Toshiba says they made a mistake but they still cannot help me - <AUTHOR> http://bandyt.site44.com/toshiba/ <comment><USER2> You probably aren't familiar with how "guarantees" work here in South America, ugh.

See companies like Samsung and Toshiba have "certified" stores that "take guarantees" but they are not tied by their parent company, they are privately owned stores that just negotiated with the parent company to use their "sticker".

I bought a Phillips shaver and under warranty, the Phillips station wanted me to pay 70% of the cost of a new one, despite being a DoA device.

So while the sticker works as it should in the US and Europe, South America has a god damn wild west scenario. Anything goes, and if you don't like it, buy something else. Yep.

(Source: I live in Bolivia)

<comment><USER3> Yup, that's the case in both Argentina and Brazil too. But then, customer service sucks pretty much at every level. In the US you can buy a product from Walmart, use it for a couple weeks and if you aren't happy with it just return/exchange it (and yes, you get your money back, not some store credit.) Coming from Argentina, I was amazed the first time it worked and felt like I was ripping someone off. After a while I got used to the idea that _that_ is how customer service should work.

<comment><USER4> Some people do abuse this to rip companies off, to varying degrees; I know some people who treat returns as free rentals, buying something, using it without ever intending to keep it, and then returning it. Some people go even further and steal things and then return them for cash.

But I guess that on the whole, the good customer experience for the honest customers outweighs the cost of fraud.

<comment><USER5> EDIT: My apologies. It looks like I'll need to have a discussion with my friend about this.

<comment><USER6> Regarding returning things without a receipt:

Once upon a time, it used to be possible to get Bing points by playing a bunch of stupid games on Club Bing - you could accumulate at most 1000 per day, unless there was some sort of modifier (like "double ticket day") site-wide. The prizes available for these points were usually older Microsoft products like old games (9.99USD), kitchen appliances, hammocks, cheap headphones, etc. The biggest prizes were Zunes, Vista, Microsoft Office, and the XBox360 Arcade Edition. As I recall, the XBox required some crazy amount of points and thus wasn't worth it...and Vista and Office are hardly sexy items. You could win at most one of each prize per physical mailing address.

The games that you played to win points were flash games, so a bunch of bot writers automated this. They'd register multiple accounts and try to max out the number of points they could get per day. Since users had multiple accounts, people would maintain different amounts of points to save for the big ticket items. I believe that Office and Vista were in the 50,000 to 100,000 point range. (Side note: Microsoft was slow, but they DID actually deliver - I got a 360 controller for free!) There are forums dedicated to "opportunities" like these.

So, what do you do with a free copy of Vista Ultimate? Well, one day a user who had exhausted all of the other prizes tried going to Best Buy with his copy. He went to customer service, in-store, and said "Hey, my grandmother got me this for my birthday. I already have it. Is there any way you could possibly help me out?"

Can you guess what they did? They gave him $450 in Best Buy credit.

For awhile, the overarching Club Bing metagame was to simply farm Vista Ultimate, go to a different Best Buy, and "return" your copy. And, on top of that, someone discovered that Microsoft's shipping treated "123 N. Fake Street Apartment A" and "123 N. Fake Street Apartment Z" (and, for that matter, "123 N. Fake Street Apartment AAAA") as unique addresses - so it became possible to have multiple copies of Vista Ultimate shipped to your house. At one point there were so many Club Bing copies of Vista Ultimate floating around that you could go on forums and purchase it directly for $100 because botters had exhausted their local return options.

<comment><USER7> So those pitiful statistics on Vista usage were -- inflated?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Doesn't look like it's just a misprinted warranty card to me:

[http://support.toshiba.com/warranty](http://support.toshiba.com/warranty) [http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/support/pdf_files/st...](http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/support/pdf_files/stdwar/gma501085010_web.pdf) [http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/support/pdf_files/st...](http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/support/pdf_files/stdwar/gma501086010_web.pdf) [http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/support/pdf_files/st...](http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/support/pdf_files/stdwar/gma501089010_web.pdf) [http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/support/pdf_files/st...](http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/support/pdf_files/stdwar/gma501089010_web.pdf) [http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/support/pdf_files/st...](http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/support/pdf_files/stdwar/gma501082010_web.pdf)

That'd be a mistake across warranty docs between 1 and 5 years. Also some other products:

[http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/support/pdf_files/st...](http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/support/pdf_files/stdwar/gma501168010_web.pdf) [http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/support/pdf_files/st...](http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/support/pdf_files/stdwar/gmaa00362010_web.pdf) [http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/support/pdf_files/st...](http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/support/pdf_files/stdwar/gmar00008010_web.pdf)

Seems a little odd though that support would go with an excuse like that. Is there more to the story?

<comment><USER9> Either there is more to this story, or the OP went to one illiterate customer care guy. OP should go and show them the official website and maybe make him/her talk to a customer care executive over phone.

<comment><AUTHOR> I talked to one call center in India and then I had to speak to the Latin America call center. They all said the same thing.

<comment><USER10> Rather mail to Toshiba and raise grievance. I see these days company responds better if you tweet against them. Just try it.

<comment><USER11> Twitted to Asus about Zenbook ux32vd that screen died 5x and still in warranty (comes back from repair, works sometimes a month, dies). No answer there. Maybe they are dead. Couse they are not repairing it eater... And Asus support is not support. It's customer avoidance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Manuel Diaz is the head of Toshiba Sales & Marketing for Latin America: [https://plus.google.com/105717227635873644097/about](https://plus.google.com/105717227635873644097/about) [http://www.linkedin.com/pub/manuel- diaz/4/862/644](http://www.linkedin.com/pub/manuel-diaz/4/862/644)

Make a nice _polite_ blog post with all of your documentation (including your sales receipt) and then send the link to him.

<comment><USER13> This seems like an immensely useful service (looking up executive level social media accounts). Are there companies out there who provide this service?

<comment><USER14> Fuck everything about that. No.

I work at a big company and get sales, marketing, press, and customer inquiries ALL THE TIME, at my PERSONAL email address (which is easier to find than my work address). There is absolutely nothing I can do to help you if you contact me directly because company policy forbids it, official channels exist for a reason.

<comment><USER15> That's fine as long as official channels work. But too often, "official channels" is "the mechanism by which we ignore everybody".

If a company suffers from people contacting the wrong people, I think the solution is to make it easier to contact the right people.

<comment><USER16> Are you an executive? At a lot of companies executives can safely ignore company policies at their discretion.

Also, you could just inform the customer to resend the info to the official channel and make sure someone is actually keeping an eye out for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I purchased Toshiba laptop in 2002. Within 3 months the laptop's graphics card failed. Toshiba does not repair their own laptops, rather they send it out to some 3rd party repair center. The repair center took 3 weeks to repairer the laptop. When I came back to pick it up, the laptop started but the screen turned off as soon as I picked it up from the counter. I left it with the relier center. 2 weeks later they called again. This time it worked for a day before dying again. 3rd time they took another 3 weeks to repair. After that it worked for a month and died. I gave up and got a new laptop. Since then I never purchase Toshiba. I don't care how good or bad their products are, their customer service is one of the worst.

<comment><USER18> > I gave up and got a new laptop.

Hopefully for free. Most states have a lemon law.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'll add another Toshiba support horror-story. It's why I haven't even looked at Toshiba products in 2-3 years:

My work laptop (supplied by employer) was a Toshiba and had a 1-year warranty. After about 10-11 months of using it, the DVD drive stopped working. Toshiba's warranty support was typical ship-to-depot, so IT pulled the drive and sent the laptop off for repairs. I wouldn't ordinarily care about a laptop our for repair, but IT supplied me with a temporary machine that was at least a generation back (ie: slow and heavy).

IT got a message that except that my machine had been received at the depot but heard nothing else for weeks and weeks after. By the time I'd bugged a tech at my company enough to contact them the warranty had lapsed ... and Toshiba refused to service the machine.

Toshiba refused to service it for several more weeks. I finally took over contacting support from the IT tech, and got the machine serviced after a half-dozen (long hold-time) calls. But for the amount of time the IT dept & me spent getting an optical drive fixed our company could have paid for two new machines.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've had good luck with Dells from that point of view. I've bought 3 in the US, and two, at some point in their lifetimes, have needed some love from a technician (bad HD, and a cosmetic problem with a very new laptop that I wanted fixed because I spent quite a bit on it). Despite being very much not in the US anymore, they promptly dispatched people on site (in Innsbruck, Austria, and Padua, Italy) to fix the problems with no questions.

(Edit: by the way, most recent one was one of these - nice dev machine if you like Linux! [http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-13-linux/pd](http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-13-linux/pd) )

<comment><USER21> You got overcharged.

I got a laptop from Newegg for ~$700-$800 with an i7, nVidia GPU, and Windows license. Installing Linux is easy enough, and dual booting gives you flexibility if you want/need to run apps that refuse to go in Wine.

To be fair, my machine only came with 4GB of RAM and no SSD, but upgrades for those can surely be found for less than the $400-$500 price differential.

And a system with no discrete GPU is crippled if you're a gamer. If I'm paying $1000 plus for a system, you can be sure it'll have a decent GPU.

<comment><USER22> To be honest there's a lot more that factors in when you're buying a computer for business. It's not just the CPU and GPU that come with it, there's a plethora of other factors that may be important to the buyer, such as:

* Maximum ram upgrade amount (most consumer laptops max out at 8 GB or 16 GB)

* Screen quality (IPS vs TN, glare vs anti-glare, etc)

* Keyboard layout and quality (yes, this matter A LOT if you type all day on the computer)

* Driver compatibility (since Linux is mentioned)

* Weight, roughness (or beat-up factor), portability factors, battery life, modularity, expansion ports... the list goes on.

