Insider trading has been rife on Wall Street, academics conclude - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21736561-one-study-suggests-insiders-profited-even-global-financial-crisis-another <comment><USER2> prev discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16353307](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16353307)</comment>


Hacking the President's DNA - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/11/hacking-the-presidents-dna/309147/#

<comment><AUTHOR> This article puts a whole new spin on 'anti-virus'. It posits that open sourcing 'important' genomes, those of presidents and others, would be the best defense against any sort of synthetic biological attack, targeted specifically at the individual, because the group is smarter than the individual. And certainly a whole industry is better than just the secret service in the case of the US President.

It seems inevitable to me that each of us will have organisms, bacteria, that exist on our skin and in our bloodstream that make up a sort of personalized and general 'anti-virus'. Coming most likely from the Cancer research of today. The question for me becomes how quickly will we get to this point, and how many will die before we reach it. If it's true that by 2020, you will be able to replicate the Polio Virus for $3, I can only imagine what fringe crazies will be able to do with better engineered viruses.

exponential growth as applied to industries adjacent to the tech industry is really hard to grasp. I have a very difficult time seeing what the future will be like 2-5 years from now, contrasted with 1999 when it was easier to see what the world would be like by 2010. 100m iPads in 2.5 years is a perfect example of this. The idea of not a tablet is now absurd in so many instances ( airline pilots, doctors, etc. )</comment>


Tech companies are hoarding patents, but they should be donating them - <AUTHOR> https://theoutline.com/post/1198/tech-companies-are-hoarding-patents-but-they-should-be-donating-them <comment><USER2> Like an arms race, this approach (formally dedicating to the public, effectively terminating the patent at the PTO) only works if _everyone_ does it.

Otherwise, it's strategic and prudent to have a patent portfolio, so you have trading cards and leverage if someone asserts against you.

</comment><comment><USER3> In the last two paragraphs it states that IBM used to publish papers on its inventions to prevent others from patenting them. I have heard that recently, the law has changed to allow it to be possible to patent something within a year of its publishing. Maybe someone knows more about this - is this true? Seems like it would incentivize patenting if so, rather than publishing or dedicating to the public, as then people would just patent whatever someone else publishes.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure it's fair to attack IBM for trying to patent out of office emails.

If they had attempted to use the patent against others, I would be immensely critical. But it strikes me as more likely that the patent was a defense measure to protect the company against trolls.

While donating the patent sounds nice, isn't it absolutely the same outcome if a company keeps the patent and does not litigate with it?

<comment><USER5> You can't know that they _won 't_ litigate it, only that they haven't. And it's always possible for that policy to change, or the patent to be sold, or even for IBM to go bankrupt and the patents sold to trolls to pay the creditors.</comment></comment>


NAND Storage at DRAM speeds. 800Mp/s - <AUTHOR> http://www.fusionio.com/demo.html

<comment><USER2> this has some interesting applications in the vertical market of photography. I wrote some initial thoughts on this last week: [http://latogaphoto.blogspot.com/2007/10/future-of-local- phot...](http://latogaphoto.blogspot.com/2007/10/future-of-local-photo- storage.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's more like 1/10 of DRAM speed, which is still awesome.</comment>


SlopPy: An error-tolerant Python interpreter that facilitates sloppy programming - <AUTHOR> http://www.pgbovine.net/SlopPy.html <comment><USER2> I think this may be useful as a debugging tool and for that reason I commend the authors for creating it, but I would be reluctant to use it for any critical application.

The example given of starting a script then leaving it only to return later and find it stopped running due to an error occurring is frustrating but nowhere near as dangerous as having it run through without halting on errors and producing corrupted data you are unaware of. Yes it produces a log file but it is far to easy to sweep such error messages under the rug only to have them come back and bite you at the worst possible moment.

Cleanliness is godliness, GIGO, sloppy programming is lazy programming IMHO.</comment>


The (not so) hidden goals of Prism, AIR and Silverlight - <AUTHOR> http://standblog.org/blog/?q=prism%2Badobe <comment><USER2> Prism offers very limited desktop integration. It wraps a browser in a separate process, so it doesn't crash with your browser. Hardly useful.

AIR and Silverlight both dig deeper into the desktop, while not as deep as a tradition client-side app, but deep enough to do interesting things.

<comment><USER3> It's not so much desktop _integration_ that's needed at this point. People are stuck all day in their web-browsers--tabbed browsing has basically eliminated the need to use any functionality outside the browser window (e.g. your window manager), and thus discouraged people from using desktop applications, as they now require a greater mental context-shift than just going to the site of a webapp.

Prism has the first, most important step down, and the rest can come later: they push the user out of the browser environment and back onto their own computer's desktop environment. From there, the possibilities are (for now) simply greater.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Freelancing and social phobia - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN, I'm an international student living in Auckland, New Zealand and studying Computer Science at Auckland University of Technology.
Since I live in the city, my living expenses are quite high. I do freelancing to help cover living costs but I barely scrape by on that. I have a love hate relationship when it comes to freelancing. It can be a decent source of income and the more interesting the job/client, the more I learn in my given field. Unfortunately I'm not very good with people.
I've battled with depression for a good portion of my life. Being around a large crowd of people makes me panicky. I worked a retail job once and would suffer panic attacks when having to deal with difficult customers. I suffer from a similar problem with freelancing. It doesn't matter whether I'm communicating solely through emails and phone calls, dealing with clients, particularly difficult ones, leaves me panicky and kills any productivity I have for the rest of the day.
I don't know how long I can continue working this way. Is there any tricks to the freelancing trade that can help me? I'm looking for advice from anyone who has dealt with similar issues while trying to ek out a living as a fulltime student and freelancer? <comment><USER2> How about looking for some remote work?</comment>


5 free days, resources for aws or ml/data science - <AUTHOR> Hello,
I have five free days. I would like to learn about aws or ml/data mining. Any good resources for each? I know c++ and python. Can I learn some thing I can add to my resume? Hopefully theory and development.
Thanks for your comments. <comment><USER2> Scrapy has tutorials around [https://doc.scrapy.org/en/latest/intro/tutorial.html](https://doc.scrapy.org/en/latest/intro/tutorial.html)

Or you can take an entire course [http://www.datasciencecourse.org/lectures/](http://www.datasciencecourse.org/lectures/)

</comment><comment><USER3> How about starting with AWS SageMaker? The blog posts at the bottom are nice tutorials that you can go through quickly: [https://aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/developer- resources/](https://aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/developer-resources/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sorry I meant data mining not data science.

A project as well as a learning path would be nice .</comment>


Eons ("MySpace for old people") Raises Staggering $22 Million Round - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2007/03/06/eons/ <comment><USER2> VC's back teams not ideas. Jeff Taylor is an executor - he doesn't need the money, but its enough to show anyone else in the space who's boss (or the monster). Having money in the bank while funds are still frothy just means they won't struggle in the future. He probably got a valuation he can't match and they are probably looking at monetising their audience in "offline ways" which may up the burn rate a tad. That said i'd back jeff taylor too. Good luck to them :)

</comment><comment><USER3> What are they possibly going to do with $22 mil, after all how much technology, people do you need for a social networking co.?

<comment><USER4> Perhaps they plan on hiring full time content creators and community coordinators.

Hopefully once you get to be in your 70s you're no submitting new content eight hours a day just for the karma to alleviate your status anxiety. Hopefully.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if that choice of the word "staggering" is an accident.</comment>


The Great Compositions of Photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt - <AUTHOR> http://petapixel.com/2013/04/15/the-great-compositions-of-photographer-alfred-eisenstaedt/

<comment><USER2> This is article is brought to you by the sort of people who do 'technical analysis' of stock charts to predict price movements.</comment>


Physics: What We Do and Don't Know - <AUTHOR> http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/nov/07/physics-what-we-do-and-dont-know/?pagination=false <comment><USER2> The article author is Steven Weinberg:

[http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/197...](http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1979/weinberg- bio.html)

The Nobel Prize in Physics 1979 with Sheldon Glashow and Abdus Salam "for their contributions to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles, including, inter alia, the prediction of the weak neutral current".

