Inability to Change - <AUTHOR> http://appicurious.com/2011/10/16/inability-to-change/

<comment><USER2> The fundamental problem with most commercial infrastructure providers (which is pretty much all wired and wireless ISP) is that competition can never be perfect because of the laws of physics.

There is only so much room to put cables in the ground, or wireless spectrum to use. Thus, the governemnt auctions these roles off (often at far far below their actual worth), and companies use their physical monopoly to extract maximal profit with as minimal infrastructure as possible.

The obvious solution is pro-consumer regulation. Eliminate long term contracts and make unlocking of phones mandatory after contract expiration. Force all carriers to have common carrier status, so the physical infrastructure is a dumb pipe. This list could go on and on...

The problem with this is that anyone in the industry will lobby against this and they already have the political will against any change, as they're making a ton of profit via their monopoly status.

<comment><AUTHOR> You have listed good points here but no matter how much money big companies(in this case wireless carriers) put behind lobbyists all it takes is just one company to stray from the pack. Why aren't in the US for example T-Mobile and Sprint trying to change their standing(# of customers) by actually providing something users want and need?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why change when you are hauling in billions of dollars per year, and there's nowhere to go but down? The mobile carriers are going to extract as many dollars as possible while they still can.

The fundamental problem is lack of competition. When there are only a small number of providers, none of them have an incentive to slash the price of texts to a more reasonable level.

<comment><USER4> I don't think this follows. In the US, for example, virtually every metro area has four national providers. They race against each other to roll out new devices and new network technologies.

The text charges are more of a historical addiction. Outside the US, voice charges were historically much higher (because they were priced to compete with the higher land line rates). So users flocked to SMS as a way to communicate more cheaply. In the US, voice charges on cell networks were comparatively cheap. Text was an "extra" that could be sold at a huge markup. And that revenue is hard to give up.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I would love to hear the HN community thoughts on my article. My new blog is a work in progress and I am always open to suggestions how to make it better.

Cheers

<comment><USER5> I think your article hits several issues on the head, and I'd like to drop my thoughts on what might actually happen...

I have some history in the telco world and while at a gig with one particular legacy carrier, noticed that when this topic came up in strategy sessions, there was zero sense of urgency. None. What. So. Ever.

My suspicions are that the rivers-of-gold experience of first vast voice revenue (tied to big investments that could be written down over a number of years) and then messaging revenue (which was just money for jam with very low overheads) has permanently damaged their business culture.

There are a couple of ways out of the bind that they're unable to face:

1\. Innovate out of their situation by offering some value add that can be priced at value level, and not at cost-plus. Your suggestion of micropayments is a good one, and could be enhanced by their potential local knowledge of their market and user behavior to do commercially driven location aware services like advertising, offers and all those other things. Benefit would be to keep existing business customers on-board. Chances? Zero to none. Innovation is a big word in the telecomms world, but it really is just a way to flush billions down the toilet with not much more than deployed hardware to show for it.

2\. Try to use their oligopoly situation (like the DSL and cable biz did) to stifle any new entrants at a regulatory level. This won't work too well because their new competitors aren't having to do buildouts - they're bypassing the carrier-customer relationship entirely. Therefore they'll need to be blocked or starved of bandwidth by the carriers. Chances? In some markets, like the US, probably 50/50 at this point looking at how successful industrial lobbying is right now. Net neutrality is their bête noir, and they'll do whatever they can to destroy any institution that tries to introduce it, like the FCC.

3\. Avoid this whole shenanigans with innovation and regulators and do what oligopolies do best: price fix so that their customers do the dirty business bandwidth starve the innovative services out of the market because they only have 30Mb per month on the basic plan and it's USD100 for another couple of hundred Mb. Chances? If all the national providers move in lockstep and avoid any successful anti-trust investigations, it's easy and cheap. They'll never recover messaging revenue, but they could avoid other revenue erosion.

My bet's on parallel attempts at strategy 2 and 3.

One metaquestion: is your blog really uncopyrighted? Pretty cool if so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am not unhappy with my carrier, China Unicom. I have a good 3G for 15$/month, no contracts. I go to the nearest cigarette seller and buy cards to pay them, and it stops when i stop paying, that's all.

When I see my relative in France talking about their locked contracts, I cry with them.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have only limited experience with wireless carriers is Asia from a week visit to Singapore and Malaysia. So I do not know what the actual situation there. My experience is mainly with Europe and the US, having lived and worked in different places in these two regions. 15$/month sounds excellent but is it for unlimited data? Right now my plan in Bulgaria(Europe) is coupled with my other monthly services. It all comes down to about 25$/month but it is 2GB with max speed and anything after that is capped at 128kb. In the states wireless carriers realized that giving users unlimited data leaves a lot of money on the table and they decided against it. Only Sprint is holding up right now but I wonder for how long. Sprint's only competitive advantage right now is the unlimited data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's still room for disruption in the U.S. wireless space. Check out our latest project, <http://ting.com>, which went into private beta last week. Hopefully its a boat-rocker.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting StartUp. Just read through your website and it sounds promising.

This is exactly the kind of disruption big companies(wireless carriers) need to get a kick in the ... and realize some things need to change.</comment></comment>


New HTML5 parser in Firefox 4 – SVG in HTML, faster parsing, and more - <AUTHOR> http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/05/firefox-4-the-html5-parser-inline-svg-speed-and-more/

<comment><USER2> Fixes bug #22480...from 1999!

<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22480>

</comment><comment><USER3> "You can now use SVG and MathML inline in HTML5 pages, without XML namespaces."

Thank reason.

</comment><comment><USER4> Any speculation on a release date?

<comment><USER5> I believe they're aiming for November 2010, but knowing Mozilla, this means June 2011.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, Firefox 3.6 slipped a whole... two months.</comment></comment></comment>


GitHub Must Be a Free Platform - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/1995parham/github-do-not-ban-us/blob/master/README.md <comment><USER2> GitHub used to be an open and free platform for everyone, but it has decided to restrict Iranian accounts from contributing and being part of the open- source ecosystem. Although we understand GitHub might make this decision under the pressure of US government, we were expecting more respectful action from GitHub.

Github restricted our access to private repositories suddenly, but at very least we wanted Github to warn us before limiting our access.

GitHub's team decided to take one step further and restrict us based on our Nationality no matter where we are living, while they were able to just restrict our IP addresses like other US-based companies.

thanks

</comment><comment><USER3> I know GitHub is just following US's legislation, but it should take some legal action in order to free open source from these rules, not just stay quiet and ban iranian coders.

#githubForEveryone</comment>


Free HTML Email Builder - <AUTHOR> http://www.formget.com/mailget/build_template

<comment><USER2> I must say this tool is amazing. I have checked this tool and it is very easy to use, simple drag and drop functionality make it easier to use.</comment>


Reggae: A build system with multiple front ends (D, Python) and back ends - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/atilaneves/reggae <comment><USER2> I love the idea of a build system separated into front ends and back ends. Imagine if CMake were just an LLVM-esque backend and you could use a nice Python (or Lua or <insert your favorite language>) frontend instead of the awful proprietary CMakeLists frontend.

<comment><USER3> Disagree. If you design your framework with language-portability in mind, you're going to have to trade off on a lot of other things you care about. You'll have to go with lowest-common-denominator design-decisions, rather than making a language with its own idioms.

LLVM itself, for instance, is a C++ API which also exposes a C API. People generally favour the C++ API. Idiomatic C++ is nicer to work with.

There's plenty wrong with CMake, but the lack of Python bindings isn't the problem. CMake's scripting language is clunky and error-prone, with documentation that is very complete, but surprisingly unhelpful for doing real work. That's the problem. The lack of choice isn't.

CMake gets all the hard stuff right. I really don't think it would be that hard to overhaul its usability, but I doubt it will happen.

<comment><USER2> > CMake's scripting language is clunky and error-prone, with documentation > that is very complete, but surprisingly unhelpful for doing real work. > That's the problem.

And wouldn't one solution be to use an alternate front-end with less clunky and error-prone syntax (say, python) that has doc strings so you can hover over an API in your IDE and read what it does, get auto-complete, etc.?

        add_library(foo SHARED
            foo.cpp
            bar.cpp
        )

vs.

        import cmake

        cmake.add_library(name="foo", shared=True, sources=[
            "foo.cpp",
            "bar.cpp",
        ])

People know how to do stuff in python. Stuff like loops and if statements and string operations. Nobody knows how to do that in CMake. The benefits of allowing arbitrary language bindings are immense.

<comment><USER3> > And wouldn't one solution be to use an alternate front-end with less clunky > and error-prone syntax (say, python) that has doc strings so you can hover > over an API in your IDE and read what it does, get auto-complete, etc.?