It's not just "this machine which has a top end Intel i7 CPU and an SSD" for everyone.

<comment><USER20> For me the screen is the most important thing. Pretty much anything these days is 'fast enough' for what I need if it's got enough memory. I was a bit disappointed, infact, in the HD screens these days - my old one was 1920x1200, rather than the new one with 1920x1080.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> After a serial number lookup, it appears that this Toshiba laptop's warranty expired in Feb. of 2013.

This is using the s/n in the image: [http://bandyt.site44.com/toshiba/garantia2.jpg](http://bandyt.site44.com/toshiba/garantia2.jpg)

Results of the s/n search: (from site: [http://support.toshiba.com/warranty](http://support.toshiba.com/warranty))

Model Name: SATELLITE C850D Product Category: Portable Model-Part Number: PSCBQU-00200F Serial Number: YC307409Q Registration Number: 827633 Purchase Date: Nov 26, 2012 Country Purchased: United States Complimentary Phone Support Through: Feb 24, 2013 Warranty: Warranty expired! +++ Warranty Expiration Date: Nov 26, 2013 Primary Service Option: Out of Warranty Service ++ [http://toshibarepairservices.com](http://toshibarepairservices.com)

<comment><USER24> > YC307409Q

You entered the wrong serial number. It's YC317409Q.

> Warranty Expiration Date: Feb 24, 2014

<comment><USER23> You're right, I entered '307' instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm probably with you, but there's not a lot of information here. Where did you buy it? Could it have been from a dealer that wasn't authorized to issue this warranty? If they couldn't agree to it on Toshiba's behalf the contract would be null, right? And what is the problem with the laptop - though that is of course a separate question from that of honoring the warranty.

<comment><AUTHOR> Bought it from Amazon.com directly Feb 19

<comment><USER26> Have you tried contacting Amazon's customer service about this? Get _them_ to either enforce the warranty or replace the laptop themselves.

<comment><AUTHOR> Amazon has always been good with me but I am past the 30 day policy to return it them. Anyways it is Toshiba's reponsibility...

<comment><USER27> TL/DR: Have Amazon handle this for you, they are awesome at customer service.

I had a one year old HTC Desire which malfunctioned under warranty (Europe here = 2yrs mandatory) and sought to return it to them for repair. They were a huge pain in the ass, refusing to pay shipping to the repair depot despite this being explicitly covered, and so I asked Amazon (from whom I bought it) for assistance dealing with HTC. Totally shocked when Amazon told me 'No problem, here's a free shipping label, send it back to us for a full refund. The price was hundreds of pounds less by then and they refunded the original price. It was in pretty good shape but not at all in 'like new' condition. I immediately bought another from them and kept the difference - they weren't interested in just exchanging it.

Fast forward to now, and it's pretty much the same deal with LG and a defective Nexus 4. LG agreed in writing to reimburse shipping prior to me sending it, but now want to change the terms & added an NDA and are illegally withholding payment[1] of their debt. I contacted Amazon again and they told me the same deal: 'Send it in for a full refund any time, no problem'.

Needless to say, I now buy all electronics on Amazon. This is probably their goal and we're both okay with it. As for HTC and LG, at least in the UK, they are bastards and I'll keep hoping for better support from other manufacturers when I can.

[[https://twitter.com/tombrossman/status/418003090059448322](https://twitter.com/tombrossman/status/418003090059448322)]

<comment><USER28> _TL /DR: Have Amazon handle this for you, they are awesome at customer service._

They are. We once purchased a PS3 controller from Amazon Marketplace. It turned out to be a counterfeit, but we didn't notice until 3/4 year later when Sony disabled many counterfeit controllers. We contacted Amazon to warn about this seller. They didn't only remove the seller from Marketplace, they also gave us a full refund.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Toshiba has been aggressive at limiting DIY repairs as well. They sent Tim Hicks a takedown notice forcing him to remove service manuals from his site: [http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/11/cease-and-desist- manual...](http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/11/cease-and-desist-manuals- planned-obsolescence/)

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm sorry to hear that you are having this problem. After buying/selling 10,000+ used laptops (every brand imaginable) over many years, I personally purchase and recommend only Toshiba laptops. Take it for what it's worth.

<comment><AUTHOR> Most brands are made in Foxcon anyways. I think it is the support and service that makes the brand.

<comment><USER30> I can't speak to the support/service (which seems to be lacking here). I'm just saying they were, by far, the most reliable machines we bought/sold.

<comment><USER31> This has been my experience as well. Bought a Satellite A205 that got left near a window in the rain, so got all wet on the back. Wiped it off, let it dry, and it was fine. It's been through hell and back over the past 5 years and is still kicking. Recommended them to my family and they're all still operating fine years later.

This is not to say whether or not their service sucks- I've just never needed to interact with their service department.

<comment><USER32> I've got a Toshiba Satellite 320CDT (Pentium 233MMX, 96 MB RAM) from 1998 that still runs -- I installed Debian Wheezy on it last November. Toshiba went through a really bad spell a few years later, but now their machines don't seem much less reliable than HP or Dell's consumer laptops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> After buying a Toshiba Satellite P100-J01 years ago, and having to choose between either sound or ACPI when running GNU/Linux (until a BIOS update came out, and even then I had to patch the DSDT), I'll never buy Toshiba again.

[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux- source-2.6.2...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux- source-2.6.22/+bug/136469)

</comment><comment><USER34> Okay, I must say the situation depends.

I bought a Toshiba laptop previously and accidentally lots of water got leaked into it. (was my mistake)

The system didn't reboot at all. They entirely replaced my RAM and other hardware components free of cost. This happened in India. So I guess the situation varies.

<comment><AUTHOR> I can see that happening but in this case I am screwed..

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yet another bad-after-sale-support story. Why is this on HN? If you go stand at _any_ laptop brand service centre, you'll hear 50 such stories everyday.

<comment><USER35> Because it's good for people to know that Toshiba sucks, so that they can avoid buying their products.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> If you purchased this with a credit card, you may be able to use the card's warranty. Many credit cards come with an extended warranty service and dispute resolution/fraud protection as a customer incentive (in addition to their points/frequent flier miles/whatever). Even if this is not covered under your card's extended warranty, talking with your credit card company may allow you get the charges reversed.

</comment><comment><USER37> Please don't tell me what to do. Every one of Toshiba's major competitors do things that are wrong and fail to own up to them.

It would take a lot more than this to get me to avoid a company as large as Toshiba.

<comment><AUTHOR> So if other companies are worse does that excuse another of doing wrong?

<comment><USER38> There would be very few companies to buy things from if we stopped doing business with every company that has ever had a complaint against them.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just want my laptop fixed. Once they fix it I would gladly remove everything. Sadly this is the only way to get their attention.

<comment><USER39> I was with you until I saw this comment. If everything you've stated is true, why not keep what you have up and just add an update to how Toshiba fixed your laptop?

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right...I will

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is perhaps the best and most tech-influential spot you can gain to advertise an issue you're having with a company/product.

However, I have a sneaking suspicion that nobody at Toshiba visits HN.

</comment><comment><USER41> Sorry you have to face this annoyance!

I had a similar problem with top-end ultrabook from ASUS (13.3" FHD i7 Zenbook Prime with discrete graphics) in 2012.

The ultrabook stopped after 2.5 months (keyboard problem), then after RMA got update that it was a customer induced damage (definitely not, it was an issue many people complained about) requiring replacement of both keyboard and motherboard almost for the price of a new ultrabook. I was really upset and after 6 months of having it in a drawer I sent the ultrabook for an analysis to an independent lab - it turned out only the keyboard module was damaged, motherboard was OK. I ordered a keyboard replacement from asusparts (~$100) and it works till today. Never heard any sorry from ASUS for trying to extract money from me for a "damaged" motherboard.

Having said that, I scratched ASUS off my list for the rest of my life. This happened in Germany. Paradoxically I was just thinking about buying Toshiba Qosmio X70-136 as my DTR but after reading this I will go with some Clevo- based manufacturer like. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER42> As a Canadian I deplore this apparent policy. I'm not sure why Toshiba has introduced it, but it wouldn't surprise me if there is difficulty warding off warranty fraud under certain legal systems. Like, those legal systems your lawyers don't know. (You fired the international lawyers as a corner-cutting move, remember?)

</comment><comment><USER43> Hey man. I can't figure out how to direct message you. I contacted Toshiba via twitter and asked for a comment. They said they would investigate. You may want to contact them directly.

Support says they've passed the matter to "customer service mgmt. Expecting a response on Monday."

These dudes: @ToshibaUSAhelp

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you Mike! I saw your comment on twitter!

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> When you buy online you need to investigate what happens before you need service. A consumer might not need to go to the effort but for a programmer a good laptop is a tool.

Years ago I bought Dell's and found paying extra for their onsite service was a wise investment. Only needed it for a single machine but they literally came to our office with parts and repaired it. Until I needed it a second time and found they had changed policies and found onsite was in name only.

So when I started buying Toshiba Qosmio's I actually investigated my service options in Michigan. It has paid dividends because whenever I've had a problem I can get on the phone with the company's owner, they turn it around faster than shipping it to Toshiba's depot and keep me informed every step of the way.

