Ask YC: Feedback on startup: wirenode.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.wirenode.com

<comment><USER3> When I first typed in my blog URL, I was hoping to immediately see the "mobilized" format of my blog. But I am now asked for another URL name - <USER2> name for the mobilized blog. It is a bit unexpected.

After giving an URL name for the mobilized blog, I was hoping to see the "mobilized" format of my blog. But now I am asked to signup.

I gave up.

It is a good idea with lots of potential. But without seeing some mobilized format, I am not going to sign up.

</comment><comment><USER4> The idea itself looks cool, but the main page lacks focus.

Might I suggest a prominent path to a quick demo - free registration will put off any casual user, whereas if there were an easy "conveyor belt" taking you through the steps of building and demonstrating a really easy mobile website, you'd have much more engaged users by the time they finished.

<comment><USER5> This advice is given to _every_ startup that presents here (don't get mad, I agree with the advice!). I think we should change the name of the site to "Hacker News - where you don't have to register to test drive a product!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Let me play devil's advocate here. There may be more types of users out there. But in my mind, there are at least the following distinct types of people that have their own websites:

1\. Those that are web savvy but use hosted application solutions for their content (e.g. bloggers using blogspot).

2\. Those that are not web savvy, but have paid somebody else to create a completely custom website solution for them (e.g., a charity with a custom database-driven website and CMS).

3\. Those that are web savvy and also are technically-adept, so they create and maintain their own custom website solution.

Now, here are some challenges.

When dealing with type 1 folks, they will just use the path of least resistance a.k.a. whatever their hosted application provides. And in fact, it probably is already on their hosted app provider's agenda to include some sort of mobile version to users.

Type 2 users won't even know that you exist and might not even be able to comprehend why they would want and/or need to use your services. The developers that hand-hold them might though. You may want to focus on attracting these sort of developers and catering your service to their needs (e.g., make it easy for a developer to do things she needs to do as opposed to making it easy for a total computer newb to do things he wants to do).

Type 3 users are probably going to roll their own solution and will simply skip over your solution at worst, or at best will use it as an interim solution.

If you can somehow create a kick-ass solution that hosted application providers themselves would want to adopt and roll out for their own users, that would probably yield the greatest reward for your efforts. However, I think the most realistic market right now are the developers who help out Type 2 users. Speaking as somebody who has done this sort of development in the past, here is what I would pay for and would simply pass on to my clients as a cost-of-doing business.

1\. I do not have the time, inclination, nor infrastructure to create, maintain, and test against the wide array of mobile devices on the market. But I want to have my cake and eat it too. I don't want to lower the mobile experience down to the lowest common denominator. If iPhone users are used to a specific UI, I want my site to appear and behave like a native app (e.g., maybe using iui.js). Likewise, if RIM users have a particular preference (e.g., some of the older ones had a scroll wheel) I want the mobile version to be optimized for the scroll wheel on the RIM device. Here is what I am willing to do in return: Provide customized structured content, maybe in XML, to your service. You don't have to translate my RSS and distill it down to whatever lowest common denominator mobile version works across all devices. That's not what I want. A lot of my clients have websites with a ton of content and the content itself will have to be adjusted for use on mobile devices, so this isn't entirely a technical problem. I'd much rather provide you with a custom XML document that also has content catering to mobile users and in return you deliver optimized solutions for each platform.

2\. My clients are professional organizations. A mobile version of their site needs to be accessible by their own domains. Make it easy for me with instructions on how I can adjust my DNS entries, similar to how Google Apps for Domains works. So maybe if I hit mobile.my-clients-website.com, it hits your servers. I don't care if your servers do the heavy lifting, but I can't be using any other domain for one, and especially not some weird .mobi one that compute newbs can't figure out.

Good luck and hopefully I've provided some useful tidbits for your company to consider (and that I haven't come off as being overly harsh)!

</comment><comment><USER7> I personally like homepage layout, I think your conversion rate could be really high for blog conversions, but, as browngeek said, there is no instant gratification.

I'm not to tempted to create my own cause I don't know what's entailed. I do know it takes 5 minutes now and that's not time I have right now.

Maybe you should make the "Start creating mobile pages" link bring you to a blank mobile page where you can become invested and then force the user to sign up once they have everything they want; like their layout, pictures, url..etc.

Good idea though, and you're off to an AWESOME start.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think this is an idea with a lot of potential. Rather than importing your blog, I'd focus on being the weebly.com of mobile.

A couple more notes, from using the product:

Deleting an element pops up an incredibly annoying confirm box. Offer undo instead; confirm boxes are almost never the right choice.

You have a captcha on signup. That _will_ reduce the total number of accounts created. You're not big yet; add it when you're a valuable spam target.

I'm not sure what I can build that's useful with this. Show me some examples of awesome mobile webpages I can copy.

</comment><comment><USER9> as a designer I would say the front page is a nice start but there are some details I would clean up.

the "Build your own mobile web in 5 minutes." does not look great and probably needs to be an image.

I would make the text box to "Mobilize your blog" bigger and more of a focus of the top of the page as it feels a little hidden.

The fade to white around the images in the yellow box do not look great. I would take off the shading and perhaps just use a darker yellow border or something. Images that look crisp are always the best.

Other wise it looks great and was super easy to signup for. On the first occasion the "phone emulator" got stuck on my mouse and I could not close it with out refreshing the page. I have not been able to reproduce it though.

</comment><comment><USER10> I had to click on some of your "Read about us at:" links to really understand what you're offering and how your site works.

I don't like to register for something if I don't understand what it does or how it works. Perhaps an informational link on the home page or a quick video would help draw people in to your registration process.

I like the overall page structure and design otherwise, though.

</comment><comment><USER11> Right off the bat there is no link for a more in depth review. You have a good pitch, but no 'Read more here' link. You have links to other sites reviewing your product, but I would like to see an explanation(more than 3 steps) of how it all works. Interesting idea, I think you may have something here.

</comment><comment><USER12> "Build your own mobile web in 5 minutes."

This tagline makes it hard to understand what you do. It's hard just glancing at the front page to tell what problem this is solving. Something like "turn web pages into mobile pages in 5 minutes" might be more descriptive.

</comment><comment><USER13> I like it, a lot! I signed up and started making my site right away. For some reason, it didn't like my RSS feed. I'm generating it from blogger and using feedburner, so I'm a little surprised that it didn't work.

Very cool idea, though!

</comment><comment><USER14> Quick and easy, I like it. I noticed however that link the whitespace around links gets destroyed when creating a site from RSS. See for instance: <http://tinyurl.com/3wquw5> .

</comment><comment><USER15> Nice job.

I'm running the Firefox 3 nightlies and it came up as an unsupported browser, even though you have Firefox 3 checked as a browser you support.

</comment><comment><USER16> Front splash page is nice, although 'create your own' position is unusual. Also would be hesitant about registering so early without seeing it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi all, thanks you all for your comments. Thanks to 9oliYQjP very much too.

Regards Tomas Zeman email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER17> There is some sloppy English in multiple places, which (to me) makes the site seem less professional.

</comment><comment><USER18> I want a demo.</comment>


Everybody's Lying About the Link Between Gun Ownership and Homicide - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@bjcampbell/everybodys-lying-about-the-link-between-gun-ownership-and-homicide-1108ed400be5 <comment><USER3> All I can say is that, as a Brit (from a country where regular police don't even carry guns), I find the concept of average Joes owning guns of any description crazy. It seems like the outcome of a broken society in which people don't trust law enforcement to protect them. Maybe higher gun ownership rates don't directly lead to homicide, but that to me isn't even the issue - the elephant in the room is the massive cultural problem the US has with firearms, especially the way in which they have been politicised in such a bipartisan, black-or-white system.

