Show HN: Findka – Personalized recommendations for any type of content - <AUTHOR> https://findka.com <comment><AUTHOR> (Reposting, again, with permission from dang)

Hi, OP here. I started working on recommender systems in 2016 during my undergrad, specifically doing music recommendation (I was dissatisfied with the quality of Pandora/Spotify recommendations). I spent about five months in 2019 trying to make a music startup based on that. However, during that time I realized that there would probably be more value in having a really good general-purpose/cross-domain recommender system. i.e. if you're looking for something specific, use Google, and if you're not looking for something specific, use Findka. That's the vision anyway.[1][2]

More specifically, the benefits I see from cross-domain recommendation are:

\- More data per user => better recommendations.

\- More potential users => (eventually) better recommendations. For example, to get users for a podcast recommender, you have to find people who like podcasts above a certain threshold. With Findka, anyone who's interested in getting recommendations for at least one content type is a potential user. (And even people who aren't above that threshold for podcasts might appreciate an occasional podcast recommendation).

\- Lots of potential applications. I'm particularly interested with trying to use Findka for social networking (opt-in of course). Data from Findka could be useful for dating, job opportunities, forming online communities, etc. This is more long-term, but I also think Findka data could be useful for search.[3]

The algorithm currently is dead simple. Just collaborative filtering without explicitly taking into account content type. So it's naively cross-domain. Since the data set is still small, there's no need for matrix factorization. I recompute the whole matrix every hour and store it in memory. See [4] for the implementation (it only took 30 LOC). That's a little out-of-date but the general approach hasn't changed.

For the tech stack, I'm using a Clojure web framework + deployment solution that I made.[5] It's like a self-hosted version of Firebase (I'm running it on DigitalOcean).

[1] [https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/6/24/search- dis...](https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/6/24/search-dis...).

[2] [https://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/2...](https://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/2...).

[3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23449754](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23449754)

[4] [https://findka.com/blog/rec-sys- in-30-lines/](https://findka.com/blog/rec-sys-in-30-lines/)

[5] [https://findka.com/biff/](https://findka.com/biff/)

<comment><USER2> > I started working on recommender systems in 2016 during my undergrad, > specifically doing music recommendation (I was dissatisfied with the quality > of Pandora/Spotify recommendations). I spent about five months in 2019 > trying to make a music startup based on that.

Hi! I'm very interested in this domain, I have long been dissatisfied with the results for music recommendation across almost every platform (and the respective apps, but I digress). So frequently it seems my own personal preferences are washed away in the breadth of ML and algorithmic recommendation systems, that no matter what I begin listening on, I will invariably find myself within the mainstream for that genre/artist. It also seems to me that many algorithms can't properly deduce that I would want songs centered around a specific year, and instead seem to draw from what's "popular" in the genre regardless of the time period the song is starting from.

As an example, I can begin a GPM station based on I Gotta Feeling, a song from 2009. When I start a playlist like that, I nearly never am rewarded with a song from that time period. I tried it just now, it immediately jumped to Roar by Katy Perry, a song from 2014 with an entirely different vibe.

I supposed my question is, how meaningful are the music recommendations Findka produces?

I would love to talk more about the music startup you were pursuing, and what you accomplished there, as well as any roadblocks you may have faced. I have been whittling down an idea for a music startup myself and can't help but wonder where that road led for you.

Also your site link is broken/not resolving.

<comment><USER3> Pretty surprised that the music recommendation results you've been experiencing have been quite poor. Your feedback would have been invaluable in retraining the algorithm to make recommendations that suit your preference. Feels like a lost opportunity. Moreover, I don't know if much thought around self-discoverability/popularity has been factored into the design of the recommendation system - ideally, the recommendation system should surface interesting things that I like that I wouldn't necessarily discover on my own.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've wondered about this a lot. It seems to be hit or miss--some people love e.g. Spotify's discover weekly/daily mix playlists, and some people hate them. I suspect that some users are outliers and it's hard to give them recommendations, and maybe tuning the system for them decreases the performance for other users. Also there may be limited business value in optimizing for those users anyway vs. pushing popular music.

<comment><USER3> I suspect you're right about trading off between pushing popular music vs tuning for outlier users. Feels like there are too many smart engineers to miss it. Plus you're building a personalisation system which should be personalising things for individual users by default.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Couple of ideas for you

\- Consider injecting information with "oracles" An oracle is a kind of virtual user that likes one thing and only one thing. For example they only watch movies that have been tagged sci-fi. This sci-fi oracle adds information about sci-fi-ness to your data which is useful for several things. It helps with the cold start problem as new items can be automatically tagged by the appropriate oracles and get past the zero information horizon quickly. Also you can measure a users sci-fi affinity by measuring that users similarity to the sc-fi oracle.

\- Another way to think about co-occurrences is as connected nodes in a digraph. You have users and items and connections between them (user watched video). Start with an item and traverse all the links to the other side (all the users who watched this video) then for each user traverse to the items side (you can roll up the occurrences for a score) and you have similar items. Works equally as well for finding similar users.

\- Create an "average user" and use that as a seed for new users. If we know nothing else we should expect a new user to be close to average. This means they will probably get recommended the most popular items but

\- Find items with divisive scores or groups and ask new users their opinion on those items to find out about them. After a new user gets created consider asking them their opinion on five of these divisive items. Their ratings should swiftly put them in an informed space the way taking five steps down a binary tree does a lot to reduce search space.

\- I like the way you use simple plus one smoothing for your scores. I'm not sure why this doesn't get used more often.

Good luck with the project!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I'm interested in all these ideas. I'm working on figuring out a marketing channel at the moment, and then once Findka is growing consistently I'd like to focus primarily on recommendation quality and experimenting with ideas like these. (If things are going really well, hopefully I can hire a couple people to continue working on marketing/UX etc while I work on the algorithm).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reminds me of Gnod, the Global Network Of Discovery:

[https://www.gnod.com](https://www.gnod.com)

For music, Gnod definitely gives me better suggestions then iTunes and Youtube.

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely. Gnoosic in particular was an inspiration for the current iteration of Findka ([https://www.gnoosic.com/](https://www.gnoosic.com/)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am going to share a piece of anedoct.

There once was a very nice German-based application called Foundd. The app was soecialised in movie recommendation and it was awesome: great interface, good filtering, good recommendations.

Then, they introduced TV shows recommendations. As soon as I started rating TV shows, the quality of my movie recommendations plummeted. I guess my general dislike for TV shows wasn't helping the algorithm.

It seems really hard to build useful cross-domain recommendations.

</comment><comment><USER7> I love the sound of this. But wouldn't it be productive for users to initially "seed" a category (say, Movies) by entering a handful of films they liked and ones they didn't like?

Rather than being at the mercy of suggested movies which, in my experience of using Findka, 80% I hadn't watched. Thus I couldn't like or dislike so the system carried on showing me more and more content suggestions that weren't increasing in relevance as they had no input data.

I'm sure by simple maths _over extended use_ I would inevitably see movies I could express a preference on, but I must be on "Refresh 50" now and only managed to vote on a tiny number of suggestions.

Also in the name of speeding up the process of identifying movies (or whatever) that I liked and disliked, would it be possible to like/dislike all three suggested items per screen before moving on to the next batch? atm as soon as one "vote" is placed the system throws out three more - when I could well have wanted to express a view on the other items that were presented.

Findka is a great idea btw! :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Both of those things are in fact implemented :). For seeding items, go to the "Add" page and there's a search bar (on desktop, it's in the sidebar; on mobile, you have to open the hamburger menu). I'll probably move the search bar to the main page to make it more discoverable.[1]

When you rate an item, are you sure all three items get replaced? If you rate one item, the ones below it should be moved up, and then the item on the bottom will be new. So if you rate the top item, you'll see a visual change in all items, but the other two items will still be there. Perhaps I should replace rated items in place without moving the others.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23542880](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23542880)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Neat idea, this could become a valuable resource for discovering interesting things.

From a UI perspective: Maybe there could be a searchbox for books, songs etc. so that one can quickly enter things one likes. With the current system of entering preferences for the 3 suggested items, the problem is that I don't know many of the items and so I can't enter a preference.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is such a search box. On desktop, click on "Add" in the sidebar. On mobile, you'll have to open the hamburger menu. There's also URL input for articles/content types I haven't added search for.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for the reply - that's great. I'm on mobile and looked for 'search', but now I see how to do it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought about calling it "search" but went for "add" since that is technically more accurate with the URL inputs--and it's already a fairly common occurrence for people to enter search terms in those instead of URLs. Though your comment makes me thing that maybe I should just call it "search"...