</comment><comment><USER45> Oh, yes, Toshiba's support sucks, especially if you live outside US and EU. My Qosmio laptop was constantly overheating in summers, power adapter got broken twice (and on one of those occasions literally started burning, smoking and all melted down), volume control got broken after about 6 months and started randomly changing the sound volume to max (very scary thing since I often leave my laptop playing music when I go to sleep)... and each time I would have to wait for 2-3 weeks for them to "repair" it. And it wasn't cheap at all, I could easily get Apple MBP for that money (which I eventually did)

</comment><comment><USER46> I've had bad experiences with Toshiba refusing to honor warranties before. After hours on the phone it turned out that the reason they wouldn't help me is because they had recorded my date of birth as the date of purchase and vice versa. Apparently no one there thought it strange that the laptop had been out of warranty for more than two decades... The one manager that did understand the absurdity of the situation still insisted that no one at his call center had the authority to make the obvious correction. Like the OP, I will never buy another Toshiba product, and I tell all my friends the same.

</comment><comment><USER47> I like the Toshiba laptop I got.. but the Toshiba Thrive tablet which came out at the same time as Xoom has not received any updates! Xoom is on 4.4, Thrive has been abandoned.

</comment><comment><USER48> So, I don't know about the north/south american systems, but in the UK when a manufacturer or a store fails to meet their obligations you sue them in small claims court. I've never heard of a company not settling out of court, they don't want a precedent set against them and they don't want to fly their lawyers out to talk about a laptop return for a day.

</comment><comment><USER49> My own Toshiba experience with Australian support is that they wouldn't even talk to you unless you paid them $55. I was after a service manual, not troubleshooting, but I couldn't even get to ask what I wanted unless I paid. There were a couple of other times I needed to ask for trivial things to service clients' laptops, but at $55 per question, sod them.

</comment><comment><USER50> I know the feeling! Living in Puerto Rico is a double edge scenario. I might be fully treated as an US customer with all the benefits or they just don't consider us a US Territory. Sometimes we are another country somewhere in the Caribbean, sometimes we get confused with Latin America and then the options for services just becomes close to none.

</comment><comment><USER51> I'm sorry this happened to you, buddy. That really sucks. Us United States consumers should be more concerned with the shortcuts and backhanded ways companies deal with customers outside of the States. A company that treats customers badly just because it CAN instead of doing what it SHOULD doesn't deserve our business.

</comment><comment><USER52> This seems like it would be a "truth in advertising" violation. From your pictures, normal recourse looks like binding arbitration but maybe the truth in advertising angle can make it a bigger deal. Especially since someone else pointed out that they have included Latin America in their warranty list for years.

</comment><comment><USER53> Called customer service for about 2 hours, they said that they made a mistake in printing the warranty card and that I would have to pay to repair the laptop.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---

Ugg. Too bad for them but I wonder what the small claims court would have to say about it. Contract is what's advertised, not what you secretly thought.

...

Assuming there is an equivalent there, of course.

</comment><comment><USER54> Toshiba makes crap. Most Windows-based laptops are. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it still makes more sense to buy a Mac laptop and run Windows on it. Every time a friend or family member asks me what Windows-based laptop to buy, I have to tell them to buy a Mac because of shitty situations like this one.

<comment><USER55> The sony vaio ones are pretty good in my experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> 2 Thoughts:

1\. Bill Clinton might say - "Well, it depends on your definition of Latin America."

2\. You should mail the CEO of Toshiba. In fact, you should give us the contact info for the CEO of Toshiba so we can mail him on your behalf.

</comment><comment><USER57> They are all the same, trust me, I am facing same on my HP laptop, they say that they are not responsible for poor battery backup after 2 months of purchase because I use my laptop excessively!!

</comment><comment><USER58> Latin America is a conceptual region, not a concrete set of countries. They can probably get away with not honoring the warranty in Guatemala because of this ambiguous terminology.

<comment><USER59> But there are no definitions of Latin America that do not include Guatemala: a) Former Spanish colonies b) Spanish speaking countries c) Romance language speaking countries d) Countries South of the USA

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> I've heard plenty of bad things about Toshiba customer support last time I was looking for a laptop. It's not too hard to find complaints about them.

</comment><comment><USER61> I guess if toshiba lies in the warranty and does not assume its errors, it should also lie in other things. Not a good company to do business with.

</comment><comment><USER62> I won a Toshiba in a science competition. Even though it was free it still sucked, they make terrible little machines.

</comment><comment><USER63> Site is down due to "excessive usage", couldn't find this in the Google cache either.

<comment><AUTHOR> fixed it, Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> According to the picture you are going to have to go to arbitration to dispute this. What a bummer.

<comment><USER65> The good news is that Toshiba probably gets to choose the venue and the arbiter! What could possibly go wrong?

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> I guess I won't buy toshiba at all now. I will also tell my friends to not buy toshiba.

</comment><comment><USER67> 4 points and the site is down

<comment><AUTHOR> fixed it! Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> I was about to buy toshiba portege laptop. Now I have changed my mind. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER69> try calling Toshiba laptop support for North America and press/ask for a representative in Spanish, they do laptop support for (some?) Latin American countries out of Mississauga, Ontario

<comment><AUTHOR> I did talk them in Spanish, the manager was the one I spoke to there...

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Did you buy from an authorized retailer?

<comment><AUTHOR> from Amazon.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Website still isn't working...

</comment><comment><USER72> Hey Moneer. Just wanted to say, I miss you buddy! I hope this all gets sorted out. Let me know if I can help you in any way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Bobby! Thanks for the support!

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> i remember back in college my friends would call them shitobas because they broke so often

</comment><comment><USER74> Take up the problem with Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER75> ... in Guatemala

</comment><comment><USER76> I haven't since this event:

> In 1987, Tocibai Machine, a subsidiary of Toshiba, was accused of illegally > selling CNC milling machines used to produce very quiet submarine propellers > to the Soviet Union in violation of the CoCom agreement, an international > embargo on certain countries to COMECON countries. The Toshiba-Kongsberg > scandal involved a subsidiary of Toshiba and the Norwegian company Kongsberg > Vaapenfabrikk. The incident strained relations between the United States and > Japan, and resulted in the arrest and prosecution of two senior executives, > as well as the imposition of sanctions on the company by both countries.[6] > Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania said "What Toshiba and Kongsberg did was > ransom the security of the United States for $517 million."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba#1939_to_2000](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba#1939_to_2000)

<comment><USER77> The Free World won the war against Communism through economic warfare, surely Toshiba contributed to that impoverishing them by $517 million of hard currency for weapons they never got to use?

<comment><USER78> Not necessarily. That $517 million would very likely have been spent on attempts to reproduce the technology themselves, not on economic development.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> Now I understand why people came and coming U.S..

</comment><comment><USER80> I don't know why you are posting this on HN. Anyway you have several options:

1\. Go to the vendor you bought it through

2\. Go to your credit card company

3\. Look up the consumer protection laws of your country and use them

<comment><USER81> 4\. Warn other consumers from buying Toshiba products.

5\. Shame Toshiba into living up to their word.

<comment><USER80> Apple did exactly the same thing in Europe (worse actually, they lied to make people buy AppleCare). In China too iirc.

Use your legal rights, and advertise what you did. If you don't know your rights you'll probably have a bad time.

<comment><USER82> Not to mention Apple in Australia. That kind of warranty protection is enough to make me want to move there! ;-)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


'Neopets': Inside Look at Early 2000s Internet Girl Culture - <AUTHOR> http://www.rollingstone.com/glixel/features/neopets-a-look-into-early-2000s-girl-culture-w509885 <comment><USER2> Was this really just girls? I knew plenty of guys who played as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, but they talk about that in the article:

"According to Sharon Lamb and Lyn Mikel Brown in their 2006 book Packaging Girlhood, nearly 60 percent of Neopets' visitors were girls, which is high for a computer game in the early 2000s. Glixel reached out to Neopets' original creators for more detailed data, but did not receive a response."</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What percentage of your paycheck do you spare for 401k? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Always the max, to capture the full annual limit for the company match amount as early as possible in the year, in case of a job loss or job change mid- year.

</comment><comment><USER3> The maximum amount your present company allows.</comment>


Breach affecting 1M was caught only after hacker maxed out target's storage - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/11/breach-affecting-1-million-was-caught-only-after-hacker-maxed-out-targets-storage/ <comment><USER2> Given the fair assumption that any piece of data you give to a third party system that has access to the internet will eventually be breached, I feel like we need an entirely new system for data sharing.

The problem with most of these hacks isn't usually so much that the hacked system itself has lots of valuable data, but that the data from the hacked system can be used to hack into _other_ systems that _do_ have valuable data. Just like we tell people to only use a different password per-site, we need the option to essentially give only tokenized versions of our data to third parties. We've started somewhat with tokenization in place of credit card numbers, but we should be able to do this in many more areas.

There are obvious difficulties here regarding how we'd handle certain fields (e.g. how do I calculate your shipping if I don't know your exact zip code), but these should still be solvable problems.

The alternative of believing that every rinky dink (or non-rinky dink) site out there will be able to keep your data secure is laughable.

<comment><USER3> > _There are obvious difficulties here regarding how we 'd handle certain > fields (e.g. how do I calculate your shipping if I don't know your exact zip > code)_

Forget calculating shipping; how do you ship me my product _at all_ without me giving you my address?

(A quick napkin sketch would be that I wouldn't, I'd give you a USPS reference number, which you could use to calculate shipping costs as well as actually mail me a thing; only the USPS would be able to link the reference number to my physical location. There's almost certainly problems with this idea, which is why it's a napkin sketch.)

<comment><USER2> "USPS reference number" seems like it could work relatively similarly to a PO Box.

Main difference of course being that you want the ability to generate a unique "PO Box" per merchant.

Of course, there is a 3rd party (the post office in this case) that would need to know the mappings between real address and "reference number", but even in the case the post office got hacked at least they would only get your _old_ mappings. Any new purchases would use new reference numbers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does the title bother anyone else? 1M what? People, records, a subsidiary of 3M.