You're right of course that there are great advantages to using existing languages with familiar syntax and good existing tools. I agree that CMake should have gone with an existing language rather than inventing a bad one of their own. Same applies more generally to projects that roll their own language for no clear reason, such as FlightGear. [0]

For me the question is how much work it would be. If they could introduce a decent Python frontend, in addition to supporting their existing language, I agree it could improve things greatly.

> The benefits of allowing arbitrary language bindings are immense.

 _Arbitrary_ languages? If that's the end-goal, presumably they'd really just be exposing a C API (the way LLVM does), or a machine-friendly text interface (LLVM supports this approach too with its own assembly language). I don't think that would be the way to go, but I can see the case for supporting _one_ language well. Python3 would be a fine choice.

[0] [http://wiki.flightgear.org/Nasal_scripting_language](http://wiki.flightgear.org/Nasal_scripting_language)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a pretty fascinating idea! I definitely like the build systems that embed a DSL in a _real_ programming language, like SCons (Python), Rake (Ruby), or Gradle (Groovy). Reggae lets any language have a build system.

Further, Reggae has multiple backends, just like CMake. And the generated build scripts can be shipped without Reggae, just like how Autotools works. Neat!

</comment><comment><USER5> This is misguided. If you look at any large cmake build, the cmake language is not the source of problems. It's the expressivity of the language that's the source of problems. Without rigorous style guides, developers can get as wild as they want. Cmake builds launching other cmake builds as part of the build? Sure throw that in! Loops, predicates, globals of unknown definition? Why not! Cyclomatic complexity run amok.

Choosing general purpose languages like D or python can only compound this problem. As anyone who has worked with Scons will tell you, having a fully functional language at your fingertips is a recipe for an opaque, undebuggable build.

The build syntax must be expressive as necessary, _but no more_.

> Pick a language to write your description in and place a file called > reggaefile.{d,py,rb,js,lua} at the root of your project.

This sounds like a nightmare, not a feature. It's an interesting technical experiment, to be sure. But not a production structure.

<comment><USER6> As someone who "gets wild" in cmake, if it did not allow it I would basically have to write my own build system to do what I want (mostly parsing / preprocessing / code generation). These steps have to be _somewhere_ and I'd much rather reuse the infrastructure available in cmake for that rather than roll my own - especially given how easily it runs on windows.

<comment><USER7> I've also had to get wild in cmake (codegen), but in hindsight, the code that I wrote for that was the most brittle part of our build system at the time.

I'd love to know of an alternative to writing gnarly cmake for stuff like this though, particularly to work cross platform and generate IDE projects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> While the idea of using a common build backend is nice, I also like the idea of a build DSL common to all projects, rather than each project using their binding of choice (and associated idioms) for the build files.

</comment><comment><USER9> Build error, build failing

[https://imgur.com/mL9ILZO](https://imgur.com/mL9ILZO)

<comment><USER10> This comment isn't very useful or interesting.

How people use CI varies wildly by project, and only sometimes has a useful signal.

For example, this project uses appveyor (where the build is passing, but the badge is wrong), and travis-ci with 7 targets (where the build is passing on 5 targets, and failing on 2 due to errors from dub (d's package manager), which the author did not write).

The author's code is not causing those CI failures, and if anything the failures reflect poorly on travis-ci and appveyor since both are on their end.

<comment><USER9> Why put the badge on the readme then?</comment></comment></comment>


Review: Helm Personal Server gets email self-hosting (almost) exactly right - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/review-helm-personal-server-gets-email-self-hosting-almost-exactly-right/ <comment><USER2> Features-wise, it seems pretty polished; price-wise, it seems steep for a small ARM Linux box with interesting industrial design. The $99/yr subscription also seems a little steep, presumably they're trying to woo potential Fastmail or Protonmail customers, but at twice the price (not even counting the $499 for the hardware).</comment>


Show HN: Easily send documents via Fedex, right from your computer - <AUTHOR> https://www.sendovernightmail.com/pricing.html <comment><USER2> Not quite clear on the use-case. It seems that any document that could be scanned and uploaded for you to send could just as easily be emailed. If something needs to be mailed, it's typically because an original or wet-ink hard copy is required.

Paper invoices may be an exception, but any business doing that regularly would already have a much more cost-effective solution in place.

One possibility that comes to mind is to remain anonymous by sending through you.

<comment><USER3> I have a use-case: I wrote a software that is used for validating accuracy of AP data by reaching out to vendors. The default method, if available, is to email the vendors. In many cases, our customers don't have accurate vendor contact info (and rarely do they have good email addresses) so, when email addresses aren't available, we print letters. Our system right now prints and formats the letters, but someone still needs to go mail the letters physically.

<comment><USER2> Good one. And probably others like this exist. So an API of some kind would be useful for you, but also likely don't need overnight/expedited delivery and would want to have much closer to regular letter postage costs.

Not knocking the idea, just hoping to help narrow the question of "who needs this?"

<comment><AUTHOR> No worries.

Some of our inspiration came from a couple of earlier services we built for print and mail, where we constantly fielded questions from customers who wanted their mail to arrive faster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN - we built this to make it super easy to print and mail documents without having to go to a post office or a fedex location.

All the work happens in your browser, and you'll receive tracking numbers and delivery notifications via email. Eager for feedback - thanks.

</comment><comment><USER4> Your pricing on the front page is super high.

<comment><AUTHOR> These should go down as we get higher volume. At the moment the fulfillment services we rely on (for a single piece of mail) are quite expensive. :/</comment></comment>


First Official Statement from Occupy Wall Street Organizers - <AUTHOR> http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/first_official_statement_from_the_occupy_wall_street_movement/

<comment><USER2> "They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization."

really? REALLY?

"They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right."

It's sad to see that people can't take responsibility for their own actions. Taking out a loan for a college degree is a gamble. You are not guaranteed a job and nobody has ever told you that this would be the case.

"They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers' healthcare and pay."

If I, as a software developer, protested because people on bittorrent are outsourcing my labor (IE: downloading it for free from someone else), how would people from this group respond? They would tell me that I'm not owed a wage and that times are changing. My response to the above is exactly the same.

"They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press."

LOLOLOLOL..sorry I'm still laughing about this one..LOLOLOL. You get more freedom of speech in the US than anywhere else in the world. You can freely say anything you want about any political figure and you won't get arrested. There also isn't any firewall blocking political speech. No newspaper is government-owned as far as I know. The funny thing is that most left-leaning countries are all about more government control..including the press.

I could go on, but I don't want to waste any more time. It's just as I thought: This group is mostly comprised of self-entitled brats. If they were actually fighting for a real cause, I might be interested in taking them even a little seriously.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think they should have stopped after the second paragraph. Though some of their grievances are valid, others are not in the absolute control of only corporations.

Let's not forget that these corporations could not exist if the 99% didn't support them financially.

Starting off with the 'illegal foreclosures', this is the first I've heard of this issue, and it makes them sound out of touch.

Have corporations perpetuated inequality and discrimination? I don't think so, individual people within a corporation may have done that, but I don't see that as a major issue in corporate America.

Outsourcing labor is a reality in the flattened world. The answer would be protectionism, and everybody would complain about the costs of things. In fact, they already do!

They have donated money to Politicians, but is that the corporations fault, or the politicians?

Basically, I agree with their initial sentiments, but when you get into the details, I think they still need to work on focusing on the change. If they expect to tear down the capitalist system, I suspect the cure could be worse than the disease.

</comment><comment><USER3> It is a really interesting phenomenon but attracting such a diverse crowd that they are most likely end up protesting against each other. Sad to see. Reddit had a great discussion about the situation and how different interest groups are all trying to hijack the movement.</comment>


Ask HN: How Open-Source libraries should be rewarded? - <AUTHOR>

When using many open-source libraries in a corporate project, what is the best way to reward those underlying projects ? Should it be donations, what kind of amount and how to value the comparative importance of each library ? <comment><USER2> In my opinion, there is no need for reward, but rather thinking hard how what you do can be aligned with what library's users are missing, and contribute that back. So essentially you are donating money, spent on paying developers to work a bit to find more generic solution for a problem you are solving.</comment>


A 'Playboy' Photo Has Been a Mainstay in Testing Tech for Decades - <AUTHOR> https://onezero.medium.com/a-nude-playboy-photo-has-been-a-mainstay-in-testing-tech-for-decades-b8cdb434dce1 <comment><USER2> The first time I saw this photo was in Commodore Amiga.</comment>


Ask HN: Are you working on a Reddit replacement? What is it? - <AUTHOR> Interested to see what the HN community is doing in response to the recent reddit events.<p>Post the name, URL, description, and what you'll copy from reddit, and what you will not. <comment><USER2> I really find it fascinating that people are scrambling to make Reddit replacements. First off, A) there's no guarantee the community will ever abandon Reddit, even if yours is better, and B) why are we mimicking what Reddit did, and succeeded greatly at? Of all places, I would think that Hacker News, a community of start-ups, would recognize that you don't often succeed by simply trying to improve on what some other company did already. You succeed by doing something completely new, and filling a gap that wasn't previously recognized.

