Responsible Disclosure Can Be Anything But - <AUTHOR> http://daeken.com/responsible-disclosure-can-be-anything-but

<comment><USER2> I'm shocked he didn't even try to contact Onity. He's trying ascribe motivations and possible behavior just based on his reading of the lock market - we have no idea whether Onity would have acted in this way. Perhaps they'd have scrambled to contact hotels? Or maybe they'd have disregarded it.

We have no way of knowing because he never attempted to do the right thing.

<comment><USER3> Don't we have a good idea how they would have responded from how they've actually responded? It took four months and a huge public backlash before they acquiesced to demands for replacements.[1]

[1] [http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/12/06/lock- fi...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/12/06/lock-firm-onity- starts-to-shell-out-for-security-fixes-to-hotels-hackable-locks/)

<comment><USER4> How they responded after public disclosure says little about how they would have responded to notification with a deadline for public disclosure.

I understand the various incentives for Onity, and I think a great incentive for them is, given six months to address the issue, knowing it'll be made public, to take at least some proactive steps such as notifying large customers or being ready upon public disclosure with a mitigation plan.

His whole blog entry is a lot of handwaving to cover up the fact that he never even gave them a chance to do something anything like the right thing.

<comment><USER5> He makes an important point though: security researchers have been used by vendors as part of trying to go through the traditional process of responsible disclosure. It could easily come off as blackmail[1]. Simply disclosing to the public avoids that possibility, because the researcher was clearly not trying to personally get something from the vendor.

That being said, I think this kind of thing should be covered by whistleblower protection laws (I don't know if it's ever been tested)... although it seems those are only enforced when it's convenient.

So while I think he may have reached the right conclusion, I don't think it was for the right reasons. If sufficient protections for disclosers are in place, this should be a relative non-issue (though it makes sense to adjust the disclosure window based on the ease and risk of the vulnerability in order to apply pressure for an expedited fix)

[1] Given there's no payout for the researcher other than having the vulnerability fixed, it is conceivably not too hard to defend against. That doesn't change the fact that they can be sued, which is expensive, time- consuming, and stressful.

<comment><USER4> The best protection for the discloser is simply to do so anonymously, which shouldn't be difficult for someone like this.

Alternately, do so 'legal anonymously', perhaps by the EFF approaching the company and saying "we have in our possession information on a security vulnerability in your product. We want to give you information on it. In six months this information will be made public. We ask for and want no compensation or consideration at all."

That's it. There exist methods to do this safely; Daeken could have done it, and didn't.

<comment><USER6> No, the EFF doesn't offer this service, and given the volume of vulnerabilities disclosed, it would be a huge waste of their resources.

I'm not paying a lawyer because you have broken software that I had nothing to do with making.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you haven't seen his original paper regarding this it can be found here: <http://demoseen.com/bhpaper.html>

Also, slides for his talk at Blackhat: <http://demoseen.com/bhtalk2.pdf>

<comment><USER8> Wow, it's so easy. I can't really sympathize with Onity in any way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> He missed an option: disclose privately to Onity's major customers, and give them some time to assess the situation and deal with Onity.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, didn't consider that angle. However, that (much like Onity's original approach to the problems) leaves the independent hotels in the cold. Definitely a decent option, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Where does US law stand on full disclosure? I'm aware of MBTA v. Anderson, but are there still some grey areas?

</comment><comment><USER11> While fixing all the locks will be costly and time-consuming, perhaps a far smaller number of specialized 'tripwire' fix boards can be sent to affected hotels, boards which track (and perhaps report instantly by radio) attempts to use the hack. For example, one such device could be added per floor.

Even if crooks only very occasionally trip the specialized replacements, they would alert hotels to active exploitation, allowing either immediate apprehension or timely review of security footage. Shifting the risk/reward for criminals could buy time for a more complete but gradual fix.

<comment><AUTHOR> Once you've already spent the time and money to pull the locks off the doors and replace/add a circuit board, you may as well just drop in the fixed board. That prevents the main vulnerability from functioning, though there's no fix at all for the encryption flaw (but no one has exploited that, nor will they in the near future, if I had to guess).

<comment><USER12> Not only that, but seeing as the locks don't communicate in any way besides the maintenance port, there's no way to know if they've been tripped without reading them at some regular interval.

<comment><USER11> The replacement board, in the hypothesized special 'tripwire' assembly, would have added radio-reporting. You only need a few of these super-locks, randomly added to the population of vulnerable locks, to catch any exploitation at scale. That'd both curtail the losses and deter future copycats. ("While you're rifling through the guest's belongings looking for valuables, security is already on its way.")

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Even if the risk for independent discovery was high, announcing it to the public without contacting the vendor and giving them the opportunity to at least prepare a response plan (even if you think the plan is inadequate) ensured a thoroughly dramatic media response that made certain that anyone with the slightest desire to break into hotel rooms now knew how.

EDIT: Yep, you're right. I don't know how I missed that given that I skimmed the article twice. Sorry.

<comment><AUTHOR> > The fact that 'contact Onity, then disclose publicly after a reasonable > period of time' is nowhere on his list just blows my mind.

That's the very first thing on the list. Quote: "The standard 'Responsible Disclosure' approach would be to notify Onity and give them X months to deal with the issue before taking it public."</comment></comment>


Connecting data is hard. What if it wasn't? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mjirv/connecting-data-is-hard-what-if-it-wasnt-de1e46962e9f <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone, thanks for reading. I started Joiner to solve a problem for data analyst: it takes too long to get a traditional data warehouse set up, and the other options for joining across databases isn't great.

Like I mentioned in the article, Joiner can connect Postgres, MySQL, SQL Server, and Redshift right now, plus CSV uploads.

If this sounds useful, you can sign up for the beta at www.getjoiner.com. If not, I'd love to hear your feedback!

\- Michael</comment>


Craig Venter's 'Digital-To-Biological Converter' Is Real - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/craig-venters-digital-to-biological-converter-is-real <comment><USER2> A dark possibility - a baby printed on another planet and raised by software.</comment>


Facebook to alter policy on sharing address and mobile phone number - <AUTHOR> http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/447

<comment><USER2> I'm sure my relative would appreciate her abusive ex getting his hands on her phone number. (And given past problems with third parties, I have to think this information -- speaking generally if not specifically -- is going to leak.)

You use the cell phone number as part of password recovery / identity verification (as I understand it). And then you do this?

</comment><comment><USER3> Typical Facebook. Push out a major privacy flaw, then back-tread and play damage control.</comment>


Intro to Group Theory - <AUTHOR> http://ureddit.com/blog/2013/02/26/featured-class-intro-to-group-theory/

<comment><USER2> My AI doctorate used a lot of group theory. I use came up with the following analogy for explaining what it is and what it's used for to fellow non- mathematicians:

If you want to measure and describe the number of occurrences of something, use an integer. If you want to measure and describe the amount of something, use a rational number. If you want to measure and describe the symmetry of a structure, use a group.

When programmatically dealing with objects that contain symmetry - e.g. physical objects like a cube, a set of identical resources like a fleet of lorries - having an understanding of group theory allows you another layer of abstraction in your computation, potentially greatly reducing runtime or memory consumption.

<comment><USER3> Groups are just the abstraction of "transformations of something", the usual example being "symmetries" but it leaves out a bunch of other natural ideas like translations, movements, etc.

Any teacher not mentioning "shape" when explaining group theory is either a bad teacher or a bad teacher.

<comment><USER4> Group theory can be taught and appreciated without the geometric approach, but instead as a pure abstract concept. Different textbooks reflect this: Herstein is very abstract, Dummit and Foote uses probably more geometric examples, and Fraleigh relies heavily on geometric cases. I've personally always preferred the Herstein/abstract approach.

<comment><USER3> Oh certainly: that is the way I studied and enjoyed it but a book is not a teacher. I am not claiming books should always be "imagination" driven, on the contrary. But teachers should.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Mathematics student here, taken a few courses in abstract algebra. Group theory is really interesting and I'd recommend all those intrigued to give it a go.

Here is a great book about Abstract Algebra. It should be about right for this course and it's free! :D <http://abstract.ups.edu/>

</comment><comment><USER6> For anyone interested in another great way of looking into this field, take a look at Aluffi's _Algebra Chapter 0_ [1].

[1] [http://www.mimuw.edu.pl/~jarekw/pdf/Algebra0TextboookAluffi....](http://www.mimuw.edu.pl/~jarekw/pdf/Algebra0TextboookAluffi.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER7> Hello, I'm the UReddit admin and author of the linked post. I'm glad to see appreciation here for Dr. Donley's class.

As we say in the article, we are trying to put together a better platform for teachers to use when they want to teach with more freedom and with more rights to their intellectual property rights than they might have when doing it through a university, and so that they can have many parts of the teaching process automated in order to be able to focus on actually playing the roles of educators.

We're running a Kickstarter to help us get our prototype into beta, and we appreciate any and all support. <http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1918344721/open-compass>

<comment><USER8> I haven't heard of UReddit before.

What's the pitch?

<comment><USER7> UReddit was a proof of concept based on which we founded the nonprofit. The pitch is essentially that anyone that would like to teach should be free to do so, so we made a place where people can do that. Now, Dr. Donley, who taught the class the linked blog post is about, had been composing video lectures for two years, but he did use the UReddit platform to run two classes and receive more attention/recognition for his efforts and quality of execution. And now we'd like to make a technologically sophisticated platform that automated the busy work of teaching and is better suited to becoming a community.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm taking an Introductory Group Theory course right now.

