occasionally political, occasionally commercial, and very often social white lies. The instant access it affords us is being exploited by everybody to affect how we think, what we buy and who we like.

It's very rapidly becoming much worse. Machine learning will adapt to people faster than legislation can protect them. And most of all, I don't know how we reverse all this.That's what really scares me. I usually have an answer for everything. All I've got here is: unplug all the things.

<comment><USER11> Do you think there's a qualitative change here, though? People have been lying face-to-face, in various degrees, for those and other reasons forever.

<comment><USER10> Absolutely.

We shop in an environment where we are being told what other purchasers thought about it. "Fake news" (made-up clickbait, not the Trumpian term for non-news) spreads like wildfire, polarising anybody who takes it face value.

You can argue that the exposure to these lies is entirely self-inflicted, but that's how society has moved on. The real question is if we can successfully wean ourselves onto something better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There are hundreds of groups on Facebook in which the seller will ask you to buy the product give them 5 star review and they will return your money (some time with the tip) on Paypal. And you can keep the product.

<comment><USER13> They're probably heaven for consumerists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I only write reviews when my experience is on either extreme. Expectations exceeded or the disappointment is too much to ignore.

It's kind of like work, innit? Who is going to pat your back when you arrive and leave on time and get your work done? No one. Why should they? It's your job.

Go above and beyond or go in the opposite direction and slack off and you deserve all the feedback coming your way.

</comment><comment><USER15> I have been thinking about the review problem for a long time and while I think I have a practicable solution, I am not sure if there is any money to be made. If truthful reviews cost more than fake ones is there anyone out there to willing to pay the extra cost? Customers don't appear to want to pay anything nor sellers.

Anyone got any thoughts?

<comment><USER16> Consumers will pay for reviews they believe are truthful, like Consumer Reports.

But it's far more lucrative for sellers to pay for fake reviews, e.g. celebrity endporsements, magazine articles, youtube videos etc.

So much content out there is just lying about products for sale that I think a for-profit model for honest reviews will inevitably decide to open itself up to fake reviews or paid content. The pressure to do so is just to great and the rewards are hard to turn down.

<comment><USER15> Are you sure consumers will actually pay? Assuming Consumer Reports is truthful, what percentage of consumers actually pay for it?

My solution actually can't be opened to fake reviews, but it is expensive and I haven't been able to find a work around for that. Unfortunately quality costs.

<comment><USER2> Looks like about 1%[1]. If that's not a big enough business opportunity for you ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Reports](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Reports) (see circulation in sidebar)

<comment><USER15> What is not encouraging is the collapse in their subsciber base with an average age of 65.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Planet Money did an episode ([https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/06/27/623990036/epis...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/06/27/623990036/episode-850-the- fake-review-hunter)) about fake reviews and talked with the creator of ReviewMeta ([https://reviewmeta.com/](https://reviewmeta.com/)), which attempts to distinguish real reviews from fake ones based on things like similarity and clustered posting.

Of course, if it has or gets traction, fake reviewers will adapt, just like spammers do.

<comment><USER18> This is the first I've heard of ReviewMeta, but I've been using Fakespot[0] for a couple years now and always reference it when buying on Amazon.

[0] [https://www.fakespot.com/](https://www.fakespot.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Isn't this just fraud, and thus illegal?

<comment><USER20> If it's not illegal, it should be made so. It's a form of false advertising.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> One thing I've noticed recently is that the number of reviews that are for a completely different product seem to be skyrocketing. This was probably the final straw for me when it came to trusting Amazon reviews, and now I usually look to YouTube to get info. Granted, most of the YouTube reviews are sponsored but it seems like the reviewers are almost always up front about this and it helps to see someone physically using the product.

Given that the review problem seems to be growing worse, I wonder what the priority of fixing this is internally at Amazon. Even if I turn to another source for reviews I'll still probably purchase from Amazon if the price is lower, so I wonder what effect this actually has on their bottom line?

It seems like the only real solution is to make it so time consuming to write a review that the economics of paying someone to do so no longer make sense. I'm not entirely sure how this could be done. Maybe have a longer length requirement? Force a reviewer to upload photos? Someone once commented here that making the reviews ephemeral or decay in importance over time could be a solution, which I thought was an interesting idea.

</comment><comment><USER22> When researching the first thing I do is A. ignore 5 star reviews and B. read the 1 star reviews first. That's probably the best way to figure out if what you're buying is a piece of trash or a legit product that works. One star reviews are usually written by pissed off customers. I also don't usually leave reviews unless it's a one star piece of garbage that really pisse dme off.

Amazon is plagued by this. I just looked up earbuds on Amazon and clicked on a pair on the first page of results. It's a brand I've never heard of with a design that looks silly, perfect. 473 reviews, ALL 5 star, ALL posted April 13th, multiple from the same users. The laughable part is many are for different products like screen protectors and "lightning wires" (lol). What a joke. How Amazon expects to stay in business is beyond me.

<comment><USER23> I wouldn't look at the one star reviews either. I usually start with the three star reviews and glance at the four and two stars unless there is a preponderance of one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> What is with HN always deleting the word "Why" from the beginning of titles? I get that it can be a filler word, but it can also significantly change the meaning. For example, the blog post that introduced Julia to the world was titled "Why We Created Julia" [1] and if the "Why" had been deleted it would have completely changed the sense of that title. In this case, it's a fairly benign change, but I've seen this drastically affect the meaning of posts recently. It seems like a bad practice that is at odds with HN's excellent policy of respecting original titles of articles.

[1] [https://julialang.org/blog/2012/02/why-we-created- julia](https://julialang.org/blog/2012/02/why-we-created-julia)

</comment><comment><USER25> For me, the whole "rate product/experience by X amount of stars" system has always been broken. Especially when it seems to be taken much more seriously than it was originally meant. Ok, I'm not a UX expert or a data analyst, but as far as I know, the statistics that are drawn from these star reviews were originally only meant to be some sort of rough pointer to approximately evaluate how good a product is. And the result should in its turn, determine if a product needs to be further reviewed. But on the other hand I get why almost everyone who offers a product or a service utilises this system, it's easy. Is this product good or bad? 1 or 5 stars? Yes or no? The web isn't really compatible for maybes, yes buts, and no howevers.

</comment><comment><USER26> Wikipedia's article on "reviews" [1] is surprisingly sparse.

I expected to find an overview of approaches to combat manipulation of reviews, e.g. through AI or collaboratively through reputation systems, but alas.

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

<comment><USER27> The article on astroturfing may be what you are looking for [0]. The Review article should have contained at least a reference to that concept.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Everyone hates this but we need...