<comment><USER8> Another option could be to add a search box to the landing page which when submitted takes you to the 'add' page

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd thought about putting the search bar on the main page but wasn't sure how to make the UX good. It never occurred to me to just switch the page. I'll probably do that, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Biggest advise I can give is that you should do a better job at content seeding to ensure that first time users have a good experience. Otherwise, you'll never get better from more usage because people won't have a reason to stick around. Then your collaborative filtering will struggle as your user likes become more and more sparse.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's an interesting idea. Do you have reason to believe that people's preferences in different areas are correlated? Not saying they're definitely not, but that's my first skeptical thought.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think some areas will be correlated and some will not. e.g. I see plenty of overlap between articles, podcasts and books, but less overlap between those things and music.

I'm pretty curious to see what the correlation ends up being.

<comment><AUTHOR> That being said, music etc. is at least correlated with demographics. I could see it being useful to a degree for recommending other content types.

<comment><USER10> Id be surprised if you get much signal out of demographic info.. but I would think music correlates more with general aesthetic taste which may transfer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Very interesting. Learned about Findka in your music recommendation service newsletter.

\- I'd like to change how many recommendations I get with each newsletter.

\- I'd like to add some music, but it didn't find anything I searched. I could just add a link. That would however link the music with the source/url, which does not make any sense semantically.

\- If you don't rate suggestions (because you don't know them), they'll soon appear again. Maybe it would be nice to block them in the current session.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback.

\- I'll add an option for this.

\- What songs were you searching for? The search feature uses Last.fm for music. They've had pretty much everything I've ever searched for, but maybe they're missing certain categories. I might investigate other/additional search APIs in the future. In the mean time, adding songs via URL is a decent option. The way the algorithm is implemented currently, it won't make a difference, and eventually I'm planning to add a cron job that'll go through the URL items and classify them as the correct content type and fetch additional metadata (with manual intervention as needed).

\- I started working on this today; should be fixed tonight or tomorrow.

<comment><USER11> \- Cool!

\- Some swiss german music. However a search for "Not afraid" didn't return anything too... Didn't manage to get any result so far.

\- Again: nice.

It's very motivating to get a response this fast and you seem to care about the input/feedback from users. The world needs more of that, thank you. :)

EDIT: My bad, uBlock Origin was blocking requests to ws.audioscrobbler.com. Can search for music now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, glad to hear it's working now. I was just about to ask you to check the network tab. Also, I pushed an update last night that renames the refresh button to "skip all" and keeps track of which items are skipped, so items won't show up again after you've seen them once (there's another button under Account which will reset the skip history).

Also you're welcome! It's been really nice to actually have some users, a luxury which escaped me in previous startup attempts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This reminds me of Stumbleupon[1] from back in 2005-ish. I used to love using it before they decided to pivot and remove all of the things that made it great.

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

<comment><USER12> Just tried findka out and going back to my comment about Stumbleupon, what I used to love the most about it was reading the reviews about the content I ^stumbled upon^ before even looking at the content. Pretty much the same manner in which most people use HN.

Additionally, reviews led to discovery of people with shared interests, when I saw the same people liking, sharing and commenting on stuff I liked. Following these people then added another layer of filtering to my ^stumbles^.

Might be food for thought.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've thought about how this relates to Stumbleupon as well. I never used it myself, but it came up while I was looking for things similar to Findka.

I'm actually just starting to implement features like these. If you make an account then go the the Account tab, you can enable a public profile like this[1]. So far I'm planning to add follow/subscribe, commentary (i.e. comment on items instead of just rating them), and showing users who've rated the same items as you.

[1] [https://findka.com/u/f962c926-43e1-406d-825d-3d7a4880befa/](https://findka.com/u/f962c926-43e1-406d-825d-3d7a4880befa/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> You mention storing the matrix in memory and recomputing hourly because of the small data set. What are your estimates for scaling ceiling with current implementation? How many users / data-items (order of magnitude) do you think you can handle with current set-up?

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't thought too deeply on it yet, but:

\- ram usage today has gone from ~1.1GB to ~1.6GB

\- DigitalOcean prices ram linearly at $5/GB (I'm currently on a $10/month droplet)

Today is a big spike obviously (the number of thumbs up/thumbs down events have gone from 3K to almost 10K today, vs going from 0 to 3K since February). But say I continue to grow ram usage at 0.5GB per week (growth hopefully won't be linear, but I'd say that's a pretty steep linear growth rate for now). That means my hosting costs would increase at a rate of $10/month which is not bad at all.

That's probably the crappiest scale estimation ever made ha ha, but I believe at least that I should have plenty of time to figure out a reliable marketing channel before I do any major re-architecting. Maybe some time I'll do a stress test on my laptop to get a better sense of how RAM usage increases with additional data.

I've been at 10s of weekly active users. I guess this should handle 100s just fine, but maybe not 1000s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've been using findka for a few months, and love getting relevant recommendations every Friday. I've discovered lots of new music, books, movies and articles through it.

</comment><comment><USER15> This would be much better if it allowed you to import ratings from other popular rating services (letterboxd, goodreads, RYM, etc.)

<comment><AUTHOR> I did this in a previous version of Findka. I had integrations for Last.fm, Spotify, Youtube, Goodreads, Pocket, RSS and a couple others I think. I did a "reset" on Findka in February, removing most of the features in order to make it simpler. Eventually I would like to add integrations back in. I'm working on some social networking features right now--hopefully that'll work as a reliable user acquisition channel. Once I've figured out a way to keep getting new users, I'll be able to spend more time on things like integrations and improving the algorithm.

Also I hadn't heard of letterboxd or RYM. I'll check those out more when the time comes.

<comment><USER16> > Eventually I would like to add integrations back in

I might be missing the big picture, but wouldn't log-in with oauth[0] solve integration problem and removed impediment from new users coming in? Also, if you do not mind, which algo do you use to find matches?

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

Edit: formatting

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think it'd make any difference. In the list you linked, only a few of those provide log-in with oauth. Letting people log in with Google won't let us import data from e.g. Letterboxd etc. Even if Letterboxd provided log-in with oauth, you'd still have to go through another authorization flow if you wanted to import data from an additional service.

The algorithm uses a simple item-based neighborhood model. i.e. if you like song A, Findka looks up all the content liked by other users who liked song A and probabilistically chooses an item that was well-liked. To help the algorithm keep learning, 35% of the recommendations are purely random ("epsilon-greedy"). I describe the implementation here[0], though it's changed slightly (now I export the database every day or so and generate a model on my laptop, then I load it into memory on the server). I experimented with a machine learning-based model (a latent factor model) last week, but it seems I don't yet have enough rating data for that to be useful.

[0] [https://findka.com/blog/rec-sys- in-30-lines/](https://findka.com/blog/rec-sys-in-30-lines/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dear Canonical: please let me pay for Ubuntu - <AUTHOR> http://www.webstylr.com/2012/09/24/dear-canonical-please-let-me-pay-for-ubuntu/

<comment><USER2> I'm surprised no one here has mentioned the obvious solution: go with the Apple model and build Ubuntu machines.

Sure, Apple made some money from selling OS X at $129. It's making less now. But new OS sales were never the reason for Apple to remain closed source. That had more to do with branding/marketing. Not many people remember that one of the reasons Steve killed the affiliate program is that the Mac affiliates were making better machines than Apple, and people were buying them instead of a "Mac". That reduces Apple's revenue, but more importantly dilutes their brand.

Ubuntu, on the other hand, has a very different brand proposition from the start. Open _is_ their brand. But so is "convenience", and what could be more convenient than a machine for which you don't have to do research to find out if all the drivers will work?

<comment><USER3> The trouble is Canonical is and has always been a software company, and Apple is a hardware company (or at least its roots were).

To make Canonical in a hardware direction under the Canonical brand, at a level to compete with existing hardware manufacturers, would take a fantastic amount of investment.

They are making steps in partnering with hardware manufacturers, see the recent Dell linux laptop, and the OEM engineering services they provide for e.g. set top box manufacturers.

But I think it's unlikely you will see Ubuntu brand hardware any time soon.

<comment><USER4> Nowdays I think Chinese manufactures make it pretty easy to grab one of those unbranded computers and just sell it with your own brand. Is this not the case?

<comment><USER5> Yeap. For Android tablets it costs something like 1-2$ to "brand" it.

<comment><USER3> Simply rebranding basic hardware isn't going to compete with the likes of Apple.

Cheap and cheerful (read: shoddy) hardware would quickly damage the Ubuntu brand, and the good hardware is locked up tight by the big brands. Canonical would need to put in some serious volume or R&D of their own to get _good_ hardware that would lead to a viable Ubuntu hardware brand.