The article is fantastically clear, with much less mystification than in ordinary physics popularization articles.

<comment><USER3> Weinberg has been writing for NYRB for a long time now. Several of his other articles are not behind the paywall:

[http://www.nybooks.com/contributors/steven- weinberg-2/](http://www.nybooks.com/contributors/steven-weinberg-2/)

<comment><USER4> Some good NYRB reviews by Freeman Dyson were collected into a book too, I'm sure some of his aren't paywalled:

[http://www.amazon.com/Scientist-Rebel-York-Review- Books/dp/1...](http://www.amazon.com/Scientist-Rebel-York-Review- Books/dp/1590172949)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That photo of the Hubble Deep Field really messes with me... in fact any photo like that. You have to realise: somewhere out there, in fact, most likely, many, many places out there, are planets where everything we have and will experience has already happened. Whatever end-point human evolution is driving towards (massive environmental degradation, simulacrum-building, rise of a superhuman elite, space-travel, true self-knowledge, total mastery over the physical world, whatever) - its already happened. Over and over again. By people/things we will never meet and never know about.

Feels very disheartening.

<comment><USER6> If it's uniqueness you're concerned about, there are _a lot_ of different parameters that describe habitable worlds and even more to describe the history of a civilization. Odds are, what most civilizations experience is unique to them; but I too believe there are likely to be many similarities, too.

Our inability to see and interact with other civilizations - even within the relatively small neighborhood of our own galaxy - is frustrating, and somewhat of a logical conundrum as described by the Fermi Paradox. Whatever the factors preventing us and others from making contact are, and I think it's likely a combination of several instead of one big filter, I hope we can leave them behind at some point and join up with the other people out there.

When I look at bigger parts of the universe, I feel inspired. The universe is _not_ small and limited, it's vast and full of possibilities. Odds are we're not singular but in good company, and we have a _lot_ still to discover and explore. What we do and know is unique and meaningful, yet at the same time _it 's not all there is_.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for that. I do hope you're right. The prospect of eternal isolation is not a pretty one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> the article seems to be dated "November 7 2013", nearly one month in the future. Clearly the author knows something about physics that we don't.

<comment><USER8> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_date#Magazines](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_date#Magazines)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> A very insightful article. Once I started reading it, I got hooked. I started searching for references on Wikipedia etc. Now I want to become a Physicist.

<comment><USER10> It's funny, for each thousand miles of space explored, we explored a mm or less of what is beneath us. We know what primal forces govern building blocks of space and time but we don't know how bicycle works.

For every profound truth we discover, there is an inane mystery we are yet to discover.

<comment><USER11> Commercial and military applications of rockets and satellites have always been important in improving access to space. There's no comparable reason to deliver a probe to the Mariana trench or to dig a few km into the surface.

And we do know exactly how bicycles work. EXACTLY. This one is up there with the one about NASA spending millions on a space pen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Oddly, little attention was given to an obvious conclusion: if the galaxies are rushing apart, there would have been a time in the past when they were all crunched together. "

I still find this hard to swallow - whilst its obvious as a conclusion, it also feels like it has obvious flaws. Can we not get exactly the same effect from a large universe in which new space and matter is formed in the voids? and don't we need to understand the /actual/ creation of space and matter in totality (v.s. eg creation and annihilation of particles and other 'bits of universe) - its an enormous gap in our understanding and a vital feature of a truly comprehensive theory...

<comment><USER13> As the _article itself mentions_ , the Big Bang hypothesis did not become an accepted theory just based on the single piece of evidence that other galaxies seem to be receding from ours. Indeed, the term "Big Bang" was originally coined as derogatory by the famous astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, a steadfast supporter of the competing Steady State hypothesis [1]. Many in the astronomer community found the idea of the universe having a beginning simply preposterous. However, in the end, it was the model that best matched observations, and thus became (perhaps reluctantly on some people's part) accepted. This is how science is supposed to work.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady_State_theory](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady_State_theory)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> So we've hit a wall in trying to understand how dark energy works or how its parameters arise. But I don't think it's logical or helpful to conclude that an anthropic explanation is the only option we have left. Maybe we just haven't yet figured out the right questions to ask, that might open up a new field of investigation that could lead to new physics that provides a mechanism for how it works.

For example, we also still don't understand the nature of dark matter. Even more fundamentally, we still don't have a solid understanding of time, and why there is an apparent flow of time in one direction from the past to the future, or whether spacetime curvature induces quantum state collapse, or how the universe began with such low initial entropy.

Maybe discovering a deeper understanding of the foundations of the physics we're already familiar with will open a way forward with understanding how dark energy works.

<comment><USER15> Yes, there is basically no real evidence for any of the multiverse hypothesis. If they're right then physics and cosmology has nearly ended in its reach of what is knowable. It feels so much like this is premature surrender and physicists are turning themselves into religious philosophers just because they can't think of anything better. If we had been backed into this wall for hundreds of years with nothing better, then I might agree that the program was over, but I think the whole anthropic/multiverse idea is a condemnation of how sold physicists and cosmologists have gotten on one possible solution, and indicative of the fossilization of some of their ideas. We need a new Einstein to do away with the modern-day aethers...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I found the article to be a good summation of work done over the last few hundred years.

<comment><USER17> I thought that article was a great read, combining historical perspective with technical detail that wasn't glossed over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't like thinking about space too much; I mildly worry that if I get too much into it, something might snap in my head, and that can't be a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER19> great article but interesting to see it on the same day as the article about science moving sometimes in the wrong direction. for example string theory no: critical results. why string effort and not others? well a lot of people and a lot of effort went down that path it's a simple as that: people. maybe there are other approaches, no doubt there are and that's where the future will be

</comment><comment><USER20> btw, Hubble Extreme Deep Field (2012) is deepest optical to date. "The exposure time was two million seconds, or approximately 23 days" [1] -- that's insane stability!

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Extreme_Deep_Field](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Extreme_Deep_Field)

<comment><USER21> Keep in mind that the 2 megasecond exposure was not done all at once. It consists of many shorter exposures (probably about 10-20 minutes apiece) added together. If the exposure had been done all at once, it would have saturated. Moreover, cosmic rays would ruin large regions of a single long-exposure image.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> why does he say this >> "early universe must have been very hot, or else all the hydrogen in the universe would have combined into heavier elements"?.Hydrogen is still present and it is not so hot nowadays

<comment><USER23> They mean that when hydrogen gas is highly energized/ionized, the (hot) hydrogen electrons exist ripped out of the atom and this state prevents hydrogen from collapsing on itself to form stars and stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> "...in the grim darkness of the far future there is only war."

</comment><comment><USER25> How many neutrinos can you bench press?

</comment><comment> _-_-_- What we don't know: shit.

<comment><USER16> Really? That's what you have to contribute in conversation to a discussion about thousands of years of discovery about the nature of reality itself? We know a lot more than "shit".

<comment><USER26> He's like the drunk neighbor who tries to break into your home, thinking he's locked himself out of his.

Dude probably thinks he's scoring comment karma at Reddit with that gem.

<comment><USER26> I'm curious to know just how the original comment didn't reek of Reddit's culture of vacuous pithiness.

Down-votes without discussion strike me as being against the generally productive atmosphere this place usually has.

<comment><USER27> I imagine it was because your comment added no more to the discussion than his did. When the standard response to bad comments becomes posting more bad comments, any community with a productive athmosphere quickly goes down the drain.

<comment><USER26> That's fair.

I'll do better.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Patent Protection Racket - <AUTHOR> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2013/04/02.html <comment><USER2> I just spoke with a friend about a time when his company was approached by a patent troll.