A digital driver's license/ID card type of thing for using the Internet(by country), especially considering deepfakes. You can still post anonymously but it won't hold much weight vs. using your real name/ID. Something that if posting junk your reputation/credit/trustworthiness takes a hit!

<comment><USER10> Yes, that limits the number of identities a review can come from, but it cannot tell if they're lying. It's powerless against approaches like: "Buy my product from Amazon, leave me a 5 star review and I'll pay your fees, a $10 bonus and let you keep the item".

<comment><USER28> Well if your caught lying your online and offline identity/reputation will take a huge hit. It would be extremely detrimental financially and professionally to your life ... like having to go bankrupt. Be moral and just online or you don't matter! Otherwise in time the Internet may not matter as much.

Further re deepfake stuff that's even worse ...threat of going to jail!

<comment><USER10> > if your caught lying

How do you vet my published opinion? If I order something from Amazon and give it a five star review, how do you, or Amazon know that the opinion I'm submitting in my review is genuine or not? You can't even vet my criteria at the point of review.

I think that is a key point here. We have started to trust aggregate "opinions" as a source of truth, assuming high numbers will obviate any tampering, assuming tampering could not be done at scale.... Something that just doesn't exist for most things on Amazon.

<comment><USER28> Well why don't you and millions of others commit crimes... cause there are consequences.

There is zero consequences now for getting paid, bribed, etc for writing fake reviews and little by little helping to destroy the Internet.

There are laws about pollution... why not have laws against polluting the Internet with bribery/racketeering junk that is detrimental to the health of the Internet?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> You can get specific details out of a review for what works/does not. That can be helpful. Details are harder to fake.

</comment><comment><USER13> I always read the reviews that are in the middle, 3/5 stars. I want to see people write objectively, with both pros and cons.

</comment><comment><USER30> TL;DR

for money.

</comment><comment><USER31> The title should be "Why bbc reads Hacker News comments to get ideas for its next article." I could swear I just read a discussion on HN (just hours ago) in response to an article about Amazon getting flooded with fake reviews. Some suggested how they write fake reviews for money and how one could monetize fake reviews. Then here comes this BBC article. Coincidence. I think not.

<comment><USER32> The recent article posted here was actually a link to the previous BBC article:

[https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47941181](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47941181)

For reference the discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19669898](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19669898)

<comment><USER31> Well I guess its not all that bad if, at least, the article is following up on points of interests collected from responses to a former article.</comment></comment></comment>


Is Trump Getting His News from Reddit? - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/05/trump-finds-old-rosie-odonnell-tweet-about-comey-on-reddit.html <comment><USER2> Is trump reading reddit? No.

Is someone with access to Trump's twitter account reposting shit from reddit? yes

<comment><USER3> quote from article - " more likely, White House social-media director Dan Scavino — happen to see the news on Reddit's infamous /r/The_Donald"</comment></comment>


Show HN: Grid – Multiplayer Creative Workspace - <AUTHOR> http://www.buildwithgrid.com/ <comment><USER2> I've looked at the site (on mobile), read all the comments on this thread, and still have absolutely no idea what this is.

Seriously, wtf is it with sites that do not state front-and-centre what the damn product is?

<comment><USER3> I _think_ its sort of like a shared/live (with collaborators) 'white board' type thing - kind of like if OmniGraffle/<insert your favourite wireframing/graphical mockup tool here> had realtime collaboration built-in... I think?

I tried something like this a while ago (don't remember the app name) with a (then) business partner. It was pretty terrible honestly - laggy, and work done on a retina screen went haywire on non-retina and vice-versa.

I like the _idea_ (I'm not a designer but sometimes drawing is easier than explaining/writing, even for technical/non-visual things) but without any information to suggest it's purely p2p, or some way to self-host the backend, I'm not interested enough to dig further.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been watching Josh iterate and build Grid over the last 2-3 years.

If I recall, Josh originally worked at Microsoft on the Excel team, and has a deep understanding of how tools can be construed into other use cases like project management and organization.

I bet it feels great to finally get this out the door and am looking forward to trying it.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm a little bit spaced out right now, but I have no clue what it does after watching the video.

<comment><USER6> Yes, impossible to say what it is about.

The animations below the video are a little more helpful. Apparently you can import images from a number of sources and arrange them into categories.

But why they write "multi-player system"? Is is a game or a design tool?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think I just preferred multiplayer over collaborative as a term, risking the misunderstanding. It's a design tool, it doesn't have a game-loop, but it is built on a game engine, and was intended to be more physical and provide more tangible feedback similar to games.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I want to like this, but I have no idea what it is.

</comment><comment><USER8> The site looks neat.

I get the concept. It seems very useful.

At first glance, I couldn't actually get it (I didn't know what it is suppose to do). I asked some of my friends by looking at the landing page, if they got it at first glance. They didn't as well.

</comment><comment><USER9> Maybe I'm not following, but isn't this just a Tiling window Manager?

</comment><comment><USER10> It's polished but this is an app looking for a problem to solve. Unfortunately by the time the problem space is discovered and understood, someone else will have developed something slightly better and more focused.

It looks like you're making its application so broad that you're hurting your chances. Unless you pick one problem, that exists right now, to solve I'm suspecting this isn't going to be a hit.

</comment><comment><USER11> There is a lot of movement on the initial viewport: fullscreen background video, changing text to the left and the demo video. I found it a little hard to actually focus on any of those.

The about page made it more clear to me, what it actually is: [http://www.buildwithgrid.com/about](http://www.buildwithgrid.com/about) [has autoplay audio/video]

<comment><USER12> Super light grey text (almost white) on a white background. How are people supposed to read that.

[http://i.imgur.com/J3qPrjV.png](http://i.imgur.com/J3qPrjV.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The dancing robots are awesome.

</comment><comment><USER14> Were do I register to try it?

</comment><comment><USER15> We changed the URL from [https://www.producthunt.com/tech/grid-3](https://www.producthunt.com/tech/grid-3) to the actual site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Dan</comment></comment>


The Stockholm tech startup scene is buzzing - <AUTHOR> http://www.micaelwidell.com/p/3/

<comment><USER2> I find it interesting that so many successful startups originate from Sweden.. (Spotify, Skype, Tictail, Klarna, etc). Why don't we see similar success stories from e.g. eastern Europe or even France/Spain

<comment><USER3> Skype was actually developed in Eastern Europe (Estonia).</comment></comment>


Ransomware Gang's Victim Cracks Their Server, Releases All Their Decryption Keys - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/white-hat-hacks-muhstik-ransomware-gang-and-releases-decryption-keys/ <comment><USER2> Victory for the good guys! And also a pretty cool thing to pull off in general.