Ubuntu users, at least at the moment, are quite picky about the specs of their PCs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The bigger issue is Ubuntu isn't a product. It's a nice community layer with some high level project management spearheading the direction and a team of core developers adding nifty features. If there is paying for the product then how is that money distributed to Jack John Johnson the guy doing patch fixes on his free time because he enjoys it. Does he get a salary? Some kind of financial bonus? Then you've got the issue of the lower level aspects being a very large part of Ubuntu, is the money in part for them? They're as much the product as Ubuntu One is.

Donations work fine, thats how the community keeps going. You're paying the Ubuntu high level team to continue what they're doing and helping cover the costs. If you like what Ubuntu does, go donate. If they're looking at 3rd party affiliates then maybe they're not getting enough donations, maybe they've been approached and think it's a good fit.

<comment><USER7> This idea that what Ubuntu does is just some light packaging is pretty demeaning to their true value. Ubuntu really pushed the state of the art in terms of polish for Linux distributions. You can argue how much of the total product value that is but I don't think it's at all reasonable to say "Ubuntu isn't a product" and that it's just a "nice community layer with some high level project management".

I'm also curious about why you take as a given that money needs to be distributed to "Jack John Johnson"? There's certainly nothing in the licenses that forces it, and when Apple takes BSD software and sells it nobody thinks that's out of line. When RedHat charges for RHEL nobody complains either, even though most of the software is open source as well. What line is Ubuntu crossing here?

<comment><USER8> I think Ubuntu moved away from "polish for Linux distributions" some versions ago. This was the time they've started making their own user interface with Unity, they're own shop with I-don't-know-what-it's-called (App center ?) and their own online storage with Ubuntu one.

They make decisions you may like or may not like (moving the window controls to the left..) - but at least for me it was time to go - and I don't look back.

<comment><USER7> The fact that that has happened only gives more weight to the idea that they are in fact producing their own product instead of being a light packaging layer over what everyone else does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Won't happen; by definition. See <http://www.ubuntu.com/project> "Ubuntu is free. Always has been and always will be." Therefore, would be much better to stop writing link bait posts, but rather go and donate <http://www.ubuntu.com/community/get-involved/donate>

<comment><USER10> There's nothing stopping them from charging _and_ offering it for free.

<comment><USER9> True!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Already exists: <http://www.ubuntu.com/community/get-involved/donate>

<comment><USER3> Or <http://www.ubuntu.com/business/desktop#services> if you want to make it a truly commercial relationship.

<comment><USER12> This wouldn't really work for a simple desktop user, seems like doing IT- department friendly crippled releases. Otherwise I was actually considering it...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Am I just blind or where the heck are those ads on Ubuntu? I use it exclusively all day and I just cannot find ads anywhere (other than on websites in the browser, but that's not Ubuntu's fault).

<comment> cf0ed2aa-bdf5 This seems to be a post in response to Canonical's plans to add amazon ads to searches in your home lens.

See: [http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/09/online-shopping- features-...](http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/09/online-shopping-features- arrive-in-ubuntu-12-10)

<comment><USER14> apt-get purge ubuntuone* landscape* unity-lens-shopping # gets rid of all Canonical tie-ins.

Not so hard, isn't it?

<comment><USER15> Why not have a click-through at install or on version upgrades that says something like "we want to install an easy way to add products to your search results for which we get payment: Allow, Deny" ... rather than default install something that is going to cause such negative press.

IFF then there is a wide-scale uptake then there is warrant for auto-install of those features.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why not donate to the maintainers of Debian, Software in the Public Interest? <http://www.debian.org/donations> They are the root of all those awesome dpkg's that we all know and love.

</comment><comment><USER17> Getting pretty tired of these "dear company, let me pay for your product instead of showing me ads" arguments. They show a lack of understanding of business models.

<comment><USER18> I am not a business guy and don't need to understand what their model is. I understand my model - that I test network software and I don't want to trudge through amazon lookups in wireshark.

<comment><USER19> What's important is to watch the money flow. The article makes a great point - If money goes like this:

      you -> developer

then the developer is only interested in making you happy, because you're the payer. However, if the relationship is like this:

      you -> advertising company -> developer

then the developer doesn't really care about you; you're just the means to an end, a vehicle to drive to the place with money. The developer and advertiser will build a business relationship, <cynical> and usually make sure their relationship with you maximizes shareholder (not your) value. </cynical>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I suppose you could always mail them a cheque, they might even cash it.

As I've said before, I don't see how this kind on monetisation would be practical for Ubuntu unless they took chunks of their software (such as Unity) and made them closed source.

If there was a sticker price attached to Ubuntu and an activation system (ala Windows) somebody would simply fork the code minus the activation and make a free clone.

Basically the same as Redhat/CentOS.

Their best way of monetising the desktop is probably to make their app store less crappy and get some paid apps in there.

If they can't get enough third parties involved , maybe they can get the ball rolling with their own proprietary paid apps.

Their main customer base right now is probably developers, so a good start might be a nice GUI DB admin tool and a good debugging proxy (ala Fiddler) and they could start monetising tomorrow.

</comment><comment><USER21> What about <http://shop.canonical.com/product_info.php?products_id=667> ?

It's difficult to envisage charging for the distribution ending well, but you can already pay Canonical for support if you'd like to, and I'm sure they'd be happy to tell you how to disable the "advertising". TBH, though, I'm not sure how Canonical's relationship with Amazon search is any different from what Mozilla do with Google search.

<comment><USER21> Actually reading more about it: this is using Amazon's store search, not their web search as I initially thought. It's also getting money by adding referral codes, rather than Amazon paying Canonical to have their search engine listed. So there's some differences after all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This seems like a really bad idea to me. You can't charge for something that the user can just build themselves for free. Someone else is just going to distribute the binaries. And so what do you do about your repos, are those just for paying customers as well? You wind up with 2 Ubuntus in this scenario, both weaker than the 1 today.

<comment><USER23> Centos does the same, isn't Redhat making money ?

<comment><USER22> The thing RedHat sells isn't the OS itself.

<comment><USER24> This is a little bit off-topic but... they removed basic support and now there's a "self-support subscription" option instead for $350.

If you don't get support for that subscription, I can't see a difference worth $350 between RHEL self-support subscription and CentOS.

EDIT: ate a word

EDIT 2: self-support desktop subscription is just $49. But the point is the same: no support.

<comment><USER25> > If you don't get support for that subscription, I can't see a difference > worth $350 between RHEL self-support subscription and CentOS.

* Access to the RHEL repositories, with faster updates than CentOS or alternatives.

* Ability to upgrade to supported tier.

* Possibly: access to RHN pages with their forums, documentation, etc?

None of which would be huge advantages to me, but I can totally see the potential value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If you have spent a reasonable amount of time with Ubuntu, try installing Debian and playing around with it. Sadly, you will probably notice how Ubuntu have unnecessarily broken things that are working fine in Debian. Core things.

Let me propose you give money to Debian instead.

<comment><USER27> Or just install Debian and see how stable it is. It's familiar enough and it will cure your upgrade fears.

I think "once every 6 months" is too often, I'd be happier if Ubuntu was released once per year but better tested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Suppose searching shops from the search bar makes sense: what would be a way to launch it that wouldn't freak out a lot of people?

Personally I find the new feature interesting, because I already use the DuckDuckGo !-Notation to search Amazon all the time.

<comment><USER29> An obvious way is to require some sort of deliberate indication that the user wants shopping results, like a separate pane, or a prefix to the search term. It's a problem largely because it's searching Amazon even when you're just looking for a file on your computer.

<comment><USER28> Prefix would be good. I guess the Unity way is different keyboard shortcuts (it is possible to limit the search to certain categories). But I won't be able to memorize those.

<comment><USER30> hold down the Super key for a list of available shortcuts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think Kilo Dalton's comment pretty much sums it up:

        > 1) make a donation
        > 2) sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping
        > 3) grab a tasty beverage

<comment><USER32> What it sums up is some Linux nerds' complete disconnection from reality.

1) Donations aren't a sustainable revenue model, and won't prevent Ubuntu from taking equally user-hostile actions in the future. What they need is a sustainable revenue model where users are the customer.

2) How is this different than the crapware that comes installed with some OEM Windows PCs? How is that a model to be emulated? What happens when a feature like this _can't_ just be installed with apt-get?

3) Water would almost certainly be healthier.

Apple used to be the reliable alternative to the Microsoft hegemony. They're squandering that position, and we desperately need something like Ubuntu -- consumer focused, polished, and as easy to use as Mac OS X (or at least, Ubuntu is a lot closer to that ideal than Linux has previously been).

For Ubuntu to maintain a consumer focus, they need the consumers to be their customers, not their product. Let me buy Ubuntu, or buy Ubuntu hardware.