The patent in question was granted in 2002 [1]. He had himself worked on the technology under "patent" in 1998, and was able to find someone who had published material as far back as 1995, and who was willing to send supporting documentation and to, if necessary, testify.

He talked with his attorney, who agreed the prior art he'd found was spot on, and that in legislation they'd be almost certain to win. But that it would cost ~$3m.

The patent trolls also were going after names such as Amazon, Facebook, and other huge companies. The troll was asking for $200k for a license from each company. As far as my friend knows, they ALL settled (or at least many of them had).

There were 15-20 names on that list. If they'd simply put the $200k-$300k of "licensing fees" into a common pot and used that money to fight the troll, then it would have done a small amount of good in defeating one troll's patent.

But really the whole system does need serious reform. His suggestion was to cause the patent trolls to have to PAY for legal fees if they lose a patent challenge, though that would just encourage them to sue from individual corporations that would declare bankruptcy on losing.

But I think software patents should simply be disallowed, or the bar raised (somehow?) to exclude anything vague and hand-wavy. One thought I've had was to _require_ an implementation of the process being patented. Then it would be far harder to claim that your patent covers something only vaguely related, and the patent would actually be _useful_ for its original purpose, which was to put the knowledge into the public domain when the patent expires.

[1] I wouldn't swear to the dates; they're from memory. The approximate order/scale is correct, though.

<comment><USER3> If there is hard evidence of prior art, then filing an ex parte reexaminiation[1] is certainly not $3M.

[1] <http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2210.html>

<comment><USER2> I thought Blackberry/RIM actually WON one of those, but then ended up paying $300M anyway? The press reporting was unclear, but that's what it seemed like had happened, which never made any sense to me. Maybe it was still pending an appeal by the patent holder?

Again, I don't know enough of the specifics. I'll ping him and see if they did that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can anyone here give (and defend) an example of a good patent? By that I mean one that is non-obvious, novel, and clear enough to be able to be used to build the claimed invention.

<comment><USER5> I'll play: US20080002776.

[[http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Se...](http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220080002776%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20080002776&RS=DN/20080002776)]

Although I no longer work for the BBC and have already received my bonuses for the filing and granting (after I left the BBC) of this patent I have a personal curiosity as the core inventive step was (I believe) mine although it was greatly extended and improved by others with greater domain knowledge in MPEG encoding. As far as I know it was a novel idea and wasn't obvious in advance to experienced video encoding engineers.

The original idea was to treat encoding losses as errors/defects that can be fixed or patched by additional data distributed separately. This was extended to arbitrary enhancements and changes and potential implementations, consequences and techniques.

I believe that there was a real non-obvious inventive step in considering encoder losses as patchable bugs. Given that idea alone a (suboptimal) implementation is relatively easy to create but was not obvious if the task being discussed is using the early 2000's Internet to deliver better video quality than broadcast (SD) TV could.

I am not aware of any current usage of the ideas in this patent or what licenses the BBC may or may not have granted.

Edit: Time for me to sleep now, will check for any replies tomorrow.

<comment><USER6> This is where the patent process really falls down - subjectivity.

You consider the idea of treating compression loss as an error to be patched as non-obvious, whereas to most on HN (being generally technical, even if not in this field), that's probably, a "yeah, duh, and?" suggestion.

The implementation of that idea, and the techniques and technologies involved may ultimately be novel, non obvious and patentable, but your argument boils down to suggesting that "if it's broke, fix it" (in any particular subject domain) is sufficient to warrant a patent, so doesn't meet the criteria requested.

I think to be objective in answering the GP post you should probably suggest a patent that isn't your own.

<comment><USER5> Your point is a fair one and what is an obvious answer depends greatly on what question is asked and also to a degree on timing. For me the key was recognising that:

1) The lossy encoding could be regarded as bugs.

2) the losses are known by the broadcaster and preserved (without further loss in a digital transmission system) to the viewers home.

Once the nature of the problem is described this way the idea does seem obvious (at least to me with a largely Computer Science rather than video encoding background) but that is not how issues are initially presented and redefining the problem is a great deal of the inventive part.

I would still defend this patent's inventiveness but I fully agree that obviousness is quite subjective

<comment><USER7> Also, a lot of times it is difficult to avoid hindsight bias. It may arguably seem obvious now, in 2013, but it is hard to say what would have been obvious in 2004.

Nonobviousness is judged as of the filing date, a fact that many seem to forget.

<comment><USER6> That's a fair point, and hindsight bias can play a part in downplaying even recent innovations, which may seem obvious only after the fact. I don't think that applies in this case, but setting that aside, my main argument (that what counts as innovative, non-obvious etc. is subjective), I think still stands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> On a related note, this is one of the reasons I prefer to use, and make, Apache 2.0-licensed software. Its terms are similar to those of BSD and MIT but it also includes a patent licensing clause.

<comment><USER9> So does GPLv3.

<comment><USER10> GPLv3 patent licensing clause was created as a copy/fork of the clause from Apache 2.0 license, and then had an added statement about patent license agreements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What if the startup uses a scorched-earth policy? Fight 'til the money runs out, liquidating your assets and closing down the business piece by piece, then if the troll wins, they get nothing because it's all been spent on lawyers and there's nothing left for them to take.

<comment><USER12> Then the startup loses. The troll assumes that the startup is rational and won't do that.

It would be interesting to see what effect a VC could have if they started a policy of not allowing their portfolio companies to settle with a troll and funding them to fight. It might be expensive at first, but in theory once they develop a reputation the trolls will know it will be an expensive and risky proposition to go after their portfolio.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Patent protection rackets have been used for more than a business model: they have been used as tools to pressure large companies into entering partnership agreements.

Please see the second item of the list: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5479381>

</comment><comment><USER14> Given the article's opening paragraphs (small businesses and startups falling prey to the trolls), I'm surprised there hasn't been an organized attempt to inform people of the problem. Maybe I don't know about it and the author doesn't mention it, but it seems like there should be a website that categorizes the various players and their actions, with forums so victims and potential victims can share their experiences. Once you have all the data being collected in one place, then you can get the word out (how?) so that people know to check online even before checking with their lawyer. It seems like patent trolling is something that could be partially defeated with better and more widespread information.

<comment><USER15> I expect it's standard for the troll's "pay up and sign here to avoid ruinous litigation costs" deal to include an NDA that would prohibit things along those lines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Isn't what Microsoft is doing with all the Android manufacturers basically the same thing, too?

<comment><USER17> I'm fairly convinced that it's mostly marketing and hot-air. After all Barnes and Nobles managed to get 1/2 a billion dollars out of their legal fight with Microsoft, it seems unlikely that Samsung would just roll over.

But signing a bit of paper that makes it sound like a bad idea for competitors to enter Samsung's main money-making area and get some "marketing expenses" from a rich but strategy-bereft supplier makes good business sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> He's goddamn right! Patent system needs to die. Now.

</comment><comment><USER19> What's more important that even companies which actually produce something are also engaging in patent protection racket. Such as MS, Apple and others. That's why the term "troll" (i.e. racketeer) is not exactly the same as NPE.

</comment><comment><USER20> Its so awesome that more and more medium-sized companies are paying attention to this! Patent racketeering needs to stop!

</comment><comment><USER21> It sounds like we need "Kickstarter for Fighting Patent Trolls"...

</comment><comment><USER22> I see ads all the time on TV and billboards for DUI and settlement and disability lawyers. "Get the result you deserve." I think many of them are national firms, although they look local.

It seems that patent troll victims would be a great area for a firm to break into.

</comment><comment><USER23> It is very easy to say that a company should fight a patent lawsuit instead of paying it up but that's not always possible. In many cases pragmatism is going to be better than fighting in court for a small business, especially if the likely court costs for the battle are going to exceed your businesses accumulated lifetime revenue.

