A Tipless Restaurant is a Well-Run Restaurant? - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/a-tipless-restaurant-is-a-well-run-restaurant/ <comment><USER2> This is an old article - Jay Porter's tipless restaurant, The Linkery, has since failed. This is my comment from the last time the Linkery came up on hackenews ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6127536](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6127536)):

>Back when I lived in San Diego I took my parents to the Linkery. The service was so bad it actually reversed my opinions against tipping. The servers clearly didn't care much about making us happy, messing up almost every aspect of the order. They put meat in my food - I'm vegetarian. My father got his food 20 minutes after my mother and I did. The waiter forgot one of my drinks. We called over the manager who offered us a free dessert to make up for it. Guess what? The dessert was on the bill. I'm always happy to tip 20+% for good service, but being forced (yes, we asked) to pay the service charge added insult to injury. This is just one data point, but the Linkery was infamous around San Diego for having much worse service than other places in a similar price range. I'm convinced their experiment with tipping was correlated with this.

<comment><USER3> Sorry you had a bad time, but sample size of 1 is not compelling. "The plural of anecdote is anecdotes, not data."

The issue could easily be bad management, bad hiring, etc etc etc.

<comment><USER4> Apparently that's a misquote and it was originally "The plural of anecdote is data." [1]

Of course more data is better.

[1] [http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2011/04/the-plural-of- an...](http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2011/04/the-plural-of-anecdote-is- data-after-all.html)

<comment><USER5> The context is different though - the professor is stating that an anecdote is a data point, and plural data points can be referred to as data. Two stories are two datums, pluralised to data.

The "not data" version is saying that anecdotes are in such small numbers and uncontrolled circumstances, that even though they are data points in and of themselves, they're not rigorous enough to draw wider conclusions from. It's a different context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > The other has refused to accept them, instead charging a fixed percentage > service fee.

Why not just show the real price in the menu? I feel offended when I've gotten shitty service and have to pay a "service fee". I also hate when my tip is what's paying the wages. Just set the price higher to cover the wages!

<comment><USER7> There was a planet money podcast recently which discussed the effects of including a tax in the price or adding it at the register. Even though the net cost was exactly the same, including the tax in the sticker price resulted in 8% less consumption. While, as consumers, we'd probably prefer products to include the all-up cost in the price tag, from the seller's perspective, it's still in their interest to add it at the register.

<comment><USER8> Where is this being practiced? I've been to pretty much every country in Europe in the last 20 years and in a conventional shop the tax (VAT) is always included in the price.

<comment><USER6> It's common in USA, because there are different sales taxes in different states. So advertised products are advertised without tax included in the price.

<comment><USER9> It goes further than that; a county or even a town can have a separate sales tax. You can have 9% in one county, 10% in a city inside the county, or 8% the next county over.

<comment><USER10> And even beyond that, some governments levy different taxes on different items (e.g., lower tax on groceries), while other nearby governments may levy the same tax on everything.

Further, some governments charge tax on the pre-coupon/pre-discounted price, while others tax only the actual final price.

Further still, some entities like public schools are exempt from paying sales taxes in many states/municipalities. In this case, the price sign would have to show both a pre-tax and tax-included price on it, which may be the best solution anyway.

Regardless, these differences are probably easiest to account for at the point of sale.

<comment><USER11> A tangential, but this complexity is one reason I think that sales tax should largely be abolished in favor of rolling it into income taxes. The only context it makes much sense in is taxing various luxuries. Beyond that, it's confusing, adds administrative overhead, and discriminates towards those with lower incomes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Mildly tangential, but I'm always surprised when people express so much anger about being expected to tip in restaurants (in America, at least). Not people who come from other places where the conventions are different, but people who have lived here their whole lives.

I'm not surprised (and empathize with) people who are reacting to the inefficiency of The System ("why don't restaurants just charge more and pay their employees reasonable wages?"). This is correct, but as others have pointed out, in the US at least we seem to be stuck at a suboptimal local maximum in this area. It would be impractical (and maybe catastrophic) for any one restaurant to suddenly adopt this policy, so that's not going to happen anytime soon.

Rather, I'm always amazed at the portion of people who have a visceral reaction to tipping due to what appears to be just plain lack of empathy. These aren't the people who are saying, "why doesn't the restaurant just pay better?". That totally makes sense. These aren't the people who tip less (or not at all) when they've had a really bad experience with the server. That makes sense too.

Specifically, I'm talking about the people who deep down inside just always have a reflexively negative reaction to directly giving their money to the person who just served them. These are the people who feel happy about themselves when they say things like, "my tips start at 0% and go up from there", or who seem to put way, way, way too much mental energy into grading the level of service that they've received and coming up with a number that reflects that level of service each and every time they go to a restaurant. If anyone posting is that kind of person, please just shut up and start being a better person already. I encounter these people all the time in SV. These aren't poor people for whom the tip is ever a meaningful amount of cash. These are people making many times the annual income of their servers, getting continually worked up over a few dollars, supposedly because of "the principle of the thing". These are always people who have never worked in a restaurant, and are almost always people who never even had a job until after they got out of college. If anyone posting here is posting for this reason, please just get over it and find more constructive things to get worked up over. Ideally something that doesn't directly impact the income of people making way the hell less money than they do.

<comment><USER13> What surprises me of the visceral reaction of those who say "why doesn't the restaurant just pay better?" is that by that logic you'd still be paying essentially _the same price_. It wouldn't actually be cheaper if you were charged for food + good service separately, so why are you getting so inflamed about it?

<comment><USER14> I'm the kind of person who "reacts to the inefficiency of The System"[0], but I also have a bone to pick with a lot of the worthless, inauthentic symbolic "rituals" that most people perform unquestioningly. it's kind of like when people are surprised that a standard way of saying "hi" in North America is "how are you?" even though the person doesn't actually wanna hear it and will be weirded out if you reply honestly.

with tipping, it is simultaneously vaguely some "meritocratic" dimension to the waiter's job, but then it's also basically just a tax, but then it's also a social ritual in which people can boast or be shamed for their ignorance or largesse. I don't like it at all.

All things the same, when some quirk is so inconsequential that people ask why you're up in arms about it, I side with removing the quirk rather than keeping it.

[0] I'd also say this is putting it mildly, almost like a euphemism. It is a way of exploitation that happens to benefit a visible minority of waiters so that the overall impression for those not in the know is one of neutrality. It is definitely a pro-employer law, that dukes the clients against the employees.

<comment><USER13> > All things the same, when some quirk is so inconsequential that people ask > why you're up in arms about it, I side with removing the quirk rather than > keeping it.

I used to think so, but now I'm not so sure that social "rituals" are really inherently something to be worn down just because many of us find them hard to navigate.

Social rituals are a side effect of existing in a society with other people and so they never really go away, they just change into other things. As such it's not really a good idea to solve the problem of such rituals by trying to eradicate them, when what we really should be doing is getting better at living in a world with social rituals that pop up and go away. Plasticity should be the goal, and while streamlining rituals can certainly work with that goal, streamlining should not be the goal itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I hate the idea of implied mandatory tipping.

Pay your staff sufficient wages please.

Whatever laws allow the below minimum wage loophole should be eliminated or overwritten, or whatever you do to laws to make them invalid.

<comment><USER16> "Pay your staff sufficient wages please."

In theory means that expenses go up and restaurant then need to charge more on the menu which will in theory result in lower sales and profit (see my other comment).

<comment><USER15> The amount the customers pay should stay the same, unless the service is excellent, then a tip would be given to the wait-saff.

Unfortunately the mindset of required tipping won't go away anytime soon.

It's not going to happen until the laws that allow below minimum wage pay are abolished, then wait a few years for people to get into the habit of tipping primarily for quality of service.

If there aren't enough customers that are willing to pay the "higher" cost then there doesn't need to be that many upscale restaurants. Sometimes I'd prefer to save a few dollars and walk to the kitchen window and get my own food.

If the profit margin is that low for restaurants then they either need to go out of business or reduce expenses, having hidden fees (tips) isn't the answer.

<comment><USER16> "having hidden fees (tips) isn't the answer."

Tips are not hidden fees. In fact if the tip isn't included as part of the charge it isn't even legally required to be paid either.

"The amount the customers pay would stay the same."

If a businesses expenses go up then their profit goes down. So they either have to accept less profit or they need to raise prices. Please explain another scenario. I'm not talking about some outlier where something else out of the ordinary happened for some other non duplicatable reason. Or how a particular business may charge less than another because they make it up on volume. (There are many particulars to why a business might operate at a different cost structure (location, suppliers as only two examples).

"Sometimes I'd prefer to save a few dollars and walk to the kitchen window and get my own food."

Ok I see where you are going with this. Have you ever seen what others prefer to do and how actual restaurants operate? It seems that most people don't prefer to "walk to the kitchen window and get their own food".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think that this is missing the biggest critique of all - it doesn't make sense to allocate 15-20% of the payment to something that is only like 1% of the value you're receiving.

The real value in going out to eat, in roughly decreasing order of importance:

\- The quality of the actual food and drinks that you consume.

\- The convenience of not having to spend the time and effort to shop, cook, and clean.

\- The atmosphere and joy of "going out" (with your friends).