<comment><USER4> > I find the concept of average Joes owning guns of any description crazy.

It becomes a lot less crazy when you consider that parts of the US still take advantage of guns as protection against wild animals. It becomes a little less crazy when you consider that a lot of people use them as a hobby - <USER2> practice (it's part of a few different Olympic sports).

Guns are, practically speaking, no more or less crazy than Bowie knives, hunting bows, cross bows, or any number of other devices purpose built for hunting.

> the elephant in the room is the massive cultural problem the US has with > firearms

Yeah, definitely an issue. It's, oddly enough, largely a city vs. country issue. People in the city have no practical use for guns. People who don't have the miles of concrete protecting them from the wilds tend to take a much more practical view on the usefulness of, the need for, tools that can protect them from predators with teeth and claws.

I've been within 100 yards of a black bear with her cubs. I'm glad I had a pistol at the time. I'm even more glad I had no cause to use it.

<comment><USER5> > Guns are, practically speaking, no more or less crazy than Bowie knives, > hunting bows, cross bows, or any number of other devices purpose built for > hunting.

US schools haven't seen a mass murder using knives, hunting bows, or cross bows. US school mass murders involve handguns and rifles.

<comment><USER4> I can do a google search and find at least three "school stabbing sprees" in the US on the first page. In fact, it seems like you're much more likely to be stabbed while going to school than shot.

Sharks kill, on average, about as many people as school spree shooters per year. Those deaths to sharks are preventable by offing all the sharks, are we doing that?

Making policies based on outrage is a losing proposition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So I'm looking at his data, and I make the following observations.

1\. In Kansas City, MO, the murder rate is 31 per 100,000 people in 2018. [1] Yet for the state it was 5 per 100,000 in his graph. That may skew the results towards rural areas with less people.

2\. Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming, and Idaho, while the highest percentage of gun ownership, are also the least populated. But they seem to skew the graph downward giving their contributions more weight than Louisiana and Missouri, say.

[1] [http://www.kansascity.com/opinion/editorials/article19263428...](http://www.kansascity.com/opinion/editorials/article192634289.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> As a gun owner I have a lot of conflicting feelings about them. On the one hand, I am enamored with the mechanical engineering. On the other, I'm proud to be able to own them, as a strange rite of practice as an American. The very essence of our democracy is so well represented in an armed citizenry. That said.. I agree we need stronger laws. Longer waiting times. Mandatory mental health evaluations and training. Limits in the number that can be purchased at one time, in one year. One per year would be fine with me. Between pride of this right and fascinating with the engineering and physics behind it, I am conflicted.

</comment><comment><USER8> Do have evidence of intentional deceit? Could it just be that those you accuse of lying are just wrong?

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't write this article. I just found it interesting and wanted to share it to see what counter-arguments and discussion it would lead to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> _One: They're sneaking suicide in with the data, and then obfuscating that inclusion with rhetoric._

Alternative hypothesis: they're including suicide data because it's relevent. Suicide is homicide (not murder), and they're including the copious accidental killings (also homicide, also not necessarily murders).

<comment><AUTHOR> I see a difference between suicides and accidents vs murders when it comes to gun restrictions. If I chose to own guns (I don't), then I'm ultimately responsible for avoiding accidents and not committing suicide, just as I would be responsible for any other risky activity or sport I partake in. Murder on the other hand involves the criminal act of taking someone else's life. In my opinion, we should only focus on acts of criminal intent when discussing banning or restricting gun use, and only include accidents or suicide when we discuss laws that improve safe use of guns.

<comment><USER10> What about drunk driving? Do you think DUI should be restricted even in victimless cases with no criminal intent?

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely, because drunk driving has the potential to harm others, even thought it may not always. Also, I'm not sure that's a good analogy, as trying to prevent drunk driving doesn't take the form of restricting driving for everyone, while gun control usually affects responsible gun owners as well as bad people and suicidal/uncareful people.

<comment><USER9> The single greatest risk factor for someone committing suicide is a first- order relative who committed suicide. Everything in life isn't as obvious as crashing a car into someone, but the harm of suicide extends far beyond the victim.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> People are talking about gun deaths and gun violence. Why would those be excluded from the debate? Why exclude injuries?

Lots of gun violence doesn't result in death.</comment>


A former WeWork employee is suing over Adam Neumann's $1.7B golden parachute - <AUTHOR> https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/wework-ex-employee-sues-adam-neumann-2-billion-leaving-deal-2019-11-1028675038 <comment><USER2> For everyone here defending Adam, I pose this question.

How exactly is capitalism supposed to work when people can use their power to funnel money to themselves from company funds while everyone else who took on equity to work at a startup is fucked?

Is the answer "be more careful next time"? If that's the case, why would people follow the rules of law when someone else is able to fuck over hundreds of people and walk away a billionaire. Why should employees not try and steal from their company when the CEO can do it _and_ get a golden parachute when their behavior destroys the value of the company?

<comment><USER3> Shareholder equal protection needs to be established more in the courts. It is bogus when some shareholders get massive constructive dividends while others get none.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Perhaps it would be good if all material facts related to a company must be disclosed to all share/option/warrant holders once the number of equity holders or claimed value of the company exceeds a certain threshold. At least an annual balance sheet, income statement, and cap table.

I've found that in practice the legal rights of minority shareholders are often not respected in private companies and there's not a lot that you can do about it.

<comment><USER5> > _it would be good if all material facts related to a company must be > disclosed to all share /option/warrant holders_

Delaware law gives all shareholders the right to inspect their companies' "books and records" [1].

Recently, private shareholders have had to sue to exercise this right [2]. That's a shame regulators should fix.

[1] [https://codes.findlaw.com/de/title-8-corporations/de-code- se...](https://codes.findlaw.com/de/title-8-corporations/de-code- sect-8-220.html)

[2] [https://law.justia.com/cases/delaware/supreme- court/2019/281...](https://law.justia.com/cases/delaware/supreme- court/2019/281-2018.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does anybody have any insight as to whether this case has merit or not?

<comment><USER7> This case has no merit and that court is not the venue to air these grievances.

A more effective idea would be to push for exchanges like Nasdaq to reject listing companies with these share structure attributes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I know it's fashionable to hate on Adam right now, but without him THERE WOULD BE NO COMPANY TO SUE. People tend to forget that.

<comment><USER9> Brokej window fallacy!

Without him there would be no WeWork but other less broken companies could have received the same capital, created jobs, etc

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Its only "self dealing" when you haven't granted yourself that right, if the organization type has a constraint from the government or if it doesnt then if the organization type doesnt have bylaws specifically allowing you that right.

WeWork was structured by Adam to give himself that right my mere nature of unilateral control via consolidated ownership and voting rights.

Part of the grievance is that his "self enrichment" torpedoed the IPO, which is not part of reality which is that employees and "minority shareholders" were sold and bought a dream that the market was laughing at the whole time.

WeWork's structure was always rat infested with a valuation nobody would accept. These payments wouldnt have changed that, its debt load, burn rate and subsidiary structure was the problem.

This case has no merit and that court is not the venue to air these grievances.

I think a more effective idea would be to push for exchanges like Nasdaq to reject listing companies with these share structure attributes.</comment>


A/B Testing - <AUTHOR> http://jackg.org/ab-testing/

<comment><USER2> Excellent point. Blindly following A/B testing can lead to a good local maximum, but odds are it's not the market maximum. Radical redesigns and new business directions can lead to even higher (or lower) conversions.

