Peter Thiel's Bet on Donald Trump Wins Big - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/technology/peter-thiel-bet-donald-trump-wins-big.html?hpw&rref=technology&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well <comment><USER2> This is a stroke of genius by Peter Thiel. In hindsight, he was hedged. If Clinton won, his Trump endorsement would have been chalked up to his contrarian, eccentric bent. If Trump won -and he did- Thiel's bet would have a huge return.

His self-interest aside, this is a huge deal for Palantir, the company that he helped found and has many federal governments as their client. Also, in a sense, Thiel ensured that Silicon Valley didn't completely lose touch with the White House and will have some leverage in influencing them. For starters, immigration is a key issue for Silicon Valley for which Thiel can be a voice of reason to influence the new administration.

I don't agree with many things Thiel says or does. That said, this was a brilliant execution.

<comment><USER3> > For starters, immigration is a key issue for Silicon Valley for which Thiel > can be a voice of reason to influence the new administration.

I don't know if immigration is _as_ much of an issue for Palantir, given many of its clients are clandestine and won't permit non-citizens to work on their projects.

<comment><USER4> > > For starters, immigration is a key issue for Silicon Valley for which > Thiel can be a voice of reason to influence the new administration.

> I don't know if immigration is as much of an issue for Palantir, given many > of its clients are clandestine and won't permit non-citizens to work on > their projects.

So, Palantir is actually in trouble for _not_ hiring certain immigrants / races. See [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/27/technology/us-accuses- tech...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/27/technology/us-accuses-tech-firm-of- bias-against-asian-software-engineers.html)

And my worthless personal single data point: I personally know a Pakistani guy who was rejected from Palantir. Sure, every other person gets rejected from every other place. The thing is, this guy is one of the best programmers I know of, has great charisma, has great communication skills, and has a star- studded pedigree. Yeah I know I'm going off on a single data, but I was just stunned to see _anyone_ reject this guy because I happen to personally know of his genius.

<comment><USER5> I expect there to be a prohibition against foreign nationals at a lot of defense contractors. Consider his country of origin: it's one of the last places our government wants technology transfer or espionage to occur with.

And I mean no offense to your friend, but that's how those folks think.

<comment><USER4> So, I should not have said "Pakistani". He's actually an American-born, his parents came here in early 80s. Is that still a problem you think? Would a defense contractor be hesitant in hiring native-born citizens with parents from a different country of origin?

<comment><USER6> > Would a defense contractor be hesitant in hiring native-born citizens with > parents from a different country of origin?

Foreign contacts (including family) may be a complication in security clearance background investigations, IIRC, but AFAIK discriminating directly on that basis (rather than simply requiring the clearance if necessary for the specific job) would be a bright-line violation of the law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _A lot of the dynamics were very similar to the Brexit vote in the U.K.," which also took many commentators by surprise._

 _Hillary Clinton's campaign, he said, forgot the motto that Bill Clinton had won the presidency with in 1992: "It's the economy, stupid."_

Donald Trump was a stealth 3rd party candidate, riding on a wave produced by demographic changes and the falling fortunes of a large demographic. He's down with OPP -- where OPP means "Other Person's Party." He's used other people's money to further himself. This time, he used the Republican Party, but historically, he should be compared to other 3rd party candidates.

The media producing class in this country is out of touch with a whopping huge fraction of the populace which is going from majority middle class status to minority lower class. Not only is the media producing class out of touch, many of them on the political left actively villify and denigrate them. Seriously, what did they expect?

The degree to which the upper-middle class is out of touch, concerned with fripperies, and denigrating of the lower classes in the Bay Area is starting to look like a bunch of tropes from French Revolution period dramas. Programmers and technorati -- This means you!

<comment><USER5> I grew up in "flyover country" as it has been so lovingly labeled by the coastal urbanites, and I would agree that the media is completely out of touch with a huge portion of the country.

Many of these people are decent but weren't offered even lip-service by the Democratic candidate or party. You have Hillary treating them like second class citizens offering them a lower minimum wage than urbanites, for example. Why should people who have been historically neglected maintain this situation?

This isn't permanent though. I've mentioned in other posts on other subjects that the "New Economy" needs to align its interests with those who have been left behind. You get their kids into dynamic programs that offer them an opportunity to share in the largesse generated by innovation and they will become more generous and open and integrated with the rest of the country.

<comment><USER8> Absolutely agree with your opinion of the decency of non-urban America and also the amount it's had to put up with.

Curious what revitalization looks like in an increasingly automated economy though. Not sure Trump has his finger on the pulse of where the world's going to aim ahead of that trend. Although he might, and honestly, is probably more likely to than Hilary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am ok with Thiel thinking Trump would win. What was a disappointment for me is that Thiel actually believes Trump was a good candidate and (I speculate) agrees with his platform. Also, apparently has no problem with the incendiary and hateful speech of Trump

<comment><USER10> He explains his rational argument here[1]. Basically his argument is "don't take Trump literally, take him seriously".

1.[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob- LJqPQEJ4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob-LJqPQEJ4)

<comment><USER11> > Basically his argument is "don't take Trump literally, take him seriously".

Which I guess is great if you're a billionaire and probably get some time with Trump or someone close to him that knows what he _actually_ plans to do.

In the meantime, all the rest of us are left with "I'm going to repeal Obamacare and replace it with something great." Forgive me if I would have preferred something a little more substantial. Then again, I would like other people to have preferred that as well. :/

<comment><USER12> Can any politician be taken literally, though? How did Obama's promises on the revolving door between lobbyists and his administration work out? Or his promise on health insurance premiums? These promises aren't the exception, they are the rule. Politicians (almost) always have to lie to win. So Trump not being specific as to what he will do seems unlikely to be any different to interpret than if he made very specific plans.

<comment><USER11> Well, I think there are differing levels of information that can be conveyed. You can say you want a healthcare system where everyone is insured. You can say you want a healthcare system where costs are lowered. You can say you want both. All these convey some information about the goals of the politician, and how they may or may not align with your own. What they eventually come up with, or not, will inform you how much they compromised on that position. I would hazard most politicians are less likely to compromise on specific goals they stated, and more likely to compromise on ones they didn't state. This allows you to steer yourself towards a candidate that may work for an outcome you want, even if there's obviously no guarantee.

In this case, we have "I will make something great", as if every candidate wasn't implicitly setting out to to do the same and every voter wasn't hoping for the same. So, am I more or less likely to get the outcome I want in this situation? Who knows? I don't because there's no way to, but I would sure appreciate being empowered to at least _try_ to figure that out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I would say OP has begged the question. Just because Trump has _won_ does not mean that Thiel's bet has _paid off_. As in cornering the market or making a killing on paper, 'how do you bury the body?' Indeed, more than one person on the betting sites or prediction markets (or Bitcoin exchange) has been burned when they thought they won something but the market resolved otherwise. Until you've withdrawn your cash, you haven't made any money and you are still vulnerable to counterparty risk. And Thiel has yet to cash out any of his supposed 'influence'.

I noted when Thiel made his original donations, and then kept doubling down, that there was a good probability he would 'win' (Trump never falling below 10% in the prediction markets) but I felt that the more serious issue was whether he would benefit. Trump has a long history of using and discarding people as soon as they are no longer useful, including decades of simply not paying people who have done work for him (at least two examples in his campaign alone: the polling agency and the girls who sang at his rallies) and daring them to sue. Not to mention how often he loudly promises to donate to charity and then... doesn't. Narcissists are not known for their gratitude, generosity, reciprocation, or feeling bound by past promises or contracts explicit or implicit. Thiel donating to Trump and giving speeches in his support is merely Trump's due for being the greatest businessman in the world and the man who will make America great again. It does not follow that Trump will actually do anything for Thiel: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farmer_and_the_Viper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farmer_and_the_Viper)

It will be interesting to see if Thiel's bet on Donald Trump ever wins big and he gets something out of it like a Supreme Court nomination. But it's not over yet, and his chickens have neither hatched nor come home to roost.

</comment><comment><USER14> A lot of speculation here about why Thiel backed Trump. If you're genuinely curious, just watch him in his own words [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob- LJqPQEJ4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob-LJqPQEJ4). You may not agree with him, but it makes sense, especially from the author of The Diversity Myth.