\- The fact that someone takes your order and brings your food to you.

There's no way that the fact that someone takes your order and brings your food to you consists of 1/5th of the value of your experience. An efficient market should then adjust to this by offering the option of not tipping, having all the consumers go to that restaurant because it's a better value, and then the other restaurants would have to adjust.

Unfortunately, this doesn't happen, probably for a variety of reasons.

1) People don't have enough information when choosing where to eat.

2) There are biases where people don't really consider the cost of tipping when they consider the cost of going out to eat.

3) People have gotten used to it, and "don't mind" tipping.

<comment><USER18> I disagree. Good service is a pleasure to receive, and adds a lot to the value of the experience.

When your water glass never gets quite empty, and the flat bread never quite runs out, and you're not sure how that happened because your conversation was not interrupted, and your food arrives hot and when you look around to get the bill and it arrives just like that. When service is really good the restaurant feels like magic. That's worth a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The premise of the article may be valid, but the author's top source is not sound. The piece quotes Jay Porter extensively and links to his blog post. Jay Porter is a failed restaurateur whose restaurants have all shut down [0] [1], not a source to be trusted on the subject of well-run restaurants.

[0] [http://www.yelp.com/biz/el-take-it-easy-san- diego](http://www.yelp.com/biz/el-take-it-easy-san-diego) [1] [http://www.yelp.com/biz/the-linkery-san-diego](http://www.yelp.com/biz/the- linkery-san-diego)

<comment><USER3> The high failure rate in the restaurant industry means these businesses could have failed for entirely stochastic reasons unrelated to Jay Porter. If 80 of all restaurants fail, then he's got to start 8+ before we start to find out if he's the common denominator.

<comment><USER19> That's not how probability works [0]. Say we assume a more realistic 40% success rate figure [1], given Jay's 2 trials:

Probability of 1 success:

(2 choose 1)(0.4^1)(0.6^(2-1)) = 0.48

Probability of 2 successes:

(2 choose 2)(0.4^2)(0.6^(2-2)) = 0.16

0.48 + 0.16 gives us a 64% of at least one of Jay's restaurants succeeding.

So the odds were in fact in his favor.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_distribution#Cumulati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_distribution#Cumulative_distribution_function) [1] [http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2007-04-16/the- restauran...](http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2007-04-16/the-restaurant- failure-mythbusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and-financial-advice)

<comment><USER3> My apologies! I'm a long way out from stats class now, but I've been doing some light A/B testing so I've been thinking about things from the perspective of statistical significance rather than simple probability.

So with that in mind, only having two trials, can we really determine a deviation from the norm? The odds were in his favour (slightly) but not so much that we can say with any certainty that he or his tipless restaurants were the issue.

I'm rusty on the math or I'd actually calculate statistical significance (p value?) of 2 tries 1 success vs two tries 0 successes. I suspect it's below 95% though.

<comment><USER19> I agree we should not draw any conclusions from my arithmetic above. I just couldn't resist the opportunity to correct someone's math on HN :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This article is very poorly written, and many of the points made in it are unfounded or irrelevant. I completely support abolishing the practice of tipping, but using bullshit arguments like "it's un-American" and "Economists don't get it" don't lend any credence to your stance on the issue. The only point that directly cited actual data was the first point. This article shouldn't be voted up as much as it is.

</comment><comment><USER21> There's nothing that grinds my gears like that blank tip line staring back at me when I pay for my takeout or counter order. The soured rapport is palpable when I hand back the signed receipt and the cashier glances at the striked-out tip space. It leaves an unpleasant taste in my mouth after what should have been a simple transaction. Ugh.

<comment><USER22> I think you are just making that up in your head. I've never tipped for counter or takeout, never heard of anyone else doing it either. I don't think anyone expects it. The person still has to look down there, but there's nothing more to it than that.

<comment><USER23> It is trivial for register software to not print a tip line when the takeout button is pressed, if the businesses wanted to support customers and not press for tips there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> As a dishwasher who makes $8/hr, tips are very important. Mine are based on a percentage of sales, like the "tipout" mentioned in the article. I don't know where the author gets their information or if they have ever worked in a restaurant. Some of the information is ridiculous. In California, everyone is payed at least $8/hr before tips. Tips only add to take home pay.

Without tips, I can't imagine making more than minimum wage. Last night I made $15.50/hr, nearly double what I or someone else would be payed without tips. The market clearing price for a dishwasher is much lower than minimum wage.

</comment><comment><USER25> I hate when I get takeout pizza or etc and the hostess asks for a tip. I would be more than happy to tip the chef if the pizza is good but that isn't the case. The tips go to the hostess.

Sometimes the hostess shares tips with chefs at the end of the night but still.

<comment><USER26> I find it annoying that more and more takeout places have a tip jar. How much are you supposed to tip on a sub?

<comment><USER3> Under $8, whatever small change I have... $0.50 or so usually. Often enough, nothing. After that, approx. 10%.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Why not install ipads in the tables and do away with waiters? All one needs are food runners. Pay them normal working rates so no tips needed, even for them.

<comment><USER28> Yeah tablets will be great at providing anything other than dry facts about the food.

At least 40-50% of the times I go out to eat I have just a vague idea what I want and it is up to the waiter to match my desires with the menu.

Just to prevent shrieks from the chefs that lurk here - I never do special requests on the tickets but sometimes a person needs a guidance trough the menu.

<comment><USER23> You are describing a very high end dining experience.

In most restaurants the server "recommends" the highest margin item (bonus commission) or whatever they like or is easier for their friends in the back to prepare. It's dinner, not a bespoke ball gown.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> That's one thing I never understood with the US. When you need a haircut, or you want to take a cab, or go get a drink... you always have to tip. Whereas the tip should be something you want to give to show appreciation.

So every time I went to the restaurant, I knew that the prices displayed were NOTHING like the prices I'd have to pay in the end. They would add taxes and if I didn't tip I would be seen as an asshole.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm more annoyed with the normalization of tipping for behind-the-counter service.

<comment><USER31> I agree with you. You scooped ice-cream for me and you want me to tip you? The gall of some people is just too much. Why should I just give you money?

<comment><USER32> This is why the rest of the world hates us in the tech industry. We get to sit in $1,000 chairs, which we easily justify, and in offices where catered food, massages, game rooms, etc are common. Yet you want to complain about the tip jar for an extra $1 that you've already made in the time you waited in line, for the ice cream scooper who has to stand on their feet for 8+ hours and may be lucky to get a bathroom break during lunch rush, and is going to make less all day than you make in an hour, all while they are just trying to mentally study for their econ 101 exam tomorrow.

It's totally the people making minimum wage working the counters who are happy for an extra $20 _per day_ that have all the gall, not the tech industry folks making six figures complaining about spending a couple extra bucks per day on tips.

<comment><USER33> Well, yes, once you accept that they are your inferiors you might even feel good about giving them a little charity. As a European, having to get into that frame of mind is probably the worst part about America's tipping culture.

<comment><USER34> I believe it is rather a European thing to think that providing service to others is demeaning, instead of just being thankful for the waiter's service.

<comment><USER33> In Europe it's neither demeaning not something to be thankful about, it's just someone doing a job. It's tipping that makes it weird.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> And you don't even create a service charge, you just include your staff costs (and your taxes while you're at it) in your food prices. What's written on the menu outside the restaurant is what you pay at the end of the meal the customer can shop around comparing the prices (like deciding between 2 restaurant, but also between a restaurant and a movie), and your market is healthy.

</comment><comment><USER36> In America I generally tip pretty well regardless of service, just because in some states their pay is so low. In some states when you receive tips, you can be paid as low as 2.xx$ an hour. Which should be against the law.

In Germany a tip is not percentage based, but usually only 1-2€. But pay tends to be a little better, everybody has health insurance , sick time and vacation.

<comment><USER37> >In some states when you receive tips, you can be paid as low as 2.xx$ an hour. Which should be against the law.

But if the server doesn't make at least minimum wage, the employer has to pay the difference. So it already is against the law.

<comment><USER38> Of course in reality, if that server doesn't make at least minimum wage in tips and tries to claim it from their employer, they'll simply get fired.

<comment><USER37> I've had plenty of server friends who've had to do this and didn't get fired.

In larger companies where payroll is handled by software, they'll do it automatically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I always tip a reasonable amount (15 to 50 percent) because it's what Americans expect and I've already factored it in.

One thing that bothers me, though, is the view that's prevalent among wait staff (if reddit posts by them are to believed) is that black people and Indians don't tip. Well, the tip comes after the service.

No person is going to provide equal service to a perceived good tipper and a perceived bad tipper. If, after providing inferior service, they receive a bad tip, it just reinforces the view. If they get a good tip, it is too late for me to receive good service.

Well, they'll still get the tip, but it makes me seethe when people say that.

</comment><comment><USER40> Tipping in Canada prevents you getting rude reminders from staff. We Brits find it truly baffling having to leave 50c-$2 for a drink you fetch yourself from a bar.

Canada is all smiles and great service (sincerely) until you forget to tip.

</comment><comment><USER41> A great (for the owner) side effect of tipping is it allows restaurants to remain open even during times they are slow (weekdays, off-season) by passing much of the financial burden to the waitstaff instead of the owner. Otherwise hours would probably be much less convenient for the customer. This may not be the case in a large city but in smaller towns the weekday shifts are also a rite of passage to earn a good night where you can make some money.