</comment><comment><USER3> I find it odd that he put the decrypter on MEGA of all places, but whatever. If it works it works

<comment><USER4> It was acquired illegally (though not immorally, IMO), so it's probably the safest place to host it.</comment></comment>


Yahoo Dings "Do Not Track" Default (And Search Partner Microsoft)  - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20121026/yahoo-dings-do-not-track-default-and-search-partner-microsoft/

<comment><USER2> Could this perhaps have been Microsoft's intention? They've implemented a widely unpopular feature that is bound to be circumvented on a large scale. They basically bastardized the execution of DNT, making it moot while at the same time protecting them from any personal liability. Or am I being cynical?

<comment><USER3> Could be, but to be fair their implementation is in line with the DNT draft which says that DNT=1 is a valid default for user agents. Maybe the draft writers didn't think through what the consequences would be for DNT support if DNT=1 became the default in any majority of browsers.

The way I see it either the consequences for not respecting DNT need to be greater somehow or the default implementation can't be DNT=1 because third parties will simply ignore it. Without consequences, a default of DNT=1 just weakens the draft and hurts the people who really do want to block everything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _In order to respect user intent, we must ignore user intent which may be expressed via a recently added user setting, because the setting's default value interferes w/ our profit margin._

Orwellian.

</comment><comment><USER5> I feel that this is is often blown far out of proportion, everyone sells the whole DNT option as the holy grail of privacy, but the honest truth is that not everyone cares about privacy, in fact, most people don't care about it at all.

Everyone seems to be confusing privacy with "tiny amounts of information" such as age, gender, etc. which most people are perfectly happy entering on basically any site.

It shouldn't be advertised as "Do not track gives you privacy" it should be advertised as "Do not track stops companies from saving personal information about you, such as age, gender and location. Whilst this increases your level of anonymity while you browse, it also lowers the companies ability to provide you with a valuable experience, for instance, it can stop adverts popping up which you may find irrelevant and will allow them to better follow your needs online."

<comment><USER3> It would be interesting to see a list compiled for the most popular services showing the features they would no longer be able to offer with DNT.

<comment><USER6> An intelligent response from Yahoo would have been to do exactly that : show a one-time popup to IE10 users that have DNT enabled and explain them what they win/loose.

But ignoring the setting is just plain arrogant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I didn't catch anything about DNT at all during setup on my Surface (not saying it wasn't there). Just tried to find the setting; it's not exposed on the Metro side at all, it's not in the logical place for it (the "Privacy" tab), rather in the "Advanced" tab and under the Security heading, nearly at the bottom of the list[0]. Microsoft's DNT position has always smelled like a political stunt, burying it like this doesn't do much to disprove that.

[0] [https://www.dropbox.com/s/xslbzy04l37wnf7/Screenshot%20%289%...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/xslbzy04l37wnf7/Screenshot%20%289%29.png)

</comment><comment><USER8> This would sadden me if Yahoo offered the world anything of value.

</comment><comment><USER9> Of course this is their response, and I'm sure the response of a lot of other advertisers, too. Microsoft is deciding for the user (the option to disable appears in an obscure place with the installation of Windows 8, which I'm sure most people will miss).

If they were serious about this, they would just block those cookies by default. Otherwise it's pointless, and having Microsoft decide for the user makes the advertiser's decision to ignore it even easier.</comment>


Multicore Watershed - <AUTHOR> http://www.hpcwire.com/blogs/Multicore-Watershed-86426622.html

<comment><USER2> My 1999 book on parallel architectures concluded 4 CPUs is the cut-off for diminishing return speedup on general purpose code.

The market has maybe shifted to virtualisation, not anticipated, where the workload is different.</comment>


Istanbul Resistance Protests and Developers - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/neozepron/status/341510700423839744/photo/1 Tech community's in person participation to Istanbul anti government resistance movement was yet another sign of the apolitical activists ( BTW diren means resist <comment><AUTHOR> Tech community's in person participation to Istanbul anti government resistance movement was yet another sign of the apolitical activists ( BTW diren means resist in Turkish)</comment>


A huge mouth and no anus – this could be our earliest known ancestor - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jan/30/huge-mouth-and-no-anus-earliest-known-ancestor-saccorhytus-coronarious-evolution <comment><AUTHOR> Here's the related research, "Meiofaunal deuterostomes from the basal Cambrian of Shaanxi (China)":

[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature21072.html)</comment>


Ask HN: Are there any 8 bit computers still manufactured? - <AUTHOR> I'd like to buy a modern computer, i.e. one being manufactured in 2016, that uses an 8 bit Z80 CPU.
Is this possible?
I want to explicitly say I'm not looking for a hobby kit or to make my own. I'm interested to know if there is any sort of 8 bit computer still being made.
As I understand it the Z80 is still manufactured and used in a range of embedded systems - perhaps one of such systems can be bought and connected to with keyboard and screen?
If the answer is no, then what was the last Z80 computer actively manufactured? <comment><USER2> You can still get Z80 boards from Zilog:

[http://www.digikey.com/catalog/en/partgroup/ez80-acclaim/158...](http://www.digikey.com/catalog/en/partgroup/ez80-acclaim/15884).

Zilog is where I'd start looking for boards and variants.

(These aren't my Z80s, these are modernized chips. I may actually grab one of these myself even though I have a few running Z80 systems.)

If you're looking for something (I'd call) "more Z80-esque" I'd check these guys:

[http://www.sunrise-ev.com/z80.htm](http://www.sunrise-ev.com/z80.htm)

It looks like it's still active, and I'll grab one of these.

In any case, the embedded space is where you'll want to look for modern boards. You may pay a premium--supply and demand, and all that.

Unrelated, but it's way, way easier to "hook up a keyboard and screen" using serial IO rather than building a display unit and/or USB.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ti84 is closest. but not connectable to screen

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow it's pretty amazing that this is a Z80 [https://education.ti.com/en- GB/aus-nz/products/secondary-cal...](https://education.ti.com/en-GB/aus- nz/products/secondary-calculators/ti-84-plus-ce/tabs/overview)

Yes the only missing thing is the ability to connect a screen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yes. I was recently at a Vintage Computer Festival and there were quite a few including the ELF.</comment>


Nathalie Sarraute: A Life Between - <AUTHOR> https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n17/toril-moi/it-isn-t-your-home <comment><USER2> > Surely Virginia Woolf's analysis applies here: in a sexist society, the > arbiters of taste simply can't help thinking that books dealing with war are > more important than a book that 'deals with the feelings of women in a > drawing room'.

Am I missing something here? Books about war are also more important than books about facial hair grooming. Still sexist? I don't get it.