Facebook didn't replace Myspace because they tried to do what Myspace did, but better; they won because they took an entirely different concept, built it, and eventually evolved into the behemoth we have today. Reddit didn't surpass Digg in content aggregation intentionally; they had a different community, with a different focus, and an entirely different strategy that eventually succeeded.

Over the years, I've gone from getting my web content through AOL portals --> blogs/geocities --> news sites --> StumbleUpon --> Digg --> reddit, and I've been on there for 5 years now. I'm definitely ready for something new.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is... if you want to make "the next reddit", you won't do it by trying to be BETTER than reddit. It's time for the next wave of content delivery, in whatever form that may be.

<comment><USER3> What's "the community"? There doesn't seem to be one community that is going to act in unison. Regarding point B, I am not sure that anyone said a replacement has to exactly copy reddit. Arguments aside, I agree with your final sentiment. Something new would be awesome.

I'd like an anonymous Usenet/distributed-server style system that runs on port 80 - like a BitTorrent for discussions where anybody that can put up a web server can run a node.

<comment><USER4> Something like Aether? [http://getaether.net/](http://getaether.net/)

<comment><USER5> Or, more relevant to this community:

[https://github.com/nehbit/aether-public/](https://github.com/nehbit/aether- public/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My Reddit replacement is Reddit, minus all the people who want to leave because of Reddit closing r/jailbait, r/thefappening, and r/fatpeoplehate. It's a pretty cool site, you should check it out.

<comment><USER7> That's a remarkably unfair characterization of people who have issues with Reddit.

<comment><USER8> That's pretty much the reality of it. The other group of users who have issues with Reddit (as we've seen yesterday) are the moderators; in particular the moderators of really large communities. Many others just seem to jump onto the bandwagon.

<comment><USER7> You don't have to think certain pseudo-religious thought patterns are bad in order to recognize that reddit has some serious problems.

The default communities are cesspools (consensus seems to be Reddit is better when they're unsubscribed)

The staff has no idea how to communicate with the userbase, a problem which has obviously gotten worse in the past few months.

The site hasn't seen a major upgrade in years and still regularly falls over under its own weight

The moderators of the defaults are all friends with each other and run each other's communities (++corruption)

Their current CEO has a questionable at best ethical history

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm speaking as a bit of an armchair developer here, but I'd be very interested in seeing a more decentralized alternative to Reddit. A user of one Reddit-like site could post on another's through some sort of protocol, perhaps much like email.

It would certainly be more complicated than something centralized, but considering Reddit's attitude towards user-generated communities and moderation, I could see it being a good fit. There could be a lot of opportunities for black/whitelisting, paid/ad-supported servers, etc.

I'd be very keen to hear more discussion on the topic!

<comment><USER10> It could be some kind of a network, perhaps, a network of users.

We could call it, "Usenet."

All jokes aside, what you're describing has existed for over 30 years.

<comment><USER11> Usenet is missing the upvote/downvote part. If it had that and a spam filter it would be mucho nicer than reddit in my opinion (which is skewed, I was on Usenet when there was no internet and I was quite fond of it before it got filled with spam).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Although it does seem to be very slow to respond, [https://voat.co/](https://voat.co/) seemed to have stepped in as a replacement at the last big upheaval. They seem to constantly have troubles staying up though.

<comment><USER13> They certainly seem to have momentum, despite having trouble handling the traffic. It's a pity that as it stands it's still pretty much a copy though, an alternative to reddit doesn't have to be, and probably shouldn't be, a 1:1 copy.

<comment><USER14> If you're looking for something different yet similar, I run valME.io which has a very different business model. And because of the business model, it will have significantly less spam and other undesirable content. But the concept it's not for everyone.

<comment><AUTHOR> very cool! this is the kinda thing I wanted to see.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Built [http://www.thealetree.com](http://www.thealetree.com) a few years ago so not related to the current issue. But I'll turn the database on for a few days if people want to try it out.

The source code is at [https://github.com/rdwallis/TheAleTree](https://github.com/rdwallis/TheAleTree)

The idea behind it was that the passionate minority on sites like reddit, hn etc tend to drive the discussion on issues because the less passionate majority isn't as inclined to upvote / downvote.

So say you've got a website where a small minority of the users are racists but the racists are very passionate and always upvote racist content. You'll tend to see a lot of racist posts on the site even if the site as a whole isn't racist. And over time the passionate racists will drive out the rest.

Wanted to see if I could solve the above without moderation, while keeping posts completely anonymous.

Probably doesn't work but the idea is that before users vote you divide them randomly into teams. And then when a user submits a post or a comment the team votes on it and only if certain percent of the team like it does it get an upvote. And the passionate racists would most likely end up on different teams so they'd be less likely to be able to get submissions into the public parts of the site.

<comment><USER16> Regardless of how you divide people up, the majority vote is the majority vote.

What problem are you trying to solve? I don't see any problem with people voting as long as it is one person, one vote.

<comment><USER15> Imagine a site with users who are all absolute experts in their chosen field. Mathematicians / Writers / Lawyers etc.

The popularity of a post will depend more on how it appeals to the majority than how it appeals to the experts. So the most popular mathematical posts may be posts that the actual mathematicians find mundane but that the writers / lawyers are able to understand. And this is true for all topics in which the non experts out number the experts.

So even though all the people on your site are experts the actual content on your site will be at non expert level, which will attract non-experts to your site who will then tend to vote on content that is at an even lower level.

Eventually the experts find all the content on the site mundane and are driven out.

Abandoned the Ale Tree because I don't think it is a solution to the problem. But there are definite problems with a pure majority vote system. The underlying concept that led me down this path was the difference between a republic and democracy. The Ale Tree was meant to act more like a republic where you elect representatives who vote on issues for you instead of voting on them directly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just as a side note: reddit is open source (I belive): [https://github.com/reddit/reddit](https://github.com/reddit/reddit)

<comment><USER18> It's actually fairly simple to get running. I'm bopping around in a private instance right now. Looks like there would be an insane amount of work to re- brand everything, but it's certainly possible.

It's licensed under CPAL, which I am unfamiliar with and do not know if it would allow for commercial use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've been toying with making one since I realized Reddit has been devolving into a reactionary, hate filled site.

I was thinking about having a gimmick of graph based commenting to prevent the "top post guides discussion" effect. Not sure at how feasible or user friendly that could be.

<comment><USER20> Someone should make a version of reddit where your upvote/downvote record is what shapes the ordering for you. There should be a global rank and an individual rank that is calculated for each user something like the netflix 5 star system. That way the hateful stuff won't appear unless you upvoted hateful stuff. Liberals and conservatives could both get the content they want going to the same politics forum.

It should be assumed that when the professional executive class gets their hands on the company they will try to arbitrarily censor and ban things. The system has to be decentralized so the parent company is technically unable to do this even if north korea were to purchase it.

<comment><USER21> What you are essentially describing, also used by Netflix, is a "collaborative filtering" machine learning algorithm [1]. It is a fascinating sparse-matrix problem that could be applied to many situations dependent upon individual preferences.

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

<comment><USER14> For my site, I coded a recommendation engine based on cosine similarity. I initially tried Bayes' Theorem and conditional probabilities but abandoned the effort when I didn't see results that made a lot of sense (probably due to a lack of training data). Instead, I used [https://github.com/aoiaoi/CosineSimilarity](https://github.com/aoiaoi/CosineSimilarity) as a base and then modified. If the results prove effective over time, I'm going to make the algorithm an option for users to select for generating their front page instead of upvotes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> For those not in the know: [http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo- way/2015/07/03/419756207/](http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo- way/2015/07/03/419756207/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Truthfully, the subreddits I follow (programming-related) are unaffected, though a few threw up a notice saying they were not going to black out.

<comment><USER24> Another solid example of not blacking out is /r/malefashionadvice, one of the more prominent voices in the Male Fashion category.

While I can understand the interest in "disrupting the space"; I'm not entirely sure that the current management conditions at reddit are indicative of an opportunity here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Even despite Reddit's troubles, you probably do not want to make a Reddit clone as a business model to capitalize if you don't have one already. One or the _reasons_ for the protest is bad tools.