</comment><comment><USER42> I feel like there's a business opportunity here. There is a large group of people who don't want to think about tipping, and would always just tip 20%.

Could a payment system or card do this automatically? Or perhaps legally signal to the server that they should take 20%?

This doesn't seem impossible, and I think the idea has a reasonable market.

</comment><comment><USER43> Tipping extra sometimes encourages behaviors that are materially detrimental to the business itself. This effect is pretty well known in the industry, so I can't imagine many restaurateurs would complain if tipping were universally ended for everyone. But are restaurant owners ready to start employing servers and bartenders on professional terms?

The article alludes to the practice of tipping out the bussers and dishwashers, but is a bartender more or less likely to do that with a $60-80K salary? Maybe the back of the house could see a percentage of sales instead... Or just food and wine, but not cocktails. There are really too many corner cases and caveats to work through up front, but if this becomes a trend it could open new opportunities for POS providers who might appreciate the shot at staying relevant.

</comment><comment><USER44> OT, an aside, but from when I last ate there ~ 2.5 years ago, Sushi Yasuda was probably the best sushi restaurant in NYC. Maybe Masa, the famous place at $300/head minimum was technically "better" in terms of the sushi you got, but Yasuda was up there in terms of the quality of the fish and preparation, at a much more reasonable price. (not cheap, but not outrageous like Masa).

Yasuda can probably get away without tipping, I am assuming, because the wait staff is probably higher trained and more professional than your average student or aspiring actor trying to pay the rent at the Denny's down the street...

Heck, I now live in LA, and I can't find sushi that good.

</comment><comment><USER45> Before I even read the articles, here's how it goes:

\- Where I live, there isn't a culture of tips. Employees are paid by employers.

\- Some employees though, and businesses, delight me. Like I "really" enjoy it there. So I tip.

Look at what happened here: I tip in an environment not used to tips _at all_.

Tips should be a consequence for delight. Not some thing you do. It's just that I can't help tip people who take care of me (and I'm from that culture). Sometimes, they'll offer a discount and I'll insist on paying the full price.

It happens I enter a shop only looking for directions to somewhere, and the person there goes beyond it. I buy something. It's natural for me.

Now, the very thought of _having_ to tip, as if it is a given, granted thing I _have_ to do, whether the waiter/waitress was good or bad would make me sick.

I understand they are under pressure, but I have seen waiters/waitresses under pressure behave with an unimaginable class and composure. With whom things that would piss you off would magically disappear. They exist, you should hire them. Not some snorky bitch waiter/waitress(yeah, there are waiters who are bitches. It's not just waitresses) who'll treat you like crap, and then have the gall to even _expect_ a tip (I mean, you screw up, you go incognito and pray you even get to keep your job, not ask for a tip and have an attitude).

So I say this:

\- Their revenues are mainly from tips and they are not very well paid: It's not the customer's problem what your employer does. But _you_ can delight a patron, and most people who are delighted pay beyond reason for service beyond "normal".

\- If you're a waiter and think this is unfair, look around you. I am sure there are other waiters who get tipped regularly and fatly. What are they doing you're not ?

Humans are generally not assholes. If a patron gets treated really well, only a small percentage will be assholes.

I help my friend with his business (car accessories, installing alarm systems, etc) and people just don't believe the length we go to. They just are shocked. They've never seen that. The welcoming, the explanations, the garantees, etc.

I have a friend who sells computers and repairs them (and some other stuff like flash drives, etc). People would drive 30 miles to buy a flash drive from _him_. They could buy it anywhere, but they buy it from _him_. People came to him from 400 miles away, because of reputation and service and referrals (his regular clients vary from normal dude, to senators).

Your behavior matters.

I once called customer service of my crappy ISP, as usual, and that day, a tremendous guy answered the phone. This is something I have never seen before. I was literally in frigging bro love with him. I mean, I asked him if there is any way I could like give feedback to his supervisor or something. He treated it with grace saying he was flattered, and he was only doing his job. And no, he wasn't just doing his job: He went the extra 100 miles.

I've eaten in many places. Some places I wouldn't let them keep a 5 cents change because they were cunts. Some places I'd have no problem leaving 30% to even 50% at times because they were simply surreal and treat people like royalty.. Like really, really, really cater to you. And it's no difference of small restaurant, big restaurant, or someone just outside grilling rabbits.

Behavior matters.

<comment><USER46> Thanks for that, you basically described exactly how I feel about tipping in the US. I'm from Europe myself, and where I live, a tip really is a way to explicitly express appreciation of service, instead of some kind of unwritten rule you have to tip '10% for mediocre service', '15% for satisfactory service' and 'above 15% for outstanding service'. No tip here, basically means 'satisfactory', anything more is considered a reward for great service and I don't mind tipping big at all when the service is good.

I travel to the US every now and then, and recently had a heated discussion about tipping with my (also European) colleague, who insisted on tipping at least 15% even though there was nothing special about the service we received. The premise was that this was considered 'normal' in the US, that we had to 'conform to this culture of tipping', and that it would be considered rude to tip less, say 10%. I vehemently oppose this kind of reasoning, because in my opinion, a tip should reflect appreciation. I'm not opposed to tipping when I'm somewhere where waiters are underpaid and depend on decent tips, but I reject the idea I have to follow some kind of 'table' that says the minimum tip is 10%, even if I get served a raw steak. I'd much rather tip a lot less (say 5 to 10%) for mediocre service, and a lot more (say 20 to 25%) for outstanding service, but apparently, this is 'rude' and 'inconsiderate' according to my collegue.

The fact that the tip needs to be a percentage of the check doesn't make sense to me anyway. If I order an expensive bottle of wine, the tip would have to increase much more compared to when I order a cheap wine. That doesn't make sense at all, it's completely unrelated to the performance of the waiter.

<comment><USER47> In the US, tips are how most servers are paid. In many cases, their hourly pay is only enough to cover the _taxes_ on their tips. A low tip is interpreted as some degree of insult, up to and including "I am so dissatisfied with the service I received that I don't think you deserve enough money to support yourself".

 _even if I get served a raw steak_

The waiter did not cook your steak. It's his job to try to resolve the problem if you tell him about it, and how he handles that situation should certainly influence his tip.

 _If I order an expensive bottle of wine... it 's completely unrelated to the performance of the waiter_

That's not necessarily true. Attempting to up-sell is absolutely part of a server's job, and the convention of tipping a percentage of the bill aligns the server's incentives with the restaurant's profits.

I'm not saying that the tipping conventions in the US are the best way to pay servers, but I will say that to disregard such a convention if you know about it is rude. I dislike the German convention of attendants with tip trays outside almost every public toilet, but it's my understanding that failing to leave them at least 50 cents is considered quite rude, so I do it.

<comment><USER23> Of a waiter is upselling because they expect ME to pay commission on their ability to overcharge me, the waiter deserves 0 tip.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> This article is clearly not written by anyone with service industry experience.

1) Tips are unrelated to good service...good tips are mostly good luck

False, I could rely on 25%+ tip average, and as a server/bar trainer I trained my staff to receive the same, by giving excellent service. _Being able to rely on tips for income (as most of the industry does) is by definition not luck._

2) It's un-American

Tipping is a direct way for the consumer to reward and punish a worker or market based on perceived value. If being capitalist is an American trait, tipping is very American.

3) Economists don't get it

Where is the source cited for this? I know plenty of people who work in finance, and tip very well. Professors however, seem to value service workers differently...

4) It's borderline racist

Because more minorities receive tips? The service industry gives countless minorities and other disadvantaged groups (criminals, drifters, youth) opportunities for employment and advancement not found in any other industry. Most people who work in the kitchen do so by choice, anyone who desires and has people/sales skills can just as easily get a front-of-house job. As a service worker I was generally hired by and reporting to a minority.

4b) "it's usually illegal to redistribute tips among the staff."

False, tip pooling is extremely common between service workers and even back- of-house (kitchen). Only tip sharing with managers is not practiced, because they have higher guaranteed pay and it would be a conflict of interest for all involved.

5) We don't tip doctors, flight attendants, and any number of occupations where service is important.

This is a personal anecdote of the writer. I tip flight attendants anywhere they still take cash. And a surprising number of occupations are happy to accept tips if you try. Tips don't have to be monetary, they can be free tickets to a show or food or a vice (i.e. cigarettes or alcohol). Doctors don't get tips because of the high pay of their job, but many industries have bonuses provided by the buyer in exchange for a job performed beyond expectations.

5b) [Workers practice tip-sharing] according to a culture called "tipout." But as this is not obligatory, it is inefficient and can foster cheating, resentment, or worse.

False, and this clearly shows the writer does not have service industry experience. Anywhere tipout is practiced, it is required as a percentage minimum of sales. However, often workers "tipout" above and beyond the required percentage, to anyone and everyone who earned it. In many service jobs your co-workers are like family and you all take care of one another.

Priceonomics usually writes great articles, but this one should be taken with a grain of salt.