Here are a few nice books I'm currently using:

[http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Theory-Groups-Joseph- Rotm...](http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Theory-Groups-Joseph- Rotman/dp/0387942858)

[http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Classroom-Resource-Materials- Pr...](http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Classroom-Resource-Materials- Problem/dp/088385757X)

[http://www.amazon.com/Groups-Their-Graphs-Mathematical- Libra...](http://www.amazon.com/Groups-Their-Graphs-Mathematical- Library/dp/088385614X) (available as eBook from <http://www.maa.org/ebooks/nml/NML14.html>)

</comment><comment><USER10> Group theory is a beautiful subject, as is the rest of abstract algebra. My personal favorite result in mathematics is the Fundamental Theorem of Galois Theory, which requires at least some understanding of group theory.

<comment><USER11> And interesting enough, you can use the same machinery developed for those problems to prove the impossibility of squaring the circle, or trisecting an angle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looking forward to this. Group Theory has always evaded me.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm in math grad school, and I'm really surprised CS majors don't know this stuff or find it useful. Probably this should be changed.</comment>


There is no fold - <AUTHOR> http://thereisnofold.tumblr.com/ <comment><USER2> Please label your axes. The units are not obvious.

I think the x-axis is pixels, where 0 is the top of the viewable part of the browser, and increases downward, but it took me a long time to figure that out. (My initial guess was milliseconds into a page view, but that makes no sense since I assume the y-axis on the second graph is seconds into engagement.)

</comment><comment><USER3> The concept of the fold is a valuable and flexible one, to be interpreted within the context of the page or platform on which it is supposed to exist. Organizing and prioritizing presentation of data relies on recognizing certain patterns of display and activity, and the fold is wrapped up in that. Why try to deny the existence of a well-known and useful term and construct rather than help redefine it, the way we've done with other terms dating from the relatively distant past? (edit:sp)

<comment><USER4> "The fold" is where a newspaper folds in half. Unless your users are folding their computers in half, it really has no place in digital screen design. I agree that the closer to the top of a document you place something, the more prominence it has, but this has nothing at all to do with a "fold."

<comment><USER5> In digital content, "the fold" has its own meaning (which is, certainly, inspired by the _literal_ fold in newspaper.)

This is one of many digital design that are inspired by terms from print, like "page" (which also is inappropriate for digital if you take the print meaning literally.)

And, anyway, laptop users do fold their computers in half, but that's a completely different thing.

<comment><USER6> > In digital content, "the fold" has its own meaning

Does it? I suppose it could mean "outside the first screen", as in on the next "card" in a mobile "slide deck", or "below the scroll" in a browser (that is: content that is on the virtual page, but outside the viewport).

But my impression is that people are _not_ using it like that -- in which case "the fold" is probably a poor/wrong metaphor/term?

> This is one of many digital design that are inspired by terms from print, > like "page" (which also is inappropriate for digital if you take the print > meaning literally.)

Not really. In (magazine/newspaper) print, a page typically holds various assorted content. Especially so for the front page. Now, with scrolling, "page" will often mean "all of a document at a given URL" \-- and that would typically be different from a print page. In that case "viewport" would be more appropriate. But I think the confusion really lies in the print world: "page" means both "what the user can see at any one time" (viewport) and "largest section of connected layout" (the physical page).

> And, anyway, laptop users do fold their computers in half, but that's a > completely different thing.

But mobile users did, at least for a while. There were/are some phones with a small screen on the back of the "flip". AFAIK all of these only have enough real-estate for a small icon and simple scrolling text message though. And aren't really meant for showing a preview of some random web page, but rather to alert the user to incomming email etc.

<comment><USER7> "The fold" in the browser is the bottom of the first screen, below the fold is everything you need to scroll to see. This is what you mean... So what is it you think other people mean? I've never seen anything to indicate otherwise.

<comment><USER6> Well, I didn't have the impression that it had a clear, and universally accepted definition in web design, akin to what it has in print. To some extent wikipedia seems to agree with me (that it can mean no just "above the scroll", but also "upper part" or "first 1000px" etc): [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Above_the_fold#In_web_design](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Above_the_fold#In_web_design)

Not that that means much.

So that part of the comment wasn't just a rhetorical question. Are there any well-known, more canonical definitions of "the fold" as used in web design? Does it make sense in the current climate of wildly varying designs for desktop and mobile?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is true and it isn't true. It depends on context. What content are you placing? Who needs to see it? What kind of mentality will they be in when they're looking for it? In a rush or browsing? All of these factors will determine what kind of placement is optimal.

If you're talking about an info box with a CTA in it, maybe it doesn't need to be near the top of the page or viewable on initial load.

But if you're a service based company, and you're talking about a support link, having it anywhere other than prominently displayed immediately on page load is going to aggravate your customers. In that case there is definitely "a fold."

The fact that there's 4k different devices viewing your page doesn't change the fact that their browser window has a bottom, it just means that the location of that bottom is volatile. If you really care, your page design can be responsive to not just the width of the browser window but the height as well.

Abusing the concept of a fold is lazy and ignorant. It shouldn't be treated like the only aspect of web browsing that matters. But at the same time, ignoring the fact that some of your content will be immediately viewable to users upon loading the page and other content won't, is also lazy and ignorant.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is 100% ripped off from [http://blog.chartbeat.com/2013/08/12/scroll- behavior-across-...](http://blog.chartbeat.com/2013/08/12/scroll-behavior- across-the-web/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Sounds like a justification for that horrible Wordpress theme with small blocks of text in a huge font, alternating with images that scroll at a different rate than the text.

<comment><USER11> Those are called "parallax" themes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Then I must be blind or delusional, based on what I've witnessed during usability tests.

I highly doubt we'd see the same breakdown for new users vs. return users. IE, return-users know they can scroll, new-users don't have that knowledge.

<comment><USER13> Are you designing a fold into your pages? If you design around viewport height and position:fix things to the bottom of the screen, then there absolutely is a fold and users will be biased to things above the fold. If your content clearly doesn't end at the bottom of a page, users are perfectly capable of and willing to scroll down to find the rest of the content.

<comment><USER12> This is primarily an issue I've seen with my students' work. They haven't always internalized the issues with folds, and the need to design around them to make sure that there appears to be a continuous flow of content.

Saying something like "There is no fold" is not going to help students recognize the issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's not so much that there is no fold as that there are a _zillion_ folds. Where the content of a page rolls down off the bottom of the screen depends on so many things: display size, resolution, browser window size, browser chrome, add-ons, toolbars, etc. etc. etc...

So I always find it a bit amusing to hear people talk in the Web context about "above the fold." Oh, that goes above the fold? OK, which one?

<comment><USER15> So "there is no _single_ fold" perhaps makes the most sense?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Twitter should take note of Tumblr usage here.

</comment><comment><USER17> I may be stupid but I don't understand the graphs. What are the axes?

</comment><comment><USER18> Darn it, the internet just broke advertising again...

</comment><comment><USER11> This is great research, and confirms to me that readers are not put off by long pages, and are actively looking to scroll for information.

<comment><USER19> If a 4 word claim with a few overstyled charts qualifies as research then we're doomed anyways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why on earth would you post this as a series of tweets.. and then embed them in a tumblr post.. without any additional commentary..

<comment><USER21> 100% this! I'm seeing more and more tweets that are entire pages of text in JPEG format. I can't really say it's a failed medium, because obviously Twitter has massive usage, but it doesn't really seem like progress.</comment></comment>


Thunderbolt 3 Comes to Linux PCs – CIO - <AUTHOR> http://www.cio.com/article/3040125/thunderbolt-3-comes-to-linux-pcs.html?utm_campaign=sflow_tweet#tk.rss_all <comment><USER2> Interesting article, it is good to see continued support from Dell in this area.

The writing style is strange though, Agam Shah seems to be chief "press release cut & paster". The style is almost bot like, like an AI summariser.</comment>


CSS 3: A Giant Serving Of FAIL - <AUTHOR> http://alex.dojotoolkit.org/?p=625 <comment><USER2> I have a history in publications, and the thing that annoys me most about web standards is that a lot of stuff that Quark and InDesign have made absolutely mundane in print isn't even on the horizon for CSS.

Little touches like easy rounded corners, smart text wraps, and detailed text formatting are what make a site. In desktop publishing, that stuff has been easy enough for a kid to do for almost a decade.</comment>


Heathrow airport first to fingerprint - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/07/nheathrow107.xml

<comment><USER2> Why is everyone so paranoid about having their fingerprints taken? Do you usually walk around with gloves in public? Otherwise this is one piece of data you leave on everything you touch.

I'd rather be fingerprinted at an airport than have to take off my shoes for example.

<comment><USER3> But it's meaningless data until it's explicitly matched to you.

For example, you leave your username on every comment you make here, but I will never have a clue who you are unless you say in a comment with your username attached.

And after you do that, you will never be anonymous again.

It may seem reasonable in this airport scenario, but the reason people are resistant is because they fear creep. That by giving up fingerprints in this situation, people will eventually be expected to give up private info in more situations.

It is paranoia, sure – if you're not doing anything wrong, what do you have to worry about? But what happens when the definition of _wrong_ gets changed?