</comment><comment><USER24> Are open web APIs becoming the new IT patents? <http://api500.com/post/46951162382/apis-are-the-new-patents>

</comment><comment><USER25> I like the photo from the Seven Samurai. :-)</comment>


California Strikes a Bold Pose as Vanguard of the Resistance - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/us/california-strikes-a-bold-pose-as-vanguard-of-the-resistance.html <comment><USER2> What was that thing, where the states that didn't want to work with impending federal legislation decided to do their own thing? That was the event that every state in the Union always describes in glowing terms, right?

And everybody has always spoken really highly of the Texan motions for secession, right?

What a bunch of hypocritical bullshit.</comment>


The Theory of Peak Advertising and The Future of the Web (2013) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://peakads.org/images/Peak_Ads.pdf <comment><USER2> I've always been a little bemused by the single-minded focus on clickthrough and direct engagement in online advertising.

In television and radio advertising, you don't have direct engagement metrics like clickthrough -- just reach. X number of eyeballs saw your ad, and that's that. Television ad campaigns tend to have a far more abstract strategy than anything that could be captured by something like clickthrough. They're about building brand _image_ and planting a well-designed perception in the mind of the viewer. It's a _long-term_ strategy. And despite a lack of any measurement or expectation of direct engagement, companies don't even blink at paying hugely more for television advertising than an equivalent reach of internet advertising.

Why are they willing to believe in longer-term, more nebulous ideas like brand image and mindshare with television ads, yet Internet ads are expected to result in direct, immediate conversion for pennies on the dollar? It's as though you measured a TV ad's success by the number of people who dropped whatever they were doing, went out to the store, and bought whatever was on the ad immediately.

It just seems like an absurd double standard, and I don't understand where it comes from (other than the general arbitrariness of marketing in general).

</comment><comment><USER3> Alternatively, advertisers (and publishers) could insist on more and more intrusive or unavoidable advertising. Even now, you could pretty reliably detect ad blocking; many sites don't but some do (eg fark). You could simply block users that don't view ads. Or use interstitials exclusively. And if some users complain, well, who cares? It's not like people who skip ads earn you any money, so in a very real sense, they don't matter at all.

I think this will lead to a web experience that I like less and less. I'm willing to pay money to not have to endure advertising but I'm very much in the minority. As blue_beetle said: "If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold."

<comment><USER4> Nope. It will go the other direction. I think we'll see an insurgence of astroturfers and their ilk.

Advertisers will realize that no one clicks in-your-face banner ads, but that people can be manipulated to purchase their items through the subtle use of forums and social media. Then we see more research into the field of planting trained individuals into sites like Reddit and HN, and the effectiveness there, then come the sales.

<comment><USER5> I'm pretty sure advertisers are doing it already, definitely on reddit. It would surprise me if HN didn't have a few stealth shills.

<comment><USER6> Do you have any examples?

<comment><USER7> [http://www.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/top/](http://www.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/top/) is the subreddit focused on highlighting posts they consider to be onbehalf of corporations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How much of the content on the web is garbage?

That is what I have asked over 100 people in the past two years. Only two have ever answered less than 80%.

> _Advertising is the critical financial engine of the Internet._

Well this explains why we have so much garbage. The web is the result of the perverse incentives advertising creates.

> _The fate of the Internet is therefore inextricably tied up in the fate of > advertising._

We are not doomed to this fate. TV has gotten better because we have decided its worth paying HBO and the others.

We have to stop the lie that the ad supported web is free: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773)

<comment><USER9> > We are not doomed to this fate. TV has gotten better because we have decided > its worth paying HBO and the others.

Do keep in mind, though, that it used to be that way in the past. It's a cycle that led to steady price increases since the advent of TV.

Once upon a time, people paid for cable TV to spare themselves of ads.

Fast forward a few years, and cable TV operators noted that they could get away with having people pay for their content _and_ show ads, all while publicly funded TV channels were steadily starved of cash.

Fast forward yet another few years, and the same cable TVs are charging for these cable channels _and_ for premium channels such as HBO.

Meinks in a few years, cash starved cable TV channels will be so crappy that viewers will begin to tolerate ads on premium channels. This will open the gate down the road for yet another round of price increases -- possibly something like paid shows with two prices, one with ads and one without.

At the same time, the coming generation will quit TV altogether (if they have ever used it to begin with) and tolerate ads while watching movies on their smart phones and tablets.

The only real question is what type of ads these will be. The paper hints at what probably lies ahead: sponsored content and product placement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Patreon is starting to replace ads for some people. Including me. I won't be sad to see them go.

</comment><comment><USER11> Interesting, but pretty thinly supported by facts. The demographics, in particular, could be explained as a function of relative disposable income as much as immunity.

Would be far more persuasive if backed up with a cohort analysis over time of a young and and old demographic.

</comment><comment><USER4> For too long, and on too many websites, you couldn't be sure that the ad wasn't just going to trigger a thousand pop-ups and/or download malware. Or, the ad was for something you just purchased on-line, leading to confusion. People no longer click ads because they've learned to avoid them (and almost every ad I've seen looks super spammy anyway).

It's called training. People can be trained to do/not to do anything. In this case they've been trained to avoid advertising nonsense; look at the annual increase in ad-blocker usage and how younger generations avoid ads the most as cited in this paper.

</comment><comment><USER12> Interesting theory. I can think of two additional counterarguments:

1) the decline in price of advertising belies the growth in users and the steady increase in advertising spend Y/Y (+14% in 2014 according to Mary Meeker's latest report).

2) the paper focuses only on advertising targeted toward the bottom of the purchase funnel. A considerable amount of display ad revenue comes from upper- funnel ads, where the objectives are not behavioral but rather perceptual. That said, I don't know what proportion of total display ad revenue falls into this category.

</comment><comment><USER13> > The fate of the Internet is therefore inextricably tied up in the fate of > advertising.

Are we going to revert to a web of sharing and free contributions by passionate people ? How sad ! Is the web close to an end ? No we're fine, thank you advertising and ecommerce people.

How are we going to do without all those big servers and clouds and things ? Peer to peer.

</comment><comment><USER14> A few observations:

• There are other revenue models online. Notably, Amazon, Apple, Google, eBay, and Etsy are all employing direct sales. This cuts out the role of advertising and focuses instead on _intent_. It's also directly monetizeable. I'm watching to see who can apply this to main street, offering a hybrid online/offline shopping system (I'd like to be able to research and order online, but pay and/or arrange for delivery offline). I'm struck by how _small_ online sales are having consistently _undershot_ growth forecasts in recent years. Federated retail is one such approach. [http://redd.it/22om3p](http://redd.it/22om3p) [http://redd.it/243in1](http://redd.it/243in1)

• Advertising is a hugely negative experience in many, many ways: [http://redd.it/24107v](http://redd.it/24107v)

• The medium is the message. Both technolgies for information and entertainment, and the business models supporting them, have had tremendous levels of influence on _what forms_ of media are available and provided. A quick off-the-top-of-my-head listing: [http://redd.it/278e2o](http://redd.it/278e2o)

• Advertising has severe perverse incentives on media. Much of the present weaponized clickbait, viral media, and other misfeatures are a direct result of ad-optimized content. The faster it dies the better: [http://redd.it/23twec](http://redd.it/23twec)

• Mass-marketing advertising itself is largely a creature of a number of accidents of history. Consumer culture (dating to Wedgewood China and mid-19th century England, see James Burke, The Day The Universe Changed: 6 "Credit Where It's Due"), broadcast media in which content was widely distributed (now rapidly fragmenting into microchannels, though costs remain low), a proliferation of consumer goods for which demand had to be engineered (possibly ending, and while the 3D printing / micromanufacture model may be overhyped, it's one possible avenue out), and a growth-oriented economy (as well as a financial system which absolutely relies on it).