<comment><USER49> And anyone who is an experienced server is so accustomed to the concept that their compensation is nearly 100% tip-based and can no longer discern reality from the tipping model. Nearly all my server friends will consistently tell me about how they game the system, and how little their actual personality comes into play during their experience. In the name of tips, they routinely abandon their principles to earn more. Your replies sound defensive and biased, and, while I understand your motive, they don't really address the underlying issues surrounding tips. If I owned a restaurant, I would certainly not allow them, especially after learning of Porter's results.

<comment><USER48> Can you provide any detail or evidence to support your third-person personal anecdote? It's a very simple system of good service in, tips out -- there is hardly room for 'gaming' or 'abandoning principles', whatever that is supposed to mean.

<comment><USER50> What about the studies Jay Porter links to in his blog posts?

[https://www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/chr/pubs/tools/...](https://www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/chr/pubs/tools/tooldetails-13630.html)

[http://tippingresearch.com/uploads/managing_tips.pdf](http://tippingresearch.com/uploads/managing_tips.pdf)

<comment><USER48> I have read both studies. Neither suggest "abandoning principles." Both suggest common techniques for good sales (i.e. calling customers by name, upselling, being personable). This is no more a game than sales in any other situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think averaging out all the numbers and reporting service doesn't matter may be missing those rare occasions when the restaurant really does screw up and you want to punish them with no tip. I want the waiter to go work hard and get me the right thing, etc., after a screw up or to know not to ignore my table for an hour. I don't have that option with an enforced service charge.

<comment><USER23> You can tell the manager why you aren't coming back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> > 5) We don't tip doctors

Not in Romania and probably other former communist states. Though this is more like a bribe than a tip.

</comment><comment><USER52> Tipping isn't a requirement for good service. Plenty of countries don't have a culture of tipping and restaurants still exist. Tipping is just a convenient way to dance around the concept of minimal wage and exploit workers, almost to the point of slave labour.

</comment><comment><USER53> You ever tip the chef? The guy who cleans the table after you? The lady who cleans the dishes? Or the guy sits at the cash counter? Or the guy who opens and closes the door after you? Or the guy who walks around taking everyone's orders?

So why do we start making a noise when it comes to tipping a waiter? Is it only him/her in a restaurant who deserves to make some extra money? Or others are well paid? Well, then why not pay him well too?

I have always found this attitude, that not tipping means you get the service what you pay for, disturbing. This is regressive. The worse are the people who chime in with their moronic "if you can't tip, stay at home". All the good restaurants I've been to, the ones which are famous for both the food and service, offer good food and service and food whether you tip or not. If there's an exception that restaurant needs to have a closer look on its policies and staff.

</comment><comment><USER54> > We tip barbers and coat checkers along with waiters, but not doctors, flight > attendants

You don't tip people who already get paid really well. I guarantee that you would tip your doctor a lot if doctors usually only made $8/hour.

<comment><USER55> It doesn't matter how much given person earns, I have no idea I don't see his/hers pay slip. You pay for the service if it is good you can pay more, if it is bad you would like to pay less (if at all).

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> The first time I heard about the importance of tips as a french guy, I thought waiter's only income were tips, so in my brain it implied waiters worked for free unless you give them tips !

<comment><USER57> This is almost true. The minimum wage laws do not apply to waiters, so they are often paid $2-3/hr.

<comment><USER38> Las Vegas casino hostesses (the ones that bring you "free" drinks while you gamble) work exclusively for tips.

<comment><USER5> I've heard that at some high-end restaurants, waitstaff actually pay to work tables, since the tips on the high bills are high themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Mandatory Reservoir Dogs clip: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4sbYy0WdGQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4sbYy0WdGQ)</comment>


Surprise Your iPhone Is Tracking Your Every Move - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/20/surprise-your-iphone-is-tracking-your-every-move/

<comment><USER2> This is a duplicate. There are a number of discussions already started on this topic.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2466445></comment>


iA makes patent threats - <AUTHOR> http://www.marco.org/2013/12/26/information-architects-threaten-with-patents <comment><USER2> I may just be a bit slow today, but I fail to see how a patent obtained by a small company can not also be defensive.

Also, note that they've recanted, as the linked article states: [http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/21/5234580/patent-pending- ia...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/21/5234580/patent-pending-ias-militant- stance-on-syntax-control)

<comment><USER3> Here's the problem with patents: if you file for a patent, you are basically manufacturing intellectual land mines. Both the ethics and mechanics involved are chillingly analogous. Yes, they can be used defensively against a specific enemy. The vast majority will never explode at all, although they will still cost money to deploy. The few that _do_ eventually go off are likely to injure uninvolved parties who didn't see what they were stepping on -- people and companies who may not even have been born when you tightened the last screw. Your creation will remain dangerous for decades, long past the point when it could conceivably benefit your country's economy as a whole.

The people who are paying you to build the land mine have interests that are different from yours -- perhaps that's not true at the moment, but it almost certainly will be in the future. They are very likely to sell your handiwork to someone else, perhaps under financial or legal duress. This may happen several times before the explosives in your creation decay into harmlessness. Chances are, any influence you may have when you manufacture your mine will only diminish with time. It is not only possible but likely that what you are building will fall into the hands of people whose interests and values are far removed from your own.

Of course, it's unlikely that you will be the one who eventually steps on your own mine. Whether that makes a difference to you depends on -- and speaks volumes about -- your character as an engineer.

<comment><USER2> Sure. I don't agree with software patents. This story doesn't really answer my question.

<comment><USER3> _I may just be a bit slow today, but I fail to see how a patent obtained by a small company can not also be defensive._

Of course it answers your question. The answer is that there _is_ no answer. You simply have no way of knowing whether a given patent will be used defensively or offensively, ethically or unethically. Like any good monster it has a life of its own.

<comment><USER2> Ah, gotcha.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Big companies like Google and Apple have defensible reasons to accumulate lots of patents: they need them for _defense_."

About that...

 _The Rockstar consortium is an organization backed by Apple, Microsoft, BlackBerry, Ericsson and Sony. It purchased patents off of the defunct telecommunications company Nortel in 2011, in a bidding war with Google.

Now, the consortium has filed suit against Google, ASUSTek, HTC, Huawei, LG, Pantech and ZTE over those patents._

[http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/31/apple-microsoft-backed- rock...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/31/apple-microsoft-backed-rockstar- consortium-sues-google-samsung-over-7-nortel-patents/)

</comment><comment><USER5> I side with Marco on this but I think he should update the original post on new developments: iA decided to drop the patent application yesterday [1]. Regardless, their original attitude towards this issue was enough for me to decide not to support future iA products.

[1]: [https://twitter.com/iA/status/416393539182796800](https://twitter.com/iA/status/416393539182796800)

</comment><comment><USER6> It's worth considering how poorly handled the communications were here. No blog posts, no responses to the forum thread that mostly started all of this [1], nor the story that hit HN's front page [2].

Just Twitter. Which is something, but not enough when you have a PR issue this big...

[1]: [http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/21/5234580/patent-pending- ia...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/21/5234580/patent-pending-ias-militant- stance-on-syntax-control) [2]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6966528](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6966528)

</comment><comment><USER7> > I see no reason to support any small developers who file for patents.

So, what if Apple, or Google, or Microsoft, or Oracle decide they like feature F and implement it in one of their applications that compete with whatever the small patent holder does?

<comment><USER8> Seeing a fervent Apple supporter cry foul over iA even though Apple does the exact same thing all the time is... Beyond belief.

<comment><USER9> In this case the thing iA tried to copyright was one of Apple's own APIs.

<comment><USER10> NSLinguisticTagger that is, for anyone wondering.

[https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/cocoa/...](https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/cocoa/reference/NSLinguisticTagger_Class/Reference/Reference.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "But when a small company or independent developer files for a small number of patents, there's no defensive value — they can only be used for offense."

This is obviously not correct.

1) With the changes in patent law, it's now critical to be the first to file. It's not enough to just have proof that you did something / invented something before someone else.

2) A patent can be filed for the purpose of preventing a competitor or aggressor from acquiring said patent and using it offensively. This makes a lot of sense for small companies particularly if their business hinges on a specific technology that is even kinda-sorta original to said company, or if the company's prosperity depends on not getting hit by a patent lawsuit on some cornerstone aspect to their business.

</comment><comment><USER12> I completely disagree with this sentiment and find this "article" to be a huge turnoff. But, thanks for making me aware of iA Writer Pro, you just got iA a new sale.

</comment><comment><USER13> And yet making threats using the bully pulpit that comes with having a popular internet personality is just fine.

</comment><comment><USER9> Finally I agree with Marco completely.

<comment><USER14> Except Apple uses their patents offensively, even trolling with them, but he prefers attacking a small developer since he may be affected this time.</comment></comment>


Show HN: MoodTrack, a simple iPhone app to track your moods and thoughts - <AUTHOR> I've often wondered whether there are any patterns or cycles to my moods so I built a simple iPhone app that occasionally pings me to ask how I'm feeling on a scale of 1 - 10. I also note down what I'm thinking or doing at that moment and automatically grab my location. I use the data to show some basic statistics on how I've been feeling on average over the past three days, past week and since I started tracking. There's also a graph of my moods over time.
I'd love to get feedback on whether people would find something like this useful. I'm curious about what other things people would want to track about themselves and interesting things to do with the data.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/moodtrack/id541505268?mt=8 <comment><USER2> I have been wanting an app that does this for a VERY long time. Ever since reading Letters From a Stoic and The Happiness Hypothesis, my life's resolution has been to be happier than I was yesterday.