Edit:

And it's not like you say at the end: you will _still_ have to take off your shoes. The fingerprinting isn't for better security in terms of safety: it's to make sure international passengers aren't getting on domestic planes – which is only a problem because of the airport's bad, unconventional layout that doesn't separate domestic and international travelers.

A trade between privacy and convenience is one thing, but this isn't even a trade.

<comment><USER2> I don't agree with trying to hide your identity online.

My username is my first initial + my last name. This is also my email address. I link to my blog which has my full name and a link to my resume which includes my address, phone number, education and employment history.

People like me with less common names wouldn't have much luck trying to hide our identity anyway. Google my name and you're likely to find where I went to high school, pictures, posts I've made to various mailing lists and the books I buy on Amazon.

The government already has my finger prints on file (and the finger prints of all legal immigrants to the United States).

I am against invasive procedures at airports (and other places). But given all the other things you must do to board a plane it's not that much work to put your finger on a small reader.</comment></comment></comment>


Rent Lego Sets - <AUTHOR> https://www.pley.com/

<comment> 97-109-107 Whoever likes this as a business model might be also interested in looking at [https://www.meinespielzeugkiste.de/](https://www.meinespielzeugkiste.de/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Why is the lego photoshopped onto a family playing dominoes?

</comment><comment><USER3> The Netflix of Legos</comment>


Amazon's $23,698,655.93 book about flies - <AUTHOR> http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358 <comment><USER3> A similar thing happened to me as a seller. I saw that one of my old textbooks was selling for a nice price, so I listed it along with two other used copies. I priced it $1 cheaper than the lowest price offered, but within an hour both sellers had changed their prices to $.01 and $.02 cheaper than mine. I reduced it two times more by $1, and each time they beat my price by a cent or two. So what I did was reduce my price by a few dollars every hour for one day until everybody was priced under $5. Then I bought their books and changed my price back.

<comment><USER4> You could turn this into a book business. List books for sale that you don't own and this other publisher does own. Reduce the price over time until it is super cheap. Buy while it is low and resell it without the competition.

<comment><USER5> Risky. What if someone buys it? I mean, you could at least have a few books ready to ship out just in case.

<comment><USER6> Not really that risky. If it was a naked call like in markets, then it would be really risky, but in this case you risk very little since there is no contractual obligation to send the actual book if you can't get it. You can reimburse and call it a day.

The calculations would have to consider the probability of not getting the book under the price of sale, the probability of not getting it over price of sale (investing the difference in avoiding a bad rating), and the chance that you won't receive a bad rating just for reimbursing it under whatever excuse. You can also ponder taking a bad rate eventually.

In other markets you'd have to basically get the book at any cost, which would make it really risky.

<comment><USER7> And in fact, in used book "arbitrage", the seller always has a very, very good excuse, which is that s/he "sold the book already" to someone in s/her imaginary brick-and-mortar store.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This explains a lot. I wrote a small book back in the 90s that had few sales and was unlamented when it fell out of print. A couple of years ago saw it as the subject of an amazon.com sidebar ad and was astonished to find that it was listed at $100 or thereabouts, and couldn't imagine how or why it might have become collectible. The idea that this was the result of competing pricing algorithms makes a great deal more sense to me.

Now, if you'll excuse me I'm off to weep over my broken dreams of belated celebrity.

<comment><USER9> My dad had a similar experience. His very obscure, self-published, out-of- print book was showing up for something like $1000, while at the same time he was mailing out free copies to people who emailed (plus shipping), just to make more room in the garage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I work at a mid sized Amazon 3rd party seller. We reprice automatically. With thousands of SKU's there's no other way to be competitive. There are many layers to consider though, you definitely can't let your whole catalog auto- reprice. Usually sellers just focus on their top X% SKU's and let the rest auto-calculate.

I wonder if we have a price ceiling setup...?

Edit: Yes we have a floor and ceiling. I have no idea what I was thinking.

<comment><USER11> Any 3rd party tools available to 3rd party sellers? Offering something that beats the current algorithms could be a good deal (if its not illegal).

<comment><USER12> I have code that does ecommerce price point optimization using machine learning. In an ideal setting, it combines a variety of signals, including prediction using previous sales data. It's also able to "smooth" over different products, so that you can make good price point choices even for products that have very little sales history.

<comment><USER13> What's the algorithm?

Edit: I'm puzzled by the downvotes to my honest question. "machine learning" is not an algorithm, it's a field!

<comment><USER14> Probably some sort of regression for the prediction part, and perhaps linear programming for the price optimization, since there are probably some nontrivial (but possibly linear?) constraints on pricing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A quick visit to amazon:

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_adv_b/?search- alias=s...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_adv_b/?search- alias=stripbooks&unfiltered=1&sort=-price)

Multiple books priced upwards of $600m. One has a Kindle edition for 9.99.

<comment><USER16> A few of these only have one seller. Money laundering? A different algorithmical problem? Something else?

<comment><USER17> Could be this: If two sellers have the book, and are setting the prices algorithmically, and then one of them sells it offline (like in a used bookshop) and removes it from sale, how does the other seller change their price to be more realistic?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> oh man. reminds me of the days when I sold books on amazon and half.com. I wrote a script that took the 'nickel less than the other guy' approach.

These things are /wonderful/ when it comes to making the market more efficient. Really, though, the shipping costs eat up most of the efficiency. Amazon needs an easy way to say "I want these 10 books, used. Find me the lowest price (including shipping)" - the idea is that the more books you could buy from one seller, the less shipping friction would be involved, but amazon isn't really set up that way, which makes it much less efficient for the low end used books.

<comment><USER19> Everyone always mentions that buying more items from a single Amazon store would make shipping cheaper? Is that ever true? Of all the online stores I've made purchases from, I believe monoprice is the only one that appears to base shipping on tiers based on item size/mass. All the rest simply charge a set rate for each item, and it doesn't matter how you divide your shipments up into different orders.

<comment><USER18> well, the post office would take less of a cut. shipping one one-pound box is usually a lot cheaper than shipping two half-pound boxes. In theory, amazon could either give that surplus to the seller, to the buyer, or they could split it between the two. (I guess they could also keep it for themselves, but that might have negative PR consequences.)

<comment><USER20> They'd also price it "above equilibrium" leading to a loss of potential profits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Very funny and enlightening analysis. I've seen the fringes of algorithmic pricing a few times in other categories -- especially out-of-print DVDs or VHS tapes.

Example: don't ask me why I enjoy the movie My Dinner With Andre, but for whatever reason, I do. A few years back, I wanted to buy a copy of the DVD and checked Amazon. It turned out that the DVD was long out of print, and new copies were going for $400 apiece. I figured this price was high, but nevertheless, it was nothing that couldn't be explained by _actual_ rarity and supply/demand metrics. Rare DVDs have been known to climb into the hundreds of dollars, especially if new and unopened. But I came back a few days later, and the price was $1932.78 (or something unusual to that effect). The next day, $3500 and change. Which struck me as odd, to say the least. Was some nefarious Goldman trader attempting to fix the market for Wallace Shawn's back catalog?

Needless to say, I didn't love the movie quite that much. So I passed. These days, Criterion has released a new DVD version of the film, and accordingly, everything's dropped back down to about $30 per copy -- including the price of the original, OOP version. I feel sorry for anyone who actually might have taken the plunge at $400, which is not out of the realm of possibility. That's a lot of money for a film about two guys having dinner.

</comment><comment><USER22> I have a book with 1 sale and 6 sellers including amazon. They definitely do not have the book.

<comment><USER23> How do you know they do not have the book? Is it a Unique Item?

<comment><USER24> Because if they all had a copy of the book, that would be 6 in circulation. But only 1 is in circulation.

<comment><USER23> What kind of unique book is that?

(The topmost book on the pile beside my bed being Vellum by Hal Duncan has nothing at all to do with the question ;)

<comment><USER25> Bump your price way up and buy one of theirs, possibly many times before they notice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I can't begin to describe how much this pleases me. It's straight out of a William Gibson novel, but happening _right now_.

God, I love living in The Future.

<comment><USER27> Indeed, I was also reminded of WG.

Alas, while it seems that information technology-wise we delve more and more into a cyberpunk world, health-wise and body modification-wise we are still not there. Where are my grafted muscles and commodity eye-balls?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Automatic pricing is super common these days, even on more expensive things than books. I'm actually working on a startup called shopobot.com that wants to help people use the volatility to their advantage. We see rapid $50-100 swings on things like SLRs, so it's actually pretty significant.

Ironically our site is down right now because we're based on Amazon's web services. Karma? :)

<comment><USER29> That actually sounds pretty awesome. Didn't some of those CSE's like MySimon used to have a graph of pricing over time as well? Any way I can get an invite code for Shopobot?

<comment><USER28> Sure! Just drop me an email (it's in my profile) and I'll hook you up with an invite code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I have been an on line book dealer for the past 10 years. Originally the rules about having actual possession of the goods offered for sale were quite strict.

Then came the megalisters - agencies with software that listed all books in print and a contract with publisher's warehouses/library supply services/factors to arrange delivery of in print books to customers.

Then came the "phantom listers" - agencies with software that spiders through the listings of legitimate on line book dealers looking for titles with few (or no) copies listed in Amazon. They then list them at inflated prices. Some of these have more than one alias on Amazon. I think of them as the Piranhas of the Amazon in the ay that they consume the smaller fish.