<comment><USER31> Honestly, what I get from your comment is that you don't like ads. If you don't like them, don't click them: problem solved. I have to grant you that Ubuntu hardware would be awesome but I'm afraid that it might create an incentive to drop support for non-Ubuntu hardware.

<comment><USER32> "If you don't like them, don't click them" is a terrible solution, because _I don't even want to see them_.

Is it so wrong that I don't want "free" things if that means I'm the product and not the customer? Is that really such a hard market opportunity to exploit?

I'd rather pay money to not see them. Problem solved.

<comment><USER31> There's nothing wrong with that but I do think it would be a much harder market opportunity to exploit. You are definitely in a minority. Also, just a nitpick but if you don't click ads you are not a product since Amazon doesn't buy products who merely view its ads.

<comment><USER32> And yet, look at Apple's profits.

<comment><USER31> Apple's profits have very little to do with sales of its operating system. As I said, it would be nice to see "Ubuntu machines" but unlike Apple, Canonical would never enjoy a monopoly over Ubuntu hardware due to Ubuntu's open source nature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I don't see _anything_ wrong with "pay what you want" Ubuntu as long as people who pay don't get special treatment. The easiest way to ensure that would probably be _anonymous_ contributions.

Similarly, certain definite projects like "get X functionality into Y application" could be valid targets for a kickstarter-like projects. Paid-for code released under GPL. Why not ? This measure would be best reserved for unfun tasks, something no one wants to do.

</comment><comment><USER30> By default, Firefox has an Amazon search listed in the search engine list. Unity lens seem pretty similar.

At present, the Amazon results are only present if you do use the shopping lens or perform an open search. As long as there is an easy way to disable the Amazon results, I don't have a problem with it.

</comment><comment><USER33> <http://www.debian.org/donations>

</comment><comment><USER34> The right price for free software is not free, it's $9.

</comment><comment><USER35> Are you willing to pay one dollar every time you open up a web browser in Ubuntu?

Or even one dollar a day?

Look into what advertisers are paying, I'm betting you're not willing to match their price.

<comment><USER36> I highly doubt they're going to make a buck a day from even 1/4 of the userbase from search ads.

Also, they're not being paid every time someone opens their browser. They're paid if someone searches in the Unity lens, sees something they like, clicks on the link, and buys something within 24 hours from Amazon. Amazon's commission rates are < 5% if I remember correctly.

I think they'll be lucky to make $100k from it.

<comment><USER37> As I recall Firefox used to make about $3 per user per year. (I'm using the past because the data I have is pretty old).

If we consider they have about 15 million users, that's about 45 million dollars. But maybe they have other sources of revenue.

<comment><USER36> Firefox is more valuable though. They have a revshare agreement with Google and others. People actively use Firefox to search for things, at least a few dozen times a day, not to mention are more apt to click on ads based on their current mindset.

I don't think that same behavior is going to be exhibited in a Unity lens, certainly not with the same frequency. I also doubt the click rate too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I switched to Linux Mint Debian Edition a while back. Cinnamon is a great desktop. Don't miss the steaming pile of Ubuntu. It was great while it lasted, but then came Unity and now they're hitting us with adverts? I don't get it. Seems like they're trying to kill demand.</comment>


Show HN: GifMe – A gif saving app and search engine - <AUTHOR> https://gifme.io

<comment><AUTHOR> The app has been around for a little over a year. The search engine is powered by users of the extensions and apps and was released earlier this year. Hope you all enjoy! Happy Giffing!</comment>


Starving your way to vigor: The benefits of an empty stomach - <AUTHOR> http://harpers.org/archive/2012/03/0083829

<comment><USER2> The content appears to be pay-walled.

I haven't read the article.

Please be careful when controlling food (your body, your choice etc) because eating disorders are not fun and it's possible (although unlikely) to develop an ED through over rigorous food control.

</comment><comment><USER3> Warning: Even if this guy is a doctor, an article online isn't medical advice, always take it with a grain of salt. This just seems dangerous without proper knowledge and awareness of what's going on.</comment>


Apple's 15 years of NeXT - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/12/21/apples_15_years_of_next.html <comment><USER2> My two biggest dissapointments with the Steve Jobs bio was they they never really gave both NeXT and Pixar the proper attention that they deserved. To me the wilderness years of Steve Jobs are where the real insights are for my money. In fact I'd dare say that even the failures of NeXT helped Apple a great deal -- it's as if running that company was where Jobs earned his MBA.</comment>


Raspberry "High" - rpi-powered vape - <AUTHOR> http://raspberryhigh.wikia.com/wiki/Raspberryhigh_Wiki

<comment><USER2> Well, that's certainly a use for an R-Pi I hadn't thought of.

</comment><comment><USER3> Takes the "MacGyver bong" game to a new and creative level.</comment>


OLPC's a con - former insider - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/16/krstic_olpc/

<comment><USER2> _"I've thought for a while that sending laptops to developing countries is simply the 21st century equivalent of sending bibles to the colonies," adds Python language author Guido van Rossum in the comments._

There may be something to what Guido says.

That said, I don't think the OLPC project was necessarily a bad project. Because the whole thing was open source, folks are now free to part the project out: borrow the bits that seemed to work well, redesign other bits, and throw out the rest. That's the best you can expect from most academic research projects.

I'm not surprised to see that OLPC didn't last that long, and that the endpoint is a big explosion. That's the problem with these semi-academic semi- charitable semi-engineering semi-commercial projects: It's hard to have a child with four parents. There's a tendency for the whole thing to devolve into a tooth-and-nails custody fight.

<comment><USER3> And let's not forget that they essentially created the tiny, cheap laptop market. People like ASUS and Intel were _scared_ of them. If the entire project has turned out to be "a con" and jack shit has ended up being done for children, you have to admit that in that case they've at least pulled the most successful bluff in the computer industry, perhaps ever.

And I still think that some of the ideas in the Sugar interface - like the Journal, and the pervasive collaboration - are potentially revolutionary. (They "just" lacked the necessary execution.)

<comment><USER2> Two things I forgot to say:

1) As a former academic, I suspect that _everyone_ who spends long enough in academia goes through phases of frustration where it all seems like "an enormous con". (In industry, of course, you learn that it's all an enormous con in your first week. ;)

2) _they essentially created the tiny, cheap laptop market._

Exactly. And that helps children worldwide as much or more as the actual OLPC does.

It can be ugly to watch the R&D sausage being made. Its indirect approach is not for everyone. Every R&D project has a stated goal of "taking over the world" or "curing this disease" or "ending poverty" or something, and almost none of them ever explicitly reaches such a goal. And yet often those "failed projects" publish stuff that gets picked up by the next generation of projects and refined into something good. Or the students who worked on the "failed" project take their experience into industry where they apply it to a real product that actually succeeds.

<comment><AUTHOR> "(In industry, of course, you learn that it's all an enormous con in your first week. ;)"

I sure hope that was partially tongue in cheek, because if it wasn't, I kinda feel sorry for you.

Many places I have worked have been total jokes and many people I have had the misfortune to work with, let's just say, "misbehaved".

But for each of those places, I found many good businesses where people got out of bed eager to do good things every day. They have produced value for others and have much to be proud of. (These are also the ones who I seek as customers.)

<comment><USER2> Oh, it's more than just _partially_ tongue-in-cheek! I actually find, as you do, that industry is refreshingly direct compared to pure research, which is why I prefer it.

I used to work at Agilent, a.k.a. "the good parts of the former Hewlett- Packard." And, with the usual handful of exceptions, it really was the largest collection of nice folks that you'll ever meet. So, yeah, I believe in the existence of good businesses.

What I refer to is the emotional learning curve coming out of school. The part where you learn, among other things, that not _everybody_ is trustworthy, and that not every market-leading product is worth what it costs. That the ugly method that is currently shipping is often better than the elegant but theoretical alternative. That some of your company's products are, inevitably, better than others. That any group of more than five people will face political problems, misunderstandings, and red tape. And that without those folks doing the marketing and accounting your business won't function.

None of which actually means that industry is a big con. It's just _real_. It's not made of imaginary people living in an imaginary land. Academia is the same, actually, though when you're in an especially bitter mood -- or faced with the occasional person who _really is a con artist_ \-- you might think otherwise.

<comment><AUTHOR> lol

I went to business school because I was tired of being a cook and wanted a better future.

The only thing I remember was, "A degree in business is a degree in nothing."

"How strange," I thought at the time.