• For content, at least, there are several ways out. I'd be particularly interested in seeing a broadband tax or content syndication scheme (the first is a proposal of Phil Hunt's, of the UK Pirate Party, the latter my own) tried. To a first approximation the dollars work out. [http://redd.it/1vknhc](http://redd.it/1vknhc) [http://redd.it/1uotb3](http://redd.it/1uotb3)

There's also Don Marti's observation that a key function of indiscriminate advertising is a brand-strength signalling message which is lost in microtargeted advertising. The waste _is_ the useful part: [http://zgp.org/~dmarti/business/targeting-better-is- worse/](http://zgp.org/~dmarti/business/targeting-better-is-worse/)

In a sense, advertising becomes a Veblen good, signalling status: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good)</comment>


Kilo: A text editor in less than 1000 LOC with syntax highlight and search in C - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/antirez/kilo <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12065217](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12065217)</comment>


Why is selling a patent legal in the first place? - <AUTHOR> http://wrttn.in/af611c

<comment><USER2> The desire to pull down the entire patent system because of failures in the software industry is understandable, but misguided, and the proposed solution is completely unworkable.

Patents [should] exist to recognize and reward real and substantial effort to create new technology from research. There is real value in fostering a research community _as a separate discipline_ to pushing it to market.

OP talks about 'insufficient capital' \- but that's looking at it the wrong way around. An "inventor" shouldn't be defined by capital they're able to bring to bear. The cost and skillset required to invent vs commercialise a technology are vastly different, and punishing capital-poor inventors serves to suppress innovation.

"Patents" are not the problem. Inappropriately awarded patents, impossible-to- contest patents, and an outlandishly complex and expensive legal system are the problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> I either didn't explain myself well enough or you're misunderstanding my argument. I'm not proposing abolishing the patent system. I'm proposing abolishing the market for their resale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I read this as _why, which made for a very interesting title.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you pay for services you don't strictly need to? - <AUTHOR>

For example:<p>- The New York Times website has a limit on the number of articles you can read each month, but anyone knows you can circumvent this with Chrome's incognito mode.<p>- Slack has a free tier but there's no obligation to sign up for its paid-for version.<p>I tend to pay for things that I think are worthy e.g. for magazine sites where the quality of writing is good. <comment><USER2> I still have a Wolfram Alpha pro account, even though I use it significantly less than I used to</comment>


What Went Wrong at Borders - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/01/what-went-wrong-at-borders/69310/ <comment><USER2> I have a serious book habit, and Borders used to be my go-to bookstore in the US. Or was it the Barnes and Noble. Well, you know, one with a B in it at any rate.

In over a decade of patronage, I cannot recall ever having a single successful conversation with a staff member (other than "These books, please.")

The bookstore receiving 50% of retail price for providing fungible copies of books, bitwise identical to those offered by all other bookstores, without even a scintilla of value-add, has struck me as something in urgent need of radical corrective capitalism.

By comparison, Amazon recommendations are routinely as good as my sister's, their customer service has been top-notch, their prices are cheaper, and the Kindle has transformed my experience with the medium and quintupled my consumption. I am in no danger of confusing Amazon with another shop that starts with A.

<comment><USER3> _In over a decade of patronage, I cannot recall ever having a single successful conversation with a staff member (other than "These books, please.")_

The problem with big box booksellers is that they can't possibly win on customer service, because their customer base is too diverse, and no single employee can begin to satisfy the customer service needs of such a broad range of tastes and needs until they've spent years both learning the store's inventory and building a mental model of customer types and their preferences. But it's a retail job and the rewards are meager, so there's little incentive to become this ideal bookstore employee, though they do exist; the employee you do end up with is either a thwarted English major who despises you (this was once me, I'm sorry to say) or the avid reader of bestsellers -- and if that's not a good fit for you, too bad.

The achievement of Amazon is that they've actually done a decent job of automating what an ideal generalist bookseller does.

(Specialty bookstores are another story. In those cases, you can more readily assume that the preoccupations of the bookseller and the customer will align.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This saddens me. Borders have always had nicer stores for a book lover than B&N... I can immediately tell if I'm going to like a bookstore by whether they display books cover-out, or on a shelf with the spine out. This immediately indicates whether they emphasize a large, diverse inventory, or focus only on mass market material. Borders did it right, unlike most other stores including B&N. They have an especially large technical inventory.

Their books were overpriced, of course, but they actually sent out 30%-50% off coupons weekly, bringing them basically to Amazon's levels - so while I did the bulk of my book-buying on Amazon, I really enjoyed dropping into the store every week or two and browsing for something fun to buy.

<comment><USER5> I didn't know that, are they still sending out these coupons?

<comment><USER6> Yes, I received a 33% off one item coupon yesterday. They sent 50% off one item coupons around the first of the year.

I never buy anything at Borders without a coupon.

<comment><USER7> Me either. And they come out all the time on their twitter feed: <http://twitter.com/#!/borders>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Borders (noun) Bor'-ders - a coffee shop where one previews books they'll buy online for 40% less.

<comment><USER9> Ethically problematic, but yes.

<comment><USER4> Why is it ethically problematic? There is no implied assumption that I will buy something when I walk into a store. People comparison shop _all the time._

And as long as you aren't damaging the books, and as long as the store isn't so crowded that you're discouraging other potential customers, the store looses absolutely nothing by having you there. In fact, they always gain something - there's always the off chance you'll see something and decide you don't want to wait for it to ship.

<comment><USER10> For me it's a grey area. For a small specialist shop where I receive useful advice? I'd almost definitely pay the higher price in return for the service offered by the shop. For a bookstore where all I did was wander around on my own occasionally looking at product? I don't know. I'd like for book stores to continue existing, but I don't know if they're worth the premium.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What went wrong at Borders? Easy. They have a ubiquitous competitor who offers customers 1,000x the selection at lower prices. The only benefit Borders offers is immediate gratification for those who can't wait a few days, or a week, for their books. Borders has had the stench of death for a long time now. I'm wondering whether Barnes & Noble is next.

<comment><USER12> _The only benefit Borders offers is immediate gratification for those who can't wait a few days_

Or for those who want a meaningful preview of a book before buying.

Over the years, I've saved much more money by avoiding purchases of books I imagined I would like, than I've saved by buying from discount warehouses.

Libraries are one way of doing this, but for new technical books, my local Borders was a go-to place.

<comment><USER13> One thing to consider here is that Amazon accepts returns. You have to pay a bit for shipping, but you could easily buy a copy of each book you might want, keep the ones you do, and still end up ahead.

<comment><USER12> Thanks. That's at least an option, especially once/if the local places close.

I will still feel bad about it. With the Borders coupons, I usually ended up spending no more than I would at Amazon, anyway. And I really like the experience of browsing. I often end up with three or four books spread out in front of me, dipping into each one, comparing their style, presentation, TOCs and indices, etc...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I had no idea that Borders was in financial trouble. I have always preferred them over Barnes and Noble because they always have a wide selection of technical books. Unlike B&N which has aisle after aisle of VB, * for Dummies books, and their ilk, Borders is a place where I have discovered great books on niche technical topics. It will be sad to see them go -- buying a book physically provides a far greater visceral stultification than buying online.

<comment><USER15> As a book lover, I'm happy in either store, but Borders has always been my preference. They always seemed to carry more titles and somehow feel to me like less of a big corporate store. (I'm a little biased, having spent quite a bit of time around Ann Arbor and the original store even before it moved.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There was once a wonderful independent bookstore here in St. Louis whose sales floor was 2x the size of the average B&N or Borders. They were run by people who _knew books_. I especially appreciated how they had a really good selection of technical books, way better than any of the chains.

They had big community book fairs, they ran the only coffee shop that was open late for a mile in any direction, they brought in local music acts.