If and when they receive an order then then try to purchase a copy from one of the "real" owners of the book.[Some are cheeky enough to request as well a"trade discount" on the dealer's price] Small businesses listing on Amazon and abebooks.com must keep their "fulfillment"rating high, so they can ill afford to refuse to supply such parasites.In fact when I requested once that I NOT be obliged to support what I think of as an unethical selling and pricing model I was told

1] that the buyer was a valued long time customer and that 2] I could approach the agency in question and - at THEIR discretion - request that they stop ordering books from me.

Since AZ and ABE take out some % of the list price for the the books sold on their site (as well as monthly listing fees, closing fees and sometimes a portion of the shipping charge ) they can and do make a much greater profit from the high priced phantom listers than from the legitimate reasonably priced offerings of small book dealers, consequently they are not very interested in aggressively policing the situation.

Now there is "Monsoon" and other software to automatically adjust prices on line. In practice most often works to REDUCE the price below the lowest price already listed - a rush to the bottom where books get listed for mere cents.

One tactic I recommend is to search for books and to see the widest range of options is to use "addall.com" It comes in 2 flavours "New' and "Used"and searches around 30 book listing services You can compare prices (ascending or descending) and also see the kind of dealers who sell the books.

Many listings have boilerplate descriptions "we ship fast" "books may have..." etc. which indicate that no human may have examined the object being listed.Other listings have descriptions of content and condition that clearly demonstrate that it is a"real"book from a "real"dealer. When in doubt look for THAT dealers OWN website to ask questions and get personal service.

</comment><comment><USER31> Hmmm. I wonder if this would work in reverse? Suppose I want to buy a book that has several new copies for sale on the Amazon Marketplace for say $60. If I post a new copy for sale for $10, perhaps one of these algorithms would kick in to reduce the price?

<comment><USER32> In the meanwhile what would you do if you get placed an order for several of those?

<comment><USER16> Cancel the sale? As someone else said, that is always an option.

<comment><USER33> Cancelling the sale if you don't like the price sounds a bit unethical :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Its all innocent when it is Amazon. But I am sure there must be similar phenomena taking place in the financial markets, but the algorithms that determine pricing there are more complicated than multiplying by a simple factor.

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm interested where the 1.270589 number comes from. sqrt(golden ratio) is close: 1.27201965

<comment><USER36> I would guess it's derived from other statistics using yet more automated systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'm surprised the author (and no-one here) hasn't worked out the starting date of the automated price war based on the original RRP of the title :)

<comment><USER38> bordeebook was effectively increasing their price by a factor of 1.2684/day, and as of Apr 8 priced the new book at $2,198,177.95. I'll guess that the used price ($35.54) implies that the initial pricing of the new book was about $50.

Log base 1.2684 of the ratio of the Apr 8 price to the estimated original price = log($2198177.95/$50)/log(1.2684) = 45 [days]. Ergo looks like the two algorithms started competing around Tuesday, Feb 22.

I'm sure my original price is off, but that actually won't make much difference. If it was $40, then the initial date was Feb 21; if $60, then Feb 23.

[EDIT] By the way, if the price was originally 99c you would still see the $2.2M price after just another two weeks (61 days total). Ah, exponents.

<comment><USER39> The original price candidate, derived from the logarithm, that is second closest to integer cents is 62.91998, with 162.85966 coming in 6th and the other positions filled by implausibly large numbers.

Neither number has integer cents, since the actual series rounded or truncated values between iterations. For that reason, a simple logarithm won't tell us what the original price was - you'd need a simulation of the rounding.

<comment><USER38> Good idea! Here it is in C: <http://pastie.org/1824968> (You have to manually add the 'f' after the constants if you want to do the whole thing in floating- point, as well as uncommenting the correct Dollars_t definition.)

For the range $20.00 to $200.00, no exact matches to an integer original price (in cents) for the algorithms ceiling, floor, or round, in float or double. This was on a 32-bit Xeon server (EC2).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> > My preferred explanation for bordeebook's pricing is that they do not > actually possess the book.

There's only one problem with this theory. The Amazon TOS requires sellers to have inventory before they can sell inventory. And they will ban you for life for violating that.

<comment><USER41> Yes and no. It's true this a policy violation, but I can tell you unequivocally that a huge percentage of used sellers on Amazon are actually arbitraging their competitors inventory. As a midlevel sized buyer and seller on Amazon, I've always assumed that these sellers had some kind of secret upper-tier arrangement with Amazon? Because as buyers, we see high volume sellers do things on a daily basis that we would never do as sellers for mortal fear of our account getting banned. Yet somehow these megasellers seem able to muddle on year after year?

A lot of them are not necessarily even primarily e-commerce sellers, but are semi-camouflaged divisions of larger traditional publishing entities - <USER2> how the seller oneworldbooks is actually the textbook wholesaling giant MBS Books. These sellers are companies so large they are akin to major new-book publishers, so I assume their relationship with Amazon as a company is cozier than ours is as "random small bookstore with Amazon account".

<comment><USER40> There is an upper-tier "club" on Amazon, you can see it alluded to indirectly in various SC help files. Maybe these guys get away with more than we do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Pricing something high can actually increase sales. There is an example in Cialdini's book "Influence", near the beginning of chapter 1. A jewelry store owner was trying to get rid of some items, instead of marking the price down, she marked them up (by a factor of 2), and they were rapidly gone.

It is a nice book to read, and will probably make you feel uneasy when you realize the abundance of manipulation tactics around us.

</comment><comment><USER43> Sanity checks, people. Sanity checks.

<comment><USER10> Actually yeah, we set floors and ceilings. We sometimes use % up or down from competitors but always w/in the floor/ceiling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> [Discalimer: I've never looked into this before and I have absolutely no idea how the Amazon reseller market works, so this might be impossible or prohibited.]

What's stopping somebody from relisting every product that already exists in the reseller market, but raising the price a few bucks? Even if people are more likely to buy the lesser priced product, the seller has to lose since they don't actually have any products on hand or skin in the game. Better yet, they could relist the products for less than the competitors and jack up the shipping prices to skim a few bucks profit off the top of each sale (this would work if somebody sorted by item price only, instead of price + shipping).

<comment><USER45> My first question: what's the penalty for listing something that you can't deliver? As in, if someone buys 'your' copy, adn someone else buys the only other copy before you get it, what do you do and how does Amazon react when you do that?

Furthermore, though, how much more do you have to charge to cover your own time, shipping complexities, and just the general mess of dealing with two other entities for every sale you make? All of that adds up to a pain in the arse to make a couple bucks, in my estimation.

<comment><USER46> I've been a seller on amazon for the last 6 months. Your order to cancel ratio needs to be below 7%. If it's above this, your account will be restricted (you won't get paid during this time). It happened to me...but it was lifted after about a month.

Depending on the category, many things on Amazon sell so fast, it would be very difficult to do this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> "they have a huge volume of positive feedback"

Is that a pun or something?

</comment><comment><USER48> I've seen lots of books on Amazon priced at $0.01 or $0.02 before. Maybe a result of similar processes? (I always assumed they were some kind of scam, since why the hell would someone sell a book so cheap?)

<comment><USER49> Those sellers are counting on making money by shipping for less than the amount by which Amazon reimburses them. ($3.99 for a recent purchase of mine, while the postage was about $2.00.)

<comment><USER17> Right. Practically speaking, these people aren't actually selling books, they are just making money by doing the "handling" part of S&H.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Sometimes you can use this for trade ins to Amazon directly. Last week I traded in a book that had several prices for $100. Amazon took it for $27. On other sites you can get it for $24.

</comment><comment><USER50> It's gonna be quite a giggle when this happens with the stock market.

<comment><USER51> You think it doesn't?

<comment><USER50> Well there was the 'flash crash' but it wasn't that big a deal. This financially uninformed hacker thinks it could get much worse some day soon.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Flash_Crash>

<comment><USER52> It won't, because although computers have a lot of control over the market, people also look at it pretty regularly. The reason why nobody noticed a $23,000,000 book on Amazon is because out-of-print biology books are not very liquid. If that were Microsoft stock, someone would have manually made a bet on it, and then the price would have corrected after a while.

<comment><USER53> "It won't, because although computers have a lot of control over the market, people also look at it pretty regularly"

The problem is a vast number of transactions, and huge price moves, can happen in literally the blink of an eye.

<comment><USER54> True, but at the same time, we're talking about billions of dollars of real money. In clear self interest, all those institutions will have built obvious checks in their system. Losing several billions of dollars in seconds is something they want to avoid.

Indeed, the fact that the flash crash was the definition of something with a vast number of transactions, huge price moves, and happened in the blink of an eye but still was relatively minor and almost inconsequential shows the reliance of the stock market.

<comment><USER53> It was inconsequential largely because most of the wonky trades were voided.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Heh.

I suspect that this is happening in a less transparent way with automated commodities trading systems.

</comment><comment><USER56> Someone should try selling a book that there are limited copies of (ie one that can't be procured easily) to see what happens if someone buys from a seller who doesn't have it.

<comment><USER57> The nice thing about selling books is that you aren't bound to deliver the book - you can always just cancel the contract and refund the money. It's unlike short selling stocks in that respect; you aren't vulnerable to a short squeeze (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_selling#Risk>).

(For an example, read up on Porsche & Volkswagen: eg. [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/30/business/worldbusiness/30i...](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/30/business/worldbusiness/30iht- norris31.1.17372644.html) )

<comment><USER54> The NYT piece on Porsche & Volkswagen (and many other market corners) is actually a really useful piece of financial literature. It nicely outlines some of the outlandish and clever ways that people can use common market forces to create situations for profit.