"Truer words about business were never spoken," I think now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I recommend everyone go read the source essay by Ivan Krstić, rather than someone's commentary on it. See here: <http://radian.org/notebook/sic-transit- gloria-laptopi>

</comment><comment><USER5> so can someone explain why Windows on the OLPC is such a crime -- especially, as I said before, when some countries won't accept the OLPC without it?

whether the goal is learning or shipping laptops is immaterial -- if by shipping laptops the students are learning, then the end goal is accomplished. don't see how opening up the XO to Windows to get distributed to more kids who need it is a bad thing.

<comment><USER6> I see two almost independent objections here, and I think the press has failed to convey this adequately:

\- One is the Linux argument; that these laptops should be open to tinkering and closed source is inappropriate.

\- One is the Sugar argument; that the desktop-and-windows GUI is not good enough, hence the building of the Sugar UI from the ground up. MS Windows is viewed as inappropriate for the same reasons that the laptop wasn't originally shipped with XFCE or GNOME.

As an interested observer, it seemed to me that both these arguments were prominent design objectives for a long time. It's not surprising that if you drop these objectives, a lot of the people who drank your Original Flavor KoolAid will drop you faster than New Coke.

<comment><USER7> Both of these arguments sound like "we're going to build what our customers _should_ want, not what they actually want". That rarely works except in a monopoly situation. Maybe OLPC imagined themselves as some sort of benevolent monopoly, but that rarely works as well.

<comment><USER8> In the case of the second argument -- Sugar as a more appropriate interface -- it may be more a case of "we're going to build what our customers will want, not what they _think_ they want".

The XO has a screen that is not much larger than other ultra-compact notebooks, but with a resolution on par with full-size notebooks. If you run a standard Linux or Windows, any interface text or icons at the default size will be so small as to be illegible. If you crank up the interface DPI to an appropriate size, however, then you lose a lot of screen real estate to menus, toolbars, and statusbars -- something we take for granted now that we have 20-inch displays (just try using Word in a 640x480 window).

What the XO really needs is an interface like a kiosk or mobile device: something easy-to-use that aggressively conserves screen real estate. Sugar fills this role pretty well... the default installs of Linux or XP do not. Windows CE would have been a better choice than XP in this respect (and others), but it would presumably have been more work for Microsoft with less payoff, since CE has relatively few educational activities and doesn't run the "real" version of Office.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Negroponte> gives Big Brother a whole new meaning...

<comment><USER2> I hadn't actually realized that these two Negropontes were related...

I'm also not convinced that it's relevant. You can choose your friends, and you can choose your philosophies, but you can't choose your relatives.

<comment><USER9> But you can choose your employer (unless you are a slave _, which doesn't apply here, being [] shipping magnates).

It is so simple; so elementary, that most people don't see it (e.g. think of mass-energy relationship).

MIT's primary goals and funding agencies are well known, and so are the little one's scientific achievements, supposedly securing him a place among "the great". Also look @ at the goals of the OLPC, as the whole concept (not as a cheap notebook with little green ears). It is written publicly in B&W:

"At its core, our journal concept embodies the idea that the file system records a history of the things a child has done, or, more specifically, the activities in which a child has participated. Its function as the store of the objects created while performing those activities is secondary, although also important. The Journal naturally lends itself to a chronological organization (although it can be tagged, SEARCHED, and sorted by a variety of means). As a record of things a child has done—not just the things a child has saved—the Journal will read much like a portfolio or scrapbook history of the child's interactions with the machine and also with peers. The Journal combines entries explicitly created by the children with those that are IMPLICITLY CREATED through participation in activities. [...] Each machine is a full-time wireless router. Children in the most remote regions of the globe—as well as their teachers and families—will be connected both to one another AND to the Internet."

<http://laptop.org/en/laptop/interface/principles.shtml>

"It's data that's practically a printout of what's going on in your brain: What you are thinking of buying, who you talk to, what you talk about." --Kevin Bankston, staff attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation

go and figure the rest. Guido's colonisation parallel with conversion to Christianity / XP / Whatever is also very apparent: practically all "orders" are from "client states". The ones likely to vote in favour of the MS Office format to be an ISO standard. Advancing (computer?) literacy in MIT's backyard would be a more ambitious goal ;)

_ Or as they say, in soviet Russia, the employer chooses you ;)

<comment><USER10> For a critical look at the OLPC security model as an avenue for surveillance, this paper is interesting:

"Freezing More Than Bits: Chilling Effects of the OLPC XO Security Model"

by Meredith L. Patterson, Len Sassaman, David Chaum

[http://www.usenix.org/event/upsec08/tech/full_papers/patters...](http://www.usenix.org/event/upsec08/tech/full_papers/patterson/patterson_html/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> first of all i dont understand why this project is taking such a long time ... if someone is really dedicated and committed then anything can be done, just like TATA who created $2500 NANO car right from the scratch from patent to assembly every single thing is innovative (<http://www.rediff.com/money/2008/may/14tata.htm>) - TATA motivated tens of hundreds of manufacturer and vendors to redesign their auto-parts to fit in NANO car ... OLPC is for poor nations or say for 3rd world countries and i dont think NGOs/Govt./schools have any preference over what o/s it comes with as far as it can launch all educational application. OLPC laptop is not meant for scientists anyway, so what the fuss - just keep it simple and open source and create nice educational material so that kids form these countries can learn something valuable. Also 3rd world countries are very humble and they will be more than happy just to get this laptop (with or without XP).

<comment><USER9> India has its own "OLPC"[1], not being a client state. Education works best, when you work your way through: there is not royal path to knowledge (or, teach fishing instead of selling cheap fish, if you like).

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simputer></comment></comment>


Amazon Local Register - <AUTHOR> http://localregister.amazon.com <comment><USER2> It's a trap. You, owner of a shop, don't do this.

Amazon will first analyze all your sales data, they will than attach reviews to your shop and finally they will oblige you to play by their rules or die (banned or killed by bad reviews) and either way they will grow thanks to your hard work.

I'm not joking, this is exactly what they have done (and keep doing) with "partners". Amazon is all but transparent and it has been growing like crazy during the last 6-8 years thanks to this exact strategy. Online is not enough anymore, they need to conquer local stores as well. The empire strikes back.

<comment><USER3> I get your comment and agree with it, but... It's funny how us (the HN/startup/pro disruptive audience) is very pro change (let's get rid off the middle man because we can create software that can do this cheaper and more efficient) and now we are 'rooting' for the brick and mortar business. There is a sociological take away somewhere here.

<comment><USER4> While I'm for technological progress, I prefer to live in an environment where small entrepreneurs can thrive, which requires me to be skeptical when a giant, borderline-monopolistic company comes along with 'new technology' that's true purpose appears to be to subvert small business owners and take their customers.

<comment><USER5> Wasn't Amazon exactly this for many years?

<comment><USER6> You don't get to be the underdog forever. There was a very long period there where people hadn't realized that Apple wasn't the struggling underdog vs. Microsoft anymore as well.

Monopolies are bad, and since all the people on HN _are_ the small business owner (or want to be soon), making people aware of what's going to happen is kind of important.

It's also not new: there are players trying to do this type of thing in every industry. You even see it in medicine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Think of Amazon's role as an online merchant: they've built a 3rd party merchant system where other folks can use Amazon's retail and distribution. Then, they gathered centralized data of what sells, at what prices. They stepped in and started carrying more profitable items themselves.

Now, look at their role here: if this takes off, they'll have data on what merchants are selling, for how much, and to whom. These are items that Amazon wouldn't normally get sales data on because people choose local vendors instead.

If Amazon wanted to start pushing more into local markets (or different kinds of products), they can make a fortune off this data, and that's why they can afford to undercut companies like Square. It's a long term play.

<comment><USER8> What makes you think they are not buying this data already from credit card companies?

<comment><USER9> Credit card companies only know where you are shopping and how much you spend. This gives Amazon product level data.

<comment><USER10> Precisely. This is deep in the trenches data.

Amazon will gain by knowing what products sell most at what time of the week. It will allow predict where to roll out certain services. One day delivery? Done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This sounds a little like a joke.

Amazon is the biggest competitor brick-and-mortar shops have ever seen; why would shops want to give that kind of information to Amazon, so that it knows in real time what people are buying outside of itself???

A coffeeshop, maybe, but for any other kind of business it sounds crazy.

<comment><USER9> 1.75% is a huge discount.

<comment><USER12> 1.75% may be competitive and better than rates of some merchants receive; however, I had a negotiated rate of .4% for one of my businesses.

One of the problems with the entire industry is misinformation, unlevel playing field (inability for your average merchant to negotiate the best rates), and the unscrupulous nature of the sales tactics of the merchant services themselves.

<comment><USER13> If you don't mind, could you please share how you got such an amazing rate? Were you negotiating on behalf of a huge corporation? Had a lot of sales? Gave them other business?