</comment><comment><USER10> His bet was completely in line with what he has been saying the past few years (about flying cars and 140 chars etc). It resonates with Trumps "US doesn't win anymore". He may have realized that a large part of US population felt the same way, something that, apparently, went amiss from everyone else in SV.

</comment><comment><USER15> I didn't vote for Trump nor Clinton. Although I'm right-leaning on most issues, I am in the perplexed camp of why 50% of voters selected Trump. I was sure Hillary was going to win.

I'm especially bewildered why deeply religious, evangelical Christians I know were big on Trump. He's such a sinner by biblical standards, the love for the guy didn't make sense - I thought it'd be hypocrisy to support the guy. For most, they told me the single issue for them was the supreme court nominees that Trump was promising to put forward. But, in discussing what Trump was going to do once elected, the level of projection of their goodness onto Trump seemed to go to delusional, fantasy-land places.

What I'm coming to realize is that, being upper middle-class puts me completely out of touch culturally with the 50% that voted for Trump. The book _Coming Apart_ , by Charles Murray is really helping me understand what is going on in America and what a cloistered life I've led.

<comment><USER10> You would be wrong i believe, because it seems that everyone, and not just the deplorables voted trump. [https://www.theguardian.com/us- news/2016/nov/09/white-voters...](https://www.theguardian.com/us- news/2016/nov/09/white-voters-victory-donald-trump-exit-polls)

<comment><USER15> > Among college-educated whites, 45% voted for Clinton – 39% of men and 51% of > women (the only white demographic represented in the poll where the former > secretary of state came out on top). But 54% of male college graduates voted > for Trump, as did 45% of female college graduates.

Fascinating, pretty strong turnout for Trump with college educated folks! Clinton's numbers reflect that she lost a ton of male votes to third party.

> But among the 64% of American voters who earn more than $50,000 a year, 49% > chose Trump, and 47% Clinton.

Middle class came out for Trump too. I wish they'd break out higher income brackets, that's where I'm at. And I guess that Clinton's support there is much stronger - which reflects the disconnect Murray describes in cultures and political leanings between the urban wealthy classes and the rest of the population.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > "His odds were very badly underestimated," he said. "Trump voters were not > being captured by the polls. A lot of the dynamics were very similar to the > Brexit vote in the U.K.," which also took many commentators by surprise.

The real takeaway for me is figuring why this is the case — how could / can we change the polls to be more robust?

To some degree, perhaps the polls influence the outcome of the election. For example, if people on the edge of voting or not think Clinton will win by a healthy margin, they might not actually bother to vote.

<comment><USER17> I've been listening to 538 for the past few weeks. I'll try and sum up what I've gleaned from their thoughts before the election and after. A few of the election night podcasts I didn't get to listen to until after the election, which helps to see what they were over-confident about or what they're backpedaling about today.

While I think it was 70/30 for Clinton they were very explicit that this doesn't mean Clinton will win. They admitted it's very difficult to convey probabilities to the average person and it's something they're still working on. I feel like a lot of the pundits (honestly, on Trump's side, too) seemed to believe Hillary winning was inevitable and the night was just going to play out like the predictions, but the polls and analysts were saying it was going to be close (although, Hillary was favored).

While Clinton had a confident lead in the popular vote, her electoral map was rocky. She had thin margins in a bunch of contentious states, but in states like California and Texas she got fairly large numbers in individuals that wouldn't translate into electoral votes. When it came to the vote she just lost the contentious states.

Something else they said today is that pollsters see outliers (changes from the norm) as possible noise, so they tend to bias that back to historical values or neighboring values. This can hide pockets of change or make trends slower to show up. The last election was Obama obviously he appealed to different groups of people. Many assumed the areas he flipped would stay flipped. That's why pollsters were off almost as much as 10% in some areas instead of the expected 3%.

Another thing I've heard toyed around is that public polls are funded by universities and newspapers--institutions who haven't had as much money lately. So while analysis of polls have gotten better, polls have gotten worse. There's also talk about landlines falling out of favor and online polling being worse. Campaign polls have gotten better since there's more money now. From what I've heard Romney's internal polls were way off, but Obama's polls were spot on. I've heard both Hillary's and Trump's internal polls had Hillary ahead...so all of that might be irrelevant.

It was a close race and the unconventional nature made it difficult to honestly predict. But most predictions ended up close to the margin of error-- they just guessed the winner with too much confidence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> A similar discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12912608](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12912608)

</comment><comment><USER19> I wish Thiel would become more involved... Trump is likely to end up starting too many fights on too many fronts by myopic activists whose concerns don't matter to the average voter but that rile up a significant activist base in opposition. Trump can't win a 2nd term without triangulation to mollify that. He needs to pick his battles.

</comment><comment><USER20> "Peter Thiel's Bet on Donald Trump Wins Big" -> "Peter Thiel's Bet on Donald Trump Wins Bigly" ... FTFY

</comment><comment><USER21> trump is an idiot who has no business being president of the country, which marks the first time someone with zero (literally zero) political experience, not even military service, was elected to that position.

That said, he speaks his mind and it's trivial to see what he's thinking.

Had Hillary Clinton (who I and any sane person would like over Trump) become President, it would be impossible to know what she really thought of anything or to decipher anything she said: she's a career politician, who pauses before speaking and then speaks out of both sides of her mouth.

listening to Trump is like listening to some random drunk idiot in a bar. he isn't pulling one over on anyone - he barely knows where he is. sometimes that has its advantages.

<comment><USER22> Very many sane people had no desire to see Hillary Clinton be the president of the United States. There's just no need to keep pretending that your opinion is the only rational choice when you've been repudiated so completely.

<comment><USER23> > There's just no need to keep pretending that your opinion is the only > rational choice when you've been repudiated so completely.

You do realize that Clinton won the popular vote, right? the majority of Americans agree with her policies and voted for her. Trump won because of the arcane 18th century election structure unique to the US called an electoral college.

<comment><USER22> Ahh, is it time to cry about the electoral college again? I suppose if no one knew going in that it was the way things were done, I'd care. Since everyone knew, it's just the worst kind of monday-morning quarterbacking.

The thorough repudiation is that Hillary Clinton was anointed the next president, anointed the "only" "sane" choice, and lost. It's a fact, no matter what tears people dredge up now.

I say this with no love or support for Donald Trump, just open eyes in a process that most people enter willfully blind.

<comment><USER11> > Since everyone knew, it's just the worst kind of monday-morning > quarterbacking.

To be fair, it's not like this only gets brought up after the election. The last 3-6 months have been filled with people complaining about how our voting system works, different systems and their own problems, etc.

<comment><USER22> Sure, that's totally fair. I don't even particularly like the electoral college system personally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "Trump voters were not being captured by the polls. A lot of the dynamics were very similar to the Brexit vote in the U.K.," which also took many commentators by surprise."

The media in both countries was outright lying. The only surprise here is that they believed their own lies.

</comment><comment><USER25> What's really scary is having 2 Germans having a go at your democracy. Who knows how it'll turn out.</comment>


Calcularium – The Almighty Calculator - <AUTHOR> Calcularium is a Descriptive, Editable, Gesture-Based & Voice Controlled Calculator (patent pending). https://itunes.apple.com/app/calcularium-the-calculator/id824113384 <comment><USER2> Looks cool. Wish there were an Android version.</comment>


Online tracking: A 1M-site measurement and analysis - <AUTHOR> https://webtransparency.cs.princeton.edu/webcensus/index.html <comment><USER2> Current discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11729438](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11729438)</comment>


Ask HN: Requiring users to sign up for free trial. Yay or nay? - jonathan-kosgei We have an API product that has had a no signup or credit card free tier for a while now.
However due to rampant abuse (potentially a small scale DDOS) we're contemplating requiring users to sign up to access the free tier.
Does anyone think this is a bad idea that might reduce uptake of our API? <comment><AUTHOR> These days, getting an email or other sign-up for something has (at least) two significant factors:

* Do I trust you with the data I give you; and

* What do I get in return for my data?

If you are clear and upfront that the sign-up has been introduced because of lots of bogus accesses, you'll gain some sympathy. But people will still ask both of those questions.