<comment><USER3> I don't know the context of Virginia Woolf's comment, but in the case of fiction, I don't think that a book about war is necessarily more important than one about facial hair grooming. Even in non-fiction, is a shallow and sensationalistic book about war necessarily 'important'?

<comment><USER2> If you know nothing else about a book, it seems a pretty fair bet that one about war is more important than one about beards.

Let me put another way. You need to rebuild civilization from nothing. There's two books left from the pile of rubles and you can only save one before the whole thing collapses. One appears to be about war, the other teaches the best method to maintain the most handsome old school handlebar moustache.

The question is, are you serious about this civilization thing or are you just out of your mind?</comment></comment></comment>


Five Buck Fatigue - <AUTHOR> https://underjord.io/five-buck-fatigue.html <comment><USER2> Back in the day the internet for normal people was 3 bucks a hour over a 14,400 modem. I didn't consider myself a "creator" for posting my recipes for making mashed potatoes in a crock pot. I just wanted to make the world have better mashed potatoes. I did it for free. There was no "like" button or comments or monetization. Just this nerd and a crock pot and a gross amount of butter. That is not a joke. I had a crock pot cooking site. I didn't have a counter or anything. Maybe it was popular.. I will never know.

The internet was pretty great when it was just people sharing info without looking for a advertising partnership with Land 'O Lakes.

<comment><USER3> That's cool, but I want people to be able to independently create content for me to enjoy, which is a bit less of a crock. That will probably takes all their time and they need to pay for ingredients for their pot. Bring on universal basic income I guess.

<comment><USER4> But there is already more excellent content that has already been created than you could possibly consume in a hundred lifetimes. Do we really need to support people to create more? I feel like we can enjoy what we already have and don't need to continuously look for something new. If people really really really want to create something, they will find a way to do so.

<comment><USER5> > there is already more excellent content that has already been created than > you could possibly consume in a hundred lifetimes.

I hear this often. Where is this excellent content? 99% of things online recommendations float up for me is garbage. Sometimes I see some gems, but it's rare. Already years ago I was hearing people say that the only thing we need now is good content discovery. Screw any new content. We already have too much good stuff.

I'm starting to think that, if in all this time Internet giants haven't been able come up with a way to get to those hundreds of lifetimes of amazing content, maybe it doesn't actually exist?

Our tastes change over time. Some things that were great 10 years ago haven't aged well. There's a long tail. What's excellent for you isn't interesting to me, and so on. In a sum there might be more content than you can watch in a lifetime, but an intersection of that whole collection with a single person's momentary interests seems to be much much smaller.

<comment> barry-cotter Have you really read the entire Western Canon? Listened to the collective oeuvres of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart? Watched the AFI top 100 movies or IMDB's top 1000? Watched all of The Sopranos, The Wire and Breaking Bad? Read the SF Masterworks Collection?

<comment><USER6> Nothing about that idea sounds fun to me.

If you've listened to some Bach (for example) and didn't like it, why would you spend 200 hours listening to the rest?

<comment> barry-cotter Is there any kind of cultural production, any genre that you like a lot more than most people? Because if there is there's someone who likes it 100 times more than you and has made a list of the top 100 things in it. If you haven't gone through multiple of these lists then you you're not even trying to get through the enormous amount of fantastic content out there that is wildly disproportionately likely to be great, for you.

<comment><USER7> You underestimate how specific people's tastes can be. There are nano niches. For example what if I like the music of a person so much that I'd rather listen to that person for 100 hours than to anything else? Well, that's exactly what I'm doing but when the author has only ever published 12 songs each 3 min long then that means I've heard the songs over a hundred times already and unfortunately at some point I just get bored of a song. I wish I could enjoy them longer but for me it would be just as good if the same author released a new batch of songs.

<comment> barry-cotter You no longer enjoy that person's music so much that you would rather listen to it than do anything else. It seems unlikely that all of your interests are so specific. If you have some more general tastes there will be lists of good stuff you should check out in those genres. If you love these 12 songs more than acting else but have listened to them so much that all joy has drained from them have you listened to songs others with taste recommend for those who love these songs?

Artistic taste is far from infinitely malleable but it's flexible enough for many to appreciate metal, opera, pop and classical music. If your tastes are so narrow and specific you are in a tiny minority.

Finally, what is the artist and album?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have the opposite feeling; very often I will contribute to someone's patreon or gofundme or whatever because I like their work and have gotten a lot out of it, but I almost never go on to read the members only writing. some part of me values it less because it isn't freely accessible.

<comment><USER9> I don't tend to take advantage of members-only content either, but for me it's purely a matter of convenience. If Patreon had an authenticated RSS feed link in user profiles, I absolutely would use it, but I can rarely be bothered (or even remember, really) to actually visit the website.

It doesn't feel like a loss, though. I mean, if I'm supporting someone's work, it's on the strength of what I could already see before I started doing that.

<comment><USER10> > If Patreon had an authenticated RSS feed link in user profiles, I absolutely > would use it

Patreon does have this feature for audio content, like podcasts, if the creator enables it: [https://support.patreon.com/hc/en- us/articles/213557023-Enab...](https://support.patreon.com/hc/en- us/articles/213557023-Enable-audio-RSS-feeds-for-my-patrons)

But I think you mean for all content? I emulate this by enabling e-mail notifications for all posts from some creators and auto-forwarding them to Newsblur for newsletter reading. Maybe that helps.

<comment><USER9> That actually really might! I've been in the market for a new reader, since Feedly's product people seem hellbent on making it worse with every update, and Newsblur might be just the thing. And while it hadn't occurred to me until you mentioned that (for which thanks!), any email-to-RSS gateway should let me do what I'm looking for.

One thing Feedly hasn't managed to ruin, yet at least, is the "today" view, with items from all sources sorted by time. Does Newsblur do something similar? Their iOS screenshots don't make it easy to tell.

<comment><USER10> There's an "All Site Stories" category that shows all unread articles from each site (a newsletter counts as a "site") with the most recent entry at the top. Most recent is across all sites, so something like this:

\- Site 2, 08:34

\- Site 1, 08:19

\- Site 3, 07:49

\- Site 2, 06:02

\- Site 3, 05:55

And so on, if that makes sense. I haven't looked for a "show me everything, unread or not, sorted by time" feature but if it's not there the dev just might add it for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Perhaps I'm not reading this in the vein in which the author intended, so I'm open to being corrected. But my read of this is that authors and other creators are in a no-win situation. People don't like ads (so they block them or simply don't interact with them, either way driving down the money made from the ads), but people also don't like subscriptions, and people _definitely_ don't like one-off "plonk your credit card here" request, yet no centralized micropayment system has really taken off because people also don't take to those.

So...what next? How do creators get paid?