<comment><USER12> In the scheme of things it was probably a combination of many things. I am a lawyer; the account was for the law firm (not a large corporation); on the scale of things I would not say a lot of sales but the sale price per transaction was ~$150-$1500; I think above all being knowledgeable about the competition and the time/willingness to negotiate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> People seem to be very confused at to who the target market is here. This isn't about bricks-and-mortar retailers switching to use Amazon as a payment mechanism, it's about providing a payment services for the (largely) local service vendors who sell their services via Amazon Local (Amazon's daily deal platform).

Powering the payments system will give Amazon the data to do far more dynamic pricing (something which they have a lot of expertise in) for their vendors on Amazon Local which is a win for both the vendors and Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER15> The rate at which Amazon is rolling out products is nothing short of dizzying. Reminds me of Google before Larry came back and retook the reigns. Inevitably they will come to a point where they start shutting down a subset of their enormous product line. It was one thing to have google wave or reader dropped, but when amazon kills some of these lines it'll affect people in real ways. And it will happen.

Here is for hoping they eventually focus on making their products better instead of constantly making new ones. Even look at AWS. I would struggle to name 80% of the services under that umbrella in under a minute.

<comment><USER16> The difference between the Google scenario and Amazon is that from what I can see, Amazon makes money on almost all of the products it's rolling out vs. Google not really directly making money out of most of its products.

<comment><USER17> If Amazon made money off 'almost all' of the products it's rolling out, it wouldn't be posting record losses every quarter and attributing it to those money-losing products.

<comment><USER5> They are "losing money" because they keep reinvesting all of their profits to facilitate all of these new products they keep turning out, and the market doesn't like it.

<comment><USER18> $150B market cap. 800%+ cumulative gain over last ten years. I think the market is liking Amazon's strategy thus far.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can someone explain why manually keyed transactions cost more than swipes? I'm thinking there's more risk involved with those or something along those lines.

<comment><USER20> In addition to the visible data (the card number, the expiration, and the CVV), there is other information encoded on the stripe that you cannot see (its called Track 2 data).

A swiped transaction will include the Track 2 data, but a keyed one will not. The Track 2 data proves that a physical card was present, which carries a far lower risk of fraud, and thus grants a lower processing rate.

Notably, in the recent Target breach, the Track 2 data was stolen as well. This means the thieves could print up real, swipeable cards.

<comment><USER21> Or it proves the card was cloned?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm interested to see how the "manufactured spent / churning" crowd will use this. There are credit cards with 2% (fidelity amex) or 2.2% (barlays arrival plus) cashback out there.

Having a 1.75% fee on this will probably have some of them experiment :)

I'm sure Amazon will shut that down, but I'd love to see how much spent people can run up before that happens.

<comment><USER23> Wouldn't that be considered fraud? Since you'd be defrauding Amex (genuinely curious).

<comment><USER22> Amex still gets their swiping fee from Amazon, I don't think they care particularly much. I would assume Amazon just swallows the possible loss. (hence: introductory rate)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Wow, talk about doing a deal with the devil. Amazon will just apply their standard rule book to the situation and choke the market, and use the data to make it easier to determine what markets are worth investing in for hyperlocal sales tools.

It honestly seems like no good can come of this, it looks like a wonderful tool, but the risks? Eeesh.

</comment><comment><USER25> We sold them the localregister.com platform over 12 months ago after 7 years of development. They are going to crush it as they have with scale, speed and everything that makes amazon, amazon. It helped put our Contrib, Domain Holdings and Global Ventures companies into a great position with future integration of our customers using the currency movement system. They will eventually integrate across all platforms quickly starting with localregister.com. Gotta love competition, makes our world great

</comment><comment><USER26> As a consumer, I'm hoping this makes it easier to find local services. There are a number of options, but none are great.

Angie's List has mediocre search and an awkward interface. Craigslist can be great, but it's more often wading through a cesspool of spam and shady companies to find the few decent ones. Yelp seems to have pretty good reviews for restaurants, but not much else.

</comment><comment><USER27> I think it's very interesting that the Amazon phone is not one of the supported devices for this.

<comment><USER28> Although not unsurprising. Once corporations get large enough you get this sort of desynchronization. Maintaining product development secrecy while also ensuring internal teams have aligned goals can be difficult.

<comment><USER27> Very true. I think it just highlights some of the cracks in their armor, so to speak.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Interesting to consider in tandem with AmazonSupply - a much bigger play for businesses, and one you hear very very little about. You can (and I'm sure they'd prefer that you do) use your Amazon Local Register proceeds to buy most of what you need to run your business. (Leaving aside restaurants/cafes – outside of AmazonFresh delivery markets anyway.)

[http://www.amazonsupply.com/](http://www.amazonsupply.com/)

Forbes had a pretty extensive look a couple months back, the only big public airing it's gotten - [http://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/05/07/amazons-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/05/07/amazons- wholesale-slaughter-jeff-bezos-8-trillion-b2b-bet/)

</comment><comment><USER30> Would be cool if they supported chip and pin and paypass.

<comment><USER31> I wonder if these kind of initiatives slow the adoption of chip and pin credit cards in the US. If Amazon is willing to lower the fees for swipes, pin entered transactions could be even lower.

<comment><USER32> I think that one of the problems for chip and pin adoption in the US is that there isn't a compelling reason for US consumers to desire it.

Credit card fraud might be a pain-point for merchants, but it simply is not for consumers. On the rare occasion that somebody makes a fraudulent purchase on my credit card, my credit card company flags the transaction. In the exceptionally rare case that this fails, I just call my credit card company and tell them that the transaction was fraudulent. Takes no more than 5 minutes, and I can count the number of times I've had to do it in the past 10 years on one hand.

Why then would I want the hassle of punching in a PIN? I'm a consumer, not a merchant. I don't care about what benefits the merchant gets out of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is not (only) about putting local retailers out of business; it's about conquering consumer's wallet. In fact it'd be better for them if (most) of Amazon Local users do not go out of business.

Having access to consumer spend outside their platform would give Amazon an incredible leverage. They'd be able to understand where else you're spending your money, which would allow all sorts of revenue streams: up-selling, cross- selling, Amazon Deals, advertising revenue, selling the raw data to data management platforms (e.g., BluaKai).

They already do something similar with Amazon Payments, but it's mostly for online merchants. This can go much further, even to industries that they have no interest in entering. If you're paying a plumber or a painter, you may be interested in decoration. If you're buying a bicycle, you may need a helmet. Buy some baby clothes, and you may be expecting, and the perfect target for Amazon Mom (I hate this name; why not Amazon Baby, or Amazon Parents?).

And let's not forget about the revenue coming from selling your data and your cookies, which they already do with advertising partners. While banks and card issuers have been doing this for decades, they are typically clueless about how to reach to consumers other than via direct mail, or co-branded email catalogs. And matching PII and databases is something that the FTC doesn't like much.

It's brilliant move for them.

</comment><comment><USER34> Does anyone know the true bottom to transaction fees? Are they taking a loss at 1.75% to acquire user base?

<comment><USER35> Large volume can get costs of infrastructure per transaction absurdly low; the true floor is the interchange rate that you pay to the card issuer; it depends on type of card but it can be ~1% for many of them. American express is much higher, taking amex at 1.75% is definitely a loss.

<comment><USER36> I've always wondered what kind of deal Costco did with American Express to make it the only accepted credit card. It's probably membership + exclusivity that allows AMEX to have much lower fraud and therefore pass on the savings to Costco.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> 1.75% limited of time offer makes me want to vomit. The one thing I like about Square is at least they're not like other CC processors that make the careers HIDING fees from their merchants. Now Amazon is coming out the gate doing this. Many of us are fighting these fees online - even the CC processors like Stripe are at least straightforward with their fees even if they're forced to make them higher than they'd like - but it looks like for in person swipes we're stuck with the status quo.

<comment><USER38> > 1.75% limited of time offer makes me want to vomit.

So Amzn should offer a lower rate, free perhaps? Or are they hiding fees somewhere else? Please you explain your aversion more.

<comment><USER37> It's temporary - they're making it seem like it's lower than it is. They're going to lock people in and then jack up the rate - it's classic CC processing trick and it's BULLSHIT. Even if the real price is written somewhere, it's still horseshit.

<comment><USER39> Can you name a significant number of instances where Amazon has not lowered prices over a medium to long term period?

Amazon has consistently made things inexpensive for the consumer. Sometimes even taking losses to ensure that customers get a lower price.

<comment><USER37> This is my point - y'all aren't even reading what Amazon is saying! They're LITERALLY going to raise the price to 2.5% - it's on the page! It's actually spelled out "we are going to raise our prices".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Looks like this is just for the US. Do any of you have cashback credit cards that offer >1.75% ?