I, similar to codegeek, always envisioned something simpler. Just three emoticons:

:( :| :)

Numbers may be more accurate, more quantitative, or what have you, but I think this is about being honest with yourself and not allowing yourself off the hook, "well, at least today was an 8". No. I want every day to be a 10!

Personally, I think trying to account for every emotion or mood possible would defeat the goal.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks good. Simple, and to the point. I would love to use it, but just a few points

1\. The website link on iTunes is not up (<http://www.moodtrack.co/>)

2\. Is there a way for me to export the data out? Every other app that I use consistently lets me do this (A good example is Dayta that exports a CSV file) and it's absolutely essential for me to do it.

Good job. Hopefully you can answer the above two questions for me.

Thanks.

P.S - I already installed it, but I probably will just play with it till I know I can get my data out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback.

1\. Yep I'll put something up at that url soon, I just wanted to get this out there asap.

2\. I absolutely plan on letting people export the data. I didn't include the option in this first release because I first wanted to see whether anyone would even use the app to input anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would really love to use an app like this. The problem I have with most things like this is that I have a hard time judging my mood on a 1-10 scale. How do I know what a 7 vs and 8 means? And how do I make sure I evaluate my mood on the the same scale day after day?

I would love to see a version of this with fewer choices for moods. Even just three options like :( and :| and :) would be enough. At least then I would know I'm getting more consistent measurements.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, that's a good point and something I've become aware of while using the app too.

Regarding knowing whether you're using the same scale day after day, how about a relative scale? E.g. rather than giving an absolute "score" of how you're feeling, you say whether you feel better, worse or the same as yesterday?

<comment><USER4> The relative scale is a really interesting idea! I'd love to give that a try!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is great, thanks for sharing. I've tried using daytum and askmeevery.com to achieve similar QS tracking, but for some reason neither really resonated.

I think you've really hit on something with the push notifications. AskMeEvery uses scheduling along with SMS and email to achieve something similar, but ultimately their tracking wasn't as robust as I would have liked.

I agree with dchuk in that the real power here has to do with your ability to turn raw data into true insights on trends and what affects a person's mood.

I saw you plan to make the data available to users over time. When you do so, it might be cool to also add some kind of data analysis forum or outlet where users can share the tools they've created to analyze their moods over time.

I'd also love to create custom categories or fields that I can check off so that when the app pings me, I answer something like Overall Mood: ____ Food:_____ Idea: ____ or something to that effect. This could also work with the tagging feature someone mentioned.

Thanks again for the share. I'm looking forward to getting my first ping and putting this app to work.

</comment><comment><USER6> A couple notes from a friend of mine who tried it out:

* Let me track answers to these questions: How was your sleep last night? Quality and number of hours.

* Optional, user-configurable yes/no questions. For example, let me set up "did you take your meds?", "did you exercise?", "did you eat gluten/dairy/etc. in the last 24 hours?"

* The workflow around adding a note is not super-clear right now.

* you should be able to delete accidental entries

thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

I definitely want to track more things too, would like to do so without making the app too complicated or feel like work.

That's really useful to know that adding a note isn't clear and I'll add deleting entries to the next version.

<comment><USER6> awesome, much obliged!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> this is wonderful, thanks for publishing this. I have a plan to launch something somewhat similar to this one day and will test it on myself (as I deal with severe depression) to see if it really does help things in the long run.

Here's a few suggestions from my list of things I want to add to my idea:

-Allow me to add tags to my mood checkin. Over time, patterns will emerge for both positive and negative mindsets (hopefully)

-make the checkins randomly spaced out throughout the day so people don't just start ignoring the app after a while

-try and extrapolate some compound meaning from the data, something like "it seems when you don't get a lot of sleep then see this person, your mood drops"...can be tricky to do, but could really add to the long term value.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the suggestion, really appreciate it.

\- What kind of tags were you thinking? I've noticed myself starting to go in the direction of tags via the notes I add when I'm tracking a mood.

\- Yep that's how notifications will work.

\- This is the hardest and most valuable part of working on something like this. I'd love to make meaningful suggestions based on the data, am thinking of the best way to do that.

<comment><USER7> In terms of tags, my idea was to just allow people to drop any tag they want in (similar to tagging a post in wordpress) and have the system autocomplete their tags when they're typing. That way, if someone is constantly tagging "mom" and their mood is low, after a while, you'll be able to positively associate the tag and the moods.

In regards to your last bullet, yeah, compound insights are tricky. I still don't really have a solid system of doing these, but essentially you want some sort of rule-based system to pull it off. Please let me know if you find any resources on it, I'd love to help you with what you're working on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I also thought about writing an app like this a while back. Having the user describe their mood with colors would also be a good way of describing mood. Perhaps look into how psychologists evaluate moods and mood disorders. I'll download it and good luck!

</comment><comment><USER9> Plenty of others working on this problem. These spring to mind as I've met founders: <http://www.moodscope.com/login> <http://www.umotif.com/> <http://moodpanda.com/>

I've also used mappiness (mentioned below) and found that the best. But after 6 weeks I was not learning anything new so stopped using it. This is a common experience for people using these apps: As I've heard it at London QS meetups (I'm a founding member).

Still awaiting an app that nails it. I'm giving it whirl. Good luck!

<comment><USER10> Agree with this.

I measured my mood twice a day for 2 months using a similar app on Android. I tracked 10 variables on a +/-10 point scale I think (excitement, contentment, anxiety, etc.)

Turns out my mood just oscillates around a baseline of about 7/10 pretty much irrespective of what's going on in my life.

It was an interesting experiment but I didn't see the point carrying on doing it long term.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been interested in tracking my moods lately, so this is perfect timing. I agree that I would find emoticons easier to use than a 1-10 scale. The way it currently is, I find myself thinking too much about what each number means, which in turn gets me thinking too much about my mood. I feel like this app needs to be very "shallow" (for lack of a better word...?). It needs to be engaging/personal enough to get people to answer truthfully/accurately, but not so engaging that it causes users over think their mood. Just my $.02. Look forward to testing this one out! (:

<comment><USER11> So after using it for 24 hours, a couple thoughts:

1) Allow users to go back and add a note to a previous day

2) Maybe allow users to customize how often MoodTrack pushes a notification asking how the user is doing. (I'm thinking an option to choose 1, 2, 3 or 4 times per day)

3) I second the option to use a relative scale (how are you doing compared to yesterday? - = +), as I'm still having trouble deciding if I'm a 7 or 8.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> One of my friends built this: <http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mooed/id522311224?mt=8>

provides you with different types of moods - related to anger, excitement, happiness etc. You can post the moods to Facebook as well as send your 'mooed' via sms to friends. Its actually pretty cool

</comment><comment><USER13> Instead of having a scale of 1-10, why not use expressions like happy, confused, sad, angry, excited, dull, bored etc ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion. It's something I thought about, I decided to use numbers because I knew that unless the app was really simple I'd never use it and picking a number seemed easier than selecting from a list of emotions. I also thought it'd be easier to graph and run analysis on numbers than emotions.

What do you think would be the best way to display the emotions? A grid of emoticons?

<comment><USER14> Personally, I think emotions would be more intuitive/easier to choose from than numbers. However, the number of emotions to choose from would have to be low (I'd say 4 or 5). I can see why you'd want to use numbers for analysis, but you can assign a value to each emotion as well.

A list/grid of emoticons would be fine for displaying the options. Nike+ does something similar to this when it gives you the option to say how you felt during a workout.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sounds very much like the experience sampling method used by Cszikszentmihalyi who has worked on research into flow <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_sampling_method>

</comment><comment><USER16> I used to track my mood using Google calendar email alerts and posterous. But I gave up because it was too cumbersome.

This looks nice and easy. And for a change, I actually said yes to push notifications!

</comment><comment><USER17> Feels like a stripped-down version of [Mappiness](<http://www.mappiness.org.uk/>) -- which isn't a bad thing, really.

</comment><comment><USER18> wow...I am so happy to read all of these comments! I just published Mood Pulse <https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=moodpulse.com> and I am thinking about taking the three moods (happy, just ok, sad) to nine choices. reading all of your comments makes me wonder if this is a good move considering that my initial goal was to have a very simple app to record the user's mood over time.</comment>


Albert Einstein bot that you can extend (click "chat" near the top to talk to him) - <AUTHOR> http://chatbotgame.com/?cmd=chat_b&mode=einstein

<comment><USER2> This is nothing new. This is a typical customizable chat bot with random Albert Einstein quotes.

 _Albert Einstein: Everything is relative you know... You: Hi, there. Albert Einstein: Hi, I am Albert Einstein You: No, you're not. Albert Einstein: Write "Tell me something" and I will tell you something You: You are a computer. Albert Einstein: You are right. What gave me away? You: You are stupid. Albert Einstein: Oh yeah? Well, you are ugly, and I can learn._

Clever, but it still needs a lot of work. Why haven't linguists ever approached this problem? I'm sure you could analyze _how_ famous people talk, and really learn how to simulate their talking patterns, and make a bot that sounds like a specific human.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think what's different here is that submitting a chat rule is so simple that anyone can do it.