If you act in a trustworthy manner, and you provide value in return, then I think it's fine to ask for a sign-up. But you need to gain the user's trust, both that you will treat their data with respect, and that there will be something in return.

Exactly how you convince them of those two things is not easy, and effectively "marketing".

</comment><comment><USER2> I am a bit surprised your free tier doesn't have a signup. Do you give people an API key, just like, randomly generated on the fly on page load?

<comment> jonathan-kosgei Nope, you can call our endpoint without an API key but you'd be limited to 1500 requests a day.

<comment><USER2> Oh, another reason I realized you should have registration/people's email: While you wouldn't want to automatically send these people marketing emails without their express interest, you WOULD want to be able to send your free tier users security notices.

I don't know which API you are at, but I use OpenWeatherMap, and usually, do so with a city ID to request the location. But you _can_ query OpenWeatherMap by GPS (I don't, myself), and you could be querying it using precise coordinates. So if OpenWeatherMap were to have a security breach, my location history might be leaked, and I'd like to know that... even if I'm on the free tier.

<comment> jonathan-kosgei Thanks for the feedback, this does help. I'm wary of adding another step before users can get started with the API but it might become necessary to do so.

Thanks again!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


HN Bookmarklet: Show PG's essay footnotes in-line on hover - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/4116565

<comment><AUTHOR> #FirstWorldProblem: Reading footnotes on PG's essays makes you lose your place, so if you're like me you never read them until you get to the bottom. Solution: Bookmarklet.

<comment><USER2> What's really amazing is that every now and again someone makes HN easier to read and use, and every time after about an hour, no one cares again. Simple text with simple styles just works, because the content is unbelievably good. Everything else is just bells and whistles.

Good job on the bookmarklet, though I am not sure if anyone will actually use it :) I think it's one of those things where you think it's a good idea, but really it's not quote as big of a problem as it seems.

<comment><AUTHOR> What you're saying is true. It's a small problem and people will forget; they always do. My real intention was to make it easy enough that there was a chance (a very small one indeed) PG would stick it at the bottom of the page and never have to think about it again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Another possibility would be to place them as side-notes (the essays only take very little horizontal space -- the rest could be used for notes).

</comment><comment><USER4> This is attacking a problem that needs a lot more attention: how should footnotes (or endnotes or whatever) be handled? In other words, what is a good way to handle the addition of optional material in an otherwise linear text?

That said, looks like a nice idea. Not sure how much I like this particular solution yet. Thanks for posting.

<comment><USER5> As an English major, I read a lot of Shakespeare plays, and I liked the versions that had sidenotes, so that the note appeared at the same level of the line it referred to. This technique translates well to the browser using a hover or click, as seen here: <http://rapgenius.com/Drake-the-motto-lyrics>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The Back button works for links within a page, incidentally.

<comment><USER7> It's nice to be able to see the footnote and the main text at the same time. (I usually open side-by-side windows to read your essays.)

<comment><USER8> I was also thinking about the footnote problem, while reading PG's most recent essay [1]. Maybe, it is time to kill or supersede footnotes on the web which are one of the examples of the paper text format skeuomorphisms, more common in scientific writing. Footnotes give the serious feeling of a well planned and well thought attire to essays where the main point is elaborated and the distractions are left out, for a delayed, independent, optional reading. However they make the deep readers'[2] experience worse; mainly they prefer to follow the true thought-flow of the writer, and evaluate each footnote in its context rather than separate from the main text.

[1] How to get startup ideas <http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html>

[2] By deep readers, I mean people who don't want to miss a single idea in the essay.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> PG's blog posts would be somewhat more navigable if the footnote number at the bottom was linked back to the original citation / reference.

<comment><USER10> But that would bring them out of the 90s. Unacceptable bloat in an otherwise MVP

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> For this kind of problems, I prefer userscripts solutions over bookmarklets as they don't require any intervention from my side -- they auto-load, which is great. This is the typical scenario for a userscripts -- predictable URL sets on where they should fire.

Think about adding this to <http://userscripts.org/>. Userscripts are handled via GreaseMonkey extension in Firefox and from what I know, natively by Chrome but I never checked.

\--

Side note: believe me or not, but I stopped using bookmarks toolbar in my Firefox a year ago or two; I store bookmarks with short memorable names and use kbd to launch them; CTRL-T/CTRL-L, type, ENTER. I abandoned having a toolbar since I was never able to keep visual order in it after constantly adding new items.

</comment><comment><USER12> Awesome. I always tell myself I'm going to make something like this when reading pg's essays (I specifically remember re-thinking it during the last one) and then never do. Now I don't have to--thanks! :)

</comment><comment><USER13> A couple years ago, the Django Advent had a nifty JS enhancement for footnotes. I thought it worked so well I stole it for a personal project of mine. I would've linked to the original but they're now offline, so if you'll pardon the personal plug you can see it in action at <http://sonsofterra.com/>

</comment><comment><USER14> <http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html></comment>


Show HN: Screen.rip – API for capturing web screenshots - <AUTHOR> http://screen.rip <comment><USER4> The Catch-22: set of folks with the skills to use a security token to call an API and archive screen dumps for visual regression testing, roughly equals the one that already knows how to automate via headless Chrome ;)

laktek, I'd be interested in hearing how you would turn this into a consumer product? For myself, I'd like an API that wraps devtools for remote debugging (on users machines). Am able to extract useful info via performance counters and computed styles. But the entire process can be made much more friendly I imagine.

Good luck, and keep building!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comment! So both Screen.rip and Page.REST are my way of validating the market. I don't expect these API services to be the end product (but rather the building blocks for bigger ideas).

However, APIs do seem to arouse curiosity among people. Lot of the emails I've been getting follows the theme of "I saw your API and was wondering how we can use to solve X". This way I get a more focused set of real problems (and their potential value), rather than I try to hypothesis problem spaces.

PS: Another cool thing about releasing API first is I can start charging people sooner, rather than having to wait till I build a finished product. It helps since I'm bootstrapping.

<comment><USER5> $7 is cheap imo. I paid for a service similar to yours for years. Their price point was close to 10 times as high as yours, yet I happily paid my monthly subscription.

I love this.

<comment><USER6> $7 for 10,000 is not that cheap ($0.0007 per screenshot). I'm charging $0.000365 per screenshot and I thought that was on the higher end.

[https://www.prerender.cloud/docs/api](https://www.prerender.cloud/docs/api)

      curl http://service.prerender.cloud/screenshot/https://google.com/ > out.jpg

<comment><USER5> I paid 10 times more for years happily.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Incidentally over the last few weeks I've been looking around the tools to monitor the appearance of websites; think of this as a step up from "is my site still online?" services, over toward "does my stride still look roughly correct". The latter is super important for sites whose functioning is critical to (for example) business happening, cash flowing, salaries being paid.

What I found is that this market is relatively crowded at the low end, with services that either don't state what browser they are using to render a site for a visual check, or which state and only support one browser.

It looks like screen.rip is also aiming at this low-end. I don't see anything on there about what browser uses, and nothing about choosing a browser. And it is only $7 (for 10000 images).

It seems to me that there may also be a market for people happy to pay $70 for the same thing, with the ability to specify which browser, and have the list of available browsers include the ones that are kind of inconvenient to support (older IE). Sure, it's a lot more of a technical slog, but I imagine someone facing the sort of troubles and trying to monitor the appearance of their site across all the major browsers would find that 10 X the stated price is a relatively good deal compared to the misery of setting all that up locally.

<comment><USER8> I've been having the same sort of frustrations and needs for a while, and recently launch something to scratch that itch [1]

It's tangently similar to screen.rip, but it's much more focused on getting up and started quickly and making it easy to monitor sides that require authentication. Let me know what you think.

[1] [https://pixelbug.io](https://pixelbug.io)

<comment><USER9> I've been using this for about month and like the email notifications when changes happen. Pretty nice to have in my inbox for what I do.

Disclosure: I know the creator.

<comment><USER10> I was going to mention Pixelbug in the comments as a possible alternative.