In my experience, the trick is finding the balance between optimization and strategy. Doing continuous testing along the way helps you find out what's working and what's not.

<comment><USER3> It reminds me of Fisher's theorem. [1]

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

<comment><USER2> Agreed.

Side note: HN removed the apostrophe from the Wikipedia URL, resulting in a 404. You can easily get to it via Google search link, though.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=Fishers+fundamental+theorem+...](https://www.google.com/search?q=Fishers+fundamental+theorem+of+natural+selection)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the point "blindly following A/B tests is bad" is valid, but I don't completely follow the path this article paves to lead you there.

For part one, regarding forecasting, you were A/B testing within the segment you were targeting, whether you realized you were targeting that segment or not. You saw improvements within this segment, but were further alienating a blind spot. Strict, purely statistical A/B testing isn't a great mechanism for testing out segmentation strategies, business models, etc. A/B testing isn't a strategy to get you more oranges, it's a tactic to get more juice from the oranges you already have.

For the second part, regarding the map, I'm still not sure if this is a good candidate for A/B testing, or if the implementation of the A/B test really isolated enough variables to reach a business conclusion. I suspect that may be difficult. Critical portions of your user interface are most likely another area where A/B testing is a bad idea.

</comment><comment><USER5> Well done; A/B testing is valuable, but under a very specific set of circumstances. The true purpose of AB testing is to say, "Does my conversion go up or down if I make that button green?" If it goes up you keep it. You put in some variables, and A/B testing can tell you which varables will produce the best result. But it's important not to forget that the results of these tests were (intentionally) limited to certain variables.

The reason being a founder is so hard and the reason your intuition as a founder is so valuable is because answers that require finding and solving pains can't (yet) be mathematically found. To us a very tired analogy, A/B testing will tell you people want a faster horse instead of a car.

<comment><USER6> _But it's important not to forget that the results of these tests were (intentionally) limited to certain variables._

I recently made the argument that you should cook up a single metric which captures all variables of interest, and use it everywhere. Put all variables of interest into them, and carefully define what tradeoffs you are willing to make.

[http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/metrics_manifesto.htm...](http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/metrics_manifesto.html)

As for the tired analogy, founders intuition gives you the idea of cars. A/B testing can still demonstrate that cars are superior.

<comment><USER7> Since you're proposing a calculated metric, it's advisable to just log all three and do the calculation afterwards. That way if the business decides that number is silly at some point it can be changed and your results recalculated. Also trying to come up with a simple formula that relates different units of business value can be VERY difficult. Any literature on perspectives around that?

<comment><USER6> _Also trying to come up with a simple formula that relates different units of business value can be VERY difficult._

Deciding what you actually want and what tradeoffs you are willing to make can be hard. Then again, if you don't know what you want you are unlikely to achieve it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I suspect many startups follow this pattern: 1\. Launch with flawed hypothesis. 2\. Confused or disappointed users say what they really want. 3\. Pivot that leads to product market fit (in Seatgeek's case, launching stadium maps, Columbus, etc).

We went through that at GiftRocket. We launched with the premise of geo- located gift cards. Of those who tried, many had bad experiences. But they gave us enough direction to kill the GPS component and turn GR into a well- packaged online way to send money as a gift.

Funny enough- PB told us to do this before we launched (the same way PG identified the issue for Seatgeek).

</comment><comment><USER9> Consumers don't want to think about fluctuating prices. Especially if it means there is a chance they bought too early. They want a price today that's better than the market.

Scenario 1: The Broker

I want to see Swedish House Mafia but don't want to pay more than $400. Inversely, I bought Beyoncé tickets, sobered up, remembered that I hate Beyoncé, and would like to get at least $300. Your give the customer a probability of the ticket being sold. Perhaps also the option of resetting the price if the probability falls below X.

Scenario 2: The Dealer

Consumers buy and sell a small number of tickets. If you bought(sold) tickets when your model said they were likely to go up(down) by a margin in excess of your error you could diversify across multiple event types, venues, artists, and dates. You would be exposed to model (transformed basis) risk and would need to finance inventory.

Scenario 3: The Market Maker

Derivatives! :D The simplest way to "do arbitrage without ever holding the tickets" would be to sell tickets as forwards. To illustrate, let's suppose prices are at $500 and you believe they will fall to $200. You sell a "ticket" at $250 to a customer and receive those funds today. The night before the event you buy the ticket at $200 and deliver it to the customer, pocketing the $50 plus interest as your spread. You're still exposed to model risk, but with the benefit of float, i.e. cash today for a deliverable tomorrow. Bonus: easy shorting.

</comment><comment><USER10> A/B testing does not tell you what to do. It measures what you have done. HUGE difference, but a difference that very few people actually seem to understand.

The last paragraph of this article made me shake my head though. If you do A/B tests and then use the losing version anyway - because it feels better in your gut - you're an idiot.

Choose a different path if you want, but if done properly, your A/B results are fact (among the options you tested).

<comment><USER11> The author wrote that they have a vision of what the seatsearching experience _should_ be like. A/B allows us to test what is. It doesn't test for what should be.

If the goal is to force the evolution of a trend/habit/market, doesn't one have to go beyond split testing, and venture into the risky unknown?

<comment><USER10> From the article: "A few months ago we tested a new design for our map UI. The new UI converted a bit worse. But we preferred it, so we kept it anyway."

 __ __

They A/B tested and then went with the LOSING version, because it felt better in their gut.

Go for something radically different if you want, no problems there, but don't test if you're going to choose your favorite even when it loses. That's just dumb.

<comment><USER12> Why?

They tested and it converted "a bit" worse. I am pretty sure that if it converted "a lot" worse, they would have not switched.

So, the test gave them useful information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think most folks building websites _should_ blindly follow A/B test results. There are no doubt situations where it's best not to, but introducing that possibility means there are too many opportunities to make judgement mistakes.

<comment><USER14> Blindly following A/B testing with no design judgment is an interesting idea, but difficult to truly do. At its extreme, it's just an interactive genetic algorithm. You start with a blank HTML page, and then you design it _only_ by A/B testing, not by any human judgment. You generate elements through some kind of statistical process (maybe Markov chains trained on existing webpages), then you make every decision of what to include or exclude based on A/B testing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> If you go through the trouble of setting up an A/B test and determining a statistically significant result, you're not _blindly following_ it when you implement the winning variant.

It's totally cool to disregard the result an A/B test gives you. But don't justify that decision by saying that if you do follow the results of well-run A/B test, that it's somehow blind.

</comment><comment><USER16> Remember that A/B testing is a tool for refining the local maximum of a specific design. It works wonders when you are at scale (with some sense of product market fit) but is not a cure all at a small startup.

Going out and talking to 15 of your target customers in person will get you more learning at an early stage than a month long A/B test

</comment><comment><USER17> A/B testing is for people who already know what they're doing, not for people trying to figure out what to do.

</comment><comment><USER18> Notice how nobody was interested in whether Marissa Mayer had any feedback for SeatGeek on the video of their pitch. I suspect that question session would work out quite differently today.

</comment><comment><USER19> Blindly following anything is always a bad idea.

<comment><USER20> Like blindly following that rule?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Perhaps it was just that the correct, holistic metrics were not used to judge the a/b test?