In '97 the owners decided to retire and sold the whole operation to Borders. Borders ran the store for about a year or two and then shut the whole place down when a huge strip mall development containing a Borders store opened a mile away.

In hindsight I guess they planned that new store all along, and bought out the little guys because they didn't want the competition from someone who actually knew how to run a better bookstore.

<comment><USER17> Library Ltd was a spectacular store with a national reputation from a single outlet back in the pre-WWW days.

A 1996 article: [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1154/is_n4_v84/ai_181...](http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1154/is_n4_v84/ai_18149391/)

I stopped buying books when they closed. B&N and Borders were useless substitutes for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I never understood how Borders became so big and powerful. They charge list price for everything! Walmart's destruction of local stores is easy to see. Grocery chains too. But Borders? They offer little advantage over an independent bookstore, and plenty of disadvantage.

I always assumed I just missed something along the way. Or I'm just too young to have really compared them.

<comment><USER15> Borders regularly emails out coupons for 33% off of a single item. That brings their price closer to Amazon.

[http://www.bordersmedia.com/coup/20110111sa33.html?cmpid=SL_...](http://www.bordersmedia.com/coup/20110111sa33.html?cmpid=SL_20110111)

<comment><USER19> Any one item, which I find to be an insult. Rather than worry about which book on my list I'm going to use the coupon for, I can buy 2 on Amazon and have them here in 2 days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I find it interesting that the OP mentions Jeff Bezos as someone who has "a deep attachment to books and the people who read them".

My understanding was that Bezos chose books for Amazon after writing a list of things people could carry in one hand, and decided Books was the biggest market on the list.

In trying to find my source for that on Google, I came across plenty of other explanations for why he chose Books as the topic to sell - they may discount my previous belief, but none of them make the case that he loves books or that books led to the business. All seem to claim that the need to create an internet business came first, books were a means to an end.

<comment><USER15> I shouldn't even attempt to recap the story, but it's really interesting to look at how Bezos selected books. He wanted something with a lot of unique products/SKUs that was cheap enough for people to try buying online for the first time. Books and CDs were two of his front-runners.

I wonder if back then he realistically considered the possibility that either or both could someday be delivered electronically?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> When Borders came to Singapore, it became the bookstore with probably the best selection of books in stock. It easily became my favorite place to browse and buy books. Two recent incidents stood out which made me realized that Borders was in trouble before I became aware about all the news of it really being in trouble.

They replaced their information counter with a computerized system that failed miserably in helping me locate a book I wanted. The book in question was Carlos Ruiz Zafón's 'The Angel's Game'. My friend had shared about the book over dinner and some of us had decided to get a copy. We went down, searched for it using the computerized system, was informed that the book was available (at least that's what the system seem to be saying). It could not be found anywhere on the shelves (where the system said it was supposed to be); more importantly, none of the staff could help us. In short, the new information counter was useless.

In the early days, the information counter was run by people who knew and loved books. The proof of that was: 1\. They could always help locate the book physically. 2\. If the book wasn't in stock, they would also be spot on in recommending a similar book that would interest me. It was the second point that got me buying a couple of extra books.

The lost of knowledgeable counter staff in hindsight was indicative of a culture shift in Borders from that of being a place where people passionate about books gathered to a place where shit got sold and it just so happened to be books.

The second incident was noticing that valuable store space was being used to sell toys and kitchenware. Yes, kitchenware in a bookstore.

In the end, I got 'The Angel's Game' and Carlos Ruiz Zafon's 'The Shadow of The Wind' at a local store <http://www.booksactually.com/>. I recommend this store to anyone who love books and is in Singapore. Clear showcase of how domain knowledge and intimate customer relations can help a local institution compete against the scale and supposedly lower prices of steam rolling multinational companies.

<comment><USER22> This is doubly funny because both _The Angel's Game_ and _The Shadow of the Wind_ take place in or around Sempere and Sons, a small bookshop in early 20th C Barcelona. The proprietor is always a "Senor Sempere" who is integrated with the neighborhood and understands its needs; much of the appeal of the shop is, of course, the books, but it's the Sempere(s) working there who make it different. Words like "integrated with the community" have been so debased by politicians and others that they barely mean anything, but if they still did, they would apply here.

The depictions of Sempere and Sons are certainly romanticized, but they still point to a desire for knowing someone who really, deeply knows books. If Borders once had that desire or those kinds of people on staff (even in corporate), the OP in the Atlantic indicates they no longer do.

<comment><USER21> Haha. Yes! Growing up with the ubiquity of libraries and books, I found it quaint that finding a book was something considered difficult enough that it was a job of professionals and that a premium was paid for the effort to locate the book. I can imagine how quaint I would look when sharing with my children about the process of physically browsing to find hidden gems; "Dad, you mean you didn't find books liked by your friends from your Facebook wall?"

Which of the two books did you prefer?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Years ago, I worked at a Borders competitor for a little while: Joseph-Beth in Cincinnati, Ohio. Things might be different now, but back then, that store kicked ass! Somehow, the store managed to have a bunch of passionate people working there, and it showed.

One of the things that we did was "don't give up" customer service. We absolutely did not give up on finding something until the customer did. Google was new in those days, and I also remember multiple "oh my gosh, that's freaky" moments from customers coming in with the vaguest, weirdest clues and still somehow finding the book for them.

I remember going into a Borders around that time and noting that the help wasn't nearly as persistent, but I went into a Borders about a year later and thought: "Hey, they must be copying Joseph-Beth now!"

</comment><comment><USER24> I worked at Borders after the dot-bomb, since my car was broken down and it was the only job I could find that I could ride my bike to. I bought a bunch of programming books with my employee discount and then realized what a complete chump I was - the exact same books, online at Amazon, were cheaper including (free!) shipping than in the store _with_ my employee discount. I quit soon after and got a job writing code.

</comment><comment><USER25> Amazon should buy them. Then you'd be able to go to your local store, browse and buy right there. Also you could ship your order directly to the store for free the same way walmart does.

<comment><USER26> IANAL, but my understanding is that this would give Amazon a 'retail presence' in most US states, thus requiring them to charge sales tax on online transactions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Borders has no competitive advantage if the book isn't in stock. The minute it has to be ordered Amazon becomes the better solution.

<comment><USER3> Sadly true. As pleasant as brick-and-mortar retail bookstores can be (and I've never said this about a Barnes & Noble), their space constraints force their inventories toward lowest common denominator titles -- meaning NYT bestsellers, Oprah Winfrey selections, and self-help books. Internet retailers have the so-called long tail sewn up.

Another indicator of retail inventory shortcomings is the "special order" process. It's been several years since I've special ordered a book from a brick-and-mortar retailer, but it generally involved a two-week wait, and you were often requested to examine the book on the spot without leaving the cash register area. If the big bookstore chains have removed the friction from this process, I don't know about it.

In fact, it seems that Barnes & Noble and Borders have responded to Amazon's inventory advantage by actually gutting their selection further and dedicating more space to tchotchkes like Michael Bublé CDs and chocolate truffles. A shame.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I love the Borders experience; is there some way "books + cafe" can work with some other business model? Maybe... an internet cafe, but with Kindles plus a book-binding machine?

Would there be any benefit to a virtual bookstore, where you can first-person- browse the shelves? Sounds silly, but you get some of that serendipitous discovery. It would probably need ridiculously high resolution for book spines to be readable from the distance one normally browses at.

Of course, all that could be done from home if you have an espresso machine.

</comment><comment><USER29> I always enjoy spending time at borders for the coffee and the chance to browse books that I wouldn't think to pull up on Amazon. One thing that I that really annoys me is that sometimes I'm comfortable, I am deep in thought and then one of the workers is near by and their radio starts to crackle. Usually they are being asked to come to the front of the store or check the availability of an item. I know they need the radios to do their job but it really destroys the ambiance. After they go through all that trouble with the lighting and the decor to create a space where you can disappear into a book why don't they invest in some bluetooth headsets or something to communicate with their employees? I'm not sure if it is Borders but some stores also buzz messages over the PA systems and I think why??