Disclosure: I know the parent commenter. And the creator. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> C# api client [https://github.com/NicoJuicy/WebsiteAsImageWebService.Api.Cs...](https://github.com/NicoJuicy/WebsiteAsImageWebService.Api.Csharp)

Nodejs api [https://github.com/NicoJuicy/WebsiteAsImageWebService](https://github.com/NicoJuicy/WebsiteAsImageWebService)

:)

</comment><comment><USER12> Good timing — though slightly OT.

For training our customers we often record little demos of how to achieve something in our app, and then send it to them as an animated GIF in Intercom. We've been using Giphy but it's pretty clumsy. The app itself is always in the way, especially on a laptop screen and then you need to record the clip, save it to disk and then drag it from disk into an Intercom conversation.

After trying a few other solutions there doesn't seem to be a pain-free way of recording a clip and then having it available as an animated GIF ready to paste into the browser. I'm not sure if some of the issue is that it's just not possible to but an animated GIF in the clipboard on OSX (it just comes through as a single still shot).

Does anyone have any recommendations for this workflow?

<comment><USER13> I use this Chrome extension[0] for capturing animated gifs. It's worked pretty well for me so far!

[0]: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chrome- capture/gga...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chrome- capture/ggaabchcecdbomdcnbahdfddfikjmphe)

<comment><USER12> Seems pretty good. It doesn't show the mouse movement / clicks, which is a shame (and probably rules it out). At least it's a little slicker to use though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Screenshots are useful, but diffs of screenshots are even more useful.

You could maybe immitate the workflow used by wraith? [https://github.com/bbc- news/wraith](https://github.com/bbc-news/wraith)

For example to setup screenshot diffs between an existing production site and local dev, use:

        # (required) The domains to take screenshots of.
        domains:
          current:  "https://prod.yoursite.com"
          new:      "http://localhost:8000"

        paths:
          home:     /pageyouareworkingon.html

Not sure how to connect to localhost 8000 from the web though...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that'd something nice to build. To connect localhost to web, maybe Ngrok?

<comment><USER14> wow ngrok is nice...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a great single-line tool that can make taking screenshots easy.

I'm a cheapskate, though, and don't mind spending the time to write my own screenshot script via Selenium.

</comment><comment><USER16> Very cool! Useful to keep tabs on competitors and your own sites.

I'd suggest adding some kind of Stripe branding to your payment form to make it a little more trustworthy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Will try to add the Stripe's new Payment Request API buttons, so payments are carried out from the Apple / Google pay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This seems like a great idea and I don't think $7 is steep. There are free options about but it's still cool none the less.

<comment><USER18> I haven't looked around but the first competitor that comes up on Google charges 29/month for 5000 screenshots so I'd gladly pay $7 if the results are good (I'd rather pay $7 than $0 if I were building a product on top of this, because I'd rather be a customer than a disposable user)

<comment><USER6> $7 per 10,000 is $0.0007 per screenshot

Get it for $0.000365 per screenshot from me (shameless)

[1]: [https://www.prerender.cloud/docs/api](https://www.prerender.cloud/docs/api)

      curl http://service.prerender.cloud/screenshot/https://google.com/ > out.jpg

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> How different is from this free tool?

[https://wkhtmltopdf.org/](https://wkhtmltopdf.org/)

<comment><USER20> If it's using Chrome headless, it's superior to wkhtmltopdf. The latter has lots of little gotchas and things that may render fine in a browser but not in wkhtmltopdf. Chrome headless doesn't suffer from those issues, obviously.

<comment><USER21> but the site itself says it "runs headless".

<comment><USER22> Running headless does not imply that it's running _Chrome_ headless, just that it runs without a GUI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> A lot of talk about pricing here, so I add my favorite www.thum.io - <USER2> $2 for 10.000 with first 1.000 for free.

What I like about them in particular is their buffering: once a screenshot is made, it can be served from their server 'unlimited' times without counting as a new screenshot.

A real improvement on their service (worth paying extra for me !) would be a way to dismiss the banner on github projects for new visitors. Obviously their browser is not logged into Github at the moment of the screenshot, so those screenshots mainly shows a general Github welcome banner :-(

</comment><comment><USER24> So one perspective is that a lot of development these days is combining existing libraries with glue code to meet a need. I wonder how much of the future will be combining microservice APIs with affordable micro transactions to meet a need.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is what I want to have too! Machine payable web. Hopefully, something like Ethereum / Lightning network would make the micro-transactions viable in the future.

</comment></comment><comment> steve-benjamins What does auto-updating mean?

I run a website builders review website and have always wanted to write a script that captures every pricing page so that my readers could scan them all at once.

Two problems have kept me from this:

1) Scrolling (which it looks like you've fixed— haven't seen other screenshot APIs do this— awesome!) 2) Pricing pages change often— so manual screenshots don't make sense. Does your auto-updating take care of this? (ie: captures a new screenshot each time the page is updated)

<comment><AUTHOR> I mean to evolve the product screenshots as you ship more features or make cosmetic changes to the app. I assume it's PITA to keep the screenshots consistent with the actual app UI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I guess it's using headless chrome, am I right?

<comment><USER26> Yeah, you can implement this in-house for your needs in less then 30 minutes using 512mb DO droplet or other in-house devops tool server for free.

<comment><USER25> in less than 30 minutes? Let's do it, I wanna see it

<comment><USER26> Took me around 15 minutes in total. Can I be CTO at your silicon valley company now with 500k salary?

        const express = require('express')
        const app = express()
        const puppeteer = require('puppeteer')
        const uuidv1 = require('uuid/v1')
        const fs = require('fs')
        const validUrl = require('valid-url')

        app.get('/', function (req, res) {
          (async () => {
            const url = req.query.url;

            if (!url) {
              return res.send({error: 'Need to specify url param e.g. ?url=https://google.com/'});
            }

            if (!validUrl.isUri(url)) { // Also protects against file://...
              return res.send({error: 'url not valid'})
            }

            const id = uuidv1();
            const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
            const page = await browser.newPage();
            await page.setViewport({ width: 1920, height: 1080})

            await page.goto(url)
            const buffer = await page.screenshot({path: id + '.png'})

            const fullPath = __dirname + '/' + id + '.png';

            res.sendFile(fullPath, function () {
              fs.unlink(fullPath)
            })

            await browser.close()
          })();
        })

        app.listen(3000, function () {
          console.log('Example app listening on port 3000!')
        })

<comment><USER27> Apart from the smugness, I hope you realize that technology != success. It doesn't _matter_ that I can replicate Tinder with a few weeks of coding.

In fact, the two are often inversely correlated because engineers can be _so worried_ about what technology, what stack, what language, instead of worrying about the _real_ deal: getting the users.

<comment><USER26> I know that you can build twitter and tinder and getting the users is hard. But my point was very different -- People will probably need this for some internal tooling (devops) and it is simple enough to just build it on your own without paying someone or relying on 3rd party.

IMO there should be a line of what to outsource and what to build yourself. In my mind simple things like this go into second category.

<comment><USER27> I see your point but I'm not fully convinced. Companies outsource simple stuff all the time. To wit, I think that line you drew might vary from company to company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> How come "Arimo" is the default font for sans-serif, though?

img: [https://imgur.com/a/ULr4I](https://imgur.com/a/ULr4I)

page: [http://www.juliendesrosiers.com/](http://www.juliendesrosiers.com/)

Edit: I know I should've used @font-face for my logo, but still, it bugs me.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was tweaking the font-setup to support full unicode ranges. Maybe a result of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Any chance you implement bitcoin/blockchain payments. So I can pay you through code and then programmatically get my token?

<comment><AUTHOR> I want that on all APIs but I don't think Bitcoin or Ethereum is suitable for such micro-payments. Waiting for something like lightning network to be adopted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Well pitched and put together IMO but the thing that always irritates me about services like these is the so-so font rendering. Screenshots taken on macOS just look better for some reason. As an aside, I've always found it weird no other OS has got text rendering quite as right, it's a key part of why I stick with it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Peter (I'm big fan of Cooper Press).

I actually tried to make the font rendering better. Installed few custom fonts and also tweaked few system options. I agree it might not be crisp as macOS.

Wonder if hardcore Linux desktop enthusiasts have any tips here?