<comment><USER22> It could be that the A/B test results were improperly stopped too early to be meaningful. (Hint: stopping when you hit 95% is not enough.) It could be, as they think, that the group that they were testing is not the group that they needed to target for future growth. It could be that there are familiarity effects that threw off the test. It could be that they were using the wrong metrics for what they needed. It could be that to get at what they want, they'd need to carefully segment their test in ways that they didn't know how to do.

There are a lot of ways to not get the answers you were looking for out of your A/B tests.

Of course it is also possible that they don't realize that their growth would have been better had they paid attention to the A/B test. We have a tendency towards confirmation bias - whatever decision we make, we often will look for ways to convince ourselves that the decision we made is correct.

We're not given enough information to distinguish between these possibilities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I didnt finish the article, but the video linked in there was really good.

</comment><comment><USER24> Thanks for exposing PG's and Jack's email to the whole world.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good catch, thanks. I just updated the images with the emails removed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I watched your pitch video, and it indeed was painful. You didn't have the answer to an important question, and you still don't. "We don't want to be a hedge fund" is not an answer. If your prediction software works, you are sitting on a gold mine, and you DON'T need a huge amount of cash.

If ticket prices fluctuate 40%, and you're right 80% of the time, and half the time the prices are going up, your potential gain is

        0.4 * 0.8 * 0.5 = 0.16 = 16%

Which is twice as good as your fee margin of 7%.

EDIT: And what's more important, your volume is not limited by the percentage of your site visitors who make purchases, you are limited by your money, which will grow exponentially, more or less. 32% average profit (minus fees) on each buy/sell is fucking HUGE, it's unbelievable you're not doing it.

<comment><USER26> I don't know if this would have an important effect on the business model (or if it's part of the reasoning of 'not wanting to be a hedge fund'), but being in that position is going to give you a very hostile user base.

As a music fan, I can't stand scalpers. I understand the principles of supply and demand, but scalpers subvert this because you don't necessarily have to resell all the tickets you purchase to be profitable - just enough that your margin covers the unsold ones. The only people losing are the fans, who can't get affordable tickets, even when the venue is half full.

I had no idea how bad the scalping situation was until I tried to buy tickets to a show in Chicago (in Australia where I live, it's a problem, but I've never been in a situation where I couldn't get tickets by buying them when released). I stayed up late (in my time zone) to get tickets, and missed out because the website wasn't dealing well with the load. Next morning, I got up, and there were 400+ tickets for sale on StubHub. For a 1300-person venue. Even if 100% of scalped tickets went on sale, on one website, within 10 hours of the event going on sale, that's still 30% scalping rate.

There are a number of solutions both easy (printing name and date of birth on the ticket, which is matched to ID at the gate) or difficult (personally I like the idea of taking 'bids' for tickets - the maximum someone is willing to pay, and then at a cutoff date taking the nth person in line's bid (of an n capacity venue) and issuing all tickets at that price. Minimal risk for promoters as they can cancel if they can't manage a reasonable margin, and no one overpays for tickets).

Anyway, I digress. My point is, I think potential sellers would see this service as ripping them off, and would be hesitant to list tickets unless they weren't confident they could resell them, and buyers would resent them because you're essentially taking a large margin for almost no service. If the algorithm works there's minimal risk for the company, you'd just be taking free cash. I could see myself as a buyer actively avoiding using this (hypothetical) service where possible because of it, and sellers also avoiding it as they perceive an offer from you as a way sign that value would go up and they shouldn't sell now.

As an aside, when I was in the US I got a ticket to see the SF giants for about $10 for great seats on SeatGeek. Was super happy with the experience (and the people next to me who so generously offered rules clarifications for me).

<comment><USER27> It's really just market making. If the venue sells the tickets for much less than people are willing to pay it's very reasonable that people will buy them to resell them. Want to stop resale? Price the tickets closer to the real value.

<comment><USER26> That was why I made the suggestion that you ask the maximum people will pay and charge at at whatever rate fills the venue (though I suspect that people would be likely to underbid compared to if they were told the ticket price, but at the same time they know that if they do not bid enough they are guaranteed to miss out on tickets, which might counterbalance it). It would certainly sort out the glut of music festivals with diluted lineups that Australia is seeing.

But anyway, take it from me, music fans are irrational types who won't see it that way. I've encountered significant resistance at my suggestion of dealing with the scalping problem. An idea exists that the 'real fans' should be able to get tickets at a price they can afford, for whatever definition of 'real' means that the person speaking falls into it.

Plus, sometimes tickets can be sold at market cost, but by taking advantage of the upper end of the market and by limiting supply, scalpers can still be profitable even when only selling a small proportion of the tickets they purchased.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


World Models - <AUTHOR> https://worldmodels.github.io/doomrnn/ <comment><USER2> Link to the neural net generated Doom level demo:

[https://worldmodels.github.io/doomrnn/](https://worldmodels.github.io/doomrnn/)

Original article:

[https://worldmodels.github.io/](https://worldmodels.github.io/)

PDF version of the paper:

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.10122](https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.10122)

</comment><comment> mh-cx Hmm, all I can see is a brownish blurry ... uhm ... something (Chrome, Desktop). Could someone explain what we are expected to see here?

<comment><USER3> As I understand it, it's supposed to be a blurry dream-like vision of Doom (or similar game) hallucinated by a neural network.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> BEWARE: This thing eats memory like crazy on firefox.

I'm clocking more than 2GB memory usage for this site after 30 secs on firefox.

EDIT: Seems to be firefox specific. Lots of CPU use on Chrome but memory consumption seems to be under control.

</comment><comment><USER5> So it's basically a recurrent neural-net version of model-predictive control, applied to reinforcement learning problems?

Nice.

<comment><USER6> Lol @ 'basically'

<comment><USER5> Working in the cognitive sciences is very weird, because you can almost always point to an idea in neuroscience and cognitive psychology, to something about the real brain, that makes a new machine learning paper look downright trivial. Simultaneously, actually implementing even established ideas about cognition from the meat-side to the software-side tends to take a lot of work.

Admittedly, IMHO, this is often because machine learners are constantly trying to transform any idea from neuroscience or cognitive science _into_ an idea about supervised loss minimization in a neural network, runnable on a graphics card, rather than having to come up with ways of efficiently computing the stuff that we're confident the brain actually computes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Draft of Readme: [https://github.com/worldmodels/worldmodels.github.io/blob/ma...](https://github.com/worldmodels/worldmodels.github.io/blob/master/draft.md)</comment>


Why Are Young Americans Killing Themselves? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/06/opinion/suicide-young-people.html <comment><USER2> >What explains the epidemic of teen depression and suicide?

When the go-to theories this guy mentions are are cyberbulling, drugs and alcohol, I've got a problem. Either he's not being honest about the current theories, or shows there exists zero insight to today's teenagers' experience of the world.

>We should have universal screening of teenagers at school, with parental consent, to identify those who are suffering from depression and who are at risk of suicide.

Perhaps we should add "living in a world structured by boomers who think mandatory psychiatric intervention of all teenagers for the purpose of identifying a disorder characterized by bad mood and lack of self-esteem is a good idea" to the list of reasons teens might experience depression.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, just off the top of my head; I think there may be some more compelling reasons: inheriting a planet primed for environmental disaster, technology addiction and constant inundation of information which frustrates the addict, knowledge that they'll enter into the game of capitalism against opponents with stacked decks, the utter nonsense that is our binary and extreme politics - and the infighting which stifles progress for all, the ever weakening power of labor relative to capital and the realization that most people aren't able to contribute meaningfully to nor influence the trajectory of human progress and are instead destined for adult day-care etc.

<comment><USER2> I don't think any of those are direct causes, the day to day realities of the world trend harsher as we look back at older generations.