<comment><USER40> My AMEX points work out to 1.33% and my Capital One gives 1.5% . Both are statement credits. I haven't personally seen or been offered anything better than Capital One for that type of incentive.

I'd guess some points/loyalty hacker has figured out how to get over 1.75%, but it probably wouldn't be cashback through direct statement credits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> In this game, one of the factors is frauds. The solution provider who is able to keep fraud rate under control will have an advantage.

<comment><USER42> Right and those two players are google and apple. Phone-present transactions with strong authentication and irrefutability would be far cheaper to process. Google had been screwing the pooch for years with android wallet. They should have owned this market years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> The awesome Brian Roemmele announced this on Quora two weeks ago: [http://acceptingpayments.quora.com/Quora-News-Before-It- Happ...](http://acceptingpayments.quora.com/Quora-News-Before-It-Happens- Amazon-To-Compete-Head-To-Head-With-Square)

Exciting times, to see what unfolds in this payment war. Apple will certainly get there soon: [http://acceptingpayments.quora.com/Apple%E2%80%99s-iWallet-A...](http://acceptingpayments.quora.com/Apple%E2%80%99s-iWallet- And-Retail-Payments-Plans-Have-Been-Exposed-In-A-New-Patent)

[http://acceptingpayments.quora.com/Confirmed-Apple-iPhone- Ev...](http://acceptingpayments.quora.com/Confirmed-Apple-iPhone-Event-On- September-9th-2014)

[http://acceptingpayments.quora.com/Apple-Patent-Shows-How- Pa...](http://acceptingpayments.quora.com/Apple-Patent-Shows-How-Passbook- Becomes-The-iWallet)

</comment><comment><USER44> I can't sign up because all my amazon accounts are associated with other Amazon payment services? Is this an AWS thing?

</comment><comment><USER45> [1]"Make sure the microphone on your device is turned on".

I am not familiar with the card reader hardware. Why is a microphone needed for processing a credit card swipe?

[1] - [http://localregister.amazon.com/help/201549190/swiping-a- car...](http://localregister.amazon.com/help/201549190/swiping-a-card)

<comment><USER46> The reader inputs the data from the magstripe as audio data. The data on the stripe can be interpreted as audio data, and it is, piped in via the microphone part of the TRRS connector on the reader, just like your headset.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Does anyone know how this could integrate with QuickBooks? We currently use Quickbooks Point of Sale to run the cash register and inventory and it loads into the QuickBooks company file each night.

I'd love to switch to something like this but I'm not really clear on how the accounting would work.

</comment><comment><USER48> "Pricing you can trust" rarely comes along with "LOW LOW PRICES IF YOU COMMIT NOW!" In fact, the combination of these two concepts in one ad campaign should double-red-flag this "opportunity".

</comment><comment><USER49> Unfortunately, the reality is that small business and service providers will use this service because they won't realize that the long term implications of this Amazon move will work against them. For them, everything is short term (swipe fees, reporting, etc.), and when we are talking about the "future them" that is "someone else" 10 years from now.

This is really the prisoner's dilemma with thousands and thousands of prisoners.

Alternatively, it is the frog inside the boiling water. The frog never jumps out of the water. It just dies.

</comment><comment><USER50> I guess maybe it saves some on TLS processing, but it's lame that I have to click through two screens to even _start_ signing up. Especially since I'm already signed into Amazon!

</comment><comment><USER51> What is it with swipe cards in the US? A lot of businesses in the EU don't take them due to security risks and only accept chip-and-pin payments,yet US parties like it's 1991?

<comment><USER35> The fraud liability shift for swipe cards in USA will be at the end of 2015, so there's some time still left - but such a card reader definitely isn't futureproof, and they'll need a new model after a year or so.

<comment><USER50> Can you provide any more information about this "fraud liability shift"? To whom is fraud liability shifting? By how much is it shifting? Why would such a shift concern Amazon?

EDIT: TIL retailers will have more liability. I suspect Amazon will find a way to pass that on to the actual retailer. Changes like this have a way of getting delayed in USA, as well.

<comment><USER52> _When the liability shift happens, what will change is that if there is an incidence of card fraud, whichever party has the lesser technology will bear the liability. So if a merchant is still using the old system, they can still run a transaction with a swipe and a signature. But they will be liable for any fraudulent transactions if the customer has a chip card. And the same goes the other way – if the merchant has a new terminal, but the bank hasn't issued a chip and PIN card to the customer, the bank would be liable._

[http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate- intelligence/2014/02/06/octob...](http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate- intelligence/2014/02/06/october-2015-the-end-of-the-swipe-and-sign-credit- card/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I'm guessing the product roadmap looks something like: Point of Sale -> Inventory Management -> All of your physical inventory is also available for purchase on Amazon.com

Brilliant.

<comment><USER54> All of Amazon's logistics for delivery / warehousing is available to you for a small fee..

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Does this track inventory? I can't really tell.

</comment><comment><USER56> In a typical Scorpion manner ([http://www.feld.com/archives/2014/07/amazons- scorpion-proble...](http://www.feld.com/archives/2014/07/amazons-scorpion- problem.html)), they are going in for the kill.

</comment><comment><USER57> Using the audio jack like Square. Isn't there a way yet to use digital like USB yet.

<comment><USER58> Or alternatively Bluetooth. iZettle's approach is a selfcontained chip+PIN device that communicates with the app on your smartphone wirelessly. The app then handles 3G connection.

[https://www.izettle.com/gb/card-readers](https://www.izettle.com/gb/card- readers)

<comment><USER57> Of course, Bluetooth. It could still plug into the iPhone audio jack for stability.

<comment><USER58> I've used these devices before. Merchant facing functionality (e.g. entering prices) is on the phone side, customer facing functionality on the box. The customer never needs to touch the phone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Another card reader that plugs into the audio port.

I'd like to include one of these card readers into my own mobile app; has anyone had success using an SDK for integration? CardFlight seems like it would work, but it's a bit expensive...

</comment><comment><USER60> Congrats to (my ex coworkers) the old GoPago team for rebuilding with Amazon!

</comment><comment><USER61> I don't get this. Seems like a late entry into a saturated and (at least in Square's case) not that lucrative market. Any insight into why you would do this?

<comment><USER62> Saturated but most players are unprofitable. Amazon has an infinite well of money to not only out-price the competition but sustain a loss for long enough that the competition might actually die.

Amazon also makes revenue off of attached services to merchants (Fulfillment by Amazon, the webstore, etc). This is part of the reason why Square has been trying to buy up merchant value-add companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Seems like quite a low rate. I hope they have a good team/plan for anti-fraud, because merchant fraud is a different beast from e-tail fraud...

</comment><comment><USER64> How is Amazon able to offer such low rates when the VISA/MasterCard/Amex processing charges are themselves higher than that?

</comment><comment><USER25> 980% ROI in 7 years on localregister.com investment, finally I made money from Amazon verses spending it with them.

</comment><comment><USER65> Well one more blow to Square, hope they gonna make it through 2014 but the more I see the less I hope :/

</comment><comment><USER66> Ah, more 90's payment technology from the US. It's becoming a bit of a running joke. (Also, extremely annoying when you live in a city with lots of American tourists that think you can still pay that way in 2014.)

Why on earth would you still develop new services for something that is so outdated and has been so completely broken and discredited even my 72 year old mother knows it's unsafe?

<comment><USER50> Security is a process, dude. Chip'n'pin has had its issues as well. (Issues which in some jurisdictions have been passed on to consumers. Fun!) The marketing efforts have certainly been more successful in Europe than in USA, however. I guess maybe we'll just have to bring more cash, or perhaps maybe vacation in more enlightened locales.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Would this would turn Amazon into a bank?

<comment><USER68> They haven't gone after PayPal yet right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Goodnight square.

</comment><comment><USER70> Did a 14 year old design this page? I thought Amazon had talented people working for them.

</comment><comment><USER25> LocalRegister.com to amazon was a great transaction for our team at Domain Holdings and Global Ventures. We are glad we can finally analyze this transaction and show others how key your url asset is and the potential technology and business models still to come for the domain channel.. Check out Contrib or BidTellect, two other up and coming platforms in good hands with big announcements soon.