(FWIW, I am on the opposite end of this. I probably devote too much of my income--not a brag, it's likely a financially unwise thing to do--on recurring subscriptions on Patreon and Maximum Fun and other platforms because I'm very quick to "ooh, shiny" and click-to-subscribe.)

<comment><USER11> > So...what next? How do creators get paid?

I think we're in a "creator" bubble and a crash is coming. There are simply too many people expecting to be able to live off their hobbies and not enough actual value being created. Many, perhaps even most, of these creators are going to have to go get a job. It may not be a popular opinion, but I don't even think that's such a bad thing; there is _way_ too much "content" out there, we don't actually need anywhere near as much as we're currently creating.

<comment><USER12> I wonder what's the ratio of people who genuinely expect to be able to live off their hobbies vs people who don't even get to enjoy a hobby due to The Fear forcing them into "The Hustle" in a world where success and even survival are not defaults?

<comment><USER13> > a world where success and survival are not defaults?

Success is never a default in any world. Even in the most utopian Star Trek universe, not everybody gets to be a starship captain.

I actually have thought about recording videos of my hobbies and sharing them, just to share, but I'm discouraged by the high production value expectations that people have now and it's not worth the hassle. But I would never expect to turn it into a career. I respect and support several content creators, but they are handful among tens of thousands. The majority of creators simply aren't generating $5/mo in value.

<comment><USER12> "Contentment" would probably be a better word for what I had in mind. I wish I could just, like, exist, you know? I don't want a damn job lol

<comment><USER14> "contentment content," i.e. stuff put online just because it makes the creator happy

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> You have to have a heck of an offering to get a $5 monthly out of me. Every $5 monthly gets measured against "half a Netflix" and comes up short.

Edit: I'll admit I'll gladly drop $40 on an ebook from the same creators I feel weird about funding monthly. I'm allergic to monthlies.

<comment><USER9> What I hear you saying is, Netflix has swamped the market and driven down the price of quality content.

Well, I say "quality". It seems like every time I look at it, their catalog's dropped something else I wanted to see. My hit rate on searches there has to be hovering around 2%.

<comment><USER16> No, really, no single human creator can provide $5/mo worth of content. If you don't like Netflix just think of a quality monthly magazine.

<comment><USER9> Judging by my actual spend, I'm _infinitely_ more likely to put $5 a month toward some individual's excellent work, via Patreon, than I am toward a magazine subscription. Meanwhile, the persistence of my Netflix account relies entirely on inertia.

Besides, when was the last time you could get a magazine for $5 a month? They were already well past that when I was still a little kid, and these days a physical magazine is both too costly to produce, and too much of a status symbol, for any such low price to seem very likely.

<comment><USER17> I think my average magazine subscription has been 80% off cover price. $5 a month is an extremely easy bar to clear.

Right now I can go out and get Wired for $20 a year and Time for $30 a year with only a couple seconds of searching, and those are probably not the best offers available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I often try to support a creator and find out that monthly support is my only option ... which I am not willing to do.

Here are some ways we have always supported creators without subscriptions: I can buy a book, watch a movie in a theater, get a CD, attend a play, buy a painting, etc.

I'm still willing to do those things, I do them all the time. I'm still willing to spend a lot of money on those things. I am not willing to lay you $5/month in the future to see what you may or may not produce. I'd rather give you $100 one time for something really great.

<comment><USER19> What's missing here is a netflix style model where your donations are distributed among people you want to support instead of having to micromanage donations.

I pay about ~30 euro per month for netflix, spotify, and amazon prime. So, it's not a stretch of the imagination that I would be willing to pay for (some) of the free content I enjoy on e.g. Youtube.

However, I follow dozens of youtubers asking for donations and while I like most of them, it's not going to add up to me handing out multiple dollars to each of them on a monthly basis because it would add up to vastly more than I spend on commercial content. And it's kind of unfair to single out just a few of them.

But, I'd be willing to put in 10 a month if I did not have to worry about allocating that to each of them or micromanaging who gets what. IMHO a simple distribution based on views/listens/clicks, could work.

It would probably add up to just a few cents per personn I donate to; but if lots of people do that, it adds up. The deal with patreon is that you rely on a handful of people supporting you while you give away most of your content for free. IMHO most of that is unrealized potential for monetization.

Several youtubers I follow have numbers of followers and views that would put some tv channels to shame and they also get revenue from sponsorships. Several others are a bit more modest but still rake in tens to hundreds of thousands of views easily.

I'd love a platform that gives me a simple predictable cost per month combined with a fair, no hassle way to ensure that money gets funneled to artists, writers, coders, and other content creators I care about. Donating 10cents per month is not a thing and donating 1-10$ per month means I have to cherry pick people out of group of dozens to hundreds I might consider donating to but currently don't.

<comment><USER20> > But, I'd be willing to put in 10 a month if I did not have to worry about > allocating that to each of them or micromanaging who gets what. IMHO a > simple distribution based on views/listens/clicks, could work.

YouTube Premium?

<comment><USER21> Does YT Premium redistribute any money to content creators?

<comment><USER22> Yes, but not to _your_ creators. Google's description is vague, but my impression is YT Premium revenue (after google's cut) goes into a big pool and is split up among all creators: [https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276#YouTube_Re...](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276#YouTube_Red_revenue_2) So your creators are getting paid by watch time, but not all of your $10 is going only to creators you watch.

<comment><USER21> Yeah, the Spotify model. Not the best thing if your main intention is supporting the creators you enjoy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Frankly, I've seen little evidence that subscription fatigue exists beyond a handful of complains in HN links and comments. The meteoric growth of Onlyfans demonstrates the opposite - that there's huge demand for subscriptions and we're only starting to learn what subscription content folks will pay for.

I suspect that the average person does not sweat every single $5 purchase they make.

<comment><USER12> The "average person" in the US also couldn't cover a $1000 emergency expense _before_ the pandemic so maybe there's something to this and we shouldn't be encouraging more: [https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/21/41-percent-of-americans- woul...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/21/41-percent-of-americans-would-be- able-to-cover-1000-dollar-emergency-with-savings.html)

<comment><USER24> Saving $5 here and there is not going to substantially improve emergency savings for the average person. However, it will make their life a little bit less pleasant.

People frequently post on Reddit's personal finance forum saying they have tens of thousands of dollars in debt, they are upside down on their car loan, what can they do? And the first responses are always things like "cancel Netflix". That doesn't really help solve financial problems of that magnitude, it just makes people more miserable.

<comment><USER25> Well, cigarettes are a $5 subscription of sorts. $5 per week, maybe $5 per day. That could substantially improve a savings fund. Netflix on its own might not, but Netflix, Crunchyroll, and hulu, if you cancel them all that's a couple hundred bucks a year.