I always try to think in a similar way when it comes to startups. Where can you harness some market force to create a favorable position for yourself?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> awww

</comment><comment><USER59> I see this all the time. On Ebay too.

Hmmmmm, maybe I'm spending too much time trolling for things to buy?</comment>


Ask YC:  What tool do you use for web page / ui mockups?  - <AUTHOR>

I dont want to/cant afford to buy photoshop, whats an alternative? <comment><USER2> Highly recommend Omnigraffle for functional specs / wireframes. You can just move UI around so much faster in a wireframing / diagramming paradigm.

Gimp / Photoshop is good for the visual design phase of things. This is really the way to get to the next level of polish.

</comment><comment><USER3> Omnigraffle for wireframes etc. <http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/pro/>

</comment><comment><USER4> gimp, <http://www.gimp.org/>

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Photoshop and Illustrator here as a Windows guy.

<comment><USER6> Seconded. I use Photoshop Elements though. It is much much cheaper, and I haven't grown past it yet. Certainly not for mock-ups.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you manage Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD)? - <AUTHOR>

I've recently been diagnosed with OCPD [1] and am in a bit of a spin. It explains why relationships haven't worked and why work has been getting worse and worse (can't do it well enough, can't work with a team, and I refuse to be wrong). On the DSM IV scale I met 6 of the 8 criteria.
I am semi-accepting the diagnosis - I can see it fits, even if I don't want to own it - but find it v discouraging to be  told there's only a 50% chance psychotheraphy can help, and apart from that, to 'manage'. I've researched via Google [2] but most is from people living with people who have OCPD, not from people with OCPD itself.
So, if you have it or have helped someone with it - what worked? I'm looking at increasing my Serotonin; but beyond that?
1. OCPD is different to OCD, despite the similar name. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocpd
2. This was the best post I came across. If you want to know what it's like: http://www.ocdonline.com/#!the-right-stuff/c1hdb <comment><USER2> I had it really bad at one point, I still have it now but less frequent and I can recognise when its affecting me. I went for CBT through the NHS (if you're in UK). Really does help.

<comment><USER3> How easy was it to get the NHS to diagnose you? I've been mulling this over, but from what I've heard unless it's life-destroyingly serious (or a bad case of depression) they aren't that interested.

<comment><USER2> I also heard this before I went to see the doctor, I just said that it was affecting my day to day activities and that some days I struggles to force myself out of the house. I said My friends and family are also noticing and then the doctors seemed to listen and referred me. The list was about 5 months before I got seen and I heard that this was quick.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Have you ever tried smoking marijuana? I have a friend who found it very helpful for OCPD.</comment>


PyCon 2011: Interview with Zed Shaw - <AUTHOR> http://pycon.blogspot.com/2011/02/title-pycon-2011-interview-with-zed.html <comment><USER2> At the moment I've got 13 students signed up for my class and the "newbie tour of PyCon" I want to do. There's also about 6 Python experts (many much more expert than myself) who are going to help with the class and the guiding during the conference. That's a pretty good student/teacher ratio of about 2/1 assuming everyone who volunteered to help actually does.

Should be a blast, but if you guys have friends who you think would benefit from this please tell them about it. They don't have to go to the tutorials to join the group either. They can just show up like normal and hang out with us.

Thanks.

<comment><USER3> I had an absolutely wonderful time teaching Python to a few high school kids last summer. Do you need any more folks on hand to help out?

<comment><USER2> Sure, the more the merrier, and I figure if you can bring a victim or two that'd be good as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Mr. Shaw giving an "extreme talk" on using ZeroMQ, _Advanced Network Architectures With ZeroMQ_ , should be interesting. For those that don't know ZeroMQ and why it's so useful, here's a few links:

<http://nichol.as/zeromq-an-introduction>

<http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/09/introduction-zero-mq>

[http://www.igvita.com/2010/09/03/zeromq-modern-fast- networki...](http://www.igvita.com/2010/09/03/zeromq-modern-fast-networking- stack/)

[http://mongrel2.org/doc/tip/docs/manual/book.wiki#x1-640005....](http://mongrel2.org/doc/tip/docs/manual/book.wiki#x1-640005.2) <== The Mongrel2 manual is probably the best concise introduction to ZeroMQ.

<comment><USER5> I was pushing for ZeroMQ as an alternative to WCF at my company, because we will eventually need to integrate components not only written in C#, but C++ and Python too.

I encountered resistance because of WCF handles not only the serialization, but the method routing on both ends of a service (by means of a proxy class, which would be hard to set up in C++/Python anyhow). My reading on ZeroMQ leads me to believe I could set up one socket as a front end which routes message to a different publisher dedicated to each method?

Is this a good way to do it?

<comment><USER6> Just out of interest, if you're going to need to talk between C#, C++ and Python, why not just use HTTP and JSON? Unless you have truly crazy performance requirements that should be more than fast enough for most purposes, and it's really easy to work with (debug in the browser etc).

<comment><USER7> HTTP is designed for a single request, single response in order. ZeroMQ messages can be sent without waiting for each messages response, thus a single socket connection can push drastically more information then a single http connection (not that you are limited to a single http connection). Connection Pooling HTTP starts bringing in a lot of overhead, but doesn't provide some of the other features ZeroMQ does (multi-honed etc) without some additional effort (load balancers on the network).

I've personally been pondering a variation of JSON-RPC that operates over a TCP socket not over the HTTP layer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The article sounds to me, like Zed is saying Python's usefulness to him is mainly as an educational language, not so much a "daily" language. Is this right?

<comment><USER2> I use Python at work, and since I do I tend to not use it at home on my personal projects. That makes sure there's no conflict of interest with my employer. It also keeps me sane so that I don't get into a rut with my ideas.

These days I'm going with C and Lua. For example, I'm starting this project:

<http://edifying.tv/>

For fun with Lua and wxWidgets, and my latest websites are all Mongrel2 and Lua based with:

<http://tir.mongrel2.org/>

But, for teaching total beginners to programming I'm finding Python is the best so far.

<comment><USER9> LPTHW is a good goal for beginners but what about the intermediate ones? I know how to code but when I see mongrel2 or any other opensource code I have no clue how to start integrating them. There may be others like me so when are you planning to write a not-so-advanced-book/tutorial for the intermediate coder who can recognize a pointer from his function.</comment></comment></comment>


CSS Creatures - <AUTHOR> https://bennettfeely.com/csscreatures/ <comment><USER2> When the content doesn't load (for whatever reason) the page only shows that ad... Which looks way too much like the actual content for my taste.

<comment><AUTHOR> Twitter's rate limit has the site down at the moment unfortunately.

<comment><USER2> I accidentally clicked on the ad because the content failed to load and the default behavior is to have the ad centered on the page with similar styling as the rest of the page...

<comment><AUTHOR> I just added a fix to keep the ad from jumping. I've also disabled it if the site is being rate limited.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's currently down due to rate limit problems.

Unfortunate that the script checks the http response code, yet the server returns 200 status for an error message...

</comment><comment><USER4> They look like the characters in Dumb Ways To Die.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJNR2EpS0jw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJNR2EpS0jw)

</comment><comment><USER5> See also: [http://simurai.com/projects/cursor- monster/](http://simurai.com/projects/cursor-monster/).

</comment><comment><USER6> Are there any examples without using Twitter?

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's a live version in the mean time

[https://codepen.io/bennettfeely/pen/tfbCo](https://codepen.io/bennettfeely/pen/tfbCo)

<comment><USER7> Cute!

Reminds me of Tabby Cats. This is my default new tab at work so things like 'HN' do not pop up. I also use it for password generation in the scenarios where you are setting up an admin login for someone.

The thing is that Tabby Cats have got me using their project every day and even recommending it to folks, so see what you can do to get your lovely characters as equally sticky in people's lives.

[http://tabbycats.club/cat/u634sb](http://tabbycats.club/cat/u634sb)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am really annoyed by websites that require you to have social media accounts to function

<comment><USER9> Yeah, the bubble is unprecedented. Like was it really hard to just put a textbox on this very website?

<comment><USER10> come on man, the point from their perspective is to generate traffic ofc

<comment><USER11> at least one static example would be nice?

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't received anywhere near the amount of traffic I'm getting right now and I thought Twitter's Search API rate limits were more relaxed than they apparently are.

This is from before I recently updated the site, I'm working on getting updated examples on CodePen.

[https://codepen.io/bennettfeely/pen/tfbCo](https://codepen.io/bennettfeely/pen/tfbCo)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can we get a version that doesn't require twitter just to use?

</comment><comment><USER13> Here appears to be a few of the creatures, from back in 2013: [https://codepen.io/bennettfeely/pen/tfbCo](https://codepen.io/bennettfeely/pen/tfbCo)

</comment><comment><USER14> This is a fun idea. Can you do more complex shapes for the bodies / heads?

</comment><comment><USER15> Is it because i am on mobile that I don't see anything?

<comment><USER16> Apparently whatever API it's using is rate limited.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> hugged to death?</comment>


Announcing Dojo 5.0.0 - <AUTHOR> https://dojo.io/blog/2019/01/29/2019-01-29-Version-5-Dojo/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is an iteration on Dojo 2, which is a completely new web app framework. It only bears resemblance to the original "Dojo Toolkit" in its name.