I will grant that they are indirect causes, in that the way adults process the issues among themselves inadvertently create the society that the young are growing up in.

<comment><USER4> Whether things are causes, consequences or side-effects is overly-simplistic, linear thinking that isn't helpful when there are many real pains. Don't bikeshed on labels or categories, please.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Digixcard - Your mobile business card - <AUTHOR>

http://www.digixcard.com
Would you use this product?
We created this during the weekend at Startup weekend. It was a great experience and we would love to hear what you think of it.
PROBLEM: Often times people go to an event/conference and are left without the right contacts and perhaps an irrelevant stack of business cards that you personally have to input.
SOLUTION: Digixcard allows you create a digital business card via your Facebook and Twitter accounts. You then pick the nearby event. Once the even is chosen you are able to view all the Digixcard users at the event. See what they are interested in, what their profession is, and their general information in order to break the ice and meet the ones who matter to you.
Once you meet that person, you can share your information and it is automatically uploaded to your Facebook account.
Would you use this product?
Thanks <comment><USER2> I would definitely use it provided that enough other people used it to make it useful :-). I was actually tracking the list of signups for Startup Weekend Phx before the event, looking for familiar names, and wondering about people's backgrounds. A concise profile list would definitely meet a need there.

</comment><comment><USER3> Clickability: <http://www.digixcard.com>

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha thanks for that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sure! Sounds awesome. Does it work with most smartphones?

<comment><USER4> We built it for android during weekend , but will release iphone version soon</comment></comment>


The NoSQL Debate: Automatic vs. Manual Transmission - <AUTHOR> http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2010/03/29/TheNoSQLDebateAutomaticVsManualTransmission.aspx <comment><USER2> Ugh. I can't believe I'm engaging in this, but there really isn't any "debate" on this issue. At least not between people who know what the hell they are talking about.

Most of the solutions people are talking about when they mention NoSQL are not replacements for SQL databases. They are completely _different_ beasts. I suppose if we're going to use strained metaphors I'd say SQL vs. NoSQL is akin to diesel vs. a V12. That is they are both fine technologies and, except for the very loosest of definitions, they do completely different things.

If you think NoSQL and SQL are actually battling, you need to do more reading...

<comment><USER3> I wonder how much of this crap we would see if the term was something less inflammatory than "NoSQL".

<comment><USER4> is "NoSQL" really that inflammatory?

Personally, I'm drawn to Mongo, etc. because I can develop in my language of choice, and not have to write/debug SQL of any dialect to store and retrieve my data.

<comment><USER5> _Personally, I'm drawn to Mongo, etc. because I can develop in my language of choice, and not have to write/debug SQL of any dialect to store and retrieve my data._

An ORM with a relational database would let you do the same thing.

SQLAlchemy in Python is reasonably good for a project nearing a 1.0 release and Linq works nicely with C#. Virtually every other major language has at least one ORM available to it.

That is not to say that a relational database with an ORM is the way for you to go at all, just that avoiding writing SQL code it probably not the best reason _by itself_ to choose your database platform.

<comment><USER6> An ORM is an abstraction layer. Abstraction layers leak. Fancy abstraction layers like Hibernate add at least as much complexity themselves as learning raw SQL afresh.

I've learned my lesson - if I'm working over SQL, I'll _use SQL_. Either via the direct record oriented API of the language, or using a thin abstraction like iBATIS that wraps the inputs and outputs into convenient data-carriers.

MongoDB is different. The "document" is real to the database. When you're saying something like "add a foo to the list of foos of record X", that is pretty close to the low level action that actually gets performed on disk. There is no abstraction-translation step to get out of whack.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Eh, I am old enough to remember when SQL was the new kid on the block and received nothing but disdain from "database experts" as it was considered toy- like and not suitable for efficiency and large data sets. I distinctly recall meetings with DBAs where SQL (and the RDBMS platforms) were ridiculed as PC- weenie toys for kiddie boxes. That no way could accommodate mission critical enterprise production systems.

Now, ~20 years later, it's the SQL advocates playing the same role as those grizzled old champions of mainframe fare hierarchical and VSAM-like structures.

</comment><comment><USER8> A lot of people drive cars with manual transmissions because they enjoy driving them, not necessarily because they can gain any tangible benefit beyond enjoyment.

I think the same may be true in many cases with NoSQL. I want to try something different, and it's going to perform better for what I'm doing anyway, so why not.

In some experiments at work we got SQL server to do a bulk import of around 1 million rows (with quite a few interspersed reads) in around 5m 30s. We got the same inserts to happen in Mongo in less than a minute. So, we went with Mongo. Do we need that speed? Maybe, maybe not. It sure has been fun to try something new, though.

<comment><USER9> On the other hand, many people also drive vehicles with manual transmission because doing so yields measurable improvements in both power output and fuel economy. Vehicles with manual transmissions also tend to be more predictably controlled in adverse weather conditions. Interestingly, but not necessarily surprisingly, these points translate quite directly into the NOSQL argument.

The downside to the manual transmission is simply that when you don't care to exert more driving effort in a given situation that doesn't benefit enough from the increase in enjoyment, power, economy, and control, you're better off with an automatic in that situation. As before, this aspect also translates rather nicely. :)

<comment><USER10> I disagree with the analogy. An ORM is like automatic transmission -- it hides the details of switching gears but the gears are still there. SQL is manual transmission: You have maximum flexibility to access your data in a variety of ways with reasonable performance. NoSQL then is like having no transmission at all! It's simpler, as there are no gears to shift and no clutch, and it's faster under very specific conditions. Just as NoSQL has no complex query API and is optimized to fetch your data in a very specific way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One thing I've noticed is that the "NoSQL" side of the debate (such as it is) always beats on MySQL as an example of a relational database.

MySQL, for all its virtues, is like the little kid brother of real RDBMS systems. Getting slightly improved performance opposed to a NoSQL system is NOT going to convince someone with a behemoth Oracle rack to switch.

I'd like to see some systems and benchmarks showing how NoSQL systems can compete in the ridiculously high-volume, high-speed space. And yes, I know Google does with BigTable, and that it's theoretically possible, but I haven't seen any implementations prove they can, yet.

</comment><comment><USER12> Personally I found Forbes post re: SSD to be very interesting, and rather than just claim the debate has denigrated past the point of usefulness -- just ignore the _rant_ from the other guy and respond to the substantive comments made by Forbes.

As a person who is investigating NoSQL as viable for a particular task, the substantive posts on either side have been valuable to me.

</comment><comment><USER13> > Exception of type 'System.OutOfMemoryException' was thrown.</comment>


Show HN: Replace CAPTCHA with Proof-of-Work - <AUTHOR> https://hashcash.io/ <comment><USER2> How does this stop spammers? Are they supposed to give up because it uses up too much time (and CPU and therefore electricity)?

\- Botnet operations are hacked PCs. They aren't paying for CPU time.

\- Low-rent spammers often use hacked or rented servers. They aren't paying for CPU time.

\- Even I don't pay for CPU load on my VPS.

 __This won 't stop spam. __Simple as that. You might get money from this but you 're also going to keep getting spam. Oh and you'll chronically annoy everybody on a slow computer who doesn't want to wait.

Compare it to this $0.70/1000 for CAPTCHAs. That's _really_ expensive because it's real money. It also takes time. It also doesn't guarantee posting (many sites have secondary spam-detection features) which might mean 90% are insta- deleted, 5% are held for moderation and only 5% make it through. $0.014/post is actually pretty expensive. Much more than they're spending to get past you.