<comment><USER24> > if you cancel them all that's a couple hundred bucks a year

Right, that's what I mean. You go without all those things for a year and all you get is a measly few hundred dollars?

Consider someone on a $15 minimum wage, working 40 hours a week, 2080 hours a year. Their pre-tax income is $31,200. Let's say they cancel subscriptions and save $20 per month, saving $240 per year. That is how much they earn in 16 hours of work -- merely 0.77% of their annual income. I think most people would be ok blowing 0.77% of their income on streaming if they get multiple streaming subscriptions for that money.

<comment><USER26> One nuance here is someone making $31,200 is barely getting by. It might only be .77% of their salary, but 50% of their annual savings. The difference between saving $500 and $750 is substantial. E.g. if you're trying to put together 20k for a down payment, that could be a > 10 year difference in time it takes to get a house.

<comment><USER27> If you're living that close to using all your salary every month, there are probably better things you can do to save more than cancel Netflix. I think that's what the OP is trying to say.

Netflix is really good value for money. If you want to cancel something, cancel your cable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > _I want to support, I want to engage. But I also want to be mindful in how I > spend my money. And $5 /month adds up pretty quickly._

So basically the author _cannot afford_ to buy all the content he would like to, but feels a pang of conscience when he has to take the content for free, even if it's made freely available by the authors.

It's an interesting internal conflict to have.

> _I think I might need to figure out what my actual budget is for supporting > independent creators on a monthly basis._

I suppose there are multiple solutions that provide something like that.

> _I think it would be worse if they were as heavy-handed as Wikipedia_

I'm totally fine with Wikipedia, and I usually give them $5-15 yearly. (They, in particular, are said to receive more money than they know what to reasonably do with.) This must be a case of personal sensitivity, which varies across the audience, and it sucks to be on the above-average sensitive end.

I personally buy stuff I find great / fascinating. I hear a great track or a great album on Bandcamp? OK, I pay for it. I see it on Youtube? I go to Bandcamp, or whatever other site the authors care to list, and pay there. If there's no such link, sad.

OTOH I don't normally subscribe to support a particular creator. I pay for the result. Great online creators usually produce good stuff anyway, they _started_ with producing and publishing free (to view) stuff. The number of people who paid for a particular episode / track / post / whatever is an important piece of feedback, I think.

<comment><USER29> When you say you're buying a product or result, you're still paying for the production indirectly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Back when we bought music albums (on vinyl or tape or whatever) we didn't subscribe to a content creator. We bought a product. If we liked it, we watched for the next release. I loved $NINETIES_BAND but I sure as heck wouldn't subscribe to them in the modern sense. The old model allowed monetizing outsized genius (or fashion) as demonstrated by dribbled song releases on the radio. This new model rewards consistently-better-than average content. It is a big divide. Perhaps what is missing is the modern DJ.

</comment><comment><USER31> Companies like [https://coil.com](https://coil.com) are solving this by giving you a single $5/month subscription and then streaming micropayments to the content creators as you consume their content. It builds on the WebMonitization standard [https://webmonetization.org](https://webmonetization.org)

<comment><USER32> There have been countless attempts to create a micropayments ecosystem during the last 20 years, and they have all flopped. What makes this different?

<comment><USER31> Coil and Mozilla working on a web standard together, the fact that we now have a couple of years of examples of digital content creators being de-monitized on ad-supported platforms, and the fact that crypto currencies are more approachable now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's kind of depressing how some business models can just siphon money (like cable bills going up a few dollars every month forever until it's hundreds), while others practically have to beg.

Apps that took literally _years_ to write can ask for donations and get nothing, while a single bank's _overdraft fee_ probably nets more.

And now of course, we passed legislation to "help" businesses that somehow couldn't even get money (despite applying the first day) because of greedier or more well-connected applicants.

This is a huge mess and it should be a massive priority for society to stop letting the leeches get away with this theft.

</comment><comment><USER34> I get the fatigue, but I also LOOOVE that we're moving towards a world of "payment for genesis", were we explicitly pay folks so that they "might" make something fantastic. It's such a breath of fresh air from the world of advertising. TOTALLY off topic, but I want to get this advertising analogy/story/parable/fiction out of my head, so I might as well write it down here:

In the advertising-based revenue world, you see really odd businesses. Imagine a world were in every town there's a pizza place with a huge sign atop reading "FREE PIZZA". You park your car and queue in line for the order window; when your time comes you ask for a pepperoni pizza and you're handed a pepperoni pizza, no cash required. However, you're also handed a 3 inch thick stack of flyers advertising for random business and schemes. Well, you didn't ask for a phone books worth of paper, so you move to throw them into the garbage. Before you can you're stopped by an employee who gasps "what are you doing?!"

As though in answer to a question like 'why are you breathing', you reply "I'm throwing away these extra papers; they're very heavy."

"But don't you know that if people throw away the advertisements, we can't give away the pizza?" moans the employee.

Feeling irritated, you respond "Well, it's my pizza now so I'm going to throw these away." And with that you walk to your car and drive home.

The frustrated employee would, by 2030 move to management, where the business would seek to have customers sign papers saying that they can be hand-fed pizza by restaurant staff as long as that customer sits with their eyes held open and stares into monitors showing advertisements on loop. Later in 2035, this nameless employee would recieve a promotion to VP after coordinating a team of lawyers who successfully lobbied the US congress to legislate allowing the term "FREE PIZZA" to describe the process of "contractually enforced assisted hand-feeding in panoptic advertising environments".

Meanwhile in 2025, Europe would rule in favor of selling Pizza for $2 a slice.

<comment><USER35> "but I also LOOOVE that we're moving towards a world of "payment for genesis", were we explicitly pay folks so that they "might" make something fantastic"

But that would be Universal Basic Income :)

think about it, that's exactly what UBI is. Pay enough people and someone is gonna come up with something amazing. They might share it, they might profit by it, but they will want it to be known as that will be the new 'need' in the Maslow hierarchy.

This has more or less happened before by accident. For instance, Silicon Valley, which came out of a period of significant wealth and leisure.

<comment><USER36> The big difference is that Patreon/Memberful subscriptions are optional and not burdensome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I only contribute to two Patreons (each $5) monthly so far: \- a friend of mine, because he is a friend of mine \- a guitar teacher that I followed, because he constantly produce good quality materials that are only available on mmembership. worth it. I also bought some of his courses and sometimes schedule a 1 on 1 private with him.

But for open source, I never contributed to anything lol. Sorry, OSS maintainers. Thank you for the awesome work. The world needs more people like you. But if I can get it for free I'll get it for free.