Here's an intro to the "new" Dojo, from the May 2018 release of Dojo 2.0: [https://dojo.io/blog/2018/05/02/2018-05-02-Dojo2-0-0-release...](https://dojo.io/blog/2018/05/02/2018-05-02-Dojo2-0-0-release/)

GitHub repo here: [https://github.com/dojo/framework](https://github.com/dojo/framework)</comment>


Piracy Is Over Like The Web Is Dead - <AUTHOR> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101201/06413612076/piracy-is-over-like-web-is-dead.shtml <comment><USER2> "So...because, after years of fighting, iTunes finally stood up and removed the DRM, followed by a few retailers, we're supposed to look to the record labels as our saviors? For not treating us like criminals?"

People that pirate music are criminals. The music industry put protections in place only after music was freely downloaded (and not paid for).

"the average musician makes roughly $23 for every $1000 in music sold -- and that's only if they actually recoup, which is difficult to do, thanks to the way the record labels account for things. For those of you who share my math skills and don't want to reach for a calculator, that's barely 2%."

People that pirate don't see a difference. Either way, the artists is getting shafted. Please stop trying to make it look like piracy is somehow a crusade against the big, bad record labels.

"Uh huh. Nuanced arguments would probably be more appreciated from the group of folks you're talking to, who actually spend more money on music than those who do not "pirate". Funny definition of cheap you're working from..."

How are they possibly going to get an accurate answer on this? By asking?

There are plenty of services that allow you to preview music: Grooveshark, last.fm, Pandora to name a few. If you are really interested in buying music, you won't be torrenting it.

I really wish people would admit they are pirating because they just want something for free.

Pirates got what they wanted: Cheap, DRM free music. Yet, the piracy continues because the spoiled brats of the Internet aren't getting something else they feel they are entitled to.

It only goes to show you why you don't negociate with criminals.</comment>


Grant application rejected over choice of font - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/grant-application-rejected-over-choice-of-font-1.18686 <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10474901](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10474901)</comment>


Good Storytellers Are Happier in Life and in Love - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-good-storytellers-are-happier-in-life-and-in-love-1467652052 <comment><USER2> You know its going to be pure garbage when the title is 'Doing X makes you happy!! '.

Fuck these studies that can never be reproduced even under the exact circumstances. These charlatans continue to be allocated funds instead of going to jail; despite being exposed as frauds countless times.

Just because reading stuff like this gives us good vibes doesn't mean we should continue wasting money on these "studies". Time to say enough is enough and put these "professors" behind bars for wasting public money.

This pointless scientific approach to human behavior and society has distracted us from any genuine discussion about our own internal and external conflicts . A Human being to these people is a machine which when given input X produces output Y.

Why do we continue to accept this?

<comment><USER3> I think "jail the professors" is too extreme. There needs to be a more constructive solution.

I completely agree with your assessment of the problem.

<comment><USER4> (Careful, heard this "story" about dcposch, he might send you to jail too.)

On more factual note, it's a known issue that as you move from hard to soft sciences that positive results increase:

[http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0010068)

Fields studying topics like "happiness" tend to validate their hypothesis over 90% of the time; which means something fishy is going on.

<comment><USER5> Or they just chose to test something fairly obvious, like that people that are good at things are considered more attractive than people who aren't.

<comment><USER6> ... or negative results are a lot less likely to be accepted for publication.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So how does one become a good storyteller? Obviously it takes experience but is there a book that anyone can recommend to get an edge?

<comment><USER8> Storytelling is learned as a child, think about it - every day child comes home and tells mummy all about their day. In this circumstance mummy can say 'very good, now play over there!' or they can ask questions about the story, e.g. ask for details to be explained or parts told again. It is this storytelling ability learned as a child rather than anything that can be done as an adult. You could learn and master everything this guy says about writing a good story:

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

But it is not about that, it is about simple stories.

A lot of people travel to very nice places on holiday, some people don't get to do that. But have you noticed people that you work with go somewhere fantastic and then have nothing to say about it? Bad storytelling!!!

Meanwhile, a good storyteller will be able to walk into town, or maybe just take their dog for a walk and be able to come back with a story. The story could be anecdotal, something seen along the way, or it could be about some other dog and owner met. Bungie jumping in Borneo might not be something that really helps conversation, people don't relate to it, no matter how outer- worldly it is. However, meeting a sweet dog and lovely owner, a story can come out of that, one that can be related to.

Going back to childhood, there are other opportunities - the formal dinner setting where adults are willing to listen to a child's story. For a child to hold their own and maybe get laughs, that all has to be learned. If the child has a reputation for disruption then the invite to the top table will not be a thing and the opportunity to tell stories in a way that works with an audience is not there.

If a child is brought up without love then there is no chance for that child to learn how to tell stories in a social setting, i.e. relevant (beginning, middle, end), with audience engaged, true rather than fanciful, with consideration for others that are different and so on. The ability to tell stories that people want to hear should be an innate thing, developed with language. But some kids are not loved and therefore do not have that social engagement where stories are shared. These kids grow up in their own world so they do have stories but they only make sense in their world, not some broader happy society context. Hence not good story tellers. The motivation and the innate ability is not there.

Therefore I suspect that there are reasons why being a good storyteller is a signifier. Would you want someone that does not do stories to be parenting your child? No. For men this is not thought of as such a big deal, but why is this? Men do not have maternal instincts and it is the 'mother's tongue' that gets learned for a good reason. Women know they can get a more loving partner by rating the story telling ability of men, men don't always care about that.

It is possible to help someone that is not a good storyteller become better at it. This involves treating them a little bit like how you might have a conversation with an 8 year old child, asking lots of basic questions to get them comfortable sharing the story. I have yet to meet a human being that does not like talking, even if shy. Just through listening and questions one can get someone able to do things like stick to the plot and not go rambling off. Then through normal friendship you can get them to want to share stories. So far everything is all about them... But, listen, ask the right questions. Then, as time goes by you can start to get to talk about other stories, e.g. one's own or the world at large, or involving a shared interest. This sort of therapy is not available on the NHS, however, people do make friends at work and those that don't have the childhood wiring for good storytelling can be brought into the fold, gossip coaxed out of them on tea breaks.

Clearly the internet has created new opportunities for storytelling. If you are not from that broken home/foster home background where things like storytelling just do not get learned, then what to do? Write!!! If you get good feedback on your writing then you will be encouraged to further develop your storytelling ability. Although there are big books that can tell you how to do it better, practice is the true teacher.

With respect to the article, I see storytelling as something very much tied into child development and I don't see how that aspect can't be gone into properly.

<comment><USER9> >>But have you noticed people that you work with go somewhere fantastic and then have nothing to say about it? Bad storytelling!!!

I'm not a bad storyteller. I just like to think about the future and discuss _ideas_ with people, rather than think about the past and discuss events.

<comment><USER10> Cool story

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why do marriages have to be saved, and why are marriage counselors presented as respectable good guys instead of odious charlatans that prey on the weak and miserable???

<comment><USER12> Because marriage, like anything worth its while, is not just instant gratification, and it often takes effort to make good again.

Or, to answer in another way, because people in falling marriages feel like it's something worth saving, that they try to find help with achieving that. Who are you to tell them otherwise, and generalize that to all marriage counselors and people wanting to save their marriage?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I fully agree that storytelling is an important skill, but boy howdy is that experiment ridiculous. Every time I read about one of these ridiculous studies I wish someone would start an organization for reproducing and debunking bad studies.

<comment><USER14> The Open Science Framework has Reproducibility Projects for a number of different fields. Like this one for Psychology: [https://osf.io/ezcuj/wiki/home/](https://osf.io/ezcuj/wiki/home/) and are generally trying to make science more open and reproducible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> _" Psychologists believe this is because the man is showing that he knows how to connect, to share emotions and, possibly, to be vulnerable. He also is indicating that he is interesting and articulate and can gain resources and provide support."_

Why this disconnect? Isn't storytelling the act of connecting, sharing emotions, and being vulnerable? The article makes it sound like storytelling is peacocking. Doing one thing to display a related ability. Like flexing to show strength. But this is the real act. Of course people who are better at interpersonal communication are happier because of it.

<comment><USER16> To me it sounds more like the man is indicating he needs other people to provide support (and motivates them by the story telling techniques he developed). Most introvert men would probably be able to provide for things themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> "The men didn't care whether the women were good storytellers, the research showed."

<comment><USER18> Men generally have lower standards.

A while ago, I ran two Tinder bots connected to CleverBot; one with a female account and the other with a male account (Both with attractive pictures). Female matches did not tolerate the male bot talking gibberish, while male matches went out of their way to try and make sense of what the female bot was saying.

Hilarious as it was, I had to cut it because it was immoral.

<comment><USER19> How did you account for a woman having many more times the matches of a man? Wouldn't this influence whether they would be willing to "spend" time on the match?

<comment><USER18> I thought about that and the only thing I could do to address it was by making the male account _really_ attractive. Couldn't think of a better solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Storytellers are more able to contextualise their misery within an aspirational framework.

</comment><comment><USER21> Whenever you're not sure whether something is a cause or an effect, look up Taleb on "Narrative Fallacy."

</comment><comment><USER22> I know a guy who's an excellent story teller.

He's also a pathological liar who never intends to keep any of his promises.