<comment><USER26> Reddit is open source so is there any evidence that _anything_ has been done or is planned to improve mod tools? Or have there been any community attempts to push code that was rejected?

<comment><USER27> > have there been any community attempts to push code that was rejected?

Apparently yes: [https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3bxrxj/lets...](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3bxrxj/lets_discuss_the_recent_incident_where_a_bunch_of/csqiv0t)

> Another great example of how much reddit cares about their assets is reddit > companion. Which at the time of writing has around 154,302 installations, is > utterly broken and hasn't been updated since February 21, 2013, the most > ridiculous thing? It isn't hard to fix people tried to do the work for > reddit since it is open source but they simply have been ignoring those pull > requests since 2013. Which is silly since those pull request effectively do > fix companion, resulting in a perfectly working version.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Philosophically, I'd like to see more non-connected link aggregation sites built around specific communities. I.e., there's no reason /r/askhistorians can't be www.askhistorians.whatever and serve the same purpose. HN is a good example of this kind of community-specific site; IMO lobste.rs is an even better example, given that it maintains a more consistent focus.

Community-specific websites have all kinds of advantages over "just another subreddit", including the fact that the community can literally own its own site, and build moderation policies and tools appropriate to whatever it feels its norms are. It can also throw up whatever barriers it feels are appropriate to keep out marauding trolls. (I'm a big fan of Metafilter's $5 account fee, as an example.)

It ought to be relatively easy to automate the process of spinning up such a site on a generic VPS. I'm very tempted to build something along those lines with Ansible or something.

Of course, in practice, the "one big site" model has tons of advantages in terms of barrier to entry, network effects, costs, discovery, and so on. So I doubt the idea would ever gain any traction. But one can dream. :)

(edit: fix wording slightly)

</comment><comment><USER29> I have some ideas for a reddit replacement.

In my mind the perfect reddit replacement is run by the users, probably with the assistance of a non-profit foundation setup to support it. Instead of subscriptions providing superficial perks it buys you into voting power within the governing body.

Effectively a decentralized network run and owned by the users, in a similar fashion to IRC or Usenet but more modern and without the centralised entities that operated them in the past. (ISPs were usually in charge of "free" Usenet servers or commercial Usenet services were run by corporate entities, IRC is often setup and operated by small cliques of people).

You could accomplish this without a fully decentralized technical architecture too though that wouldn't be a bad goal long term. The main goal would be to distance the control of the platform that keeps the community together away from commercial and political interests.

It's worth mentioning that reddit gold = $5 which is about the price of a small VPS. If every reddit gold user instead provided a small VPS worth of compute it suddenly becomes pretty simple to replace reddit from a money/infrastructure perspective.

</comment><comment><USER30> I want to put Arc to some serious load testing!

PG and current sys-admins of HN, open the flood gates, put in this ticket for HN development project: "Create sub-HackNewsies".

Also, I think Reddit source code is open source; so people can use that too! A great business idea I think is doing a bannedsubreddits.com/r/{banned}; crawl webarchive.org for the previous archives for all the banned subreddits for continuity...

<comment><USER31> Sub-boards or tags have been discussed multiple times on Hacker News. Unfortunately, the developers seem allergic to modernity when it comes to forum design.

That said, here is the software that Hacker News is based on: [http://arclanguage.org/](http://arclanguage.org/) so maybe someone can fork a version with those features themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I used to be a huge fan of tribe.net until it got sold and the site started becoming unreliable.

[http://www.tribe.net/welcome](http://www.tribe.net/welcome)

edit: tribe.net history [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribe.net](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribe.net)

</comment><comment><USER33> There have been some posts on this thread saying that reddit is losing users for bad reasons. The users want to make hiring decisions, or approve of hate boards. That might be true, but there's one damn good reason to leave.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/3byaei/reddit_alt...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/3byaei/reddit_alternatives_other_subs_going_private_to/csr0by6)

The CEO went on reddit to explain her decision. It comes down to "the software is bad, and we'll release better software". She did not acknowledge her mistakes. Nor did she explain why she reacted before the fix was ready. Instead, she blamed it on the developers.

This is cowardly and self-serving. If reddit is in the hands of a person with no loyalty to her customers, they're going out of business. If Pao is still CEO by Monday night, reddit is done.

I'm moving on.

</comment><comment><USER34> I have been working on one, it's not really ready for prime time yet.

The idea is that it's a news aggregator that learns what you like, so it forms a probabilistic model of what it thinks your interests are and applies that model to the network of submitted content to decide what you see. Instead of subreddits the system forms subcommunities by showing users with similar interests similar lists of content.

The main thing I'm having a lot of trouble with is figuring out how to do efficient keyword extraction on pictures and video. Otherwise it only supports links that have a lot of text. The other problem is it doesn't have enough of a community feel so that's something else I'm working on.

One of the ideas I am about to experiment with is removing user accounts and using browser fingerprints instead. I think if users dont have to sign up it will encourage users to more actively participate in the community.

<comment><AUTHOR> As a fellow builder, also with something not ready for prime time, I say: ship that shit. If you're going to strike, now's the time. Any reason it can't be live, end of the month?

> Otherwise it only supports links that have a lot of text Sounds good to me!

> using browser fingerprints instead

By all means experiment; but this has a few problems with it. Some people like (or need) multiple accounts, which would mean separate browsers at the least. Equally, it's trivial to spin up a VM with a browser. So, the users who need multiple usernames can't (or lack the technical understanding), and the ones you don't want having multiple can easily create hundreds.

<comment><USER34> Thanks for the support, I can probably make it live by the end of the month I just thought that a lack of image and video support would limit its chances at survival.

The browser fingerprinting idea is a bit more involved. The idea is that everyone is anonymous and the types of people who you seem to like, based on factors like leaving your cursor over their comment for a while, are slowly deanonymized to you. The way browser fingerprinting would work in this scenario is that instead of storing usernames attached to models, we store a few different indicators (like browser fingerprints) and create probabilistic models relating these indicators to the aforementioned models. That way even if we have a completely new user we can create a new initial model for them based on what they might like. I have only just started working on this idea though, so I'm not sure how well this would work in practice and I'm not sure what other indicators I might use.

With this in mind I don't think there would be a reason to spin up VMs and create new 'accounts' because it would just limit your personal experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I help run Discoverboard, which is a subscription-based discussion community (less of a new aggregator). It's been around for a few months.

If you're interested, you can check it out: [http://discoverboard.com/code/HN](http://discoverboard.com/code/HN)

</comment><comment> TD-Linux The only thing I've used reddit for in recent times are projects (like rust) that use it as their official forum. Otherwise, I tend to find that my needs are better filled by independent, specialized forums (RCGroups, reprap, etc), and imageboards like 4chan or 8chan provide endless entertainment value.

</comment><comment><USER36> I have been thinking it would be cool to have a Reddit replacement ran by a non profit, similar to Wikipedia. Does anyone here have experience running something like that? I understand non profits are very complex to run.

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought about this for my project, but decided against it, primarily due to associated complexity. Although I hear there are other business types being created that might be more suitable for websites.

Personally, I don't think profits are bad. But I think being profit driven is. I also think a company can serve a public role and not have to be a non-profit to do it.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm working on the rebolder, a social news site for amplifying the best behavior and discussions humanity has to offer. It's something of a cross between reddit/craigslist/nyt; really I guess it's my vision for newspapers in the web era, because I'm crazy enough to think I know better.

The gist is: unwavering loyalty to users, voteable tags, "no" shills or bot armies, powerful search, various efforts to donate to charity, username obscurement, and lastly unwavering loyalty to users; which is important enough to mention twice.

</comment><comment><USER37> Reddit's core problem is that they don't make much money, and all the things they might do to make money are things that will piss off the user base.

It's the exact same problem that Digg had. And if Reddit experiences the same outcome, I don't know why anyone would rush to replicate that model a 3rd time.

Look at the history of 4chan: you can grow a large audience by allowing people to say whatever they want, anonymously. But no one has effectively monetized that yet, because it turns out that such a site collects a lot of objectionable content.

<comment><USER38> This image portraying reddit gold proceeds got posted earlier: [http://i.imgur.com/fcfseA4.png](http://i.imgur.com/fcfseA4.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Is Reddit doomed already?

<comment><USER40> Without a radical turnaround, yeah, I think so. It feels very much like Digg did back in the day.

When your userbase is your main asset and you treat them as a given, bad things happen.

<comment><USER41> Except that reedit had the population before digg crashed. There currently aren't any sizeable alternatives to reedit right now, so the same thing can't possibly happen

<comment><USER40> It can absolutely happen. The population is primed. The same scenario doesn't have to play out for the end result to be the same.

Digg had some mildly bad policy before their exodus. Reddit policy is failing in a much more dramatic way.