<comment><USER3> On top of all this, the fact that hashcash requires the browser to "work hard" means that any website using it will heat up my laptop and drain its battery unnecessarily.

Why is that a good thing?

<comment><AUTHOR> if you laptop solves this in 10 seconds and you need to post 10 messages a day, it is under 2 minutes of working hard for your laptop. I doubt it will make a dent in your battery life

<comment><USER4> > and you need to post 10 messages a day

Showing a captcha each time, for a repetitive task would be a horrible UX decision.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess this would depend on how bad situation with spam is on specific site. Just like showing CAPTCHA only once you could do showing hashcash widget only once...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really like the idea, but... I'm not sure it's possible to achieve right kind of cost balance here. Some assumptions at first: every device has to use the same work scaling factor (because you can always pretend you're running something slower), any cloud server runs at least 10x faster computations than a low-end mobile phone where this captcha has to also work.

That means that even if you scale the work to take at most 10 seconds on the client machine, you'll be able to crack 1/s on a $5/mo on digitalocean. That's ~2.6M answers a month. That's $0.002 per 1000 captchas, instead of $0.70 mentioned on the website and as a bonus it removes the part where you rely on people who could mistype things.

I really want it to work, but does the economic balance actually work here against the spammers or for them?

<comment><USER6> This is the key point I think. From my desktop (Intel Xeon CPU E5-1620) the example takes 12 seconds to run, on my phone (ARM Cortex-A7 MPCore) it's taking about 120 seconds to run.

If you don't want to annoy your visitors you're going to need to have the max runtime on any device at around 25 seconds.

Now you can't scale this per device, because you can't rule out devices spoofing what they are. So this means you're looking at barely a few seconds to break it on any sort of desktop hardware, and even less on any dedicated server.

Spammers are probably waiting longer than that to just load the page they want to spam, so it wont slow them down. For this to work you need to solve this issue, and I hope you can, but I don't see how.

<comment><USER7> If the workload is made to be very large, say 30 seconds on a recent desktop, it could fall back to a captcha for slower devices. At least people visiting with fast computers could be spared the captcha.

<comment><USER6> That's a very good idea, coupled with what other people have suggested (Increase the time on the fly for devices/IPs making repeated or spammy looking requests) I could see this working.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As someone with experience in both implementing and bypassing spam protection, this idea makes no sense to me. Let's say it takes the user 30 seconds to calculate proof-of-work. 30 seconds per sign up (at effectively no cost) is quite good compared to current solutions spammers use to bypass CAPTCHAs - third-world sweatshops with people solving CAPTCHAs for <$1/hour. What's stopping a spammer from implementing your algorithm in more efficient C? Still assuming the algorithm takes ~30 seconds, all this does is limit the user/spammer to 172,800 sign-ups per CPU core per day, making it (much) less effective than rate-limiting sign-ups coming from the same IP address. Increasing the difficulty of the proof-of-work would just frustrate real users and make them leave your page for a competitor. I know cryptocurrencies are hip and all, but the problem space for proof-of-work algorithms is much smaller than some people here seem to think.

<comment><USER9> 172,800 signups per cpu core per day seems... off. Since there are only 84,400 seconds per day, wouldn't that be 2,880 signups per core per day? Doesn't seem terribly profitable. Particularly when compared to, say, 20 signups per core per second with no proof of work (~1.6 million per core per day).

Even if you reduced the proof of work from 30 seconds to two seconds, that's negligible to the user when submitting a form, but limits a computer to performing a mere 42,200 signups per day, which is several orders of magnitude better than the 1.6 million figure above.

And nothing says you can't also implement rate limiting per IP, which is frankly not terribly useful when facing botnets.

<comment><USER10> 86,400

<comment><USER9> Whelp, that's embarrassing. 86,400 is indeed the correct number of seconds per day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is the first CAPTCHA replacement that I really like.

Adding a delay that costs computing power will both slow down and add real costs to spammers (though if it's a bot net they'll not care about the latter).

I really dislike how impossible CAPTCHAs have become, and the slew of startups working on advertising based ones is not the solution the users want.

As a user, all I want is ease. I'm fine waiting a few seconds... just don't give me an impossible task to perform or use the inconvenience you've created as an opportunity to advertise. All I want is to do whatever I wanted to do, read, write... I can wait a moment, just don't make it painful.

<comment><AUTHOR> This was a reason I made this project. Thank you for great feedback! :)

<comment><USER12> Thank you for making it. (I'll beg you for an invite later.)

I'd experimented with embedding Javascript Bitcoin miners in my website as a means of monetization without ads. I see this as a more intuitive version of that which restricts the user based on usage (posting rate) instead of on viewership.

The issue I encountered was a miniscule rate of return on the JS-based mining. Do you think that if HashCash integrates with BitCoin for monetization/mining purposes, JS speed will be a limiting factor?

<comment><USER13> To be precise, right now it uses Dogecoin proof of work. I got it running pretty good with asm.js compiled scrypt miner code. In future I will need to solve scaling problem, as right now it runs with fixed 2 threads only. In future it will self adjust based on user computer performance.

Right now there is no payouts to webmasters, but this is next feature I am working on. It will be made directly to webmaster dogecoin address from p2pool I am running for this project.

<comment><USER12> Woww. Such clever. Much compile.

I've been trying to get Hamiyoca's JS miner to work with mupool without much success. (Stratum is straitforward. I'm just dumb.) p2pool is way easier from the cursory glance I've given it. I'm surprised I hadn't heard of it before.

Any chance I could trouble you for an invite for jo.jcat at gmail? I'm already using proof-of-work to keep spam off my blog (josephcatrambone.com), but I wouldn't mind switching early to something more conducive. Hell, if the payouts are nonzero when they roll around, I might be able to strip the ads. Alternatively, what's the official way to request an invite? Sign up for the news letter and wait?

<comment><AUTHOR> basic dashboard is out there, but payments are not yet. there is not much stuff behind login form yet :) so yeah, i would rather develop it further before letting people signup for it. till then you still can use it as a proof-of-work solution using keys generated on home page :)

I will definitely email invite codes to everyone once it is ready to go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> To allow for larger workload values, could the user start "earning" points by doing jobs as soon as they reach the website, and then "spend" those points when they decide to post. The average user will have been on the site for a few minutes once they decide to make a post. When they reach the post page, they will have already earned the post privilege in the form of a payload that has been stored in local storage or cookies.

<comment><USER14> Interesting idea. It would also give people who frequent the site the most the loudest voices (which could be a good or bad thing)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> $url = '[https://hashcash.io/api/checkwork/'](https://hashcash.io/api/checkwork/') . $_REQUEST['hashcashid'] . '?apikey=[YOUR-PRIVATE-KEY]'; $work = json_decode(file_get_contents($url));

Pretty sure this code is vulnerable to local file inclusion. Running file_get_contents on unchecked user input is a terrible idea, even more so coming from a "security solution".

<comment><AUTHOR> It was quick and dirty example on how to use it. Frameworks usually expose builder function where you can pass query as and array/hash and that should be used. Do you have better example which will be clear about what happening and use pure PHP?

<comment><USER16> Add:

        if(strspn($_REQUEST['hashcashid'], 'abcdef0123456789-') !=
           strlen($_REQUEST['hashcashid'])
             die('Invalid character.');

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The last time I saw this kind of proposal, it was even simpler than this.

The work was defined as: Given the following salt, construct a payload such that a md5 hash of the salt and payload would result in a hash with n consecutive 0's.