<comment><USER31> Rent a Mac mini in a colo and charge more for OS X screenshots?

<comment><USER32> Checkout [https://www.macincloud.com/](https://www.macincloud.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Awesome product, awesome landing page, awesome pricing scheme. I wish you only success!

Next step: animated screengrabs (gif/webp)? :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot David! Yeah, Screencasts seems like a natural progression to the API. Will explore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The api is just perfect, I wonder if I can use it in a commercial project to address some niche market ?!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes absolutely! You just have to pay for an API token.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Does it work with emojis and other interesting characters? If not then we should talk since I'm working on a project that helps solve the browser part of the equation [https://browserless.io](https://browserless.io)

<comment><AUTHOR> It does! check emojipedia.com and popular non US sites like taobao.com. I did that heavy lifting ;)

<comment><USER35> Any advice for where I can learn more about proper handling of emojis in my front-end and database?

<comment><USER34> He's using the Google Noto library for handling fonts: [https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-emoji](https://github.com/googlei18n/noto- emoji)

EDIT: This is also a really nice font library as well: [https://www.emojione.com/](https://www.emojione.com/) though you have to pay for a commercial license if that's your end game

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I am working on a tool[0] to record a video of a website or web app. Instead of A/B testing, I am using it to capture Repro Steps.

[0]: [https://github.com/styfle/magnemite](https://github.com/styfle/magnemite)

</comment><comment><USER37> I build a similar tool but with few more capabilities like CDN, analytics and PDF support. Feel free to check it out.

[https://capture.techulus.in/](https://capture.techulus.in/)

<comment><USER5> Question: How does your PDF version of web pages work? Is it an image turned into PDF or?

<comment><AUTHOR> In Screen.rip, generated PDF is a real PDF, which you can select and annotate. Check [https://screen.rip/#pdf](https://screen.rip/#pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'm curious what the "We're ::lightning:: by Drift" means in the contact box. What verb is supposed to be conveyed by ::lightning::? Fast? It's just the chat box.

<comment><USER39> We're 'powered' by Drift.

<comment><USER38> I'm an idiot. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Check out [https://www.pdfparty.com](https://www.pdfparty.com) as well - <USER3> similar and different capabilities

</comment><comment><USER41> I like the "capture an area" feature. Very nice!

</comment><comment><USER42> The 365 day expiry time is a little frustrating - but you probably don't want customers stretching out the quota over 2+ years.

<comment><AUTHOR> Felt 365 days is ok in terms of security as well. For example, if you lose the token (aka dead project) and someone get hold of the key starts using it for abuse. This way we have at least an annual check of the keys.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Looks cool! Maybe you can add an option to record the screen / area for x seconds as a gif, it might be useful in some cases.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the idea, was thinking of exploring screencasting possibility as a next step.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I've tried 7 different pages from our setup and not one of them worked.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you share more details of your setup? (my contact details are on profile)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Can you make it save the page as PDF as well?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes [https://screen.rip/#pdf](https://screen.rip/#pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Any consideration towards bulk pricing?

100's of millions?

<comment><AUTHOR> 100s of millions over a time period? You can keep buying more tokens as you run out of request quotas.

<comment><USER46> Bulk pricing generally implies a reduced price for a larger purchase.

$7 per 10k stops being cost effective at that scale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> why? Why not just use casperjs or something and use the built-in method?

It's literally 3 lines of code. Or even a one-liner if you really want.

      require('casper')
        .create()
        .start('https://rms.sexy')
        .then(function() {
          this.capture('test.png');
        }).run();

<comment><USER48> I have a little design for a Cortex based platform with enough memory to hold these images, but there's no way I could run an entire webkit instance for capturing images. This is a perfect solution me.

So yeah, in my case casper is a no-go.

<comment><USER47> Writing and hosting this yourself on a different machine is very little work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I've never heard of several proper nouns in these threads: Intercom, Selenium, Drift.

Time to Google.

<comment><USER20> Drift is a cheaper (read: free) version of Intercom</comment></comment>


The secret life of SIM cards (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://simhacks.github.io/defcon-21/

<comment><USER2> i hate to be that guy, and without actually trying to start a flamewar or "who's better", I find it really interesting that americans are so great at marketing things, the german stuff works, but usually looks crappy. here's a CCC talk from 2011 on the topic [1]

you could observe the same thing when the ccc guys had their first gsm phones. Someone just showed up with a base station in the trunk of his car. compare that with the huge buzz that went around the same thing at defcon a couple of years ago. The defcon truck definitely looked WAY cooler.

but on topic what's actually really scary about this is that even newer smartphones would allow sim exploits to roam free. contrary to what you may think it's not just old phones.

[1] [http://events.ccc.de/camp/2011/Fahrplan/events/4427.en.html](http://events.ccc.de/camp/2011/Fahrplan/events/4427.en.html)

EDIT: while technically not exactly the same as opensimkit here's an answer to the why question posed by jacob appelbaum. I suspect the same applies here(and it's not really a bad reason either)

[https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2013-J...](https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2013-January/006554.html)

<comment><USER3> The CCC talk looks cool for digging into more of what's possible as well as actually building their own serial interface, but the DEFCON talk is more interesting from the perspective that they actually got their own virgin SIMs and implemented their own app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In Kenya, the SIM card application is very important as most Telecommunication companies have important services that they offer thorugh the application. These include Mpesa, Airtel Money, YU Cash and Orange Money among other services.

The iPhone has a menu option within Settings > Phone > Sim Applications where these are displayed. I haven't seen this on other SIM cards

<comment><USER5> Same for Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, and I suspect a lot of the rest of the (non-Eastern) Africa.

USSD codes are critical.

<comment><USER6> Tanzania? Not so sure. What I've seen in Dar is that the way to access mobile money for instance is to dial _150_ XX# to access services. SIM Toolkit Applications on the contrary present as regular phone applications (albeit limited by the SIM tooklit capabilities).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It reminds my good days programming simcards, i was the founded of a startup in Brazil that made a good use of simcard programming to store two numbers in the same simcard, around 2010 it's a cool and profitable, the thing is that i managed to insert a local imsi and an a north american imsi registered in the same card so everyone that travel abroad could be free of expensive roaming charges, them we sold the company and now days they are a reseller for some major carrier in US =)

<comment><USER8> Can you go into more details?

I travel a lot and use a hacked up Chinese phone since it supports dual SIM pretty well but I'd rather use an iPhone. Unfortunately I want both my US and UK numbers and contacts slightly more.

<comment><USER7> For some reason i have that NDA shit on my back, but i can show you a few options available on ebay that works well too!

<comment><USER9> I'd certainly be interested in that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wait, what? They're unknown in the U.S? Then what in the world are they using over there?

<comment><USER11> Apps that run directly on the SIM card are relatively unknown in the US. We (in Canada) normally download apps that run on the phone's OS, like Android or iOS apps. Running apps directly on the SIM card is very unlikely.

<comment><USER12> Most carriers like Wind sell phones with SIM apps to control your account, also there were a few banking apps done like this [http://www.newswire.ca/en/story/1063949/cibc-and-rogers- comp...](http://www.newswire.ca/en/story/1063949/cibc-and-rogers-complete-the- first-mobile-credit-card-transaction-in-canada)

I played around with a TurboSim for a while too back when I was testing out a SIM card 'firewall' that would block the carrier programmed SIM from responding to OTA updates or type-0 stealth SMS and other bad things [http://www.bladox.com/](http://www.bladox.com/) then phones with wifi that didn't require a SIM came out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In the public health space, these SIM applications on programmable SIM cards (pass-through sandwiched with parallel carrier SIM cards) are very useful for data collection: See Medic Mobile and [http://vimeo.com/45532467](http://vimeo.com/45532467) [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/ict4chw/5WKV3c6RfEU](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/ict4chw/5WKV3c6RfEU)

</comment><comment><USER14> In Norway we can use a SIM application to log into the bank. Don't know how it works, but here's a introduction in English: [https://www.bankid.no/Dette-er- BankID/BankID-in-English/Bank...](https://www.bankid.no/Dette-er- BankID/BankID-in-English/BankID-on-your-mobile/)

</comment><comment><USER15> They did not mention who was their SIM vendor but each SIM vendor is using their own design for the metal contacts. One could find which vendor was trying to sell them the software which they did not own for $600.