<comment><USER5> "subsidiary of 3M" : made me laugh quietly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've got a long running bet this is how AGI will be discovered as well. A full disk alert will lead a tired sysadmin to ssh into an old R&D GPU system and be greeted with "Hello, Dave"

</comment><comment><USER7> plaintext passwords in 2019 .. it hurts to read articles like these.

<comment><USER8> These are often found in log files when people get a bit to log happy.

I've seen many smart developers accidentally log a request in an API that also happens to show the login credentials.

<comment><USER9> Even Google fell for that one recently.

<comment><USER10> Didn't Facebook fell for it too?

<comment><USER11> No. Never.

<comment><USER10> Could "Never" be defined as a time frame from year 2012 to at least 2019 ?

[https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/03/facebook-stored- hundreds...](https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/03/facebook-stored-hundreds-of- millions-of-user-passwords-in-plain-text-for-years/)

[https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/21/18275837/facebook- plain-t...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/21/18275837/facebook-plain-text- password-storage-hundreds-millions-users)

[https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2019/03/faceb...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2019/03/facebook-developers-wrote-apps-that-stored-users-passwords- in-plaintext/)

[https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-passwords-plaintext- cha...](https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-passwords-plaintext-change- yours/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> >full payment card numbers

storing these in plain text violates PCI-DSS

<comment><USER13> The article doesn't say that they were stored in plaintext. Still a PCI violation though!

<comment><USER14> From the FTC complaint:

"... stored consumers' personal information, including consumers' SSNs, payment card information (including full or partial credit card and debit card numbers, CVVs, and expiration dates), bank account information (including account and routing numbers), and authentication credentials such as user IDs and passwords, in clear, readable text on InfoTrax's network."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Reminds me of something similar that happened to me once a long time ago.

I hacked into a server. I wanted to take a copy of everything so I made a tar of / to wget it to computer later. Only that the disk was at >50% usage so I filled it by making the tar file. Everything stopped to work with 0 bytes left of disk space (I wasn't root) so I kinda bricked the machine. I had to walk away in shame.

<comment><USER9> > I had to walk away in shame.

No, you'd have walked away in shame if you had walked away in handcuffs. Don't do stupid stuff. Imnsho you got lucky that disk filled up before you could notch up a(nother?) crime.

<comment><USER15> What happened is arguably more stupid: by filling up the disk, 1) they definitely noticed, 2) I couldn't get what I wanted, and 3) I couldn't clean up the logs after it. Thankfully I had covered up my steps (or, more probably, the sysadmin was ashamed to see he had been hacked and chose to fix it and say nothing).

<comment><USER9> I hope you learned and not just to use 'df' more often.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Running lean: Download book for free, pay with a tweet - <AUTHOR> http://www.runningleanhq.com/

<comment><USER2> Not, not free... is a 20% discount code if you tweet first.

ಠ_ಠ

<comment><AUTHOR> I got a 100% discount 3 hours ago, just clicking the button that says "Pay with a tweet".</comment></comment>


At Last, a Firewall for Your Car's Black Box - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/04/autocyb-car-firewall/ <comment><USER2> But you need to unlock the car in order to get to it, surely that keeps out anyone nefarious?

I don't see what problem this solves.</comment>


Rails rumble 2015 is here - <AUTHOR> http://blog.railsrumble.com/2015/08/11/announcing-rails-rumble-2015/

<comment><AUTHOR> Need tips on how to choose an idea which can be coded in 48 hours with 4 people in the team ?</comment>


What Should Children Read? - <AUTHOR> http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/what-should-children-read/

<comment><USER2> Everything, and as much as possible.</comment>


Spotify Lightsaber progress bar - <AUTHOR> Go play the new Rogue One soundtrack for a cool surprise in the bottom of your player. <comment><AUTHOR> [http://imgur.com/a/cMGzV](http://imgur.com/a/cMGzV)</comment>


ProtonMail and SMTP and Linux is out of beta - <AUTHOR> https://protonmail.com/blog/proton-bridge-linux-launch/ <comment><AUTHOR> Yikes, thanks for the title edit moderator - I understand what you are looking for in a title like this, now.

Unfortunately translating the pluses to and breaks the semantics. If you see this, should I just re-submit it with a better title?</comment>


Ask HN: Do you keep a programmer journal? If so what do you document and how? - <AUTHOR> I've been thinking of keeping a journal for a long time, I've had many false starts. If you keep one, how does it benefit you? <comment><USER2> Every time it takes more than 10 minutes to solve a bug, describe the problem in your journal. When you eventually fix the bug, describe what went wrong, how you found the bug and how you fixed it. If you can't explain precisely what caused the bug, you haven't solved it yet.

As you build up a collection of mistakes and their solutions, start treating your journal like a checklist. When you encounter a new, unknown problem, review your journal- do any of the symptoms seem familiar? Any strategies you can try again?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great use case, thanks. Do you keep one? If so, how often do you find yourself going back and finding a solution from your journal? I feel a lot of my bugs are one-offs, maybe I'm not seeing a pattern because I'm not documenting them properly?</comment></comment>


Equifax I-Cards: A Service to Prove You Are Really You - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/a-service-to-prove-you-are-really-you/

<comment><USER2> I guess there somewhat of an off-line component, but how is this any better than having a client certificate signed by a "trusted" 3rd-party entity?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's very similar. Typically client certs are "dossier" certs that contain _everything_ the CA knows about you, while infocards can contain only certain claims (e.g. the holder is over 18).</comment></comment>


On webkit monoculture - <AUTHOR> http://germanforblack.com/post/43978215281/on-webkit-monoculture

<comment><USER2> This is a very different world from the one in which IE6 rose to dominance. We're in no way in a Webkit monoculture right now – Trident and Gecko aren't going anywhere any time soon!

Specifically addressing Opera: the smaller-audience engines that have had their chance but not done much with it should be left behind, making room for new small players to step in and take the reins. I can't wait to see some new players in this space.</comment>


Filigrams: A New Type of Pretty Picture (2000) - <AUTHOR> http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/filigram/ <comment><USER2> looks similar visually to "Patterns in modular Arithmetic" not sure if they are mathematically same though.

[http://maxwelldemon.com/2011/11/20/22-1-patterns-in- modular-...](http://maxwelldemon.com/2011/11/20/22-1-patterns-in-modular- arithmetic/)</comment>


Cod accused of "rewriting history" to blame Russia for controversial US attacks - <AUTHOR> https://www.eurogamer.net/2019-10-28-call-of-duty-modern-warfare-accused-of-rewriting-history-to-blame-russia-for-controversial-us-attacks <comment> Pick-A-Hill2019 According to the BBC - In total, there are more than 4,000 negative reviews from gamers playing on a PC, PS4 or Xbox, compared with just over 1,500 positive reviews.</comment>


What do grad students in math do all day? - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/4158578 <comment><USER2> > OK, so then, after more thinking and doing some research on extension cords, > you think it would be feasible to use a vacuum cleaner to clean the > outdoors. You look in the literature, and it turns out that nobody's ever > thought of doing that! You proudly tell this idea to your advisor, but they > do some back of the envelope calculations that you don't really understand > and tell you that vacuuming the outdoors is unlikely to be very useful. > Something about how a vacuum cleaner is too small to handle the outdoors and > that we already know about other tools that are much better equipped for > cleaning streets and such.

<http://www.travelblog.org/Photos/6689183>

[https://lh3.ggpht.com/-AnVOwQYTNos/TcQqcMYp- cI/AAAAAAAAAEw/2...](https://lh3.ggpht.com/-AnVOwQYTNos/TcQqcMYp- cI/AAAAAAAAAEw/2rOYWsCQC4Y/s320/montreal+street+cleaners.jpg)

<http://www.fotopedia.com/items/4tg1q9r7sq5v1-yq8FXc45gIE>

[http://pdf.directindustry.com/pdf/johnston- madvac/lt500-high...](http://pdf.directindustry.com/pdf/johnston- madvac/lt500-high-capacity-mobile-vacuum/26093-137061.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> What do grad students in math do all day?

[http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=%20exp%28-%28%28x-4%...](http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=%20exp%28-%28%28x-4%29^2%2B%28y-4%29^2%29^2%2F1000%29%20%2B%20exp%28-%28%28x%2B4%29^2%2B%28y%2B4%29^2%29^2%2F1000%29%20%2B%200.1exp%28-%28%28x%2B4%29^2%2B%28y%2B4%29^2%29^2%29%2B0.1exp%28-%28%28x-4%29^2%2B%28y-4%29^2%29^2%29&meta=)

</comment><comment><USER4> I read that answer on quora too a couple of days back :)</comment>


Mastering Google AdWords - <AUTHOR> http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/mastering-google-adwords/

<comment><USER2> There's a zillion books, blogs, seminars, and tips on optimizing Google Adwords. In my experience, unless you're really willing and able to dedicate a ton of time to Adwords, you won't do well with it (even if you read the books and go to the seminars, etc.) What does this mean? Google Adwords still isn't truly reaching the long tail of local businesses. I think it's one reason why people show interest in other promotional tools (like Groupon) for small local businesses. They're simply easier to use than Adwords. Most small business owners don't have the time or aren't web savvy enough to figure out how to optimize Adwords. I think there's a real opportunity to serve the lower end of the market that Adwords isn't reaching.</comment>


Only 8% Of Verizon iPhone Buyers Are Ditching AT&T - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/verizon-iphone-survey-2011-2 <comment><USER2> Sample size of 40.

Margin of error c. 15%.