Simple to implement on both ends, and fast enough to not impede much in the user experience but still expensive enough to limit spam. And it becomes easy to increase the work proof required - just increment 'n'.

</comment><comment><USER17> I built the same thing in terrible form a few years ago! [https://github.com/007/hashcash-js](https://github.com/007/hashcash-js)

I always wanted to go back and put in a TOTP seed and properly productize it to make it easier to use, but I never made the time. It makes me happy to see someone take it seriously, and build a proper version for modern browsers.

</comment><comment><USER18> I implemented a proof of work system to protect access to a large number of webpages before.

The problem is that a native implementation is an order of magnitude faster than the best JS interpreter, and it can be 2 or 3 orders faster than an old browser, or on mobile. It would leave IE7 hanging actually.

I concluded that the only way to use a proof of work system effectively would be native crypto primitives in the browser itself.

Another way we explored was making a very simple challenge (not computationally intensive), that yet you can only realistically solve with a JS interpreter. The goal shifted to "spend cpu time", to "raise the difficulty of programming a bot".

I know there are lots of ways to include a decent JS interpreter in a headless program, but it seems this hasn't caught on with bot makers yet.

</comment><comment><USER19> I keep getting "[fail] Proof of work not calculated" as my Public Key

<comment><USER13> If you could send me info about browser you use and extensions to email@example.com - I would greatly appreciate it.

<comment><USER20> I'm also getting this in Firefox 31 on Mac OS X.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanx. I will look into this issue. Do you have any privacy-related extensions installed by any chance?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This isn't a fundamental problem with the idea here, but one thing I don't like is that it makes hashcash.io a point of failure in your form submission. If the site goes down, either you can fail open (spammers get to comment) or closed (nobody gets to comment), but either way you fail. It's also going to add additional latency to your form submission.

I don't see any reason why this needs a third party, although I do grant that makes it easy to use.

</comment><comment><USER22> Why does this have to a sort of CAPTCHA? It could just be the payment method for your API. I'm not sure that the current difficulty of Bitcoin mining makes this practical, but the idea would be that in order to get to my precious API you mine a little bit for me.

This way you don't need to buy API credits or stuff like that, login and billing are somewhat conflated.

Maybe someone with better knowledge of Bitcoin can comment on the feasibility.

</comment><comment><USER23> Idea of CAPTCHA is to differ a human from a bot. By making bot's job harder you don't stop them.

</comment><comment><USER24> I think the same thing we saw at the beginning of bitcoin would happen here - a GPU implementation would be able to run hundreds of the proofs in parallel. Changing the difficulty to compensate for this would be way too much of a burden on the CPU-bound JS implementation.

</comment><comment><USER25> This can't really be viable unless it is for something where the attackers need ridiculously large scale. Hashcash was actually invented for preventing spam emails, where attackers are used to sending billions of messages per day.

</comment><comment><USER26> If you have a large social site, you could just set up real turing tests between potential sign-ups and a list of the existing users, with users being removed from the list if they get too many false positives and negatives.

<comment><USER12> In a similar vein, I had an idea for a social site where everyone was invited via other people, establishing the chain of invites. Spamming from one of the leaf nodes propagates upwards as bad karma, decreasing exponentially (or by some power, depending on how strict you want to be about anti-spam ruling) with each parent step. If the inviter's karma drops below a certain threshold, he/she can't invite more people. If it drops lower still, the branch dies and everyone on it gets banned.

This is probably not a great user experience (getting banned because someone above you invited a bunch of spammers), but I think it's conceptually interesting to distribute the anti-spam onus to the users of the community instead of the administration in a form other than 'report spam'.

<comment><USER27> This wouldn't 'distribute the anti-spam onus', though. No one _wants_ spam in their community, you don't need to teach people that it's bad. What this system would do is distribute the punishment for the presence of whatever the moderators decide is spam in a way which is disproportionate to users' actual responsibility for it.

Just having an invite-only system should solve the problem equally as effectively (although it creates its own issues with politics, groupthink, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I don't get it... why not just make your account creation endpoint sleep for 10 seconds? Add a little thing for users to focus on so they don't notice the delay. All set.

<comment><AUTHOR> because user can create 1 million of accounts in parallel

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> It's a good idea, its just that not everyone is using a top of the line machine, mobile users will take longer than desktop users for example.

They're definitely onto something though.

</comment><comment><USER30> great idea! but is it necessary ux to burden the human user to manually trigger unlock? form onfocus or page onload should be less intrusive and still serve the purpose

<comment><USER13> Other types of widgets can be built on top of API. jQuery.hashcash.io plugin is just one implementation. API docs are yet to be built tho :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sorry, can't reply everyone as HN keep erroring with "you submitting too fast". Feel free to reach me with any questions at email@example.com

<comment><USER31> We marked your account as legit. If you still have the problem, let us know at firstname.lastname@example.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Recent versions of SpamAssassin already include support for this and subtract (varying amounts of) points for e-mails containing valid Hashcash tokens.

</comment><comment><USER33> Equivalently, you could just make the user pay a tiny amount of BTC or similar. Then they can cache the work so there's no UI delay.

<comment><AUTHOR> While not with jQuery.hashcash.io plugin, but with direct use of API you can make it transparent for use to calculate it in background after form focus event for example. I am working on complete API documentation so third-party widget could be created.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Have you thought of the possibility of increasing the difficulty after each subsequent request from the same IP address?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can require arbitrary complexity and therefore if you implement logic which will increase complexity every time username/password are not valid, you should be able to achieve just that.

Checkout jQuery plugin github repository for details on available options.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> So what's the user experience??

</comment><comment><USER36> What's the advantage of this versus just rate-limiting the number of requests per IP.

</comment><comment><USER37> Takes way too much time, I wouldn't wait.

</comment><comment><USER38> I've got an idea. CAPTCHAs could be replaced with suitable items of work from Amazon's Mechanical Turk. It stands to reason that these can't be solved by current computer vision algos, or else they wouldn't be on Mechanical Turk in the first place(?), and the side benefit is that the site owner can collect the 5 cents or whatever the going rate is.

<comment><USER39> Not necessarily. Let's say a company has some computer vision problem that it needs to be solved with 99.5% accuracy. Let's say today's computers can solve it with 85% accuracy.

The computers can't solve the business need, but they are certainly right often enough to get some spam comments posted (because their cost of being wrong is zero.)</comment></comment>


Explore the secret lives of TinyUrls - <AUTHOR> http://www.tinywurld.com TinyWurld.com is my latest toy project. It finds tinyurls and shows thumbnails of where they lead. Of working tinyurls (a good chunk are broken) about 30% are maps--which are currently filtered out on the site. <p>I'm not a designer, but did the design myself, so suggestions and bug reports are welcome. <comment><AUTHOR> I'll be keeping an eye on here if folks have anything to point about TinyWurld --it's my latest toy project.</comment>


Exercise for High Blood Pressure - <AUTHOR> https://www.fitnesssolutionsplus.ca/blog/exercise-high-blood-pressure/ <comment><USER2> Since getting an Apple Watch in early May, and discovering that I'm as susceptible to psychologically manipulative gamification as most people are, I've been doing a 30 minute walk in the morning to close my exercise ring for the day.

I have high blood pressure and take pills for it. I measure my blood pressure at least twice a day (just before taking pills in the morning and evening), and occasionally at other times.

My blood pressure has definitely lowered a noticeable amount. That doesn't prove anything, but it correlates well and I made no other changes anywhere near that time that would be expected to affect blood pressure.