</comment><comment><USER23> Matthew Dicks is a great story teller with some good tips: [http://www.matthewdicks.com/new-page-5/](http://www.matthewdicks.com/new- page-5/)

[https://themoth.org/storytellers/matthew- dicks](https://themoth.org/storytellers/matthew-dicks)</comment>


Distributed Ledger without the Blockchain - <AUTHOR> https://fauna.com/blog/distributed-ledger-without-the-blockchain <comment><USER2> Blockchain seems like a brilliant solution when multiple anonymous untrustworthy parties need to get together and agree.

But to the point of this article, most situations aren't like that. You have identities, contracts, and trust at least as much as can be enforced with the legal system.

I have also seen a lot of over-application of blockchain to "standard" banking problems. I guess it's real value will depend on whether or not it's successful in "decentralizing all of the things". If that doesn't happen, then it may just be a very cumbersome way of doing something we already knew how to do.

<comment><USER3> Blockchain is a terrible solution.

Firstly Proof of Work is incredibly energy inefficient, to extent that electricity consumed to append to public blockchains is comparable to electricity used by nation states.

Secondly POW by its inherent design recentralises trust. When mining evolves to deploying on ASIC and deploying it where electricity is cheap you are recentralising trust to a tiny few who are willing and able to fulfil the ever higher and steadily increasing bar that POW, by design, demands. The trust model at this point has evolved from technical difficulty of fabricating & maintaining long duration forked chains to one where key block creators are too financially invested in success of the chain overall to allow fraud to happen. At this point, when your trust model is essentially too much to loose to cheat, there are scant distinguishing features between a blockchain ledger and a traditional centralised clearing house.

To steal a line from a good book I read recently about blockchains: "The good bits of blockchain are not original, and the original bits of blockchain turn out to be much good."

[Edit: grammar / readability]

<comment><USER4> While your criticisms are valid, you're criticizing just one implementation of "a blockchain", namely chains secured by CPU-bound PoW. There's plenty of other implementations with different trade offs. You could design your PoW algorithm to be more ASIC-resistent, eg [https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/29890/memory- hard...](https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/29890/memory-hard-proof- of-work-are-they-asic-resistant). You could switch to proof of stake. You could use whatever algorithm XRP is using.

Also, by saying "blockchain is a terrible solution", I assume you mean "there are other better solutions [to the problem of creating a decentralized ledger, or whatever]". What are those better solutions?

<comment><USER3> I agree that bitcoin's use of sha256 nonce seeking is a very easy target for critique. My broader assertion though is that proof of work, by design, will always centralise into a few, one way or another. Other theoretical schemes may be more resistant to centralisation though my instinct is that unless you find some sort of PoW mechanism that strongly anchors to some universal and impossible to simultae physical constraint of the universe we inhabit, POW mechanisms of any economic value will all race towards centralisation shrinking number of signing peers.

Proof of stake at this time is purely theoretical. It lacks strong proof that it solves the problem it sets out to solve. I personally doubt it is a viable solution and my belief it is a dead end avenue of research. Notable there are no large scale implementations yet, even eth rolled back the clock on POS.

Never heard of XRP before. Very briefly scanning, looks like a distributed consensus type protocol, which isn't anything new doesn't attempt to solve the core concern about decentralised trust. Realise am being a bit flippant here, I need to study more which I will, but this is my initial impression.

>> I assume you mean "there are other better solutions [to the problem of creating a decentralized ledger, or whatever]". What are those better solutions?

No I am not saying this at all. Why is it incumbent on me to solve this problem merely because I advance a critique of the current solution? Does my failure to bring an alternative to the table make my critique invalid? I don't think so. I have been puzzling over this problem space and exploring some ideas for alternatives. The problem is hard and honestly I am probably not smart enough to solve it. But the problems are interesting so I'll keep turning it over.

In terms of my thinking right now, I am not even confident that problems solved blockchains are even problems worth solving, that blockchains provide us, as a society, anything of value at all. Too much is given up: notably for example dispute resolution. Look at all the long parade of thefts and errors that have happened on Eth, the legacy to date of the idea of "the code is law" is problematic at best. To date I can only think of one real use case that has made me think blockchain/bitcoin is actually even useful : when US DoJ leaning on Visa/Mastercard to cutoff funding to Wikileaks, bitcoin provided good stopgap technical solution to this grotesque legal excess.

<comment><USER5> > _Never heard of XRP before. Very briefly scanning, looks like a distributed > consensus type protocol, which isn 't anything new doesn't attempt to solve > the core concern about decentralised trust._

To save you some googling, it _does_ try to solve decentralized trust. It goes for a more traditional scheme, a variant of Byzantine agreement.

However, there was a dispute wherein David Mazières (of Kademlia fame) claims that Ripple's design has a flaw, that he fixed in SCP (Stellar Consensus Protocol), by designing FBA (Federated Byzantine Agreement) as described in his paper: [https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus- protocol.pd...](https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pdf) (which features a comparative description with Ripple and Bitcoin).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Given the amount of people that suggest blockchains in a trusted environment it seems perfectly reasonable to reiterate that you don't need a blockchain to have distributed consensus.

I was hoping for something different given the title though.

<comment><USER7> I think a benefit of blockchains is that a single(ish) protocol can support many different distributed applications.

It's sort of like apps that run on Electron, performance might be bad but it's easy on the developer.

<comment><USER8> Except blockchains are incredibly complicated, and as the hacks have shown, programming on the blockchain is a great way to create a bug bounty that also shuts down your company

<comment><USER7> Definitely, blockchains aren't secure in the way that many Ethereum apps seem to think they are.

But for certain types of lower stakes applications (say a log running on a mesh network of sensors) blockchains can provide a simple way to do something that could otherwise be fairly complicated. Certain blockchain implementations (I like MultiChain) are really easy to use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There is no such thing as trust anymore at our level of information and 'evil' density. Yes 'evil density' meaning the amount of unemployed outsiders working from a different mission statement than their target. Trust is a relic of small communities and shared goals. As we break down barriers, go global, increase information density - we tempt fate by assuming all new members will function honestly. Or that established members will remain honest

<comment><USER10> It's a good thing that we've long found something better than blind trust then: the rule of law.

<comment><USER11> Trusting the lawmakers, and elected / appointed agents in general, to do the right thing is another interesting problem. It does not seem completely solved yet, too.

<comment><USER12> "Law and order" might arguably about trusting such agents; but _rule of law_ is more the opposite. It's about putting those agents in a situation where they tend to enforce rules that they cannot easily manipulate.

You are right that is a hard thing to do, and no society has ever done it perfectly. But western democracies do it surprisingly well, and do so using a playbook of principles that has been understood and written about since the 18th century.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think the inclusion of blockchain is misleading. I had to wrap my brains around the straw-man first to understand what the article is trying to show- case. It should simply say FaunaDB supports distributed transaction.

Separately, distributed transaction is not the primary motivation for using blockchain. For ledger/financial use cases its the verification and auditing confidence it provides.

</comment><comment><USER14> just a sales pitch for Fauna, nothing interesting to see there.

</comment><comment><USER15> it's kind of annoying how people abuse the term "blockchain" nowadays whenever there's something remotely close to distributed systems.

"Distributed Ledger without the Blockchain" is just a distributed database, which has been possible forever. Check out couchdb/pouchdb, etc.

The innovation of Bitcoin's blockchain was that it introduced distributed ledger that didn't require centralized trust. If you take that way, you're just a database no matter how you try to spin it.

This is like saying "We've built orange juice without the orange!" Yeah, you've built bottled water.

<comment><AUTHOR> FaunaDB's consistency model is very different than CouchDB. (Disclosure, I'm one of the early contributors to CouchDB and work at Fauna.)

More about the FaunaDB consistency model here. [https://fauna.com/blog/consistent-transactions-in-a- globally...](https://fauna.com/blog/consistent-transactions-in-a-globally- distributed-database)

<comment><USER15> Does it matter in the context of this comment thread? I'm sure you guys have built a damn good bottled water, but it ain't orange juice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. The point of the post is that with global ACID, distributed ledgers among trusted parties are just regular applications. You can't do this with eventually consistent databases. What I'm describing is a genuine solution our customers are choosing FaunaDB for. For their distributed ledger requirements, a blockchain is overkill.

<comment><USER16> And the point of the GP was that that does not address the OP point that it is "just a distributed database"

<comment><AUTHOR> A distributed database with global consistency, which is a new category. FaunaDB (and similar databases) allows a distributed ledger among trusted parties to be "just a database application."

<comment><USER17> Great. Just take the word blockchain out of the article, it adds nothing but confusion.

<comment><USER18> I disagree, with the number of people pushing blockchain when they just want a distributed ledger, an article like this is quite helpful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Consider enterprise B2B transactions - There will always be an old school legal contract in place and hence trust in the existing system. The overhead of the blockchain can be avoided in such cases.

</comment><comment><USER20> The use-case here interest (run a ledger with invoices) me but wonder if exist a way to do this on mobile? (not JS)?

<comment><AUTHOR> FaunaDB has drivers for Java and Swift, so this schema can easily support mobile apps.</comment></comment>


The Day We Set the Colorado River Free - <AUTHOR> http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/nature/Open-the-Floodgates-The-Day-We-Set-the-Colorado-River-Free.html?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=facebookpost <comment><USER2> Really great article. I love the weekend reading on HN.