If someone comes out with a viable alternative with, perhaps, one or two notable improvements there is enough froth to push people to a new home.

I personally hope it fragments. The slacktivists and amateur political wonks to one corner with the news, the popular entertainment to the other, and the learners/hobbyists/special interest associations to yet another.

Reddit is the Craigslist of 2015. It is doing too much and it is ready to be picked apart.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> It seems to me that the issue is not making a technically equivalent site, which is "relatively" easy. There's more to it than that.

</comment><comment><USER43> If you're working on a reddit replacement, I have an answer to the question of how to monetize your site. See this video featuring Victoria: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhpB6QDOxCI&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhpB6QDOxCI&feature=youtu.be)

The way it would work is that you'd install our plugin onto your site and make all of the images hoverable and linkable. Then, when people purchase through those links, you make an affiliate commission. The way we'd envision it working is that users would get a percent of the commission of whatever purchases they drove, and your site would also get a percent of the commission.

<comment><USER44> Why do it as a plugin?? Why not just straight JS embedded in the site. Then you don't have to ask users to download it.

<comment><USER43> As a plugin, it works on sites that don't have it installed natively (Facebook, Pinterest, etc.). PLEENQ is both -- we offer a plugin that lets regular users use it on any site, as well as an embeddable version for website owners who want to monetize their image content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> pier to pier, in-browser reddit</comment>


Microsoft Seeks to Put the Hot Back in Hotmail - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/microsoft-hotmail-facelift/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo

<comment><USER2> They can start by getting rid of the spammy taglines at the end of outgoing email messages.

<comment><USER3> I just started using Hotmail's new comment authoring system.

 _Sent from Hotmail Commenter 1.5.4 (TM)! Where do you want Windows 7 Service Pack 3 Hotfix 362354 to take you today!?_</comment></comment>


Vanguard's Low Blow - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-02-10/vanguard-is-more-mutual-than-most-mutual-funds <comment><USER2> To summarise, Investment Managers manage Funds. When you invest in a mutual (or hedge or venture or wine [1]) fund, you put money in to a Fund. The Fund then pays an Investment Manager a fee for managing it. (Of course, you, the investor, indirectly pay this fee.)

Vanguard is mutualized. This means the Funds _own_ the Investment Manager. Unsurprisingly, the Funds vote for lower fees. The result is Vanguard charging its funds staggeringly lower fees than average [2]. This also means Vanguard makes less profit than competing Investment Managers.

Enter this guy [3]. He observes Vanguard paying less tax (on account of making less profit) than its competition. He concludes that Vanguard is dodging its tax bill. Vanguard, he argues, should be taxed _as if_ it charged the higher fees it doesn't. They should also pay the back taxes they would have owed if they had charged these fees and earned those profits, again, that they didn't. This last part is helpful because he likes the whistleblower bonus the IRS would pay him if the case succeeds [4]. (Or maybe not [5].)

If this sounds bonkers, it's because it likely is. We don't tax SpaceX _as if_ it were bilking the U.S. government on par with its competition. In any case, the boosted post-fee gains from Vanguard's funds are still taxed at the individual level. But my pie is better than your pie and so the idiots get their air time.

[1] [http://www.wineinvestmentfund.com/disclaimer.aspx?url=http:/...](http://www.wineinvestmentfund.com/disclaimer.aspx?url=http://www.wineinvestmentfund.com/index.aspx)

[2] [https://investor.vanguard.com/mutual-funds/low- cost](https://investor.vanguard.com/mutual-funds/low-cost)

[3] [https://www.linkedin.com/in/david- danon-a0a5017](https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-danon-a0a5017)

[4] [http://www.newsweek.com/2015/12/25/vanguard-whistleblower- ta...](http://www.newsweek.com/2015/12/25/vanguard-whistleblower-tax-dodge- complaint-400901.html)

[5] [http://articles.philly.com/2015-11-19/business/68386489_1_da...](http://articles.philly.com/2015-11-19/business/68386489_1_david- danon-new-york-state-joan-madden)

<comment><USER3> In nl we have one particularly crazy tax called the 'huurwaarde forfait'. It's basically a total fiction, the idea is that if you own a house that you are financing you are not renting, and this then rent that you are not spending - tadaa - is income.

<comment><USER4> Economically this is correct - you do have an imputed stream of rental income from a property. You are just choosing to consume it directly (by living in the house) rather than sell it to another party, receive money and turn the money into other consumer goods.

Imagine an alternate scenario. You own a home, but rent it out. Also, you rent an equivalent home from another person. In this alternate scenario, you'd have to pay income taxes on the rent you receive. Similarly, if your employer gave you free rent in a house they owned, you'd need to pay tax on the value of that rent.

Economically there is no good reason to distinguish between these two cases. It sounds like NL is doing things right, or at least righter than the US.

<comment><USER5> It's a special case of the more general case of taxation of non-market services.

Say A is a stay at home dad, B is his spouse, and C works at an office. B and C both make $10 per month and there is a 20% flat tax. So total tax revenue is $4. Now, say that A wants to live a life of leisure. So he hires C to do nannying on the side, and they pay her $3 per month. Now, total income is $23, and total tax revenue is $4.6. But the same amount of work is being done as before! All that's happened is an activity moved from the non-taxed domestic realm to a taxed market one.

<comment><USER6> It makes sense economically, but at some point you have to draw a line. Should I be taxed when I cook a meal for myself, because it's a valuable service that would cost $X if I had somebody do it for me? Should I be taxed based on the price of transportation if I walk somewhere? Breathing?

It seems that we typically draw the line at the individual or household. If not there, then where should it go?

<comment><USER7> I don't know the answer to this question, but it's clearly related to the fact that work done to maintain one's own household gets left out of pretty much every measure of costs or productivity. (I suppose it's probably some form of externality. I ought to study more economics.)

Given traditional gender roles, this is one factor that has historically led to massive undercounting of women's total contribution to the economy, which could potentially lead to distortions in selecting good public policy. (It's certainly not _just_ a women's issue, but that's one of its big impacts.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "They charged less than their competition. That's potential tax revenue lost. They are therefore thieves." is the dumbest argument I've ever heard.

How is this even an issue, let alone the basis for a legal case?

<comment><USER9> > They charged less than their competition

It's a lot less crazy than it sounds, because they are wholly owned by Vanguard. So the customer is effectively setting the fees.

There are certainly scenarios where you could see how this is clearly abusive. As a contrived example, imagine if Apple moved its legal headquarters to Ireland and made California into a subsidiary. They would still have to pay the California subsidiary for the design services it provides, but they could set those fees at way below market price and thereby shift all tax liabilities to a lower tax jurisdiction. We have transfer pricing rules in place to prevent this.

The situation is more complicated than this because the fund (the client) is not a profit-seeking corporation, so it's not arbitrarily moving funds around. It's an odd scenario where the customers are _also_ the owners.

<comment><USER10> Customers being owners is not that odd; it's called vertical integration.

<comment><USER9> In the context of B2B it's not at all odd, you're right. (In fact, that's the whole reason transfer pricing rules exist.)

In the current era, it is however uncommon for consumers to simultaneously own and (exclusively) be the customers of a company. (Historically, that is of course the entire principle of mutual funds.)

<comment><USER11> This is what co-ops are, and as far as I know they do not face special tax reporting or payments.

<comment><USER9> Depending on structure, co-ops often _do_ face special tax reporting requirements.

Moreover, in this case the fact that Vanguard is a co-op is a redeeming factor. If it were a typical corporation charging itself below-market transfer prices, that would likely be illegal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This story irritates me. I have been using Vanguard for decades and have always been very happy with their services.

Strange lawsuit. Horrible if the case goes against Vanguard. We live in a strange world.

<comment><USER13> Yes, long term Vanguard client here. Because I opted to go with someone with lower costs the other funds are unhappy and want Vanguard to pay more in taxes?

So does the shoe then fit if Vanguard triples their fees making them the most expensive, do the other management companies then need to pay taxes on the difference between their now lower fees and Vanguards?

I think this is a ploy by the management firms that are being undercut and in a tight market (or a down market) the management fees become important.

<comment><USER9> > I think this is a ploy by the management firms that are being undercut and > in a tight market (or a down market) the management fees become important.

I'm pretty sure it is almost exclusively a ploy by David Danon (who brought this complaint) to extract a massive whistleblower fee.

<comment><USER13> Good point. I'm pretty sure that Vanguard has thought this through. The article says "Danon collected a $117,000 whistle-blower bounty in Texas in November, meaning that Vanguard paid the state at least $2.3 million. It's possible that Vanguard's payment had nothing to do with the fee issue." So I'm going to guess it's some other arcane thing they missed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If this lawsuit succeeds, then we'll live a surreal world where financial companies are routinely hammered for charging high fees...and for charging low fees. Perhaps we should have a state-mandated price list for all financial services.