</comment><comment><USER30> Purveyors of dead trees need to take a serious look at printing books on demand in the store at price that competes with online prices. Stock the shelves with a few full-price deluxe copies, and print discount copies on demand in store.

</comment><comment><USER31> I used to be a huge Borders customer, but over the past few years, they became useless at having anything in stock or being able to easily check if anything was in stock without calling the seven or so stores in the greater Phoenix area. I like being able have a book in my hands the same night I hear about it, so I prefer brick and mortar stores (and I don't like e-readers much).

If they can solve this problem the way Powell's in Portland has (one giant bookstore with everything in stock and two or so subject-specific bookstores), then I'd still be their customer.

</comment><comment><USER32> I used to frequent the borders in provo utah. The computer science section was actually decent for a while (I snagged a copy of ansi common lisp, the little schemer and the structure and interpretation of classical mechanics) from there. The last time I was down there they were seriously playing country music. I'm not trying to be a snob (maybe I am) but this was like garth brooks esque pop not johnny cash - this was lyrics about boot skootin and drinking - the absolute diametric opposition to reading. Good riddance.

</comment><comment><USER33> I have very fond memories of that first store in Ann Arbor. Perhaps it is too bad that the Borders brothers sold and did not keep pushing their vision as they expanded.

</comment><comment><USER34> I like the concept of "niche" stores that happen to sell books. Case in point, here in Portland, we have a New Age bookstore that sells all kinds of stuff from books, cds, dvds, clothing, all kinds of accessories and conducts events for the community, and of course has knowledgeable and passionate staff and so it has become like the hub for the New Age folks. It's doing very well too.

I wonder if this is the way to go for other niches too.

</comment><comment><USER35> Summary: slow to adapt to internet; didn't have "book people" running it, whatever that means.

<comment><USER36> > whatever that means.

Let me put it this way. You're looking for a new CEO for a fashion outlet. You have two top candidates: one who has an encyclopedic knowledge of shoes, dresses, designers, and how to spot a knock-off from the genuine article. The other guy ran a very successful chain of grocery stores.

Now, on one level, selling clothes is just like selling anything else -- groceries, toothpaste, power tools. You have your marketing, your in-store experience, etc. But your grocery store guy will lack the one thing the fashion guy has: namely, an intuitive sense of what makes an otherwise rational consumer spend far too much on some shirt just because it says "Armani" on the collar. Your fashion guy knows who his customers are, who they talk to, what they read, and what motivates them to open their wallets. That does not mean the fashion guy will do a better job, but he does have a distinct competitive advantage over the grocery guy.

What happens when you don't have a guy like that at the top? Well, Apple nearly tanked after they pushed Steve Jobs out the door in 1986. Jobs' replacement, an ex-CEO of PepsiCo, simply didn't understand the Apple customer the same way Jobs did.

Hence "book people." People who understand why people buy books, and how books are different from socks and celery.

<comment><USER37> I think part of it was not just the CEO, but the buyers were not as good as they used to be. Thus the books chosen were not the right selection, leading to further deterioration.

Might I pimp my previous comment on an earlier Borders-related thread? ... <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2056531></comment></comment></comment>


Here's Why Someone Would Seek Rejection for 30 Days Straight - <AUTHOR> http://mynorthwest.com/category/news_chick_blog/20101110/Seeking-rejection-for-30-days/

<comment><USER3> There's another name for rejection therapy -- it's called sales work.

Typically it's the kind of sales work hackers dislike. But plenty of people have built good careers around a sunny tolerance for rejection. Real estate agents, insurance sales people, cold callers, door-to-door sales people -- all of them experience many rejections for each closed sale.

One successful sales person told me that "it's just a numbers game." I still think about this with every rejection I receive.

<comment><USER4> I'm currently a salesguy doing door-to-door work for a telecom fiber optic campaign. I wouldn't quite call it a "sunny" attitude, but you definitely get used to it very, very fast.

It's vanishingly rare that rejections are actually personal in any real sense anyhow. At least when business is concerned. Heck, even when they know you, it's rarely personal - personal circumstances and biases are a far greater factor than any real animosity.

Except for a few comical asides, you never remember the no's anyhow.

<comment><USER5> Actually, when you're a developer trying to sell your own creation, you can easily take rejection personally. Maybe this is why hackers hate sales.

This leads me to an idea: What about if a bunch of hacker entrepreneurs got together and agreed to try to sell _eachother's_ products? It could actually be fun to try to pitch something where you have no emotional investment in the product. Naturally you would do your best to succeed and agree to document all the responses from prospective clients.

<comment><USER6> And maybe like, the hacker doing selling part could receive some financial incentive to overcome the wasted time. And that incentive would of course be given by the hacker whose product is sold, because he could make a profit on that experiment. And like, part of it would be fixed, and part of it would depend on the acceptance, which could be called conversion rate?

Congrats, you've just invented the salesman :-) Joke aside, it might be fun to try to do some sales time to time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The original post on HN:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1754790>

<comment><USER8> Eliezer: _"Did anyone else glance at this, think "rationality level too low, I cannot trust anything these people say" and give up?"_ (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1755741>)

My response is to quote Nassim Taleb: "Be gullible in the small, and skeptical in the large." <http://akkartik.name/blog/9400292> It's an _extremely_ rational strategy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I really want to see a journal of someone who tried this: what they asked for, what was surprisingly accepted and how rejections were issued.

<comment><USER10> I think HN member Jason Shen is on the fourth week of the 30 day challenge right now (although he hasn't posted about it yet): [http://www.jasonshen.com/2010/the-rejection-therapy- challeng...](http://www.jasonshen.com/2010/the-rejection-therapy-challenge- week-2/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why not just do things you _actually want to do_?

If they work, great.

If they don't, and you tried really hard, I can't imagine anything more likely to help desensitize you.

</comment><comment><USER12> Thanks for checking this out guys. I think it's been a great experience - <USER2> I actually work in sales so I already deal with a great deal of rejection. I'll be writing a summary of my experiences soon so stay tuned ...

</comment><comment><USER13> Google "social skydiving" for people's experiences doing this kind of thing.

</comment><comment><USER14> Sounded like the typical dating website - before I read it. Much more intriguing.

</comment><comment><USER15> is it still worth the effort to try things that you don't actually want?

seems to me that not only will you not feel the pain of rejection, you also won't be able to reap the benefit when there's an unexpected yes.

<comment><USER16> The reward is realizing that the pain of being rejected is negligible.

<comment><USER15> but there is no pain if you don't have any expectation!

<comment><USER17> That's the goal, anyway. Some of us aren't there yet. Rejection of any kind, even for something that wasn't expected in the first place, can be painful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is there something special about getting one rejection each day?

I've been doing part-time canvasing and I can accumulate far more than 30 rejections in the less than an hour.

But I still have no-rejection days. Does it matter?

<comment><USER17> It's not about being rejected _every single day_. It's about learning to accept rejection more easily, which it sounds like you're doing fine on with part-time canvasing. (Or perhaps you could cope easily before that.)

I'd take a bet that you're not the type this was designed for. For some, being rejected at all is a huge blow to ego, confidence, and self-esteem, which can have serious effects on mood and productivity, for instance.

For these people, getting rejected more often means that each rejection is less significant and reinforces the knowledge that rejection happens. That is much healthier, and I'd hypothesize that it can increase one's average level of happiness. (It also gives an individual much more control over himself -- or takes it away from others, at any rate. Same thing.)

<comment><USER19> "For some, being rejected at all is a huge blow to ego, confidence, and self- esteem, which can have serious effects on mood and productivity, for instance. For these people, getting rejected more often means that each rejection is less significant and reinforces the knowledge that rejection happens."