</comment><comment><USER16> We need to get rid of the SIM card and the closed basebands if we ever want to save the internet / PC / FOSS that permitted this open ecosystem... #KeysToTheUsers

</comment><comment><USER17> These must be pretty small applications -- don't SIM cards have under a megabyte of storage capacity?

<comment><USER18> The wonders one can do with 64KB. :)

<comment><USER19> Indeed: [http://www.pouet.net/](http://www.pouet.net/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It seems it would be a lot of fun to hack on these with some version of Lua. A reference counted variant might be more suitable.

Havent had a chance to watch the presentation, perhaps its already answered there: Are these totally locked down or is it within realms of possibility to take out the SIM card from an average GSM phone and start poking around, adding one's own applications.</comment>


Are We Built to Run Barefoot? - <AUTHOR> http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/08/are-we-built-to-run-barefoot/ <comment><USER2> I didn't know this was still an unanswered question. Surely there are children of western/first-world hippies who have worn barefoot-shoes all their life? I don't run, and walk indoors barefoot far more than I walk outdoors with shoes, so am I meant to be somewhere inbetween, or does any shoe-wearing at all create bad tendencies?</comment>


Ask HN: Will BitCoin reach $30 this week? - <AUTHOR>

No betting, just discussion. It's already $29.5 on MtGox. <comment><USER2> On localbitcoins.com, the price of 30 Dollars is already exceeded, at least if you convert between Euro and Dollars.

Doesn't mean that trading in Bitcoins isn't simply money laundering. And no, the standard argument "cash is used for ml too", doesn't hold. The illegal uses of BC seem more visible and more voluminous than the legal ones, so yes, when trading bitcoins, you are helping the illegal part of the economy a lot more than the legal part of the bitcoin economy.

The ECB clearly said so, officially, on the record. This might be the year of the bitcoin: Die or prosper.</comment>


Why do some intelligent people lose all interest in academia? - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-intelligent-people-lose-all-interest-in-academia/answer/Steven-Thomason-8?share=1 <comment><USER2> Money.

Culture.

While there is certainly an "academic ideal culture" that people imagine. Being able to research interesting things, share your knowledge, take sabbaticals, etc.

It is a grueling path to get there, and when you do get there you realize that because of the mostly small close-knit departments, everything becomes extremely political.

This happens in private business, but in business your avenues to power and influence are usually a myriad greater than in academia.

Struggles within your department feel like family fights, not work just bullshit.

The overwhelming progressive, leftist bias in academia is attractive to some. If it isn't you thing you really have to be well prepared for cancel culture.

I once had a professor tell me she had to register as an independent because you couldn't be a registered Republican in her department. And this was 20 years ago. From all accounts it is 10x worse today.</comment>


The Green Energy Fantasy - <AUTHOR> http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=22651&news_iv_ctrl=1021 <comment><USER2> This kind of thing is really starting to irk me; and I'm a libertarian (although, not a 'Randian' libertarian).

Summary: _Greentech sucks compared to the low low cost of wonderful coal._ Brilliant deduction. I've got a calculator too. The implicit (and never stated) "solution" offered by articles like this is, "just keep on burning the coal and don't think to much about it." Its just complaining without offering up any ideas to fix things.

The whole point of _renewable_ energy is that its... (do I really have to say it?). So Keith thinks green energy will wreck the economy? Wait till there's no more coal. If the government is going to make-work, we might as well work on saving our asses.

<comment><USER3> I'm actually a pretty big fan of Ayn Rand's works, so all that aside ...

How does it take "tens of thousands of acres" to house 1,000 wind turbines? All the wind farms I've seen so far have a much higher turbine density than that -- on the order of 1 / acre at least.

I also used to loathe wind farms as an example of a stupid resource sink, since I so often saw them sitting idle, and since I considered all of the energy required to manufacture and maintain the things versus their output. Turns out, I was wrong. I finally found some data -- at [http://www.eoearth.org/article/Energy_return_on_investment_(...](http://www.eoearth.org/article/Energy_return_on_investment_\(EROI\)_for_wind_energy) \-- and it turns out that wind kicks the pants off all the other energy generating systems we have, even nuclear, in terms of energy-return-on- investment.

I think this article is factually wrong.</comment></comment>


Will Serverless be the death of pure ops/production focussed roles in 5yrs? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> No, both because serverless will not replace all other and because I suspect serverless applications past a certain size will require such roles (doing monitoring, debugging, security, ...) even if the precise skill-set shifts.

</comment><comment><USER3> No, you'll need the same rules, but doing slightly different things. Or someone else will have to take them over. Either way, you'll have N-persons- worth of pure ops work - someone will have to do it.</comment>


An Open Letter to Zee Kane and TNW Regarding Proper Attribution - <AUTHOR>

Zee and TheNextWeb's writers, editors and contributors,
I apologize for the public nature of this post, but at times it seems a public call to action is the only way to ensure some degree of accountability and a timely response. I am writing to call to your attention the unprofessional (and at times illegal) manner in which image attribution is handled at The Next Web by, it seems, a manner of policy.
Last night I noticed in one of your articles posted to Hacker News that the creative commons image used was credited only as "SOURCES: IMAGE CREDIT", when the photographer clearly states that attribution by name is required for use of the image. I should also point out that this "SOURCES: IMAGE CREDIT" appears only at the very bottom of the post, far from the image itself, possibly causing confusion about what image is being credited without clicking the link. In this case the author of the article saw my comment on Hacker News and corrected the attribution, however it called my attention to a disturbing trend. I noticed that nearly all creative commons licensed images were credited only with "SOURCES: IMAGE CREDIT" and not with the photographer's name. In some cases this may be technically legally allowable since not all copyright holders know to clearly express how they wish to be credited under the CC license, but it does not follow industry best practices, and if not befitting of a high profile and widely read publication such as The Next Web. It is clear from what I have seen that it is The Next Web's policy to deliberately leave out a photographer's name from image attribution unless they are caught doing so.
The photographer whose work was used weighed in on the HN thread and noticed that his photographs have been used by The Next Web without attribution in another 9 articles dating back to early 2011 (original thread here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4074535). He has requested that proper attribution be given, and I hope you correct TNW's mistake, but my point in writing this is that he shouldn't have to. TNW should have policies in place that ensure proper attribution to sources is given.
So, what I would ask of you, and my purpose in writing this letter, is that you give us, the greater Hacker News community, your word that you will work with your staff to write and implement a policy for proper attribution of images, and that you will provide some outreach and education to your staff on how to properly credit images. In the meantime myself, and hopefully others, will do our best to hold TNW accountable to the high standards that any respectable news organization should be held, by notifying your writers as well as copyright holders when TNW fails to meet those standards.
Thanks for listening, and I'm sure you'll do the right thing.
-rjsamson
TL;DR - TNW has not been properly crediting image sources unless asked to do so, I've kindly asked Zee to look into this and update their internal policies appropriately. <comment><USER2> People tend to treat CC licensed stuff very fuzzily. Once I was reading an article on copyright and using CC licensed material. It was a well written piece, yet image at the top was violating CC license(!). It was a crop from 'no-derivatives' licensed image. How come? I tried to push a kind comment raising the issue. You guessed it, it didnt come through.

If I ever try to use a copyrighted image which is not directly for sale ('Its so lovely, its the only option'), I'll usually email the person. It ends with two or three warm emails and best wishes. Is it that hard? Sure not a way to go for TNW (choosing CC is faster and problem free for them).

Using CC'd stuff I will often find myself finding how a person would prefer to be attributed. For example, if the user has a full name on flickr (different from a nick), I will rather use the full name and not the nick.

Recently I even started adding 'Thnxx!' or something similar.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah - its a good policy on CC stuff to at least use the person's name, or if that is not available their nick/username. In this case there were clear instructions by the person on how they should be attributed, but they were still ignored.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> UPDATE: It looks like TNW is going to be changing how they handle attribution for the better - looking forward to it!