Moreover, it's kind of fun to submit a chat rule and see how well it works out in actual chats.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, but that's an old thing. A friend did this with Trillian for a group of us: it's neat at first, but it's simply preprogramming responses, even if the web site in question says it's teaching the computer to think.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sometimes simple methods can work well. For example, Deep Blue brute-forced it with speed in chess.

The idea here is to accumulate a large database of chat rules to provide convincing conversation.

<comment><USER2> Chess is far less complex than conversation, though. For conversation, the opening line alone will have trillions of possible permutations. Brute-forcing it won't work for something that incredibly complex. A more subtle solution is needed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Humans are predictable though. That makes it tractable via brute-force.

<comment><USER2> They're not so much predictable as anticipatable. You can't determine what they're going to to. You can only track the most likely conversation threads and attempt to meet them as readily as possible.

The problem is, unlike in chess, there are no restrictions in a conversation. The trick with programming a really believable bot, I think, is not to brute- force it, but to create some sort of emotive simulator. Something that shifts the bot's mood as time goes on. That way, you're able to make the responses more believable, even if you don't anticipate responses to each line.

The reason brute force doesn't work is because the _human_ mind can't always anticipate things. However, we know why we don't anticipate things. We're able to tell when other people's responses are absurd and don't make sense; we can choose not to follow threads. Look at the snippet I posted above: the computer responds to everything as if it's logical conversation, which it's not. If a robot can't tell that, then the next step is to teach it how to tell. And you can't brute force that.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Acknowledgements from Scsh Reference Manual - <AUTHOR> http://www.scsh.net/docu/html/man.html <comment><USER2> Olin also likes karaoke</comment>


Alaska National Weather Service office begs "please pay us" in secret message - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2013/10/04/weather-service-office-begs-please-pay-us-in-secret-message/ This may help: http://i.imgur.com/N6XipNQ.jpg<p>From: http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1nr3oh/subtle_noaa/ <comment><USER2> Every time I see something like this, I would normally go on some boilerplate rant about the troubles of our government and society, and how USG should be paying NOAA instead of the RIAA, MPAA, NSA, and CIA and how this corruption is awful and terrible and despicable and horrifying.

I've done enough of that. I want to actually _solve_ things instead of wasting my time on the 'net talking about them. The problem is, I don't know _how_ on earth we can get the crooks and corrupt out of our government. It's seems like muckrakers don't even exist anymore, and those that do (Greenwald) barely get attention.

I wish I could do something. I bet many other on HN do as well, but ultimately, I'll just go on with my day job and silence the inner cries of freedom.

We all do.

<comment><USER3> These are the consequences of gerrymandering -- hyper-majorities where one side rarely (if ever) cooperates with the other. Hell, cooperation is internally translated as _capitulation_.

Our congressional representatives don't have to care about their constituents because they are guaranteed re-election due to electoral districts being meticulously reorganized in their party's favour.

We need a third party that one of the two has to appease in order to get any work done, and if that third party is ignored by one then the other gains favour. Until then, we will live in tyranny of "The Other Side" holding us hostage.

<comment><USER4> Gerrymandering is not about creating hyper-majorities. That would be counterproductive - votes above 50% are wasted. It is about maximizing number of likely seats. Also the country has sorted itself geographically (e.g. cities vs. rural) along ideological lines, so non-gerrymandered districts might as much if not more one-sided.

[1] [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/02/17/r...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/02/17/redistricting- didnt-win-republicans-the-house/) [2] [http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114989/government- shutdow...](http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114989/government- shutdown-2013-gerrymandering-isnt-blame)

[Edit] Hyper-majority _may be_ a result, but not on the side controlling redistricting: the opposite side may be gerrymandered into _few_ concentrated districts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This may help: [http://i.imgur.com/N6XipNQ.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/N6XipNQ.jpg)

From: [http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1nr3oh/subtle_noaa/](http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1nr3oh/subtle_noaa/)

</comment><comment><USER5> James May (of Top Gear fame) got fired from Autocar magazine in the 90s for similarly smuggling a message into the magazine: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:JamesMayAutocar.jpg](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:JamesMayAutocar.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER6> Looks like written by someone with a good wit and humour. Stop suspecting foul play in everything.

</comment><comment><USER7> How do we know this acrostic message was not a random coincidence? How many other "messages" can you find in the NWS archives?</comment>


Launch HN: Freshpaint (YC S19) – an automated, retroactive Segment alternative - <AUTHOR> Hello HN!
We're Fitz & Malis, the founders of Freshpaint (YC S19) (https://www.freshpaint.io/). Our product is a more flexible way of setting up your analytics and marketing tools.
With our javascript snippet, Freshpaint automatically instruments your site by tracking every behavior for you, up front. From there, you can create events for behaviors like clicks, pageviews, etc either through a point-and-click interface or code (whichever you're more comfortable with). In one click, Freshpaint sends data collected for that event – past or present – to 80+ analytics or marketing tools.
What does retroactive mean? Install Freshpaint's snippet today. In 6 months start tracking something new, and you'll have the last 6 months worth of data that our product has already collected. We make it easy to backfill that historical data into your tools.
There's two types of people that get the most value out of Freshpaint:
1. The developer that owns data infrastructure at their company, and wants to lighten the load through automation.
2. The non-technical marketer/customer success/PM (or founder!) that makes use of the tools that require customer data.
We both met while working at Heap (YC W13) – Malis led the database team and Fitz led product marketing. When starting Freshpaint, we were inspired by a phenomenon we saw while working with customers at Heap. Even though they used Heap for analytics, we kept seeing companies also writing tracking code for each behavior they wanted to use in other tools, either with a routing service like Segment and mParticle or building direct implementations and their own pipelines. Across analytics, product, and marketing it was common to see a dozen tools that required the same data including tools like Hubspot, Intercom, Fullstory, advertising platforms, data warehouses, and more.
Let's say you want to see how many users clicked your signup button or played a song in your analytics tools. Or you want to take the users who added an item to their cart and engage them in an automated marketing campaign. First, you have to write code to collect and log each behavior that you want to track. Then you have to send it to your marketing and analytics tools.
This requires a massive engineering effort and it's distracting to maintain (it's not uncommon to delay shipping a new feature by 2-3 weeks because of this tax). If you didn't track something or made a mistake, that data is lost forever.
Developers have to do a bunch of work that (1) is not core product development, and (2) they often aren't the ones to get value from that work because they're not the end users of this data. Flip this problem around and you have marketers and PMs that are slowed or blocked from their work, and have to distract developers to get unblocked.
This is painful for multiple teams. Fitz experienced this a few years back as part of the growth team at Quantcast, and he always had to work with engineering to instrument what he needed to trigger marketing flows and or get analytics telemetry on his experiments.
We built Freshpaint to lighten the load and streamline the workflow for both groups. How it works:
1. Install Freshpaint's javascript snippet on your site. It takes 60 seconds, and from that point Freshpaint collects every behavior like clicks, pageviews, etc.
2. Connect destinations like Google Analytics, Amplitude, Hubspot, Fullstory, Intercom, and a data warehouse. This is done by copying and pasting an API key or account ID. Complete integrations list here: https://www.freshpaint.io/integrations. We plan to build more so let us know what you'd like to see.
3. Create events for clicks, pageviews, form submissions, and more from data in Freshpaint. Create events thru code or point-and-click in our UI. Data is retroactively available back to the day you installed Freshpaint, regardless of when the event is created. We also support manual tracking and server-side tracking.
4. Send data to the destinations we support in one click. You can even backfill past data that Freshpaint has collected.
We're eager to hear your feedback, since we know HN has a ton of members who are familiar with this space from all different perspectives! <comment><USER2> From my experience working with both Segment and mParticle (and tons of tools they integrate with) this is definitely a need and a great idea!

My only advice would be to focus your primary messaging closer to that primary value prop. I can see how it probably took many iterations to get to "Codelessly connect your site to your stack." But I'd guess that the concept of 'codelessly' won't be as exciting to people with the problems you're solving as something like "Capture all data for today's needs AND tomorrows. It's like time travel." Or "A time traveling, no-code analytics tool for the future.", "The world's first time traveling analytics tool.", "Future-proof your analytics with the world's first time-traveling analytics tool."

One other customer acquisition idea- many co's will already have segment/mparticle and if they're opening communication with you then that likely means they want something better but it takes a surprising amount of work to integrate segment/mparticle with many marketing tools so I'd offer some sort of onboarding assistance if you can otherwise they won't want to take the risk of embarking on them migration.

Great idea, good luck!

</comment><comment><USER3> Curious. Since you both worked at Heap before, is there a potential conflict of interest or Non-compete that you may have/had to worry about ? I don't know the details of Heap or Segment but I am assuming this service is similar to them if not closer ?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're a Segment competitor, not a Heap competitor (we actually support Heap as a destination). A significant number of Heap's users use both Segment and Heap. That's actually one of the big reasons we started Freshpaint. A lot of people would buy Heap for product analytics, but they would still setup manual event tracking for Segment for their other tools. We started Freshpaint so you won't need to setup event tracking at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't have any specific context on this company so won't comment on their offering compared to that of Segment, but I do find the "collect everything" approach to be generally bad and undesirable.