Take this with a huge lump of salt.</comment>


Staying consistent helped Failory grow to 800$ MRR - <AUTHOR> https://www.blog.openstartuplist.com/how-staying-consistent-helped-failory-grow-to-800-mrr <comment><AUTHOR> Rich shared with us insights from Failory, his open startup. He has a unique perspective to learn from failed startups and not only those that succeed. Pretty insightful.</comment>


Bitcoin Payment Processor BIPS Attacked, Over $1M Stolen - <AUTHOR> http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-payment-processor-bips-attacked-1m-stolen/ <comment><USER2> I'm not a bitcoin expert, so I may end up off base, but...

The US government seemed surprisingly warm to bitcoin in the senate hearing. I suspect that if governments end up getting involved in bitcoin, each merchant will require some form of ID for each wallet that they interact with. This will mean that tracking down crimes like this will be fairly easy, since there's a record of each transaction. Trace down the chain, find the people involved, and if an anonymous wallet shows up, you investigate the people that it transferred to or from.

Sure, it erodes privacy, but bitcoin has the potential to make things _much_ easier for law enforcement (and anyone else interested in money transfers) by causing registration of endpoints, giving very strong leads to investigators.

<comment><USER3> If the US government decides to take this approach, I am sure that a few of these guys will do the exact opposite: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#Examples](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#Examples)

<comment><USER4> Jurisdictions like that have been increasingly disappearing. If regulators in major countries make it illegal to exchange BTC anonymously, it will significantly hamper its adoption.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ugh. There are much better solutions than keeping user funds in the hot wallet (fully cold storage with manual withdrawals, multi-signature wallets), but many "reputable" businesses STILL uses them. I don't understand why. If you want to store your customers funds online, do it the right way, or don't do it at all.

<comment><USER6> You cannot automate a cold-wallet scheme.

Any automated website or tool will require a "hot wallet" of some kind. The more funds in the hot wallet, the longer the website / BTC Bank can go automatically.

Customers like having funds available to them immediately... among other things.

<comment><USER7> Given the choice between being hacked, losing your reputation and millions of dollars; or having someone on call 24/7 to move USB sticks across an air gap; I'd choose the latter.

I've seen fast food joints and parking lots with 24/7 attendants, it can't possibly cost more than $100,000 a year.

<comment><USER6> THIS IS THE FUTURE EVERYONE!!!!

The future of modern banking is to return to physical transfer of funds. Instead of relying on modern networking, technology, automation, or websites... we will _manually_ move money over a physical medium.

</sarcasm>

Without automation, how the hell is BTC supposed to be any better than cash?

<comment><USER8> Uhhh let me get this right:

$10,000,000 spent to secure a bitcoin exchange to within 99.999% secure via "automation"

$100,000 spent to secure a bitcoin exchange to within 99.999% secure via physical air gap...

which makes more sense

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I know it makes for a better headline to say $1M stolen, but unless actual USD was taken in the theft, I wish these headlines would say "X BTC stolen, valued at $Y."

But then again, the headline made it to the front page and got me to comment...

<comment><USER10> Why do you wish that? Every news source on the planet localizes currency amounts to their audience. Are you actually making some weird political point about BTC value, or are you surprised that a news source is localizing currency values?

<comment><USER9> 1) When large amount of BTC are stolen or moved, the fiat value would be far less if the coins were sold on the open exchange.

2) The article title becomes immediately obsolete due to exchange rate fluctuations. On the day of the theft for instance, the BTC/USD rate was hugely volatile, fluctuating between $522 and $788.

We could go dig up the old Bitcoin Forum posts about people losing 25k coins and mark-to-market those losses for more sensational headlines. Or we could simply post the BTC amount in the headline along with present fiat value.

<comment><USER11> Well, it's a news article. The goal of the journalist is to get people to read it. It would be a less interesting headline if it forced people to do the conversion since many people still do not yet understand BTC. Putting both values (BTC & USD) into the headlines would make it redundant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you are new to bitcoin-related sites, you might find this story legitimate. But anyone that reads the article will see there is a basic flaw: DDoS attacks do not give access to the server, they just make the service inaccessible. If you read past (paid) articles about this very same service, you will see claims about how secure the system is, and how expert everyone that developed it is. The same was claimed by inputs.io, I'm sure you have read about that story earlier.

The thing is, if you want to use bitcoin, you cannot trust third parties to hold your coins for you. If you want to support bitcoin in your business, you cannot trust other sites to handle the payment for you. Yes, it is not convenient. But you have everything available to handle this yourself and, yes, you will need someone competent to do that for you if you are not into it. Bitcoin is not meant for the average user or the unaware merchant and it might never be, people need to start accepting this fact.

</comment><comment><USER13> Misleading. 1295 BTC were stolen, no USD.

<comment><USER14> Well thank goodness for that. At least this way there is no chance of recovery.

I enjoyed the bit at the end about a potential lawsuit to get the BTC back. Sounds awfully familiar to the legal posturing after some other BTC heists-- none of which got anywhere AFAIK.

Do people still think the irrevocability of BTC transactions is a good thing?

<comment><USER15> >Do people still think the irrevocability of BTC transactions is a good thing?

Yes. Third parties will provide escrow/insurance services if there is demand for them. Transactions been irreversible "by default" is a core benefit of bitcoin and merchants may preffer that over chargebacks at 18€.

<comment><USER16> I've heard that this type of insurance is expensive and a large part of banks' transaction fees. I can only imagine how expensive an insurance service like that for Bitcoin would be.

<comment><USER17> However unlike the existing system there will be a transparent, competitive market for such insurance mechanisms, and they will be available to consumers/businesses directly.

<comment><USER16> I think the banks are pretty focused on offering competitive products that are packaged together neatly to avoid putting too much of burden on consumers (what's the diff between choosing a bank or choosing a private transaction- insurance service?).

I'm paranoid of investment banks but I think plain old banks are benign. You put a certain amount of money in your account and they handle all this for you. There is usually no charge for checking. Credit cards don't charge interest unless you go into debt, etc.

I don't think lack of competition is so much an issue, it seems that the Bitcoin movement just has a fundamental distrust of govt/corporations. I think if Bitcoin money didn't magically appreciate in value so much it wouldn't be much cheaper than banking except for big international money transfers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Whale Communications, before they were purchased by Microsoft, had a hardware solution where a shared HDD disk was used to physically switch it between 2 different hosts to enable file sharing in a shared directory. would be almost perfect to secure the hot wallet of a BT service. MS seem to discontinued the product. I wander if something like this still exists from another vendor?

</comment><comment><USER19> Can we get a break from all these Bitcoin posts please?

<comment><USER20> I agree, there are six posts about Bitcoin right now on top. On one hand it is community regulated matter, but on other hand 20% of top posts is too much.

<comment><USER21> When Steve Jobs passed, the entire home page was related articles.</comment></comment></comment>


Do We Have a Free-Market Medical System? - <AUTHOR> https://mises.org/wire/do-we-have-free-market-medical-system <comment><USER2> I kind of feel all pricing should be transparent.</comment>


Google deserts desserts: Android 10 is the official name for Android Q - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/22/20827231/android-10-q-google-name-officially-announced-new-logo-wordmark-desserts <comment><USER2> I am waiting Apple to redesign iOS instead of keeping with the outdated iOS 7 style. Things like organizing the icons on the screen to our will like we do in Android aren't present as features must be because of patents. Aside from that, Apple needs to wash up the entire OS. Android keep updating Material Design every single year.

<comment><USER3> I have no interest in constant cosmetic updates.

But I would love for Apple to take after Windows Phone and use those gorgeous big tiles on the home screen. Fat chance, but one can dream.

Windows Phone was really something. A dearth of important apps, but design- wise it was a milestone.</comment></comment>


How is Philadelphia's startup ecosystem? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking to move in the next 12 months, and Philadelphia and the greater region has been shortlisted (wife has family there) as one of the potential locations to move.
Does Philadelphia have a good startup ecosystem, or am I going to find that there are plenty of "startups" but that the good jobs are few and far between?
I'm looking for something that's a bit more work-life balance than the previous startups I worked for, but at the same time I'm interested in being part of something that I believe in and which could lead to big things. <comment><USER2> I work in Philly - it is a great city! Very clean and lower crime compared to New York. Also the cost of living is much lower than California - not to mention the taxes! We have a great startup scene as well, but if your real goal is Create your own startup, then the Valley or NY has more money and exposure. On the other hand, if you want to join a great company, we have some great ones- from DuckDuckGo to Comcast. GSI Commerce just got bought by eBay, so I guess they do not count as a startup, but it is a great company. You can live in NJ and have the option to work either Philly or New York.

<comment><USER3> Fellow Philadelphian here, while Philly has a ton going for it, its crime rate is more than double New York's.

[http://city-crime-statistics.findthedata.org/compare/4852-65...](http://city- crime-statistics.findthedata.org/compare/4852-6509/New-York-vs-Philadelphia)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Might want to check out this map of statups in Philly:

[http://phillystartupleaders.org/map/](http://phillystartupleaders.org/map/)

I'm from the city, I live in SoCal now taking advantage of that startup scene, but I think if I moved back home I could find something tech oriented to do. Whether that company will be the next Amazon is a different story...

</comment><comment><USER5> Is a smaller version of NY, easier for mining data. Is a multi-cultural haven in which they all mingle within a 2 miles radius. Head over to North 3rd(N3rd) St, is the equivalent of Silicon Valley. That's your best bet to Net-Work if you seeking Innovation. HUSTLE!!!

I hope that was helpful..