For indie SaaS, I never pay anything as well. Sorry indie SaaS devs, but I am not an app/software heavy user even though I work as an SWE. I don't use note taking apps or any other productivity apps.

<comment><USER38> You're pretty typical in this respect. It's why open source software needs to be sponsored by large corporations and why indie software is "free for non- commercial use". It's easier to swipe that business CC than it is your own one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I've found that I'm much more willing to spend a larger chunk of money in a one off payment than signing up for yet another "only 5 dollar" pledge. I recently signed up for a few substack accounts from writers I've admired, and, in a move that would have horrified my younger, eye patch wearing self, have bought a year long subscription to The Economist. They offer good writing, interning opinions that, though I may disagree with them, are well thought out and we'll constructed. Publishing in this day and age is easy - twitter and Facebook and friends have shown us how simple it can be to say, well, anything. Good writing is hard, has remained hard, and should be valued. I've done my level best to make sure that only the most dedicated institution can reliably get ad revenue from me - it's only fair that I buy and support the things I value.

</comment><comment><USER40> > Let's call this the Five Dollar Fatigue, sounds catchy.

This is already commonly called "subscription fatigue" and has been discussed extensively

</comment><comment><USER41> > There is a lot of consideration in committing that recurring payment for .. > indefinite duration.

It's (yet another) negative externality of the Anti-Money Laundering / Know Your Customer mania.

If it turns out that a drug cartel used one of these crowdfunding platforms, the government will kill/bankrupt the platform. Requiring recurring payments is the only reliable way to screen out prepaid gift cards, because prepaid gift card issuers are no longer allowed to process fixed-amount recurring payments.

Any other approach is EXTREMELY labor-intensive and still doesn't work 100% -- for example look at Amazon AWS, which devotes a huge amount of effort to playing this whack-a-mole game and yet still isn't 100% successful. AWS bills aren't the same dollar amount every month so they can't go this route.

Basically AML/KYC is Why We Can't Have Nice Things like micropayments or even one-time minipayments to individuals without something like Paypal where they randomly lock up your money for 180 days while demanding "papers please". AML/KYC simply does not scale down to micropayments or even near them. It's not about the payment processing technology, it's about the legal/regulatory burden.

</comment><comment><USER42> My mental model lately has been, if I'm enjoying the content, I should try to figure out how to pay ~$1/hour.

If I'm not enjoying it, I should find a better way to spend m time.

</comment><comment><USER43> I usually donate a one-time, larger amount. I know it isn't recurring which is what people want but this is the way that I'm able to deal with it.

<comment><USER35> I make my living off Patreon and have many people doing exactly that. Also, I support quite a few Patreons myself but they're all ones that I can do $1 a month… forever.

I feel like if I started throwing around $5 pledges, I'd soon have to backtrack, and that seems bad. But then being close to the top 50 in the Music category equates to maybe a bit over minimum wage so I do in fact have to budget if I intend to keep all my pledges up forever. So I do budget.

Any way people want to do this is fine with me. I prefer the little tiny patreon pledges, because they average out to a steady amount. The danger of pushing people to do larger pledges (even the $5) is that they will hit a rough patch and bail. If you have encouraged them to pledge only small amounts they think they can afford, and encouraged them NOT to pledge if they can't handle it, people see it more as a 'stick with it' thing rather than a 'highest amount' thing. And 'stick with it' is more predictable and easier to plan for, as the creator.

<comment><USER44> I thought Brave was going to go a different direction, closer to what Apple music streaming does, where they look at your traffic over the month and divvy up your subscription between them.

Or even: these are all of the things you support: which ones did you enjoy this month?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> @lawik not sure if you caught this the other day [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23981563](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23981563) <\- that person proposes an interesting solution specifically in the context of supporting open source software that would seemingly address this fatigue phenomenon you experience: a monthly pool that you can apportion so it dilutes and supports the projects you choose. That way you set the total monthly contribution and then you're just carving that up. Assuming there was a simple enough one-click interface for doing so that could be one way to address this. Of course you'd have to get a critical mass of makers to adopt the standard in order for it to take off (or convince the Patreon's and Github's of the world to adopt it).

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, yeah, I saw that. It could definitely be good for some cases. I think it would be good for GitHub and such. I think the incentives for fairly successful creators just isn't there. They'll get more from their dedicated fanbase. But I hope something like this shows up for and from GitHub, especially for businesses. I think a lot of dev-teams would like to portion out some stipend from their company on a monthly basis to support their dependencies. I'd do it privately too, for sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Was just thinking of this yesterday as I listened to ATP (Accidental Tech Podcast - ATP.FM).

They're adding a members component to their podcast. Just $8/month. And they don't do the hard sell, but there are little perks.

I listen to at least 5-7 podcasts regularly. If they all do the same thing, it's close to my cable + Internet bill from just 10 years ago.

Now let's do streaming: Netflix + Disney+ and you spent another $20/month.

I just don't think this model is going to work in the long term. Who knows!

<comment><USER47> I listen to ATP as well, and I did end up joining their membership program. The author mentioned CGP Grey specifically, and Cortex, his podcast with Myke Hurley on relay.fm recently announced a $5 membership. Upgrade, with Jason & Myke _also_ announced the same $5 membership. So I see where the author is coming from. At the same time all 3 podcasts for now say that just by listening, it supports the podcast through the old channels. I do get a little of that FOMO, but I don't feel any guilt for not paying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> $5 adds up quickly but $1 adds up a lot slower. So far I haven't hit my budget for $1/month support, and over a big group it's enough to fund a lot.

<comment><USER36> $1 is not enough to qualify for the extra content many of these services are offering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Doesn't seem to be a problem for purveyors of high quality content. Often they only get a small percentage of people to contribute, but they make do. And IMHO more of them make out like bandits than one might think, especially Youtubers with multiple ways to make money. I think that number is closer to the low thousands than the high dozens.

</comment><comment><USER49> I've been trying to loosen up with my small subscriptions like this. Back when I became a consistent member of the internet and multiple communities on it, I was a middle school student with no money, and when I did have pocket change from mowing lawns, I had no way to exchange it online. I gravitated towards free content because of this. Even once I was working and had a bank account at 16, I still felt weird about committing to a subscription. Now that I keep my costs low and work full time, I have a disposable income that could be spent on these creators, but there are so many that I don't know where to put it. Should it go to the long time creators I've followed since those middle school days, or should I throw it towards the real underdogs right now?

There is only so much to go around from my pockets, and just like the author says, it adds up quickly.

</comment><comment><USER50> What you can call "fatigue" in the first world, presents itself as impossible to overcome barrier to the rest of the world.