What I want, past any sort of reasonable business scale, is a constrained set of specific events that I have explicitly decided that I want to track. I then want those events to be well documented and well QA'd. The approach of "here we tracked everything for you, now just sort through it" is great if you only want to serve small companies who just don't want to do the work to be more intentional about their data, but at any sort of reasonable scale of people touching data this becomes a recipe for disaster.

<comment><AUTHOR> Freshpaint works like:

> What I want, past any sort of reasonable business scale, is a constrained > set of specific events that I have explicitly decided that I want to track.

and not like:

> here we tracked everything for you, now just sort through it

We collect everything for you behind the scenes, but we will only surface a piece of data if you explicitly ask for it.

This is similar to undo in a text document. While you're editing a document, the entire history is tracked behind the scenes. You don't ever need to pay attention to all of that data unless you explicitly use the undo feature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This absolutely brilliant. Been using Segment for multiple project on over 1m MTUs and now at a B2B SaaS where we simply can't invest in writing events for every interaction. You've perfectly captured our/my pain.

</comment><comment><USER6> I remember seeing you guys sometime back on Show HN. Any change in your product positioning since then? Any learnings from customers?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21973458](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21973458)

Congrats on building this. This is awesome and much needed.

</comment><comment><USER7> Sorry, I am not very old :), but I didn't follow up with the tools. I don't know anything other than Google Analytics. So could you please explain as you would explain to a child what those tools do more than GA?

<comment><AUTHOR> Fitz wrote a blog post on the analytics and marketing tools we recommend startups use [0]. It goes through a number of the different tools and why or why not you would want to use them. You should check it out.

[0] [https://www.freshpaint.io/blog/yc-stack-recommendations- for-...](https://www.freshpaint.io/blog/yc-stack-recommendations-for-growth- analytics-and-marketing-tools-for-2020-yc-startups)

<comment><USER7> Thanks <3

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I always found it interesting that YC will fund competitors of existing portfolio companies, but I guess it might make sense from various angles as they increase the chance that one of their funded companies will make it big, and it will probably stimulate innovation.

I wonder though how they handle the potential conflict of interest as I imagine they get updates from both companies and might be asked for advice by both as well.

Regarding the product I think it's interesting but if retroactive event streaming is the only USP I think that should be easy to reproduce for Segment. Also, I really like that Segment started taking privacy a bit more serious by introducing their privacy hub. Freshpaint is probably not compliant with GDPR as of now, I guess as they're focused on the US market that might not matter much though.

<comment><AUTHOR> We didn't apply to YC with the idea of Freshpaint. We were initially a Postgres performance optimization tool.

> but if retroactive event streaming is the only USP I think that should be > easy to reproduce for Segment

Retroactivity has been the main differentiator between Heap and it's competitors for seven years now. None of them have been able to successfully copy it yet. Mixpanel launched an autotrack feature, but later shut it down.

> Freshpaint is probably not compliant with GDPR as of now

We are GDPR compliant. In fact, Fitz helped form an industry working group on GDPR with the IAB while working at Quantcast a year ahead of GDPR coming into effect.

<comment><USER9> Can you speak to the architecture at all? e.g. an event hits Freshpaint, and 3 months later is is qualified as a defined "event" to be forwarded to 3 destinations - how does it happen?

I ask because I saw your previous comments and saw that 1) you're an expert at optimizing PostgreSQL, and 2) you said that Heap was harder to build because of the queries that users can define in the frontend.

So basically, are you able to leverage PostgreSQL to build something like Freshpaint? I would imagine it is prohibitively expensive to store your event data in PostgreSQL if it's sole purposed is to be categorized and forwarded to other destinations, vs. being queried like it was in Heap.

Amazing work and best of luck!

<comment><USER10> They probably store the XPath of each click, and when an event with the same XPath is created they browse through all the past click with this specific XPath

<comment><USER9> Of course. But my question pertains _how_ the event data is stored. Heap stored the event data in Citus, and OP worked to optimize their PostgreSQL for queries across the data. Freshpaint doesn't query the data (in the aggregate form that Heap does), it simply needs to find events that qualify as defined events and forward them to their destinations.

I'm just asking if PostgreSQL is still the right tool for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been using Freshpaint for a few months and really enjoyed it because it's an end-to-end solution. While i's not fully "code-less", it did speed up our analytics deployment process by _weeks_. I'd highly recommend it to people who are semi-technical (i.e. you know how to code but would rather someone else did it for you). Also support has been tremendous and their release pipeline looks very impressive.

</comment><comment><USER12> How does the point and click UI generate event targets? At my work we use Pendo which sounds very similar to Freshpaint. Pendo's UI generates CSS selectors. Problem is that we use CSS modules and our class names include a hash, so they change frequently. Also our classes aren't designed to communicate the semantics the Product team is trying to capture, and there's also no way for Pendo to know that the selector it generated uniquely captures whatever event the user wants - it's entirely possible that the same selector could occur on a different screen.

We've been asked to "stabilize" our class names for the product team, so that Pendo doesn't "break", but we have resisted as fundamentally this is not what CSS is meant for. Nonetheless we now have an invisible, undocumented coupling between our application internals and Pendo.

IMO the only way this kind of event tracking can be done right is if developers and Product communicate and the devs, who understand the code, put the tracking in the right place.

I'd encourage you to bless a "data-freshpaint" attribute as the preferred way to link events to your system, if the way it currently works is CSS selectors.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I'd encourage you to bless a "data-freshpaint" attribute as the preferred > way to link events to your system.

If you want to go through with this, you can do this already with CSS classes. You can have classes like "freshpaint-login", "freshpaint-checkout", etc.

> IMO the only way this kind of event tracking can be done right is if > developers and Product communicate and the devs, who understand the code, > put the tracking in the right place.

If you have the resources to do this, I highly recommend you setup manual tracking. In Freshpaint, we give you the ability to fall back to manual event tracking if you want it. The thing is most teams don't have the resources to write tracking code for everything, so a lot of the time it just doesn't get done. We commonly hear it takes 3-6 months to get Segment fully setup, and even then you have to constantly write new tracking code as you launch new features.

<comment><USER12> True, you could dedicate CSS classes like that. I'm really talking about separation of concerns: CSS is for styling, not communicating user intentions to external systems. A data attribute is better, and you could program the selector-creator to prefer those attributes if it can find them.

That doesn't help with after-the-fact attribution, though. That's where using existing CSS classes really shines. With the huge proviso that you have to be sure the CSS selector you're using really captures (and only captures) the action you're trying to track. I suspect it's easy to get this wrong and end up with skewed analytics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Congratulations on your launch!

I use Segment and can easily see the value in backfilling historical data when adding new data destinations. Also impressed with the respectable set of integrations [1] you have implemented already.

[1]: [https://www.freshpaint.io/integrations](https://www.freshpaint.io/integrations)

What would be your plan if Segment added "backfill" as a feature to their existing product? Does your "automation" also provide significant advantages over Segment?

<comment><AUTHOR> > What would be your plan if Segment added "backfill" as a feature to their > existing product? Does your "automation" also provide significant advantages > over Segment?

I don't think it's possible for them to provide the same kinds of backfills we provide. At least not without completely redesigning their infrastructure. In order to support retroactive backfills, we capture every user action up front. If Segment were to try to do that, they would suddenly find themselves processing an order of magnitude more data than they are today. If you want to support autotrack, you need to design your infrastruture from day 1 with that in mind.

<comment><USER13> From other comments by you & Fitz, the "define events in UI" feature is also very intriguing as a value prop.

Thanks! Look forward to trialing this soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hey sounds brilliant, congrats on the launch.

As soon as I heard of Segment, I knew they were onto something valuable and can only welcome more competition.

Now that I've been nice, allow me to get the plastic pitchfork.

I see no mention of GDPR, I assume you are going to restrict your market to NA for now? What about CCPA?

In the same vein I don't think you have any integration with open-sources alternatives to commercial software that one could host on premise.

That's an odd choice given the shape of things to come wrt privacy.

<comment><USER15> Hey thanks for the feedback!

For customers that need it, we get necessary legal documents/procedures in place (DPA, etc) to be compliant with local regulations. We also share with customers our documentation that communicates our security measures and how we process customer data. You are correct - this stuff is not accessible on the marketing site, we'll get there :)

In terms of your integrations comment: beyond the integrations we have now, we prioritize new ones based on customer demand. So, yes, if the market trends in the direction you mentioned then we will as well. My personal take is that open source alternatives are currently a small subset and it's unclear to me where the future lies. I also think privacy and security get conflated here sometimes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Without more integrations, it's a hard thing to sell. Salesforce? Dynamic Yield? BounceX? Emarsys?

Also, how does it work with native mobile apps? No catch-all collector?

</comment><comment><USER17> Firstly, congrats on the launch.