</comment><comment><USER71> They did not even bother to create some unique design of a landing page [1], just copied it from SquareUp [2] -> PayPal [3] pages:

1\. [http://localregister.amazon.com/](http://localregister.amazon.com/)

2\. [https://squareup.com/](https://squareup.com/)

3\. [https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/credit-card- reader](https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/credit-card-reader)

<comment><USER72> They're not that similar, aside from common UI elements seen all over the web, and showing the device and app. Honestly, the Square page looks like a typical theme you can buy on ThemeForest for less than $20</comment></comment>


Groovy Weekly #40 - <AUTHOR> http://glaforge.appspot.com/article/groovy-weekly-40

<comment><USER2> > Groovy reached 10,000 questions on Stack Overflow

Groovy's shame considering it's a language with so few users, except in the case of Gradle's DSL, which has so few lines in build scripts.</comment>


Google: people won't 'collapse in terror' when someone uses Glass in a bathroom - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.theverge.com/2013/6/7/4405326/google-ceo-larry-page-glass-privacy <comment><USER2> What's the matter, do you have something to hide?

<comment><USER3> "...(from the Big Brother)?" Especially in light of the other stories today, this is getting downright scary. (see e.g. this: [http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/nsa-tapped- internet...](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/nsa-tapped-internet- servers&#x2F); )</comment></comment>


A Bot Bought Dozens of RTX 3080 Units Before Consumers Could Grab Them - <AUTHOR> https://www.pcmag.com/news/how-a-bot-bought-dozens-of-rtx-3080-units-before-consumers-could-grab-them <comment><USER2> It's a controversial viewpoint but I don't have an issue with these scalpers. This is just supply and demand. Nvidia should release more cards instead of artificially limiting the supply on release day. Don't buy into the hype.

Don't buy the card on eBay for more than Nvidia's MSRP at launch and these scalpers will be stuck with their cards. It will not hurt you in any way to buy the card a few weeks later, on the contrary... Some of the initial bugs will be ironed out and you as a consumer will be able to make a better choice since there will be a lot more reviews to look at as well.</comment>


Erlang/OTP R14B is now out - <AUTHOR> http://www.erlang.org/download/otp_src_R14B.readme

<comment><AUTHOR> From the Erlang mailing list:

"This release is mainly a stabilization of the R14A release (which was a beta) but there are some new functionality also."

<comment><USER2> Standard release schedule for Erlang/OTP. Same thing with R13A, and so on backward (except that the A releases have not previously been available outside of Ericsson (and had the name P rather than A)).

The R14B release is the real release of R14. Will then be incremented with R14B-1 etc.

I would recommend Erlang developers to use the B releases in development, but wait for the B-1 release before upgrading production servers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Use the torrent for faster downloads... [http://www.erlang.org/download/torrents/otp_src_R14B.tar.gz....](http://www.erlang.org/download/torrents/otp_src_R14B.tar.gz.torrent) which is linked prominently from erlang.org's downloads page.

Actually, what I find most interesting is that looking at their tracker stats: <http://www.erlang.org/stats/torrent.html> reveals surprisingly small download counts. It isn't clear when the download counts were last reset (or if this is accurate at all?), but so far, only 13 people have completed a download of this latest build via the torrent, and at most a few hundred of earlier versions. Interesting way to estimate the size of the "active" Erlang community?

<comment><USER4> This doesn't hold account of people installing it through packages or compiling from the github repositories or downloading the flat file without a torrent.

<comment><USER3> Understood. I suspect flat file is #1 (although it's a big file and the erlang.org server isn't on the world's fastest pipe). I doubt too many "active users" use distro packages because of how out of date they often are. But to me, just for an order of magnitude estimate, it suggests an active Erlang community of perhaps a few thousand users. Just helps me put a number on it when I had no reference previously. You probably have your own estimates based on your traffic stats... and thanks for your Learn You Some Erlang tutorial: <http://learnyousomeerlang.com/> !

<comment><USER4> Yeah, Learn You Some Erlang gets an average of 4800 unique visitors (or 41500 page views) a month according to awstats.

There are about 100 (mostly idling) users in the #erlang channel on freenode and a few hundreds on the mailing lists. There are 1,800 subscribers to r/erlang on reddit. You have 719 watchers of the Erlang/OTP project just on github. Trapexit's project tracker has a bit more than 1450 projects (<http://projects.trapexit.org/web/>) there.

Note that it's been a few versions since Ubuntu started shipping with a minimal version of Erlang to allow CouchDB to be used there, so the repository stats likely show a whole damn lot of users, so it'd be hard to count how many developers you have precisely.

A few thousand developers might be a good estimate, although those would only be the vocal, active ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Please advise on when erlang is good for production. They have a bit more frequent releases, it seems, an I'd expect.

Is it feasible to install R14B and stick with it until R15B? Or do i need to be installing the -1 ets as well?

Also, is there no autoupdatable ubuntu package so that I can at least install security patches?

<comment><USER6> Companies with telecom products are generally conservative about switching Erlang versions. Most of Corelatus' production systems run R11B-5. Quite a few still run R9C-2. There's no compelling reason to upgrade them, there are thousands of those systems in dozens of countries and most run billing systems. They typically run for years at a time and only get upgraded in conjunction with a larger system upgrade.

It's not like you sit there typical 'apt-get update' a couple of times a day to see if there's anything new you might want...

On the other hand, people who are new to the language generally like to use the very latest because it contains the most features. E.g. later versions have increasingly good SMP support, which may be important if you're working on something which has to scale across many cores, but it's completely irrelevant to me because our hardware only runs Erlang on one core.

My suggestion for a starting point: if you're just developing, follow the R14 sequence, i.e. every time a new one gets release, download it, compile and install from source. If you're ready to deploy now, use R13B04 and let others find the bugs in R14.

Potential biases: I work at Corelatus. I've worked for Ericsson. I maintain the Erlang FAQ.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is where Node.js and Clojure fanboys should learn from. First ones, about what is real concurrency, second ones - what is a functional programming (as opposed to code imperative stuff in a funny lisp-like systax). ^_^

<comment><USER8> why so many comments starting with a "fanboyism" criticism are perfect examples of fanboyism???

<comment><USER7> I don't know about why so many, but my own comments are based on a some sort of a cognitive dissonance between what I read in the related mailing lists and in classic CS books like SCIP or what I've learnt from a Berkeley's courses.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN:  Would improving US high school education discourage entrepreneurship? - <AUTHOR>

Some factors to consider:<p>* getting grade inflation under control would reduce self-confidence, thus making it less likely that people would do a startup<p>* a better understanding of probability would allow people to more accurately predict their chances of success, thus reducing the number who would attempt a startup<p>* a more competitive high school environment would implicitly tell students that academia is the way to go <comment><USER2> Ultimately, improving high school education should to lead to smarter, more imaginative students, who focus less on grades and more on their aspirations. I don't see how this _couldn't_ lead to even more entrepreneurship.

* Getting grade inflation under control will help demonstrate to students that results come from work, not from handouts. Entrepreneurs have probably the best grasp of this idea.

* The average founder probably has a much better grasp of probability than the average high school graduate. This doesn't seem to stop them now.

* A more competitive high school environment will encourage kids to do amazing things. Sure, some will get caught up in the grades game, but an ideal education system wouldn't have kids idolizing grades as is done today, and students will be allowed to focus on the things that matter to them (be it arts, entrepreneurship, or a million other mentally stimulating activities whose end results mean more than grades).

</comment><comment><USER3> Getting grade inflation under control would teach that life is not an all or nothing proposition and a business does not have to win the VC/IPO fame lottery to be viable.

A better understanding of probability would create a better understanding of the difference between the mass market and niche markets.

Improving high school education would create better educated students, who would make educated decisions.

</comment><comment><USER4> You have a _lot_ of hidden assumptions built into your statements, to the point that unpacking them would take longer than I care to spend on it. Your question is malformed.

</comment><comment><USER5> Why are those "factors"? Do you have examples demonstrating the these are indeed cause-effect relationships and not just your opinion? e.g. "getting grade inflation under control would reduce self-confidence" - For every student? According to who? What do school test marks have to do with starting a business?

</comment><comment><USER6> High School is a early 20th century (industrial age) concept and should be scrapped. We need innovation, choice, and flexibility in education. The current system is a dinosaur on a trillion dollar+ life support system.</comment>


RoboFootball League – Each play determined by Ethereum - <AUTHOR> https://robo.football/ <comment><AUTHOR> eSports are the future</comment>


17 dimes, 21 nickels, and no decisions. - <AUTHOR> http://www.glowingrectangles.com/2012/09/17-dimes-21-nickels-and-no-decisions/

<comment><USER2> When I find something I like I end up ordering it over and over again, never wanting to substitute. this solves two things, no decision needs to be made, and cost/benefit analysis of ordering something new says the risk of not getting something good is too high to chance so i'll just keep getting the same thing until i'm tired of it, because I know it is good. boring I know.

<comment><AUTHOR> I tend to do that naturally, but in an effort to get more experiences in life, I try to always go for something new.

"New is always better. True Story" - Barney Stinson

(the quotes logic is utter bs, but still relevant)</comment></comment>