@iamdprz

<comment><USER6> Well, "an analog to" rather than "the equivalent of" might be a better qualifier in the above.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> We are a philly startup hearo.fm and there is quite an ecosystem. Philly Startup Leaders hosts a ton of events and Penn/Wharton has a ton of founders who organize all kinds of things. Mentortech Partners and First Round are the prominent VCs. There are also a few co-working spaces. Are you a developer?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am a programmer, process manager, development manager, project manager, and former business owner. I've pretty much done everything.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How much would you pay for this?  - <AUTHOR>

I have a project I'm playing with. Trying to figure out pricing.
Pain point: Hand writing notes sucks - especially if you have bad hand writing. But hand written notes are powerful. And leave an impression.
Solution: Email email@example.com with note. Include address of recipient. We write it on a plane card with gender neutral hand writing. Stamp it. Send it.
What would you pay for this? http://www.scendr.com <comment><USER2> I would actually pay $0 and wouldn't use it. Why? It's a logical decision: a hand-written note is, as you said, powerful and it leaves an impression. People notice. I'm in Dallas, Texas - if I send a hand-written note to anyone who knows me, they know that I live in Dallas. If the note is postmarked from San Diego, for example, it loses it's value to me as a purchaser. Also, someone inevitably will ask about my handwriting. "Wow - you have great handwriting! Where did you learn to write like that?" Then what?

It's disingenuous and I'd have to fend off questions like the above. So I wouldn't buy it for any price.

That said, I'm one person and that's simply one person's opinion. It doesn't invalidate your idea so don't take this the wrong way (as an insult or personal attack). It's a fun idea, but not one I can see anyone who is "serious about business" using.

<comment><AUTHOR> Scott, appreciate the feedback. And I've gotten several pieces of feedback like yours. And, to some extent, I agree with you.

I would never send a note to my grandmother trying to deceive her. Nor will I send these to my family.

But... If I interview with a dozen people over a weekend. I might come out of each interview, and bang out a thank you note on the spot - while the conversation is fresh in my mind.

Or... If I meet with a dozen people at a company I'm selling my product to, I might follow up with individual notes thanking them for their time.

This will never replace the thank you notes you already send - it will simply enable you to send more thank you notes to people who are still deserving.

Again. thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you guys want to try it. I'll give it to ya for $3. Just send the email/note. Then I reply to request payment.

</comment><comment><USER3> $6 maybe?</comment>


Black Swan' Author Taleb: Stimulus Made Economic Crisis Worse - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-25/-black-swan-author-taleb-says-obama-s-stimulus-made-economic-crisis-worse.html

<comment><USER2> _"[Soros] made a lot more decisions. Buffett followed a strategy to buy companies that had a certain earnings profile, and it worked for him. There is a lot more luck involved in this strategy."_

I don't buy that. Even the shallowest read of Buffett's investment history, you'll find he's always followed a very concentrated portfolio strategy. He waits for the fat pitch, and loads up when an opportunity comes along. He's mentioned that if you were to take away his top 20 best investments, Berkshire would have a pretty average record.

Does Taleb believe more decisions increase the likelihood of reverting to the mean (ie: average returns in this case)? And by that logic, Soros has made more decisions, so that must suggest its less random, and more talent? This is a classic case of man with a hammer syndrome.

By only deploying capital when the odds are disproportionately in your favor, you are LESS likely to make errors. The less decisions, the more deliberate your actions are. Inactivity isn't a measure of luck.

<comment><USER3> If you have a hundred would-be Warren Buffetts who each make one investment per year, and a hundred would-be George Soroses who each make dozens of investments per year, the variance on the Buffetts' investments will be a lot bigger than the variance on the Soroses'. Consequently the richest investors out of the whole group will almost certainly be Buffetts, even if the two groups do equally well on average. In fact, the average of the Buffetts has to be quite a bit worse than that of the Soroses in order for a Soros to come out on top.

That's the argument Taleb is making: that Buffett's success is weaker evidence for the expected return of his investment strategy than Soros's success is for his.

Taleb is correct. If you think he's wrong, you don't understand his argument.

Now, you (and Buffett and Munger) argue that there's an additional reason to believe that Buffett's strategy is a good one: because fewer decisions means that each decision will be smarter. Well, you could be right. Historically, though, human beings are pretty bad at distinguishing good investment strategies from bad ones by logically analyzing their premises. So the statistical evidence Taleb is discussing counts for more, in my book.

<comment><USER2> I understand what you're saying. But don't you have to consider the number of times Buffett exercised his investment decision, and not only when he's put money up?

You'd have to consider all those deals he passed up, as using his investment strategy, no? He may make 1-2 investments a year, out of maybe 200 investments available to him that he's analyzed. Thats still 200 investment decisions, not 1 or 2, which I'm assuming Taleb is using.

Wouldn't a thorough analysis consider four possible outcomes? The first event is the decision to invest (Y/N). The second event is whether their decision worked in their favor (+/-). (Y+, Y-, N+,N-) Y+ and N- are successful use of strategy. Y- and N+ are failed strategy. Same for Soros.

Example: Consider all of the investments that were passed up, that would have been terrible investments. That could be considered successful employment of an investment strategy. Buffett inherently (based on his style and risk profile) has a larger proportion of these.

<comment><USER3> > But don't you have to consider the number of times Buffett exercised his > investment decision, and not only when he's put money up?

You might think so, but as it turns out, no. Try simulating it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think Nassim is standing on shaky ground here, although we do not have the full text of his remarks.

I do not think our understanding of real world economics and the way that our economy actually works is adequate to state anything about the impact of one strategy versus another. Academic Economics certainly is not adequate to predict anything in the real world with any degree of reliability. Time series analysis of indicators does not provide insight into the causes and effects of complex events. No one seems to be trying to model the impact of various strategies and compare them to observations.

Policy makers really need better, experimentally validated tools to help them make decisions. We need an experimentally verifiable model that allows rational comparison of strategies. It would be nice to have some experimental validation of the belief systems of the current economic pundits. Me, I doubt that the unfettered free market economy can deliver what is promised.

Without better understanding, we will continue to fly blind, waste resources, and make sub-optimal decisions.

<comment><USER5> I would like to point out that the understanding of real world economics is developed enough to make very accurate predictions.

For instance, I knew in late 2000 or early 2001 that there would be a housing boom, a housing bubble, and a banking crisis when it burst. I was a slacker so it wasn't until 2003-2004 that I started putting money behind this scenario and I profited on the way up and on the way down. (I was way too conservative in retrospect.)

I applied economic principles (and not my own genius, I just knew who to read) with real money and profited greatly as history unfolded as predicted.

The school of economics that told me about this upcomming bubble and predicted it using the same theories they have used for nearly 100 years is the Austrian School, and you can learn more about them at <http://mises.org>.

I know much of what is presented in mainstream media, the NYT and in many college courses seems complicated to the point of uselessness, and certainly we had Bernanke and Greenspan both claiming there was no housing bubble, even when it was well on its way in 2006-2007.

It is not that economics is so very complicated, it is that these people have a vested interest in pretending like economics is unpredictable. Their interest is in unlimited government spending, and so they constantly talk about deflation (never a real fear) to justify an inflationary policy which is also known as "letting the government spend whatever they wish to buy votes and gain power."

Of course you doubt that an "unfettered" free market economy can deliver what is promised because you've never seen one, and instead all your life you've seen government interventions result in disaster, and then said disaster being blamed on "free market principles". Like california, which banned the generation and sale of electricity in the state blaming "deregulation" for the energy crisis. Complete with well orchestrated ENRON show trial.

It is not ignorance that causes these suboptimal decisions, it is poltiicians putting one over on you.

FWIW, the Austrian Schools predictions go back many years, including accurately predicting the great depression, the fall of communism-- not just that it would fall, but how exactly it would fall and why-- 70 years in advance, etc.

I believe the ability to make predictions is the mark of a science.

I shouldn't care that most people buy the government nonsense that economics is "just too complicated"... because I am able to profit from the ability to make these predictions.

But I see so many lives destroyed by this, and needlessly, deliberately, by people who are either extremely ignorant, or dishonest, that it drives me up the wall. (And so I post here, knowing that I risk being downvoted into oblivion, not for failing to provide a wealth of information or a relevant perspective, but for not goosestepping along with the party line.)

As long as you believe it is impossible, you won't hold them accountable when they cause disaster.

I can predict the next two bubbles... they are already well under way. The bond market bubble is the next one to pop. I expect we'll have a crisis in some form before the end of 2012, though timing is hard to predict. The question is, how are they going to inflate their way out of that one-- because the prime candidate for the crisis is a failed bond auction. (The fed appears to be printing money and buying at its own treasury auctions already to keep them from failing... this is hidden, but the clues are there, and as a result, buyers are getting wary...who knows when they will be spooked.)

AT some point after that the next bubble- the bubble in the value of the US dollar, will burst. We'll have hyperinflation, most likely, unless our government takes as sharp turn towards responsibility.... but how long that takes to play out is unclear. What is clear is that we have benefited from exporting our inflation for the past 70+ years, under Bretton Woods and other agreements, and this was viable so long as we were a major exporter, and our government was solvent. But the soverign debt crisis sweeping europe right now is hitting countries whose (real) debt to GDP ratio is similar to ours or lower--- and our debt is growing at an unprecedented clip.

It is not hard to make predictions, even with some understanding of the timing.

Economics works. The problem is what is passed off as "economics" in popular culture is, most of the time, simply political ideology pretending to be economics.

<comment><USER6> I voted you up, even though I don't know that I agree with your coming predictions.

But I've been thinking about a similar topic tonight, as I read columnists and reporters talking about how complex financial instruments are these days and how no one really understands them. Because the basics of them aren't all that complicated. CDOs, CDSs. ETFs, whatever. None of them are particularly complex concepts. Anyone with a CS degree has mastered concepts many times more complex. I accept that the details get tricky, but the details of lots of things get tricky, and a lot of people make solid livings being responsible in managing tricky concepts. None of these financial instruments are magic. I'm a curious layman, I get the gist of all of it.