<comment><USER15> I'm sure you could find that proposal _somewhere_ in Bernie's policy briefs.

<comment><USER16> Actually, Sanders proposed postal banking. That's not the same as Vanguard extending mutual ownership to the fund managers, but it's roughly the same effect: Retail banking and investing is a rip off in many cases, and having an alternative structure is going to save the small investors and retail banking customers many tens of billions of dollars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm going to report David Danon to the IRS. He could have made more income as Wall Street corporate lawyer instead of working for Vanguard as a tax lawyer. The extra income he could have made would have resulted in more income taxes to the government. Obviously, he is a tax dodger.

Did I get that right?

</comment><comment><USER18> For a less biased view about why Vanguard really does do things wrong in the eye of the law even if it sounds perfectly reasonable to you and me, try this: [http://www.joshuakennon.com/vanguard-accused-of- nearly-35-bi...](http://www.joshuakennon.com/vanguard-accused-of- nearly-35-billion-tax-abuse/)

<comment><USER19> This is a very good read and it lead me to think about this somewhat differently.

The whistleblower is making the case that if Vanguard had kept all the profits then there would have been a $34B tax bill. But that's an assumption. It's far more likely that Vanguard would have paid out the extra money as a dividend so that there was no profit. Or they figure out some way to pay it out as extra shares in the investments, perhaps there is some way to make it be like unrealized gains so that there is no tax event until you take it out.

Can anyone who has some background shoot holes in the thoughts above?

To me this case looks shaky but I'm not a lawyer, tax guy, or even much of an investor (I do have money at Vanguard for whatever that is worth).

<comment><USER20> I think it is even more likely that Vanguard would never gained number of customers it did, if they charged regular market rates.

So the whole "if, else, else if" thing in "whistle-blower's" argument is ridiculous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This article seems to lean heavily on the argument "if the law said this, it would have bad consequences; therefore, the law doesn't say this", complementary to the popular argument "this thing is bad, therefore this thing is illegal / unconstitutional".

</comment><comment><USER22> Slightly off-topic: a lot of Vanguard's ETFs are synthetic. Is there anyone who can say something about the risk involved in this in contrast to non- synthetic ETFs?

Edit: As it turns out most or all of Vanguard's ETFs are physical.

<comment><USER23> I was under the impression that a lot (if not all) of Vanguard's ETFs are physical, not synthetic. Can you name one of these synthetic ETFs?

<comment><USER22> I believe VOO is a synthetic fund.

<comment><USER23> VOO is not synthetic. Quoting the overview page[1]:

> Employs a passively managed, full-replication strategy.

[1]: [https://advisors.vanguard.com/VGApp/iip/site/advisor/investm...](https://advisors.vanguard.com/VGApp/iip/site/advisor/investments/productoverview?fundId=0968)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't understand the central claim of this lawsuit:

"Vanguard is cheating state and federal tax authorities by charging its customers much less than other fund companies do."

This simply isn't true. A list of the 100 lowest ETFs [1] shows several form the Schwab near the top of the list.

[1] [http://etfdb.com/compare/lowest-expense- ratio/](http://etfdb.com/compare/lowest-expense-ratio/)

<comment><USER24> This list is incomplete. I own some VSTAX (Vanguard, .04%) and FUSEX (Fidelity, .04%) etfs, neither are on this list. I've seen even lower mentioned at Vanguard (The "institution" version of VSTAX, .02%)

<comment><USER25> I assume by VSTAX you mean VTSAX? That is on there as the ETF version is VTI. And institutional versions of the fund are not ETFs... they are only available to institutions, and for the .02% rate, you need to invest 100MM, which is the opposite of being exchange traded.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Why is this being upvoted? We can basically be certain that this guy is either a shill, or drunk.

Product is cheaper than the competition. Boo hoo.

<comment><USER27> Because it's an interesting example of tax laws being, for lack of a better word, wonky.

<comment><USER26> Tax should be on profit, not revenue or turnover. By offering lower fees, Vanguard transfers wealth from the investment fund industry to the consumers of its products.

I see no difference between what Vanguard is doing here, and what WhatsApp did for instant messaging - disrupting an incumbent industry with a new and cheap option.

I don't see how anything about it is wonky. Care to explain?

<comment><USER28> The difference is that Vanguard is owned by it's customers so the low fees are transferring wealth from the consumers back to the consumers while (allegedly illegally) lowering their tax bill.

It's the ownership structure that makes things different.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN:  Please destroy my startup idea so I don't waste time on it - <AUTHOR> Problem:
1.)  Hard for Content Newsletters to Find advertisers and sponsors.
2.)  Very difficult for startups who want to advertise in newsletters to find similar newsletters to advertise in.  (no central location - have to find advertise area on website for each newsletter or email publisher directly for smaller newsletters)
This isn't just something that's new for newsletters.  I believe this was inherited from direct mail from magazines and publishers.  I remember pursuing a startup idea in high school, looking for ways to reach out to highly targeted magazines, and being pointed to a directory in the library.  And even the library didn't have that directory.
My Solution:  BuySellAds.com type of website for content newsletter publishers.
My Minimal Test:
Advermin.com - Performable Landing page to see if there's interest in this.  Landing page hooks up to mailchimp.  For first few weeks, I'll send advertising opportunities from friends who own content newsletters - see if there's interest and if we can pick up steam.
Finding if publishers are interested by using howtosubscribe.com to find newsletter publishers.
My Concerns:
(1) Too small of a market.  Some of the data from EasyUnsubscriber.com shows me that most email newsletters are from newsletters that are selling a product or service or are extremely interested in driving traffic to their blog.
(2) The larger newsletters (highest value customers)  probably don't need someone to find opportunities because they're popular enough to attract advertisers directly.
Target Newsletters include content newsletters like HackerNewsletter and Startup Digest.
Final Plea:  Please poke holes in this.  Tear me apart.  Spit on my ideas.  I want to save time and focus full attention on easyunsubscriber.com if this idea isn't worth pursuing.  All input appreciated. <comment><USER2> (disclosure: I founded BuySellAds.com)

I think it's a great idea, actually. At BSA we've been talking about newsletter ads for a while, but haven't been able to commit to executing on it properly. We went as far as acquiring the NewsletterAds.com domain, but have since stopped there. One of the biggest hurdles with selling ads in newsletters is getting enough valuable inventory. Even with our existing publishers (and with 150-200 new sites submitted every day) we would struggle to have enough _meaningful_ inventory to put together to sell. That being said, I had _many_ people tell me the same thing before I started BSA - that I would never be able to get enough inventory together to make it work.

The other piece of advice I can give you is that operating at 25% commissions (like BSA does) is definitely a bootstrapping path. If you can sell ads in newsletters that they aren't already selling, then it's something I would do at a 35-40% level. Maybe that sounds crazy, but if you're able to make sales that are normally not made you can charge whatever you want.

So, I'd say go for it, hustle, and make it happen if you are passionate about it.

<comment><USER3> I'm in an office adjacent to you - nice job on BSA. ;)

<comment><USER2> nice! let's grab a coffee or beer or something one day, I'd love to hear more about what you are doing with <http://datatrailer.com/>. shoot me an email (firstname.lastname@example.com) or just swing by and knock on the BSA door.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Advertising sales is really hard. You can create a marketplace and get connected to a bunch of newsletter publishers but then you need to convince a whole heap of people to give you money.

Publishers are also (usually) particular about what kind of advertising they run in their emails. They want to make sure that it's "on brand" because if it's not then people might stop opening or reading their emails.

It's the classic problem of the 2 sided marketplace but the easiest way to start out here (IMHO) would be to find a newsletter or two and go out there selling their inventory. When you're oversubscribed go and find another relevant newsletter and sell their inventory. Wash, rinse and repeat.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comment nedwin.

If nothing else, I'd like to at least make it easier for startups and small companies to have somewhere to find what these requirements are. Maybe this ends with howtosubscribe.com being a labor of love to help organize the net's plethora of newsletters.

If your proposal of selling one or two and then expanding from there. This idea would probably be suited better for someone with history of selling newsletter ads. For me, it'd be a problem of being the "wrong person to execute". Something I hear Chris Dixon & PG mention a lot.

<comment><USER5> I guess that in the early stages of your idea your in a way going to have to be selling the inventories anyway, not going to be easy to build both sides of the market without some legwork on your part. One of the advantages to being small I guess is you can actually go above and beyond to broker deals rather than only having time to really be doing it passively through a webapp.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great point. It'll be a solid way for me to gain some domain expertise at the same time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We run a niche, high-value newsletter and so from experience, I think there is a market for this.