<https://twitter.com/Zee/status/210444266185560064>

</comment><comment><USER3> Did you try the normal email way of sending a letter?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not yet, though I plan to. I mention why I've posted here instead of starting with a direct email in the beginning of the post. In short, I feel that an explanation is owed to their readership in general, not just to me, given the widespread and longstanding nature of their decision not to credit photographers by name.</comment></comment>


Markets are Efficient if and Only if P = NP - <AUTHOR> http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1773169 <comment><USER2> Title should read: "If markets are perfectly efficient P=NP" rather than "Markets are efficient if and only if P = NP". For example, say P = NP, but the only person that knows the proof is me. If I start using my knowledge that P = NP to trade I will not have enough capital to swing the market to truly reflect the efficient price. Therefore it does not follow that if P = NP the market will be perfectly efficient, which is required in an "if and only if" proof.

<comment><USER3> > If I start using my knowledge that P = NP to trade I will not have enough > capital to swing the market to truly reflect the efficient price.

How long would it take you to gain enough capital to start moving prices? If you have a systematic edge on all trades...

In any event, I didn't find OP interesting the first time and I don't know. Most people aren't using OP's extremely strong definition of efficient market, but merely saying that humans and current algorithms cannot over long periods extract money; it's a statement about the market vs other actors, not markets versus omniscient gods.

<comment><USER4> Results like general equilibrium are conditional on the OP's extremely strong definition of _efficient market_. Whether or not you personally can get rich by beating the market is not the only possible interesting question about economics!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hacker News submission and discussion from 540 days ago of previous version of same author's paper:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1144548>

<comment><USER6> I also posted the author's video explanation here the other day: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2867429>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It feels to me that all he's done is show that the "instantly" in the usual definition of markets being "efficient" is a nonsense. Prices must take time to compute, you can't know the correct price instantly even with access to all the past information.

He proves that, but it doesn't seem that surprising to me.

<comment><USER8> I was coming here to write almost exactly this.

Markets are provably not 'instantly' efficient because arbitrage exists. Arbitrage is simply not possible in an efficient market, because it's an exploit of inefficiency.

However, exploitation of abitrage (and of knowledge generally) is what makes markets largely efficient.

<comment><USER9> The point though is that whoever has the most computational power has the most power to exploit arbitrage.

<comment><USER8> That's /a/ point. Whenever people start harping on about Market Efficiency, you need to find out "why do you care?". The answer to "Are markets efficient? I have this hot stock tip I read on Tech Crunch" then the answer is yes, because other people have more time, money, expertise and - as you point out - computational power - as well things like preferential data access and physical proximity to the exchange.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If we allow that large, computationally capable entities are likely to form in free markets, it is probable that individuals will be faced with a market in which the prices of major goods vary wildly from minute to minute, from person to person, and are predicated on both fantastically complicated loyalty programs and data collected about the individual and current market circumstances, processed in statistical models that no human has ever understood or evaluated. A market in which machines algorithmically game humans and each other by adjusting prices and the nature of the goods themselves to exploit cognitive or algorithmic flaws in other actors.[1]

The classical model of efficient, free markets ignores computational complexity and time bounds, as the article notes. These were reasonable approximations for a hundred or even twenty years ago, but I can forsee environments in which these factors lead to significant asymmetry. I question whether humans can really compete successfully in this environment, and whether the process of doing so is really _best_ for us.

[1] Cases in point: Amazon, insurance companies, grocery stores, every major retailer, Google, high-frequency trading firms, airline ticket sales.

<comment><USER11> Even fairly simple tools must be able to game humans. We must be so bad at making rational decisions that prices typically are set just below a psychologically significant level for example $2.99. This of course assumes the market is correct in its assessment of us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Even if the problem that markets are trying to solve is NP hard, this doesn't mean anything. Market forces are always subject to random factors. For practical purposes, randomized approximation algorithms are actually a great choice for tackling NP hard problems.

<comment><USER13> Sometimes. I think the simple answer to that is 'it depends on the problem'.

<comment><USER14> That's not an answer, that's an IOU for an answer, unless you can begin to describe broad classes of problems and how they differ.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "The majority of financial academics believe in market efficiency and the majority of computer scientists believe that P ≠ NP. The result of this paper is that they cannot both be right: either P = NP and the markets are efficient, or P ≠ NP and the markets are not efficient."

I'll hazard a guess the computer scientists are right, but most financial academics will probably get by just fine if markets are approximately efficient - if prices can be estimated in probabilistic polynomial time.

<comment><USER16> I'm pretty sure financial academics don't claim that markets are efficient, but that they _tend towards_ efficiency.

<comment><USER17> For those wanting to know more about the efficient-markets hypothesis, Wikipedia has a good article: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient_markets>

My amateur understanding is that most academics get that it's a simplifying assumption, but that a lot of other people treat it as a guarantee. It's sort of like people who learn a little about evolution and then conclude that a) we are the most highly evolved organism on the planet, and b) we are therefore perfect.

<comment><USER11> > a) we are the most highly evolved organism on the planet

I know little about evolution and assume that bacteria are the most evolved because they have a faster cycle of reproduction, and stronger selective pressure.

> My amateur understanding is that most academics get that it's a simplifying > assumption, but that a lot of other people treat it as a guarantee.

Most practitioners do understand that it is a simplifying assumption, and then ignore that fact, just as most engineers ignore quantum and relativity effects when calculating the required size of beams. The difference between the better and the simpler models is big enough to cause problems in economics.

<comment><USER18> _> I know little about evolution and assume that bacteria are the most evolved because they have a faster cycle of reproduction, and stronger selective pressure._

That you know what selective pressure means probably puts you in the top couple of percentiles for evolution knowledge. The whole world is emphatically not like Hacker News.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> People get tied up in knots about the Efficient Market Hypothesis. The factor that often gets ignored when approaching the problem is the costs factor. Trading fees, Analysis, Commissions, etc. make it very hard in practicality to beat passive investment with the markets only being passably efficient.

<comment><USER11> I think that analysis ignores tax effects. To have a stable excess return you need some collection of people accept a stable lower return. This is possible if you have different tax regimes. Tax advantaged entities can accept coupons/dividends, and highly taxed entities want capital gains.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Since politicians have no business trying to solve NP problems, perhaps we'd better deregulate the market.

<comment><USER21> Been there, done that, bought the recession. Regulation, of course, isn't "solving the NP problem", it's modifying the boundary conditions to prevent the system from getting too far out of whack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Just the concept of the proposition of this paper is pretty amazing. The author Philip Maymin is a serious bad ass for doing this proof. What a dude.

</comment><comment><USER23> YOU'RE GAY

</comment><comment><USER23> FUCK YOU

</comment><comment><USER24> Free markets are a great heuristic.

</comment><comment><USER23> shut up!!!

</comment><comment><USER23> PENIS

</comment><comment><USER23> ASSS

</comment><comment><USER25> He's mostly smoking funny stuff: He's talking applications of optimization. Okay. Optimization contributes problems, e.g., integer linear programming, in set NP-complete only if one insists on exact optimality down to the last tiny fraction of a penny of cost in the worst problems that can occur, even in principle, in execution time that grows no faster than a polynomial in the size of the problem. That's a LOT of very special and quite unrealistic context.

E.g., it's not the least bit clear that finance needs to attack the worst case problems. Even if so, finance, anywhere close to reality, doesn't need to get solutions that save all of the last tiny fraction of a penny.

If relax worst case problems and saving the last tiny fraction of a penny, then the situation is MUCH different. E.g., once I got a feasible solution to an ILP with 40,000 constraints and 600,000 variables within 0.025% of optimality on a 90 MHz Intel processor in 905 seconds. More generally, here's an easy approach to the ILP problems: Just drop the integer constraints, solve with LP, and then round to integer values. For the LP solution, if insist, then use a polynomial LP solver. Crude? Sometimes. Always crude? No.

He's making a common mistake: He's assuming that because in general ILP is in NP-complete that good work on all practical ILP problems has to be too challenging, and that's nonsense.</comment>


XKCD considering leaving GoDaddy. Help suggest a good replacement - <AUTHOR> http://blog.xkcd.com/2011/12/31/godaddy/

<comment><USER2> I hear namecheap is a really good one. I'm thinking of using them for my domains coming up here soon.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think they support DNSSEC

<comment><USER3> Indeed, they do not currently support DNSSEC.