And then there's people who claim their variable rate mortgage was too complicated to understand. Come now.

So I was thinking that it's really just in everyone's interest to _pretend_ this stuff is hard to understand, that it's complicated, that it's magic.

Because then no one is responsible.

And then, as the saying goes, was I enlightened.

The housing bubble was easy to see. Everyone saw it. Many, perhaps most, ignored it. Because they wanted to. It let them gamble and not be responsible. From Joe Homebuyer to James J. Investmentbanker IV.

Some things are complicated, sovereign bonds and currencies among them. There are many reasons that nearly all the powers that exist want to keep that music going, and they have many tools at their disposal. I honestly don't know what will happen there, which is why I'm not sure I agree with your predictions in those areas. There's real magic at work there, and it's one of the few areas where make-believe becomes reality. The US has a very strong hold on centrality in the global economy, and I can't see how it's cleanly broken without severely damaging anyone who has the power to break it. That's the magic part.

<comment><USER5> Currencies are a really interesting thing. After I started to get into commodities and read up on the history of central banks-- the creature from jekyll island is a good book on the subject-- I found I started tobsee money fundamentally differently..... I see the paper in my wallet like i see the huge bundles of worthless notes from Zimbabwe.... Worthless. I know intellectually that I can exchange it, but knowing it's eventual and intrinsicev value changed my relationship with it.

And in doing so, I realized just how strongly I'd been conditioned, emotionally, and thru rationalizations, to see this paper as money.

Not sure if that resonates. One thing I'd like to also put yor ear is the idea of moral hazard. Even when everyone was in denial about the bubble, and trying to not be the greater fool, they had in the back of their heads the moral hazard.... Knwoing if it was really bad, they'd get bailed out by the government. Im not talking about banks, but about real estate agents and home buyers, etc...and they were right!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> When a patient has heart failure, you try to stabalize him first. You don't immediately put him on the operating table to do stomach reduction surgery in order to combat the obesity that caused heart failure.

<comment><USER5> Bad analogy. Here's a better one: When a patient is dying of blood loss, you don't continue to put more leeches on and make charts showing how his cheeks will be rosy if only we add more leeches.

The "stimulus" destroys jobs, it is a leech on the economy.

<comment><USER8> How about this:

When a blind fat man gets depressed, you console him first. You don't immediately put him in a go-kart with a fistful of antidepressants,a bottle of gin and a sword in order to combat the lack of euphoria that caused the depression.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> But no mention whatsoever how paying down federal debt instead of stimulus would supposedly have strengthened the economy.

The argument for paying down our debt is usually to prevent inflation or keep future borrowing cheap, but despite the plunge in GDP neither of these are anywhere close to becoming an issue.

Speaking of GDP - it's not the deficit that's responsible for the US's decreasing GDP/debt ratio, it's the drop in tax income due to the job losses following the financial meltdown.

There is plenty to dislike about how the stimulus turned out (too small, partially negated by state-level cuts, focus on tax cuts), but no evidence whatsoever that it made things worse.

<comment><USER5> You mentioned the evidence that it made things worse, by obama's own numbers, the unemployment rates are much higher than he claimed they would be if we DIDN'T pass the bill.

The "stimulus" destroyed jobs, as all government spending does, and it made the economy worse.

Further, it is deficit spending that is killing us, as we are incurring unprecedented deficits.

Finally, borrowing is already becomming a problem with indications that the FED is printing money to participate in the auctions (using a major bank of convenience, of course) in order to keep auction rates low... this means that the treasury auctions have already started to fail. Further, the auctions for the last 2 years have shown a sharp shift towards shorter term notes, which means the amount that has to be rolled over at each auction is snowballing.

<comment><USER9> _You mentioned the evidence that it made things worse, by obama's own numbers, the unemployment rates are much higher than he claimed they would be if we DIDN'T pass the bill._

How is that evidence it made things worse? It could be evidence that job losses were far more severe than anyone anticipated, but with the stimulus they were still lower than without.

Your following two statements are basically soundbites with no reasoning, or basis in economic theory.

<comment><USER5> Right, just imagine how much blood loss the patient would have experienced if we hadn't used the leeches! His is the kind of nonsense you guys trot out to defend every program... No matter how much damage to the economy, you just claim that things would have been worse otherwise. You never support these claims, of course, but you then go on to claim that those who point out the damage are not supporting their claims, even when they do, and you just, out of the blue make nonsese assertions like "have no basis in economic theory".... Without, of course, defending that asertion. I find this mode of argument particularly anti-intellectual.

<comment><USER10> Congratulations on knocking down that straw man.

ajg1977 didn't say the economy would have been worse without the stimulus. He said that what you presented as evidence was not, in fact, evidence, because it could be interpreted a different way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I always felt that Soros was better than Buffet but could never adequately explain why. I like Nassim's explanation that since Soros made more decisions, his outcome is less likely due to luck.

In other words, the more your ability is tested, the more likely your results are closer to the expected value as randomness negates itself out.

<comment><USER12> His characterization was interesting, but I'm not sure if I agree. Since the crisis, Warren Buffet acquired 10% perpetual preferred stock of Goldman Sachs, invested $2.6 billion into Swiss Re, and acquired Burlington Northern for $24 billion. Three deals, each of which was different in composition, cost, and market. Moreover, I suspect each will be success and none wholly initiated by a "certain earnings profile." Nonetheless, while I think the comparison is meaningless, the underlying logic is intellectually attractive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The initial point of the article is faulty. The federal government was running a deficit before the bailout and stimulus bill. These bills were deficit spending, something you can't do to pay down the debt.

</comment><comment><USER14> > Canada has the lowest ratio of net debt to gross domestic product among the > Group of Seven industrialized countries

If we're including household debt this does not square with what I've read elsewhere.

p.s. I've immensely enjoyed various sharp screeds from recent years ripping Taleb a new one:

[http://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2009/07/17/nassim-taleb- cl...](http://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2009/07/17/nassim-taleb-clown-of- quantitative-finance/)

<http://falkenblog.blogspot.com/search?q=taleb>

<comment><USER15> Those Taleb take-downs are well worth a read. Taleb makes for good media soundbites as a contrarian; but to me it seems more like anti-intellectualism for the educated. I'm not sure why he deserves that platform he apparently has.

From the first piece: _"So why do people listen to this guy? Part of it is doubtless the "famous for being famous" effect. Taleb is witty and clever, and ruthlessly promoted himself as a public figure after his trading days were over. Not a bad strat for success in the modern media culture: grab the megaphone and declare yourself a genius. Everyone wants to think they're more of a mental bigshot than the eggheads who run things. Plus, it's not like Jim Simons has time to write Financial Times articles. He's too busy making money more or less proving people like Taleb wrong."_

<comment><USER16> I dislike pyschoanaylsis. They're really neat explanation but they're well, lack explaining power.

Plus they don't do much for learning about the truth, and they're more about attacking a person's character.

<comment><USER17> Not sure if psychoanalysis (a.k.a. Freudian psychology) has anything to do with the subject at hand. I think you mean to say you don't like comments that delve into a person's suspected motivations. But the comment you're replying to doesn't talk about motives at all. It just talks about the means this man has used to achieve fame and why they worked.

<comment><USER16> _I think you mean to say you don't like comments that delve into a person's suspected motivations._

Yes, this is what I meant.

 _But the comment you're replying to doesn't talk about motives at all._

Then I have completely misinterpret what the comment say.

<comment><USER15> Yes, my comment was just that the quality of his ideas don't seem to match the size of his platform, if I can put it that way :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Such a big discovery!

If you have spent billions and billions of borrowed dollars and got nothing, but interest payments for your increased debt, it surely seems like you've made things worse.</comment>


Spurred by Amazon, Supermarkets Try Swapping Cashiers for Cameras - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/spurred-by-amazon-supermarkets-try-swapping-cashiers-for-cameras-11562491800?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> I tried out Amazon Go in SF and I have to say that I'm very impressed. It doesn't even require a standalone app if you already have the Amazon app downloaded. I walked in, scanned my phone, grabbed a sandwich and walked out. It took 2 minutes and felt a lot less friction-y then buying something at a convenience store, which admittedly was low friction to begin with.

<comment><USER3> Yesterday I had a similar experience with a cafe in a smallish town (Malvern, PA). However, instead of using an app system, they relied on the "honor system". I would be curious as to their annual losses, and how that would vary when in a metropolitan area such as SF.

<comment><USER4> We have a trust-based beverage PoS at our hackerspace. The bottle crates are just standing there and everyone is trusted to pay into the cash desk next to the crates when they take bottles out. Our weekly losses (i.e. bottles and money not accounted for) average ~40€, with weekly revenue around 200-300€. The losses are factored into the prices. Prices are comparable to or slightly below convenience store levels.

<comment><USER5> Is there a mechanism for IoUs / credit lines for members?

I've seen trust-based mate shops at hackerspaces around the world, and I've been told that the ones that have a credit system (even one that's not limited, checked, and that's not even authenticated) end up actually not having any significant losses. Like, anything from a piece of paper with people noting down unpaid mate purchases to things like android tablets with a webapp letting you note that you put in a bill of N euros and taken out a bottle of mate.

Friction from being able to pay right away seems to lead to "I'll pay extra later" thinking, which makes people either forget or miscalculate how much they actually owe.

<comment><USER4> Yes, each member account has a balance without any restrictions in either direction, and it mostly works fine. At times, the negative balances pile up, in which case I write a mail to the mailing list asking people to pay their dues. Usually, the negative balances approximately cancel out the positive balances, both at something like 1000 euros.

Also, when your balance is negative, after every purchase there is a big red notification reminding you of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm sure this is a small subset of people/places, but our small local markets seem to be doing very well in recent years. They are moving the opposite direction. I personally like knowing my butchers name and getting sound advice on purchases from real people.