To validate, I'd find a newsletter(s) you think you can sell an ad(s) in and talk to the newsletter creator and say "If I can get you a sponsored ad for $x, would you (1) want it and (2) give me a Y% cut?"

If you get positive response from them, then try like mad to sell the ads you promised.

I'm not sure the size of the market but given how much Bob Pittman, Lerer Media and the guy at HARO like email newsletters, there is prob something here. We think so.

Also, IMO, I don't think startups is a great demographic from a monetization perspective unless you can slice it more finely, i.e., venture-backed startups or startups who are hiring.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great points. From lean startups & cust dev principles, I think you should start charging from day one.

Well, the margins would come from venture backed startups looking for high growth.

I am also a huge fan of lean, so personally, I'd also like to hook up very small newsletters (less than 5,000 subscribers) with bootstrapped startups. I also think these newsletters would be easier to start with - since many aren't monetized yet.

I already have one newsletter signed up for this. This idea came from when I pitched a different startup to them and they thought I was talking about this idea. They said "if you do this, I'll be your biggest advocate". So that's why I'm considering the idea.

<comment><USER6> Glad to hear of market validation you've done.

I'd caution against small newsletters which may have low-value audiences. The "CPM" you'll get will be low and so $20 CPM on a 5k newsletter is $100 and if $80 goes to newsletter, that gives you $20. (And $20 CPM may be very aggressive)

You have to find and get an absolute cr^pload of those newsletters on board to make any amount of real cashish.

And bootstrapped startups as advertisers strikes me as a terrible segment as they have little to no money and may often be PITAs.

<comment><USER6> Addressing your comment below as I couldn't find a reply on your comment.

Why go into a business with terrible margins from the start? Usually successful biz have great margins to start and then those get eroded with competition, technology, etc?

In general, it also seems easier to go from big to small vs the other way. If I'm a large newsletter owner, I want to know you've worked with folks like me. I don't care that you've done work for 100 newsletters of 5k people.

Waiting on bootstrapped startups to get funding and hoping they'll continue with you is dependent on lots of variables you have no control over. Business is already uncertain and this is just compounding that uncertainty.

I'm all for validating the market but do it in a lucrative area in my view where there is a real ROI on your effort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Personally, I think you are thinking too small. IMO there is a larger opportunity for a marketplace to buy and sell promotion for the long-tail of the web (niche content providers and small startups selling to a niche audience) across many mediums including newsletters but also company blogs, social media presences, forums, etc. Buysellads.com does it well, but I think there is room for another player who can execute in slightly different ways.

I actually have been thinking about this idea for a while and would love to chat more about it. I've been working on a travel industry startup for 2 years that has had a difficult time finding great/targeted advertising opportunities.

<comment><USER8> It's a really hard problem. I worked at a company that tried to create vertical ad networks that would allow advertisers to tap a large pool of related content. A lot of pieces have to come together for it all to work - finance, technical, and high-touch things like having a direct sales team and managing publishers (recruiting them, getting your tags up, etc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Besides not being a subject matter expert, I don't have any evidence to support this assertion:

It feels like you're looking to get involved in an industry that's being disrupted (unless e-mail newsletters are going to continue in their current form, which I don't believe), but that your idea isn't causing this disruption. I feel like there's a pivot somewhere here, after some more time on it.

So in essence, I'm giving you the opposite of what you want; I think if you start looking into this further, you may hit upon the true solution. At least it sounded to me like you had the knowledge and interest to make it happen.

</comment><comment><USER10> I actually like the idea a bit. Chicken and egg problem for ad networks is difficult, but not insurmountable. I can tell you that there are many big newsletters out there that are under-monetized. It' not about spamming, either, it's about providing a quality offer that makes sense for the audience. Feel free to reach out to me if you pursue this (you can find me through my profile).

</comment><comment><USER11> You may want to checkout <http://www.heyamigo.net> and <http://www.barenakedapp.com/category/amigo/>

HeyAmigo sounds like exactly what you are talking about. It was built by Carsonified a few years ago and sold (I think). The Bare Naked App blog was a chronicle of them building it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link. I just visited and toyed around. I hate to be "that guy", but I didn't really love it. Does anyone here use Hey Amigo? What do you think? Good results?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have a small but growing daily stock-related newsletter (3500 subscribers in 45 days). So far, I really have no methods of monetizing it and the monthly sendgrid bill doesn't pay itself. If that service existed, I'd give it a try.

</comment><comment><USER13> Its a niche market. You have specifics. Sorry, I kind of like your idea. After a zillion "its like teh facebook of x" or "its kind of a social-ad-media- blogging deal", that's really refreshing.

I'm not going to be able to shoot down an idea this specific, Content Newsletters are. Find a few. If they think its a good idea, see if they'll pay you something, or even trial some stuff for you. You should be able to quickly determine if there's anything here worth pursuing.

</comment><comment><USER14> who the hell signs up for newsletters? interesting how your other business was created because newsletters are lame.

these problems don't seem like ones normal people deal with. they're just problems for people trying to add something to their domain squatting businesses. spam my inbox with lame content, and then spam the newsletter with ads? ugh.

how about, people want really good content through email (huge assumption), but great content publishers aren't publishing content due to low advertiser involvement. the service could hook writers up with relevant advertisers who could add something to the conversation, giving the user something other than a text ad or banners. if it's a small market, the service could be very specialized and deal with people/advertisers individually.

but honestly, there's probably more money in viagra ads than there is in email newsletters.

<comment><USER15> Many people sign up for email newsletters -- in fact lots of people spend their whole day in Outlook or on their Blackberry, so it's far more convenient than configuring an RSS reader. More people send/receive email in a given day than run a Google search or check Facebook.

Ads in an email newsletter that you intentionally signed up for is no more "spam" than ads on a website you routinely visit is "spam."

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd also like to add that well targeted magazine ads can even ad value. Who is to see this can't translate to email newsletters?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It'd be interesting to add an A/B testing twist to this--provide value-add to advertisers and newsletter operators by providing them visibility into click- throughs, and then spiffs to the newsletters for going with the better path. But you'd need volume to do this.

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't read newsletters.

While some do, their use is dying and being replaced with new forms of social media. Even if your business becomes huge, it's going to be facing a market that's declining. That doesn't seem like fun.

</comment><comment><USER18> I know it's not exactly what you're looking at, but it brought The Deck[1] to mind. Carefully curated high-quality advertising on select sites.

[1] <http://decknetwork.net/>

</comment><comment><USER19> Can't remember where but I saw a service that described itself as "buysellads for e-newsletters" the other day.

</comment><comment><USER20> its a massive market. the problem is the targeting. how do you target ads appropriately? everyone wants the high CPM ads, but nobody knows how they will perform. and you have to do a separate mailing each time

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think I agree about massive market. There's a large # of newsletter publishers that don't advertise. Thing of every SaaS newsletter promoting their own sales, Best Buy and their newsletters, Groupon doesn't directly advertise (this distinction is somewhat complicated).

Selling ads appropriately is also extremely difficult. Click-thru rates is another issue, but I could probably overcome this issue with unsubscribe rates data from easyunsubscriber after it finds P/M fit.

I don't think a lot of this stuff is public unless SendGrid/MailChimp/et al has open APIs which I doubt. I think publishers often fudge this data and if their open rates are bad, they inflate the numbers of don't mention them. Very difficult to monitor esp. since the data isn't open.

Do you advertise in newsletters or publish one? I'd love to hear more of your experiences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Pivot to "appsumo + groupon for email newsletters" :)</comment>


Microsoft's Sidekick/Pink problems blamed on dogfooding and sabotage - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/10/12/microsofts_sidekick_pink_problems_blamed_on_dogfooding_and_sabotage.html <comment><USER2> I think that's the most twisted definition of "dogfooding" I've ever heard.

Also, this article seems to be about 98% speculation from a site that has no previous history of "inside sources" at Microsoft. Boo on that.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I came in here to say that in my world "dogfooding" means using your own application during development. To eat your own dog food.

<comment><USER4> I agree as well on that definition. Which is what brought me to start reading the article since I was really curious to know how Microsoft engineers using Sidekicks could have caused any issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't think it's fair to rule out the possibility of a simple screw-up. I've been responsible for important web services and I took a lot of precautions, but I can't say it was inconceivable that something could have gone wrong causing major permanent data loss. There are so many ways in which failures can cascade in a complex system there can be no absolute guarantees.

Can anyone quantify how much address book data there was? As an outside guess, 1,000,000 customers times 1000 addresses times 300 bytes each is only 300 GB. They could have kept an emergency backup on rsync.net for $300 / month. I keep secondary, well-encrypted backups of things I particularly care about (not nearly 300 GB worth) there, as well as on a USB disk under my bed, in addition to the regular complete backups.