According to their forums, this is a feature they're currently developing.</comment></comment></comment>


How to manipulate people with font type? - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-recipe-for-motivation

<comment><USER3> Original, and far more meaningful and accurate, title: A Recipe for Motivation: Easy to Read, Easy to Do.

<comment><AUTHOR> For the first 20 minutes this post had different title (much closer to the original one). No one has voted.

I thought of a little experiment and put on much more provocative title - <USER2> what do you know! It ended up on the main page few minutes later...

<comment><USER3> I see. So it's basically "how to manipulate Hacker News readers by using a hyped up headline"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hyped up? Maybe a little. But notice the font! It's totally readable! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would be far more interested to know how similarly "easy-to-read" typefaces fared. Does an androgynous typeface like Helvetica have a different result than one more aligned with a gender? Does one with sharp aggressive serifs like the Copperplate family cause a different reaction than the smoother Garamond?

</comment><comment><USER5> How about telling us what font type is best for various writing situations.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you pay your utility bills? - <AUTHOR> Interested in learning how/where individuals or businesses pay their essential monthly bills such as, Utilities, Rent, and Insurance?
1. How? Credit Card, Debit Card, Cash or Check.
2. Where? Biller Website, Through your Bank Account or others? 3. What are your current pain points, and what improvements would you like to see? 4. Auto payments. Yay or Nay?
Especially interested in points 3 & 4. <comment><USER2> It varies by billers, and how much fee they charge on using cards. I prefer autopay for billers on their website where I can add credit card and forget it (for ex. telecom and internet bills). For others, such as electric or rent bills, I prefer to pay using ACH but cannot schedule auto pay as I want to make sure I have enough balance in my bank account before making a payment. Plus, ACH has risks of NSF from both sides, which I don't like. I have tried using my bank account to directly pay bills, but not super convenient.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good point you bring up! In this day and age, there is no reason, a customer should have to pay overdraft fees. We always check our customer's bank accounts to make sure they have enough money to make their payments, and never make a charge if that is not the case. So we ensure there are no NSF fees from our side or your bank's. Also, our customers can pay Rent using our virtual credit line, so you won't have to worry about checking your bank balance each time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> My preference is always auto pay, in preference order credit card, debit card, ACH. I only allow ACH access for my mortgage. I tend to use the merchants site to set it up, and allow them to draw. It would be nice if there was some kind of reach back where I could de-authorize these things with out interacting with each merchant.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's interesting, thanks for sharing! We're building Neon, a one-stop bill pay solution for all your essential bills and hence, we're interested in learning what else can be done to improve user experience. Would you think a centralized dashboard where you can add your bills once, and then can control such things (like payment methods or bank account), help? For some added context, we provide a credit line at 0% APR and automate payments using that credit line. We also consolidate all bills in a centralized location, on our dashboard.

<comment><USER3> The biggest reason I have my preference of CC first is points and to a lesser degree consumer protection.

I'm guessing you couldn't let me use Amex as a middle man between me and your service and not charge some fee, and I have a feeling I (personally) wouldn't be all that interested as the overhead of bill payment isn't that high (for me as just one person). Not to say it isn't an issue for some. I definitely know it was when I was younger, but I'm not sure how much of that was how available online payment was at the time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Got it! We are providing a virtual credit line that is used to directly make payments on your behalf, so to answer your question - no you cannot use Amex to pay us. Our customers pay us directly from their bank account, pretty much the way they would pay for their other credit cards. We're different from traditional cards though, because we offer a credit line at 0% APR and no fees (overdraft fees, late fees etc.) and you can pay Rent using Neon (which is otherwise not possible using traditional credit cards or there are high fees). Besides, we do not charge any additional convenience or processing fees that traditional card companies do. As far as the points go, we'll be launching some features soon, that will far outweigh the returns you get from accruing points on your cards. :) Keep an eye out on our website, if you'd like to learn more: www.neonforlife.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> chris-orgmenta Hi Megha,

I manage Accounts Payable for clients.

>1\. How? Credit Card, Debit Card, Cash or Check.

EFT/Direct Debit > CC/DC manual/ACH/Wire Transfer > Check (US only)/Paypal/other expensive payment platforms.

2\. Where? Biller Website, Through your Bank Account or others?

Automatic payments > Manual batches through accounting package > Manual payment via phone/biller portal

3\. What are your current pain points, and what improvements would you like to see?

\- Current clients: Biggest pain point is actually financial onboarding suppliers, e.g. verifying bank details / setting up direct debit etc.

\- Current clients: Credit requests / getting suppliers to make changes to their invoices can be laborious.

\- New Clients: Distributors such as Ingram Micro will place companies on stop credit as soon as one bill is overdue - Which seems to catch a lot of orgs off guard if they don't have a stable AP process in place.

\- New Clients: Three way match is rarely done.

\- New Clients: Often miss on-billing supplier costs. E.g. purchasing M365 licenses, provisioning them, paying them through AP, then forgetting to add them to a client agreement for invoicing.

4\. Auto payments. Yay or Nay?

Absolutely Yay, but they should still undergo a three (actually five) way match, and be 'approved' by the decision maker before being debited.

\---

I reviewed [https://www.neonforlife.com/](https://www.neonforlife.com/) & [https://medium.com/neonfinancial/neon-whats-all-the-fuss- abo...](https://medium.com/neonfinancial/neon-whats-all-the-fuss-about-) and I'm wondering:

\- You are pivoting from b2c to both b2c & b2b? Seems sensible, I can't imagine b2c being very lucrative.

\- For B2B, is it your 0% credit line that makes it worth using your dashboard instead of Xero/QBO/etc.? Or are there other benefits?

\- How are you monetising this? You are shouldering such massive risk here, surely you will get masses of late payments & defaults ...

I really like that your B2C offering can prevent 'charging poor people for being poor'. Good on you

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Chris!

Thanks for your detailed feedback. You have a ton of great insights on bills that businesses pay. To answer your questions -

We started out, we intended to cover user's essential household bills only (rent, and utilities). But we had some early adopters add their business bills as well, and we decided we weren't going to turn them away. So as far as the bills fall in these categories - Rent, Electricity, Internet, Telecom, Water, Gas, Parking or HOA - we cover them both for businesses and consumers. We do not cover the type of B2B bills that businesses need an accounting software for. So we think, we can co-exist with the likes of QBO/Xero.

We don't think that the B2C side is not lucrative enough, given in the absence of fair lending products users resort to Payday or other high cost loans. In numbers, Payday Lending is a $90B industry and 70% of those funds are used to cover a recurring household bill such as rent or utilities. That being said, our current users are definitely not the ones who are desperate for cash or just bad with finances (people often think that we'd be competing with the likes of early-pay or cash advance apps). That's not true. Our users are actually fairly responsible and tech savvy. They might or might not have been affected by the pandemic, and are actually using credit line at 0% APR to spread out their bill payments but also, benefit from bill consolidation and automatic payments. Solopreneurs, small business owners, white-collar workers are the ones who are using us currently.

 _How are you monetising this?_ You are shouldering such massive risk here, surely you will get masses of late payments & defaults ... We plan to monetize from businesses. Mostly through partnerships or transaction fees on payments processed through our platform. The intent is to look for value add services for our users, for ex: some users want to know how their bill amounts compare to others in the same area/demographics and get better deals. By showing relevant deals and helping businesses gain customers, we can earn revenue. However, these are just some preliminary ideas, we're exploring.

 _As for the risk,_ we're thinking about it differently. Rather than profiling users as risky or not, we evaluate risk for transactions or payment types. Surely, essential bills are always top of mind for individuals, and likelihood on screwing those up is the least, even if you compare people across credit scores. That doesn't mean that people will not default - there will be circumstances where people may not be able to pay even most essential ones, however, we are hoping that (most) people can recover from those circumstances. Our philosophy of avoiding interests and fees will keep overall debt levels lower, and hence, reduce time in which they can recover.

We really appreciate your kind words. And yes, we're not out there to exploit people. We believe people are more good than evil, and wealth is not the best way to judge a person's willingness or ability to pay back. We just want to build the right products and incentives to help them be more responsible.</comment></comment>