Please let me know if I am wrong but it seems the major differentiator from Segment is (3) as you can do the 1,2 and 4 with Segment. And even with (3) the only difference is the way the events are collected (through code / point-and- click). So my question is whether this really needs to be an end-to-end solution / competitor to Segment rather than just an adapter/ wrapper on top of Segment.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're missing out on the whole retroactive piece! When you install Freshpaint, Freshpaint starts tracking every click, pageview, etc. This means Freshpaint is tracking nearly every event you will ever care about from day 1. At any point in the future, you can send any data Freshpaint has collected to your different tools. In the same way that programmers try to achieve 100% test coverage, Freshpaint achieves nearly 100% "event tracking coverage" out of the box. That's not true at all with Segment and it can take several months to get even most of the events you care about.

<comment><USER17> I assumed that companies which used Segment would also integrate with solutions like Kissmetrics and get those analytics automatically through their Segment integration.

What am I missing here? Are you saying that Freshpaint replaces Segment + Kissmetrics?

<comment><AUTHOR> Freshpaint is separate from Kissmetrics. Freshpaint and Segment are both data collection tools. Out of the box Segment collects nothing, while Freshpaint collects everything.

Let's say you want to send a purchase event to Kissmetrics to do analytics on. With Segment that would look something like:

      1) File a JIRA ticket for an engineer to instrument the purchase event.
      2) Wait a few weeks for the engineer to write and deploy the Segment tracking code.
      3) Wait a few weeks to collect enough data to do your analysis.
      4) Run your analysis in Kissmetrics.

With Freshpaint:

      1) Use our UI to create the purchase event.
      2) Send every purchase event that happened since you installed Freshpaint to Kissmetrics. This is possible because Freshpaint tracks every event out of the box.
      3) Run your analysis in Kissmetrics.

Does the difference make sense?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> One point of clarification: what counts as a user?

We have a product that has both public- and private-facing components. If it's unique IP addresses then we'd be close to your enterprise plan which seems price prohibitive. If it's an authenticated user with a name, that seems much different.

Otherwise looks great and love the point-and-click. Even though creating events is easy, it saves the back-and-forth with development.

<comment><USER15> When a user visits your site, we give them a cookie with a unique user ID. We determine the number of users you have based on the number of distinct user IDs we've seen.

We're definitely conscious of user-based pricing, and we'll try to work with you to come up with a price that allows you to use Freshpaint across your entire site. We've done this with others that have funky business models where traffic is high in some spots. Otherwise, you can install Freshpaint just on the private component of your site and collect data where it's the most valuable.

<comment><USER16> What about bots?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Congrats on the launch!

Is there a way to track when a component comes into the viewport?

What's the best practice for tracking component impressions?

</comment><comment><USER20> Congrats on the launch. I have been a segment user and I think they also have capabilities to backfill as well as they seem to be moving towards a CDP. I am struggling to see what is the difference here? Or your value proposition is different business/technical model ?

<comment><AUTHOR> The big difference between us and Segment is we automatically instrument your entire site. As soon as you install Freshpaint, we are automatically capturing every click, pageview, etc, performed on your site. You can create a new event six months after installing Freshpaint, and you'll have access to every instance of that event since you installed Freshpaint. This means you:

1) Don't have to delay launches so you have time to setup event tracking.

2) Don't have to worry about forgetting to setup tracking. A common problem is a company will ship a new feature and realize two weeks down the road that they forgot to track a key event. They then have to setup tracking for that event and wait another two weeks for data to come up. That jus doesn't happen with Freshpaint. Freshpaint collects every action out of the box and gives you access to that data whenever you want it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> How does backfilling work? Do all destinations support it completely? Do things like the original IP address and date time get passed through?

</comment><comment><USER22> Saw your comment on the Posthog post yesterday. Sounds like you felt the pain of scaling at Heap, which bodes well for FP.

Freshpaint looks super useful for two reasons:

1\. Heap-style "collect it all" and "define events in the UI" features. Loved these on Heap and it should be the default collector for taking dev out of the "tracking usage metrics" equation

2\. More Segment competition. Segment's great, but super expensive for business models where the # of your tracked users doesn't scale with pricing.

I could imagine using this with PostHog for a nice product usage stack.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Saw your comment on the Posthog post yesterday. Sounds like you felt the > pain of scaling at Heap, which bodes well for FP.

Yep! At Heap I had to build a system to ingest a ton of data and process queries over that data that returned in seconds in real-time. For Freshpaint, we need to ingest the same amount of data, but without the need to query it. I honestly think building Freshpaint has been several times easier than building Heap.

Early on, I had a conversation with Heap's CTO about Freshpaint. He said something funny along the lines of "I wish I could work on this because I would absolutely destroy this problem."

> Segment's great, but super expensive for business models where the # of your > tracked users doesn't scale with pricing.

Definitely! This is one of the things Fitz and I noticed before starting Freshpaint. It seems like until now, Segment hasn't had any real competitors. Segment is kind of now known for being overpriced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Would this work for React Native?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not right now, although we have plans to build a React Native integration in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Could you compare your product to PostHog that has also launched on HN recently ?

<comment><AUTHOR> They're pretty different tools. If anything, you would use Freshpaint to send data into PostHog.

PostHog is an analytics tool. Once you have data in PostHog, you can run queries against the data to produce various charts and graphs. Other analytics tool include Mixpanel, Amplitude, and Heap. The primary reason you would use an analytics tool is you want to ask questions about your users.

Freshpaint is a data collection tool. We automatically collect data from your site such as clicks, pageviews, etc. You can then use our UI to send that data to different tools. We integrate with the large analytics tools and also a ton of marketing tools like Intercom and HubSpot. There are two reasons you would want to use a tool like Freshpaint:

      1) It's easy to collect data. Freshpaint instruments your entire site, so you don't have to.
      2) It's easy to send the data to different tools. Once a piece of data is in Freshpaint, you can send it in one click to any of your analytics and marketing tools.

Does that make sense?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Fantastic idea - congrats on the launch!

</comment><comment><USER26> Segment + a universal no-code events collector?

<comment><USER26> Because events collector can not make money and usually open source... so have to add one ETL backend.

<comment><USER9> I'm not affiliated with Freshpaint, but I'm curious what you mean by this.

Event collectors absolutely do make money (albeit none are probably profitable due to being in growth phases right now). Also, very few are open source (Mixpanel, Segment, Snowplow, and Amplitude's tracking libraries are open source, Heap's mobile library is open source, but the backends and visualization platforms are closed and the primary value of the product).

<comment><USER26> collectors, I mean analytics.js...

These js files collect the events from web app and sent them to the backend.

You can charge people on these files, but who is gonna pay?

But once the events are in your backend, customers have to pay for getting them out and for storage as well.

<comment><USER9> Who is going to pay for anlaytics.js? Segment, the maintainers of analytics.js, did $50MM in revenue last year.

<comment><USER26> That is because they have a backend service. The revenue is generated through the backend service, not the js client.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


British couchsurfer visits every single country in the world - without flying - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/been-there-epic-journey-takes-in-all-201-countries-and-a-lot-of-sofas-8468813.html

<comment><USER2> It's surprising the Russians issued him a visa after he entered their country illegally. Fingers crossed for him arriving there today.</comment>


Can the Bitcoin Community Stop Neo-Nazis from Using the Digital Currency? - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vbbb5y/can-the-bitcoin-community-stop-neo-nazis-from-using-the-digital-currency <comment><USER2> Remember yesterday when people said this slippery slope was never going to happen?

I'm at a loss for words on what to say about this. Private businesses doing what they like in terms of serving customers is entirely valid, but it has set a dangerous precedent in the minds of people who don't know where to draw the line. The author has this asinine idea that the Bitcoin community needs to "step up" and compromise the very reason it exists because of what has effectively become a Nazi boogeyman. This excerpt makes it abundantly clear how little he understands the value or overreaching goal of Bitcoin:

"If they're the average bitcoiner, they might just have to look on with horror as their digital currency is used by neo-Nazis."

The idea that just because a group uses (or even glorifies) a currency or token of some sort, the claim you support or enable their ideals by holding it is outright stupid. "If they're the average US dollar holder, they might just have to look on with horror as their currency is used by neo-Nazis."

The best part is that the author is entirely ignorant of one of the large driving forces behind Bitcoin's cultural impact; it has long been a tool for moving drugs, reagents, firearms, explosives, counterfeit money, stolen credit cards, stolen information/databases, and child pornography, long before it was ever a twinkle in Richard Spencer's eye. Yeah, you can ruin people's livelihoods, contribute to criminal activity on a global scale, or distribute opioids that will ravage poor communities, but you know what's worse than that? Using Bitcoin to donate to a fringe political site, of course!</comment>


Prime minister apology after Turing petition - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8249792.stm <comment><USER2> on the front page right now:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=816217>

<comment><USER3> and <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=816182></comment></comment>


Sure, Big Data Is Great. But So Is Intuition.  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/30/technology/big-data-is-great-but-dont-forget-intuition.html

<comment><USER2> The article steers the reader, wanting them to conclude that there is something wrong with data science as a field that is solved by _human_ intuition - this left me feeling much the way any science fiction movie makes me feel: no matter what mothership, demigod, or alien species they encounter, _humans_ will emerge victorious. Fine for a science fiction story, but not quite so believable in this context, where little evidence is offered.

</comment><comment><USER3> I thought big data was the problem. Why is it great all of a sudden?</comment>