This part of the article really caught my eye:

>>> Current "use it or lose it" water laws don't allow farmers to sell any surplus allotment, so they end up growing as much alfalfa as they can and selling it on the global market. Peter Culp estimates that 50 billion gallons of water—1.5 pulse flows—is shipped to China each year in the form of alfalfa, and even more to Japan. An open water market would allow both cities and environmental groups to pay farmers far more than they currently make growing alfalfa. <<<

Terrible! The US West has been fighting water scarcity problems for 10+ years and we're exporting billions of gallons of water overseas?

There is also a new documentary out called DamNation which looks quite interesting. [http://damnationfilm.com/](http://damnationfilm.com/)

<comment><USER3> My fathers specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce.

Couldn't resist. Not often alfalfa comes up in conversation.

<comment><USER4> You should mention that this is a quote from Catch-22.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A common misconception is that hydroelectricity has the advantage over other renewables of requiring less land. This is not the case. The surface area of Lake Mead is 640 square kilometers -- this much ecologically viable land was destroyed to make way for hydroelectricity. The power generation capacity afforded by the Hoover Dam on this lake is roughly 2 GW.

A solar panel produces roughly (we're lowballing) 100 watts per square meter. Solar panels to produce 2 GW -- the power output of Lake Mead -- would cover about 20 million square meters, or 20 square kilometers. If we assume the solar panels only operate at capacity for a third of a day, that's 60 square kilometers. If we also assume that only half of the used land is actually light-capturing, that's 120 square kilometers.

Even under the most pessimistic of assumptions, solar still uses _five times_ less land than hydro. Realistic solar installations would probably be significantly more efficient than I've assumed. Batteries are also significantly more space-efficient than hydroelectric storage.

<comment><USER6> It's also a misconception to equate huge-reservoir hydro with all hydro. The Norwegians have incredibly high head, phenomenally efficient hydro in the mountains with minimal environmental impact. We have run of river hydroelectric in the states that diverts some water via penstock, as well as canal-based systems and those that utilize Army Corp dams. In fact, there is significant non-powered dam resource available: [http://nhaap.ornl.gov/content/non-powered-dam- potential](http://nhaap.ornl.gov/content/non-powered-dam-potential)

I'm actually working on national-level hydro assessments at a national lab. We don't really predict more huge reservoir installments, but there is plenty of capacity out there. These set-ups (particularly non-powered dams) are also generally pretty cheap per kWh generated over their lifetimes (which in some cases reaches 70+ years).

<comment><USER7> > We have run of river hydroelectric in the states that diverts some water via > penstock

Do you have wildlife issues to consider in the design? E.g., are the dams on rivers fish migrate up?

<comment><USER6> Well, run-of-river installations actually don't have dams, and you can prevent most fish with just some mesh, so you're avoiding that impact entirely.

<comment><USER7> Ah cool, that's good to hear (so long as flows are sustainable, unlike some of our proposals for 'harnessing all that wasted water')

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is amazing! It's unfortunate that we can't have the dams constantly open or at least a few to keep some water flow. I would love to fund something that would allow us to do this yearly or even more frequently

<comment><USER9> If you're a US citizen, you already do fund such an entity with your taxes.

If it's important to you, let your legislators know, and vote accordingly.

<comment><USER10> You "already fund" something, but need to vote for it to be funded?

<comment><USER11> No, you need to vote for it to take the decisions you'd like taken.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> >>> hamburgers are a particularly stupid thing to make out of the Colorado. Each hamburger takes about 500 gallons of water.

I will be eating fewer hamburgers after reading this.

<comment><USER13> Yea ~1500 gallons of water for every pound of beef</comment></comment>


Money as debt (5x10min videos) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArfPytAoeZ0

<comment><AUTHOR> Why and how money is steering mankind. Basic economics class (I had 3 years ago), but I think it's laid down beautifully. Doing the buzz for 3 weeks in my friends circle, so I thought it could be of interest for HN.</comment>


What most don't see in TBH, an app sold for ~$100M and launched only 9 weeks ago - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/what-most-dont-see-in-tbh-an-app-sold-for-100m-and-launched-only-9-weeks-ago-f15edd11505f <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone! Happy to answer any questions or comments about the Post!</comment>


Invite Your Friends To Google+ With A Shareable Link - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/103365801604763251648/posts/fZZqRLQHC5q

<comment><USER2> This is a pretty great addition to the invites system. Here's 150 from me you can link your friends to: [https://plus.google.com/_/notifications/ngemlink?path=%2F%3F...](https://plus.google.com/_/notifications/ngemlink?path=%2F%3Fgpinv%3DEu45-7RW0eg%3AhN0znOCV7Jg)</comment>


Prove Your Haskell for Great Safety: Dependent Types - <AUTHOR> https://www.fpcomplete.com/user/konn/prove-your-haskell-for-great-safety/dependent-types-in-haskell

<comment><USER2> Very nice writeup. BTW, I signed up for a 1 year personal subscription to fpcomplete earlier this year - even though I only use it an hour or two a week for brushing up on my Haskell, I really like it.</comment>


Show HN: Crowdtilt announces the first Crowdfunding API - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Crowdtilt/crowdtilt-api-spec

<comment><USER2> This is one of those things that you take a look at and you say "oh thats nice", then you take a second look and yoou're like "Holy shit, that's life changing"

Crowd tilt literally just became the company that can work with any range of major processors to split up payments and allow the payment gateways, processors etc to worry about what they do best, at 1% it would be alot of work to go replacing their system and yet it will still rake in profits for crowdtilt.

As someone who has watched them from the start and met both founders I always knew that good things were coming but this move could actually change online commerce for the better, its just awesome.

<comment><USER3> How is it better than WePay? I've used WePay's API, which supports crowdfunding, and it seems to work fine.

<comment><USER4> Among other things: One, wepay isn't international. Two, you have to send users off your site to use it. Three, you can't plug in your own credit card processing if you use wepay (you have to use theirs).

Additionally, their api doesn't provide the tools for the collaboration side of things (messaging, invites, sharing, comments/nested comments, reward tiers, tilting mechanism, etc). Think of this api as a layer above credit card processing (so you get to choose whichever processor you like or already use, thus not disrupting your current flow of funds and you get to keep the branding/UI/UX, the users, the user data, and the credit card processing data, etc - all important things if you're, say, hotels.com).

(disclosure: I'm one of the crowdtilt founders)

<comment><USER5> > Two, you have to send users off your site to use it

Thats completely false.

<comment><USER4> Project creators/campaign administrators must use wepsy to set up their merchant account. So, that is indeed not false (completely or otherwise).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was buying tickets on StubHub the other day and was pleasantly surprised that they have an option to "split the cost" with someone. Awesome because buying tickets always ends up being such a risky business -- if your friend doesn't show up or cancels last minute

What's awesome about this is that one day hopefully it wont just be crowdtilt but everything. Airlines, tickets, hotels.

<comment><USER7> Was it specifically through Crowdtilt?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Awesome idea - we've been considering a feature at FamilyLeaf that would have required building something like this, but this API would make it much more feasible. Looking forward to trying it out!

</comment><comment><USER9> The API looks awesome Khaled. Congrats to the Crowdtilt team. Can't wait to see what people do with it!

</comment><comment><USER7> This is crazy. Very smart and perceptive move, and it puts the power of crowdfunding directly into the hands of the masses.

I wonder if this will spin out ton of niche-specific platforms. This does remove some of the heavy lifting, but the hardest part about building a crowdfunding marketplace is priming the marketplace.

</comment><comment><USER10> This looks amazing.

Once available, a live sample of someone using it for a specific purposes would be even more amazing / would help show just how awesome this is.

</comment><comment><USER11> Congrats James & Khaled!

+1 - Love this idea :)

</comment><comment><USER12> this would be awesome for group vacation planning via airbnb.com.

<comment><USER4> it's funny you should say that...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Congratulations! Now to go put this together with exec or taskrabbit. :)

<comment><USER4> we'd love to see that too. as well as uber here in sf. like my co-founder said here (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4912389>), we'd love to see people build all kinds of things like crowdfunding-as-a-service (think kickstarter meets wordpress).

whether it's a feature in a current app like exec/taskrabbit or it's own app like a dinner-bill splitting mobile app (take a picture of the receipt, ocr, text it out, everyone's charged once the total is reached or exceeded, etc) the api was built to help any time groups and money interact... and we hope this renders the ideas devs come up with endless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> congrats to the entire CT team. Happy to be working with you guys!

</comment><comment><USER15> Looks great, but I wonder how this goes beyond <https://github.com/lockitron/selfstarter>?

<comment><AUTHOR> The Crowdtilt API can easily power something like Selfstarter and significantly improve its features by offering support to multiple payment processors instead of just Amazon Payments. It also provides collaboration tools for the supporting community as mentioned by my co-founder <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4911765>

Selfstarter is really cool for a one-off type of project such as Lockitron, but with the Crowdtilt API, you can also build a "kickstarter-as-a-service" type of product, which I would really love to see built one day.

(disclosure: I'm one of the Crowdtilt founders)</comment></comment>


A photo tour of Seattle's Living Computer Museum - <AUTHOR> http://www.flickr.com/photos/mratzloff/sets/72157634396194597/

<comment><AUTHOR> I recently went to the Living Computer Museum in Seattle and snapped a few photos. It was really interesting for a vintage tech geek like myself.

If you're interested in more information, I've written detailed descriptions for most of the photos, sort of like a photo story.

Anyway, I highly recommend a visit if you're in the area!</comment>