<comment><USER6> > _There are so many ways in which failures can cascade in a complex system > there can be no absolute guarantees._

What about off-site backup? How many failures can cascade in a way to wipe out off-site backups?

<comment><USER5> Many backup systems copy the data automatically each night, but if the data is damaged on the main system and nobody notices right away it can overwrite the backup. Or, in the stress of late-night recovery sessions, someone can copy things in the wrong direction and overwrite the backup. Sometimes the backups are encrypted with a highly secure key, and the key is lost with the original failure, or stored within the encrypted backup like keys locked inside a car.

Because SANs allow multiple machines to write to the same disk, they have byzantine failure modes where data can be overwritten on disk, but cached for long periods of time by the machines that need it so there's no visible problem until after a power failure.

When data is migrated to new database hardware, sometimes the backups haven't actually been tested. Sometimes during the cutover, someone who didn't fully understand the architecture backs up the new (empty) machine on top of the old machine's backups, so there is no backup for a while. All these mistakes can happen pretty easily when sysadmins are woken up in the night to fix a service outage while people are yelling at them. I have made some of these mistakes myself, though so far I've been lucky.

The computer industry has never learned to admit that there is always some level of risk. You won't hear an oil company exec say "Inconceivable!" when an iceberg crashes into a North Sea oil rig, or a refinery catches on fire. Systems fail, and all you can do is try your best to avoid it and move forward after it does happen.

<comment><USER6> A lot of those possibilities are preventable though. If you backup through an automated rsync, why not used versioning (ala rdiff)? Why not periodically swap out the disks on the backup machine so that if the disk gets hosed you have _some_ data backed up, even if it is old data.

Some of the things like 'locking the keys in the car' can be mitigated by making sure that you _test_ you backup system.

Obviously you can't prevent everything, but to say that some of these issues are 'unavoidable risk' is like saying that an oil company exec would say, "shit happens," to reports that one of their oil tanker captains crashed a ship while drunk.

The _real_ problem is that backup is usually an after-though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good article.

Once upon a time, I wrote a series of opensource iSync plugins for the sidekick/hiptop platform, back when Danger first opened up their XML-RPC Service.

Then it came out that in order to run in "production" (e.g. on a phone without a developer provisioning loaded) your app had to have t-mobiles permission. We kept repeatedly getting told "no" on the iSync plugin, that they had no interest in supporting Mac. Then of course a commercial plugin appeared and I got fed up and stopped trying, getting the clear impression that commercial was what T-Mobile wanted.

Mostly however, it was the shock in realizing that you had no access to your own data as a standard user. You were completely and utterly locked in to that device, with no alternative.

<comment><USER8> Are you kidding? It's a terrible article that consists of nothing but speculation and conflicting segments that attribute the data loss to "dogfooding", and/or sabotage, and/or aggressive non-beneficial firmware updates, and/or incompetence.

Well done AppleInsider, you managed to nail the problem simply by covering every possible base.

<comment><USER7> Fair enough. In hindsight: \- I'm at the point where my brain mostly parses out all the speculation crap, I come across it so often. There was good tidbits in there covering some of the contract issues, etc. \- I think the "Good article" was almost a (can't think of the word[s] I'm looking for, but something you say out of habit/reflex without thinking). It kind of came out without actually considering other than "I found interesting things in it". I apologize, you are in fact correct that it was incredibly speculative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Microsoft's insistance on rebuilding with their own technologies must put them at a big competitive disadvantage. Google can buy up just about any small web company and have 100% code compatibility from day one.

<comment><USER10> That's not true in the slightest, unless that "small web company" is using App Engine.

Microsoft has a hardon for dev-managed directly-addressed OS instances running on x86 machines, so you could at the very least migrate to their extant hosting infrastructure. Even if you have to rewrite your app in C# + SQL Server, it's still going to be a direct gloss for most traditional webapps.

Google does no such thing -- everything is massively distributed at every level, where blocks of infrastructure are managed as ideal services independently from any application, and addressed at the datacenter level. You are not going to get to manage your own machines, access a traditional filesystem, use relational databases, a direct socket to the client, direct access to internet hosts, _basically anything you take for granted_.</comment></comment>


Can chance make you a killer? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-10729380 <comment><USER2> 100 operations is really small sample for something that happens once in a 100.

If you have chance 1/100 of death then with sample 100 you have to have 0 or 1 deaths to fit in 60% but with sample 200 you can have 0,1,2,3 deaths to still fit.

It's just 60% is harsh limit for small samples. There should be some lower limit on sample size you have to gather for given probability before you start judging. Either that or threshold should depend on sample size and probability, but limiting sample size might be easier to understand for general public.

<comment><USER3> I wish that journalistic integrity extended into statistical analysis, and that the bar for understanding of basic statistics were raised so that someone with a high school degree would be as irked as you or I about poor excuses for analysis.

<comment><USER4> Wishing for normal people to understand statistics isn't reasonable. I'd also like a pony. But the first point is important: journalists shouldn't be allowed to publish statistical musings without some oversight from a statistician, which any reputable paper would have on staff anyway to avoid basic mistakes. Journalists would never be allowed to speculate as freely as this in deciding questions of climate science or molecular biology, but once it's a question of statistics everyone is instantly an expert.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps statistics, (of the relatively advanced variety rather than the mean- mode-median variety), should be inserted into every high school student's curriculum. It is, after all, _far_ more important to the life of the average citizen than, say, trigonometry or calculus. And it _ought_ to be easier to understand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As with everything there is always multiple factors, one of them being chance, this article (interactive no less) seems to highlight this very well.

I guess the rest of us not in the hospital business can use this to be weary of statistics and data presented to us, even when provided from a reliable source. When gathering our own statistics its often necessary to do that for a prolonged period in order to let the data reveal what and what isn't pure chance.

</comment><comment><USER7> They are describing a basic Monte Carlo simulation. It shows you that, given a certain distribution, some subset of trials will exceed some arbitrary cutoff. But, well, of course! This must be topical in Britain - is there some flap about death rates going on there? Perhaps there is some concern about too- stringent cutoffs being used there to try to catch bad physicians?

The real take-home here is that if you set your 'warning' threshold to be too low, you'll get a lot of warnings. Here, they used an arbitrary cutoff of 8 as their warning threshold. A fairer move would have been to allow some data to come back, try to infer a distribution and it's parameters, and then set future cutoffs based on those parameters. One could even continuously recalculate based on incoming data.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think there's anything particularly topical about death rates here in the UK right now. The author together with Michael Dilnot presented a radio show "More or Less" which covered lots of topics of this sort, showing how maths can aid an understanding of the world in general and current affairs in particular.

Their book "The Tiger That Isn't" ([http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tiger-That-Isnt- Through-Numbers/dp/1...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tiger-That-Isnt-Through- Numbers/dp/1861978391)) is excellent and includes some other examples around sample size and regression to mean.

One thing that struck me from the article was how computers and Monte Carlo simulations have lowered the barrier to entry for statistical understanding. It seems much simpler to run this sort of simulation than to understand the intricacies of different probability distributions.

<comment><USER7> I agree, but understanding probability distributions is actually key to this simulation that they've performed. The results would differ, greatly, by running it with a uniform vs normal vs binomial distribution, or by tuning their parameters.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was thinking that they probably just simulated each individual patient by picking a random number and seeing if it's less than the death rate.

So the number of deaths in a hospital is just

      sum([random()<deathRate for i in range(numPeople)])

and they can do the analysis without needing to know what a Bernouilli or Binomial distribution is, even though these both feature in the problem.

<comment><USER7> Again, the "random number" comes from a distribution. You can have a random number from the binomial, normal, etc distribution, and the output will look quite different. Also, there are clearly bounds on the distribution. Etc. They absolutely _do_ need to understand how their pseudorandom number generator works in order to understand the properties of their simulation.

<comment><AUTHOR> I can't tell if we're disagreeing or just at cross purposes.

In the code above the random number is uniform(0,1), the standard random number in most languages. So each individual death is Bernouilli, although you don't need to know the word Bernouilli. Then this leads to a binomial distribution for a hospital as a whole.

But the binomial assumption doesn't need to be known or explicitly built into the model. It's effectively an emergent property of the individual deaths.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "You are a product of your environment." --Clement Stone</comment>


Touchable taskbar - <AUTHOR> http://www.mathieupassenaud.fr/touch-task-bar/ <comment><USER2> Seems like exactly the use the Touch Bar on the current MacBook Pros could be put to - the best I have so far seen for that is NyanCat...</comment>