I get that if platforms and creators charged any less than 5 bucks they probably lose even more in payment fees.

Can't help but think that we still have so much to overcome with regards to cheap or free micropayments.

<comment><USER51> $1 seems to be the lower limit.

Transaction fees on low volume are usually like 30c or 1% whichever is higher.

<comment><USER17> Competent sites, like Patreon sometimes, will let you support multiple creators off one transaction fee.

Also if you deliberately set up for small payments, there's things like paypal micropayments offering a fee of 5 cents plus 5%.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> One HN comment mentioned the value of a magazine subscription, which can be ballpark similar monthly costs.

For me a patreon (or whatever) subscription to a whole GROUP of specialists in a field would be valuable.

As it stands: Patreon person:This thing I did/reviewed is great! Me: Is it though?... _search more internet for validation_

<comment><USER44> I had the thought, "why doesn't PBS or a PBS-like organization do stuff like this?"

PBS doesn't exist without the local affiliates, though, and chasing after web content too vigorously would betray that relationship, if you didn't handle it very, very carefully.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> For me, the only reason I'd be willing to pay $5/m for a single creator is because of information disparity: it is difficult to find content I like, because the signal-to-noise ratio is so low. If I have to spend a lot of time looking this costs far more than just paying for incrementally more of the same, even though the perfect content for me is probably out there somewhere for free.

AI will probably solve this problem eventually, though recommender services are in general pretty crap right now.

I think there is a lot of value in a service that can go through the Amazon catalog and just cull the 99.9% of stuff it thinks I'm not interested in, then give me advanced search / preview / indexing on the rest. Problem is, it would have to do this without taking ad dollars to poison the list. Also privacy concerns.

</comment><comment><USER54> Kind of curious if there's a way to batch support... you put in a fixed amount of money/month and you can subscribe to multiple people, but your contribution gets divided... probably not viable due to transaction fees and somebody's like "oh great I got a penny"

<comment><USER55> I think this is what Brave is trying to do with attention tokens? I don't use it but I think that's what it's called.

<comment><USER54> I see. I was thinking about Patreon/support like YouTubers but maybe they do something like that already/reason not to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> There is a malaise in the world and no matter what you call it money will flow in other directions now. You need to force the payment; optional or piratable walls are meaningless, that means you need to provide a service the people expect to pay for and some parts have to be closed!

I think 1$/month should be the goto value that we sponsor each other with.

The only way to get velocity in a deflation is to spend, but you need to get spent on more than you spend which requires inflation! Let's wait and see how the money will be distributed after the "easy dead tree" has been burned, just make sure you are prepared, things are going to get hard and accelerate down for the first time!

</comment><comment><USER57> I think it would be better if people allowed a Patreon "any amount you choose", which gets you...nothing. Just allows me to contribute however much I want, in exchange for the already freely available content. The advantage of it being Patreon is that the per-charge expense is spread among several creators who I am a patron of. I rarely take advantage of any of the "special content" for Patreon supporters, anyway, I'm just doing it to support people I like. Some of them, it's $1 a month, some it's $3 a month, and I don't want or expect anything from it except what they are already providing for free anyway.

</comment><comment><USER58> I can relate. If I were to imagine a perfect system for this it would be something that tracks whatever I subscribe and drops unused things, with some sensible safeguards not to drop something I don't actually want to drop.

</comment><comment><USER59> Human beings need to understand that it is simply not possible for a large portion of people to live off their hobbies - there's a reason why they're called hobbies or passion projects to begin with.

</comment><comment><USER60> I don't mean this as a critique of the article, but it seems this is just the burden of so much choice. There is amazing, wonderful, life-changing content out there today. And, there's so much of it. It feels so overwhelming. It's just like the calorie problem that shot up in the 80s and 90s. There's too much of everything, and the only filter is ourselves.

And, much like the calorie problem most people never solved it. Most people are anywhere from a little fat to very fat. And, so it will be with content and distraction.

</comment><comment><USER4> The only subscription I have is to Disney+ for the kids and even that I'm considering dropping. I have friends who have Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, whatever the paid version of YouTube is called, whatever streaming service has Star Trek, etc. It's gotten to the point where they are paying as much for those services as they do for cable.

</comment><comment><USER53> Are the members-only content higher or lower quality, in general? The incentive seems to be for lower quality, because the vast majority of time and effort is spent on the free part that convinces you to pay. It's a reverse iceberg.

</comment><comment><USER61> People value a product or service more when it is priced higher, so in my opinion, good content needs to be priced a lot higher than it is now, an order of magnitude higher, even (~$50/month), for people to value it properly.

</comment><comment><USER62> Tangent: I don't have access to a computer right now to analyze this website more, but it's blazing fast! Great work, author. I'd love to know more about the technology stack (seems like it's hosted on AWS with CloudFront).

</comment><comment><USER63> I prefer crowdsourcing incomplete but defined works. I'm always happy to crowdsource an album on Kickstarter.

IMO, I'd prefer if Youtube / Spotify / ect had some kind of integration with Kickstarter or similar.

</comment><comment><USER64> I wish we could just set a fixed monthly budget (e.g. $40/mo) and divide that among all the creators we wish to support. Then when we come across someone whose work we like, the question is simply "do I want to support this person's work?", and if so, they get a fraction of our budget.

Right now, rewards effectively make every membership a _custom membership_ that requires users spend extra time considering their support and dollar amount. This type of decision doesn't scale when we all want to support dozens of creators.

I wrote a more detailed breakdown of this design here: [https://nickpunt.com/blog/designing-a-better-memberships- pla...](https://nickpunt.com/blog/designing-a-better-memberships-platform/)

</comment><comment><USER65> I'm willing to buy swag if it's particularly unique or interesting, but I won't subscribe unless it's something really really special.

</comment><comment><USER66> I offered a newspaper $60 for a years hassle free reading but they still nag me.

I definitely feel the $5 fatigue here, because its a $5/mo payment threshold.

</comment><comment><USER67> > And $5/month adds up pretty quickly

Does it?

If you can't spare fifty bucks/month on whatever on top of your other expenses, you're doing it wrong :)

<comment><USER68> It adds up if you like fifty different things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> "You are fighting uphill against a cultural expectation for things to be free on the web."

A great solution to this problem of "free", is to make things that are "better than free". Kevin Kelly explains it really well in his essay ([https://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than- fre/](https://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/)), but TL;DR is that traits like Immediacy, Personalization and Interpretation play a very important role in getting people to pay for stuff. Software: Free, The manual: $10,000

</comment><comment><USER70> Yeah, but just in time, the five-dollar-foot-long is back.

</comment><comment><USER71> why cant the guy making videos just like sell tickets or something instead like for a normal movie?</comment>