One question I have concerns distribution. Does it matter if 30 minutes of daily walking is done as one 30 minute walk, or split into separate morning and evening 15 minute walks, or maybe even 10 minute morning, mid-day, and evening walks?

</comment><comment><USER3> I needed this info because I was worried about exercising. I have anxiety-like physiological issues, tachycardia, high blood pressure and exercise intolerance without clear causes. I was even admitted to Stanford's cardiac unit for a week, leaving without a clear identified cause after a battery of tests including a 12 lead ECG, stress echo and catheterization. I suspect pulmonary hypertension as I was never ever able to run a mile continuously to save my life at any age without being out of breath, and I have an undiagnosed CTD like Marfan but not (span > 1.0 and many other indicators). Been on propranolol er 160 mg for about a year and 10 mg/dose CBD isolate tincture for about 8 months.

</comment><comment><USER4> Exercise for High Blood Pressure _Reduction_

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h A useful distinction :-)

Otherwise we'd have a list like

* lift weights with improper technique

* stare at a picture of your least-favorite politician

* start a discussion of tabs vs. spaces on IRC

* get a job in high-speed Trading

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think this is the first place I've seen recently that says steady-state cardio is better than HIIT for anything. It does seem odd that they study they cite compared equal times for steady-state vs HIIT; I thought one of the main benefits was with HIIT you can see benefits with less time.

</comment><comment> yjftsjthsd-h So to summarize... basically any exercise will help blood pressure. Benefits observed as low as 15 minutes of low intensity cardio, although it does look like higher intensity is preferred for strength training.</comment>


Canonical might switch Ubuntu to rolling releases for 14.04 - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/146442-canonical-might-dump-interim-releases-by-14-04-switching-to-rolling-releases

<comment><USER2> It seems silly to have any modern Linux distro be anything but a well implemented rolling release, because people aren't getting physical dvds to install this stuff anymore. If you run a server, get the latest stable packages, run with it, and if something needs upgrading manually upgrade the select packages you want to update. Keep security updates. If you are a normal user, you can probably just let rolling updates upgrade everything.

The greatest problem I have with my relatives who I have running Ubuntu or Fedora is that major version increments will almost always critically break the system because they are often 4 - 6 kernels or other package versions behind. If you were to step through the update process in order, you might get a minor snag, but often it updates flawlessly. I have never had an issue in over a year running an Arch box (besides porting my init scripts to systemd, but that was a unique case, and that wasn't a _problem_ , it just required effort) whereas on two separate machines going from 11.04 to 12.04 broke the kernel or graphics drivers respectively.

I do think most distros could do better with 3 tiers of packages in a rolling release, though - new releases for the actual developers of the package to run through the ropes and find and _fix_ major bugs they specifically encounter, which then pass into a testing branch where enthusiasts can run bleeding edge software and submit errors they encounter to be fixed before it enters mainstream core repos. A lot of the current problems with rolling releases are that you don't have a big enough pool running in testing to catch the majority of slip-through-the-cracks integration problems that pop up after the release itself is solid, so you need to properly incentivize people to use the testing branch, and the main reason people don't do that is that updates often just outright break the software entirely rather than have integration issues, hence 3 tiers.

<comment><USER3> Sounds like Debian sid/testing/stable...

<comment><USER4> Or ArchLinux testing/stable.... though sometimes even stable feels like "testing", but with the occasional breakages I had less problem with Archlinux, then I had with the Ubuntu updates release by release....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Rolling releases and the 6 month-release cycle the worst thing about Linux. I hate it when I have reinstall and upgrade because of compatibility so often - there is zero new functionality and rather that reducing bugs, the distributions replaces the old ones with new ones. Or it randomly breaks your fixes. Or after the update your system locale is switched to Chinese (happened to me, and no I have nothing in common with China).

<comment><USER6> This has been my experience too. In the end, I found myself more comfortable with slower-moving distributions like Slackware.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Linux Mint does this on their LMDE version. A rolling release will mean that Canonical must provide an easy way to rollback to previous package versions or to save snapshots of the user's machine before upgrading. You can't expect that an Ubuntu end-user to have the same technical knowledge as someone with experience with Debian, Gentoo or the BSDs to troubleshoot when suddenly their computer is not booting and that they need to change run levels or disable their display manager to figure out what's wrong with Xorg. Shit happens, and happens often.

Also, I've used Archlinux (now Debian sid recently with their systemd "upgrade" and other desicions that deviate away from their KISS principle) and haven't experienced any problem, then again I tend to run a maximalist[1] desktop. Stuff starts to break when you have a lot of applications installed with their own dependencies and their own team of people working on that application, I've always felt that the whole desktop environment on Linux is like building a tower with cubes, it's solid when you have a few applications, but as you start adding stuff on top, the whole things starts trembling away and it takes a really small problem to bring everything down.

If this is going to be done, they better provide ways to their users to easily recover from an upgrade gone wrong.

[1] - Maximailism is a better word: [http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2010/05/05/maximalism-is-a- bett...](http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2010/05/05/maximalism-is-a-better-word/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it's a win, as long as they make rolling releases between LTS releases optional. That way the LTS users keep their current status quo, and the 6-month release users get a more even distribution of new features and OS updates (they can be released when they're done, not when the release cycle hits, and you can always have the latest web browser).

(For what it's worth, my current Linux distro of choice is Linux Mint Debian Edition, but I used Ubuntu on my primary machine for a couple years around the end of the oughts.)

<comment><USER8> 6 months of "rolling releases" isn't a rolling release at all (i.e. if the rolling releases are only between LTS and LTS). LTS would have to be separate from the rolling releases entirely.

<comment><USER3> I meant that the users that currently upgrade every 6 months would move over to the rolling release system.

Also, I don't think LTS would have to be completely separate from the rolling release. IIRC Debian stable is basically just a freeze of the Debian testing rolling release somewhere that makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I guess the idea here is to bring the joy of running Arch and Gentoo to the unwashed masses?

<comment><USER10> If it weren't for pacman's weird user interface (not functionality, just the UI), I might have already switched to Arch. As Ubuntu gets worse (it seems like every day there is a new anouncement that sucks), pacman looks better and better.

<comment><USER11> What UI are you talking about? pacman is a relatively simple to use cli tool. -S to install something, -Ss to search for something -y to update the package list, and -Su to upgrade packages; that's basically four flags to memorize. Or do it all at once with -Syu.

<comment><USER12> It's simple, but the switches are rather odd. I get the point of S, Y, U etc... and then the minor options of yu etc... but it's rather arbitrary in practice.

Note: -S isn't "install," it's for syncing which does all manner of things including installs, but not removals (oddly enough). It's little things like this that bother me about pacman.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


GitHub's technology predictions for 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blog/2480-github-s-technology-predictions-for-2018 <comment><USER2> The treatment of data seems very shallow. Data varies widely in value. I'm sure some companies will find hidden value in their data. Others will be disappointed. Often, holding onto data is not worth the risk. Consider why there are email retention policies and all the high-profile hacks last year.

If anything, this points to companies keeping better track of their data, understanding why they have it, and making rational decisions about what to collect and when to delete it.

Also, I expect that companies won't be allowed to make their own decisions about this - outsiders will make demands and this will eventually result in more regulation.

</comment><comment><USER3> Pretty vague stuff.

My prediction as funding begins to try up, data science will go under a moment of crisis, and come back stronger with greater ai integration.

I'm already hearing feedback from my local angel group that its(big data) not replicating,not producing sales results, or not business profitable.

Also the ad apocalyse will continue.

</comment><comment><USER4> That article has an incredible level of buzzwordiness...</comment>