<comment><USER3> That interest has an inverse correlation with social anxiety; which I believe will continue to rise with the rise in virtual experiences over real-world ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I hope that everyone that is trying this out and/or is excited about the technology is aware that they are basically giving away their biometric data. The way you talk, your physical dimensions, your behavior, everything that makes you you can now be monetized (if we're lucky).

I know the same argument can be made for buying stuff online - but in the physical world you cannot really change your appearance without ridiculous costs/time involved.

<comment><USER8> But...they same could be said of walking into a regular supermarket too.

Many supermarkets already have a large amount of CCTV inside of them. Some of these are already mining the data for the concerns you describe (often without the audio aspect).

What makes this worse than that?

<comment><USER7> yes. you are right. what makes a supermarket "better" is that their tech is not yet there + you can in theory pay with cash making it harder to link your identity with your characteristics.

we need strong privacy laws so that the penalties for collecting/abusing biometric data is a strong deterrent for whoever does this kind kf thing.

<comment><USER8> Yea, I'm absolutely onboard with privacy laws that make this kind of mass biometric recognition illegal or subject to very strong constraints.

The point I (poorly) tried to raise wasn't: "well, grocery stores could do this too, so it's not a problem". Rather, it was more: "shouldn't this be even more alarming, given that it can already happen at most stores across the country".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For me, the source of friction is always the long wait for the cashier. And if I forget something, another wait. I'm looking forward to just walking in and walking out with my purchases.

<comment><USER3> Why go to the grocery store at all?

<comment><USER10> To buy groceries.

I dont think you intended that, but your comment seems to imply that having higher friction is an inherent experience of a grocery store, and that there is no reason to go there otherwise.

<comment><USER11> I think they were instead implying you could just have your groceries delivered for a very low cost. I've used grocery deliveries from the chain directly before, but they would sometimes make minor substitutions, like between ice cream brands for instance, that I could not then eat because of dietary restrictions. Returns / refunds were easy but it was still more of a hassle than just showing up to the store, which is usually pretty hassle free unless you pick an exceptionally bad time.

<comment><USER10> Delivery isn't a substitute for shopping on your own, it is just a completely different experience, and I don't think they are meant to replace each other any time soon. While shopping on your own with an automated checkout is clearly just a slightly modified version of shopping on your own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I can see this being useful in France. I was basically accused several times of being shoplifter. At one store they demanded to look inside my bag and then zip-tied it shut. At another store they wanted to go through my bag at checkout. It was all very rude and undignified.

</comment><comment><USER13> Local supermarkets have cameras with blinking red lights and a real-time screen watching you at the self-service checkout that you have to use because there are 5 cashiers in a hypermarket vs. 40 when I were a small.

</comment><comment><USER14> I wish them and amazon go all the best in the world but this will not fly at all to be the common situation. It will always remain a novelty used by a few locations in cities and that's all. And you wanna know why? Simple, who's stopping the theft? Once this will go mainstream the theft will eat the profit margins and they will revert to current situation.

<comment><USER15> No one is stopping the thieves today. I regularly see people walking out with stolen items. Unless there is a security guard there, which an automated store could still hire. Also the amazon stores make you scan your phone on the way in, so they can prevent people who have shoplifted before from even entering.

<comment><USER16> In the US, stopping someone can be difficult when it comes to legal liability. There is a thin line between detaining someone and forcibly kidnapping someone.

<comment><USER17> E.g.: Theaters don't allow entry without tickets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In Dubai, Carrefour has a branch that allows you to scan the items with your while you adding them to your trolley, so that in the end, you do not need to do a full checkout and can just do the payment and walk out.

There is another Carrefour branch, which does not have the above option, but allows you to give your trolley to the checkout counter, and just go home. In 30 minutes or so, you get the products delivered to your door, with the credit card reader, so you can pay.

What would be really awesome, would be a merger of there two features, as follows:

I walk around the supermarket scanning the items I need (without adding to trolley, and lugging the trolley around). Then pay and walk out, and in 30 minutes the items are delivered to my house.

That would be cool, and the tech and systems are in place for that.

<comment><USER19> You can do that in the UK already too. Or self scan at a checkout. I think the difference here is really that they're talking about using cameras instead of scanning and it seems not even having a cashier as an option.

I think nearly half of people do some grocery shopping online these days, I wonder if that's putting more pressure on supermarkets to reduce overheads like cashiers. The lower end supermarkets seem to mostly go the other way - with Aldi and Lidl not having self scan checkouts even other than trials.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I believe instead of using sensors and camera with computer vision, what if someone uses RFID systems for self checkout.

Implementing RFID would be cost effective as compared to implementing Amazon Go based approach. Where you need to install sensors and camera installed!

RFID tags are the major cost, which can be solved with bulk purchases.

Decathlon has already deployed RFID based self checkout system!

<comment><USER21> How does that work? Can the checkout machine read the tags inside the bag? I'd prefer if my groceries didn't advertise themselves as I walk down the street.

<comment><USER20> Checkout machines will have RFID readers. When you place your bag inside RFID reader, all tags will be read.

UHF based RFID readers are better since they have more than 1 meter of read range.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think a big win for Supermarkets would be Square/Clover-like NFC payments (ie. no interaction other than tapping your phone) as the Chip+PIN dance still sucks.

Even places like Whole Food and 7-11 still require PIN + cashback + yes/no prompts on NFC payments which IMO defeats the purpose.

<comment><USER23> This is a US only limitation. The rest of the world has long since moved to Paypass. The terminals are the same (no Square needed) however the US refuses to support it, i guess because of tipping.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Based upon my experience with the supermarkets in my area they still haven't mastered self-checkout technology. It doesn't instill confidence that they will be able to deploy this in the near to medium term. I really don't have much more confidence for the long term.

</comment><comment><USER25> This trend to lower cost has downsides. My local Home Depot has become horrible to visit. Last time I was there I had to wait 40 minutes for a piece of hose to be cut from a reel. Workers in an adjacent aisle said they weren't authorized to cut the hose, and the one worker on shift who was authorized was apparently busy. Once someone called for him it took ~15 minutes for him to arrive followed by 15 minutes of him helping the one guy there before me. So ~30 minutes later he cut my 4 foot length of hose, then discovered there was no SKU to scan for by-the-foot measurement. Another ten minutes passed of him radioing for a SKU to give me on a slip of paper. I felt like I should not have bothered, apparently the workers are all overworked or not permitted to help.

Meanwhile at my local ACE hardware store they manage to have everything I need in a MUCH smaller building, but they always have someone on hand if any help is needed.

So I'd rather the shop cut costs in other ways, like use smaller buildings and narrower aisles to save on rent. I like people.

<comment><USER26> Maybe I'm an isolated case but I NEVER use self-checkout at Home Depot. The reason is simple: if Home Depot believes it can lower costs by not hiring as many cashiers, then I should get a discount by using the self-checkout. Without such a discount I always insist a human cashier checks me out. Why should I do extra work for Home Depot?

<comment><USER27> Self checkouts benefit you too. At least in supermarkets I always go for the self checkouts because the line moves way faster than a regular one.

<comment><USER28> I used to feel the same way until I began focusing on my diet and purchased more produce. Self checkout is a nightmare for produce. They rarely have a bar code which leads to a mystical hunt through the usually horribly slow UI. Compare that to a person who has done it so many times they have the code memorized for your apples and they can just punch it in quickly and keep going. And don't even get me started with how excruciatingly painful it is when suddenly all of the machines need assistance and the one attendant can't be in 6 places at once.

<comment><USER29> This is a solved problem.

Our grocery store (Wegmans) has labelmaker scales in the produce department, and the four or five digit code right next to the produce items. You bag it, weigh it, and label it yourself.

Speeds up the human checkouts, too.

<comment><USER28> This sounds like an excellent solution and perhaps I should let someone know at my local Kroger. Maybe its just something I've overlooked while shopping. Either way, I have a young child now so we mostly just use ClickList.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


AWS cross-AZ data transfer costs more than they tell you - <AUTHOR> https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/aws-cross-az-data-transfer-costs-more-than-aws-says/ <comment><USER2> The short version: cross-region and cross-AZ data transfer costs the same.

</comment><comment><USER3> AWS Calculator only works for infra structure. People still forgets about indirect charges.

Believe me, they're making a killing $$$ there.

A survival tip if you have 10TB of data to replicate across regions.

Share via VPC across replications(you will increase latency a bit but saves around $10.00 every sync.

In case you do this every hour, it's like saving the price of an car.

Images? Share via VPC.

Don't use any managed service.

<comment><USER4> Can you elaborate a bit more. Are you referring to SaaS services they offer like S3? EG: Host your own filestore on IaaS components only?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thinking on it, that doesn't surprise me as much as I'd expect. My understanding is that different AZs within a region are physically implemented as different buildings, which are some distance apart. So you'd need the same type of network hardware for the inter-AZ links as you'd need for inter-Region links.

<comment><USER6> But then traveling over their dedicated lines when using cross AZ might bring additional considerations than leaving their network and being exposed to internet routing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This pricing only seems make sense when the two instances are belong to different owners that are billed $0.01/GB both. But still ridiculous: Data transfer in from internet is free, but from another zones/regions cost $0.01. Maybe they just want to make the pricing "look cheaper"?

</comment><comment><USER8> What about GCS? They say cross-AZ is free, and cross-region is the same 10c/GB. Is it really so, or like with AWS?

</comment><comment><USER9> That is ridiculous. Does anyone know if that's the case with GCP / Azure too?

</comment><comment><USER10> Charging for the sending _and_ the receiving of the same data within a region, huh?</comment>