Yes, but this sort of "therapy" only works if you have the right thought patterns to go with the rejection (i.e. not taking it too personally, realizing it's not that big of a deal, etc). It may not work so well if you (were raised to) believe that you have to please others in order to feel good about yourself. In that case, each rejection is just more evidence that "you suck", and you enter a downward spiral.

<comment><USER17> That's what makes the game hard, and also what makes it worth it. The key is that repeated exposure leads to desensitization.

Fear of rejection is no different from other irrational (or at least maladaptive) fears -- and those often _are_ treated by repeated exposure to the source of the fear.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desensitization_(psychology)></comment></comment></comment></comment>


AI X Global 500 Healthcare Companies|Drug Supply, Wearables and Glucose Monitor - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/syncedreview/ai-x-global-500-healthcare-companies-drug-supply-wearables-glucose-monitoring-ebf8b366bf2b <comment><USER2> Paywalled. Anyone have an alternate link?</comment>


Casio files DMCA complaint against user who hacked calculator to connect to net - <AUTHOR> https://reclaimthenet.org/casio-dmca-internet-calculator/ <comment><USER2> Link to video documenting this very clever hack, by the author: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGjS5958g1g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGjS5958g1g)

A second display is installed in place of the solar cell. The display is connected to an Arduino with Wi-Fi connectivity, programmed to exchange data with Firebase. Hall effect sensors are used for input control.

The claim in the DMCA notice [1] that "the entire repository is infringing," linking to Casio's "preloaded basic formula programs" [2] is not substantiated and makes little sense (the hack is essentially a separate device installed into the calculator).

Has anybody ever been convicted or at least tried for perjury in DMCA notice?

1\. [https://github.com/github/dmca/commit/1e533a25356944db37d238...](https://github.com/github/dmca/commit/1e533a25356944db37d238361989ec1ceb2cc215)

2\. [https://support.casio.com/en/support/download.php?cid=004&pi...](https://support.casio.com/en/support/download.php?cid=004&pid=729)</comment>


GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/fr3ino/status/1000166112615714816 <comment><USER2> Discussed at the time:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17162000](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17162000)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://eu.usatoday.com](https://eu.usatoday.com)

I don't know if it's available outside of Europe, feels like browsing a website locally on my machine.

<comment><USER4> There is practically nothing on the webpage for uBlock, Ghostery and Privacy Badger to block.

It's like a dream come true.

<comment><USER5> Wow, it's like browsing the internet in 2009 again - everything just works.

How did the web get so morbidly bloated again?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This recipe website is blazing fast too for EU visitors like me, but not quite for all the right reasons:

[https://food52.com/](https://food52.com/)

If you're not from the EU, this is what their site returns:

        We're sorry you're not able to access the site at this
        time, but this is a temporary measure to ensure we can
        best protect your data under new privacy regulations. We
        value your support; thanks for your patience and we can't
        wait to have you back!

The message has been up since May — a bit annoying if you're using a search engine to find recipes and hit a link from such a defective service. Plenty of alternatives though.

<comment><USER7> Accessing [http://geniuskitchen.com](http://geniuskitchen.com) from the EU just redirects to [https://www.foodnetwork.com/not- available.html](https://www.foodnetwork.com/not-available.html) :/

<comment><USER8> This probably means that they disrespect users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > They went from a load time of more than 45 seconds to 3 seconds, from 124 > (!) JavaScript files to 0, and from a total of more than 500 requests to 34.

This strengthens my feeling that JS in web pages (as opposed to web apps) is used mainly against the user, not for them, and it's best to just turn it off unless you really need some specific functinality.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's really fast, but something is wrong with their links. Hyperlinks to related articles ("Related: " or "More: ") doesn't seems to work.</comment>


Comcast Changes Guy's Name to "Asshole" After Wife Tries to Cancel Service - <AUTHOR> http://www.buzzfeed.com/stephaniemcneal/comcast-changes-guys-name-to-asshole-after-wife-tries-to-can#.wx4XmAolJ <comment><USER2> Stay classy Comcast.

On that note: who fears the two hellhounds TWC and Comcast coming together? I shudder at the very thought.</comment>


Inside the fastest font renderer in the world - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@raphlinus/inside-the-fastest-font-renderer-in-the-world-75ae5270c445 <comment><USER2> Very cool! Font rendering still seems to be a very under appreciated aspect of UI/UX considerations, and with higher-resolution displays rendering performance is definitely more important today than it otherwise has been.

Is the aim to use this in the Xi Editor project? ([https://github.com/google/xi-editor](https://github.com/google/xi-editor) for those who haven't heard of it, another Rust-based project of Raph's.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Not directly. My approach in Xi is to use the system text stack (including font rendering) for a variety of reasons, including consistency of appearance with other text on the system, keeping the front-end small and lightweight, and being able to exploit hardware acceleration to the max.

That said, my hope is that these ideas make their way into at least one system text stack running under Xi. The ideas are simple to implement, and I hope I've made the case that the performance improvement is compelling enough to pursue.</comment></comment>


Google Glass App that tells you what you are looking at - <AUTHOR> http://ThirdEyeGlass.me

<comment><USER2> I'm not great with Java, but it seems to take a picture and send the picture[0] of what you're looking at to CamFind[1] which is a reverse image search service.

Pretty nifty.

[0] [https://www.mashape.com/imagesearcher/camfind](https://www.mashape.com/imagesearcher/camfind) [1] [https://github.com/sandlerben/third- eye/blob/master/ThirdEye...](https://github.com/sandlerben/third- eye/blob/master/ThirdEye/app/src/main/java/thirdeye/thirdeye/MainActivity.java#L196)</comment>


Worst things about working at Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/these-are-the-worst-things-about-working-at-google-2015-2

<comment><USER2> The website took a year old Quora thread ([http://www.quora.com/What-is-the- worst-part-about-working-at...](http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-worst-part- about-working-at-Google?share=1)) and converted it into a slideshow. Previously discussed in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6659860](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6659860)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, didn't know this... Now I understand how big tech sites write 'new' articles.

<comment><USER2> It's surprising they dug out old news. The quora thread is bit more informative I think so I added the extra link.

At least better than "news" reporting based on which-celebrity-said-what with 20 embedded tweets. Or a slideshow of tweets. Oh, and welcome to hackernews.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Maybe I should delete the submission?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> nothing different than any fortune 500 company</comment>


UX Details: Hovering over a link also highlights an image - <AUTHOR> http://hellyeahdude.com/articles/the-small-things-count-in-user-experience-highlighting-over-a-link-also-highlights-an-image/ A nice little UX trick that most people don't use. Very minor CSS detail. <comment><AUTHOR> Can you direct us to some JavaScript that does this? This style of implementation is used by Dan Cedarholm and Jason Santa Maria. I think they would confirm it's best used in CSS. Haha

<comment><USER3> It's trivially implemented in something like Jquery. Just give related elements the same class name.

        $('.someClass-xx')
    	.mouseover(function () {
    			$('.someClass-xx').each(function () {/* Do Stuff */})

    	})
    	.mouseout(function () {
    			$('.someClass-xx').each(function () {/* Do Stuff */})

    	})

I only say it's better to implement in js because css forces you to tie behavior to markup in this case. Good implementation separates content/markup (html), presentation (css), and behavior (js).

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow thats great! Thanks for that! Great code!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice but almost certainly better implemented in Javascript rather than pure css.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. This doesn't solve a problem, it's just nice to have so keeping your CSS lean and using a tiny bit of Javascript is the best route imo - <USER2> with noscript won't complain about missing out on some neat effect .. they're probably used to it :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not sure I understand what (usability) problem this solves.

<comment><AUTHOR> User Experience. No one said there was a problem to solve, but someone did say it was a tip to help polish things up for your users experience on your Web site or app. See Pownce, they do this same trick.</comment></comment>