'Revenge porn' site runner gets 18 years in prison - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Revenge-porn-site-runner-gets-18-years-in-6178500.php <comment><USER2> I'll break the mold in this thread by saying this outcome is ideal. At the core, this was a new kind of case. This sets a precedent for people who may try to replicate his business model, and it makes it seem less desirable. Sure, people could just do it internationally, etc, but this is a good outcome for a tenacious and abusive criminal.

edit: it is an injustice that people are jailed for minor crimes, it seems wild that this is longer than some murderers receive, but recognize that what effectively happened here's was the monetization of widespread psychological and social abuse. 18 years is likely less than the sum time his victims have spent trying to deal with the abuse he inflicted, willingly and for profit.

edit 2: removed downvote gripe, in response to feedback, previously the first paragraph ended with "Let the downvotes flow."

<comment><USER3> Damn it, I was all set to upvote you, and then you had to go attempt the reverse-psychology "I'm sure I'll be downvoted for this" ploy.

Sorry, but that's an automatic "stop reading and downvote" in my book.

<comment><USER2> Given the tone of the thread when I posted this, it felt necessary. Reactions on HN are truly stochastic and if what I said before the defensive comment wasn't meaningful enough for you to upvote then I'm glad you downvoted it, it only reinforces how reactionary people can be.

<comment><USER4> Complaining about or goading downvotes turns a comment into a soapboxing whine. It's a juvenile debating tactic where if the author gets modded up they claim victory because of assent, and if the author gets modded down, they also claim victory because "I called it, you all suck!".

> _it only reinforces how reactionary people can be_

You're calling raldi reactionary even though the downvote was not for your 'meaningful comment', but because you _literally asked to be downvoted_?

<comment><USER2> I didn't ask to be downvoted I expressed my expectations. I didn't force anyone. Also, I've since made an edit.

Edit: on inspection of your profile you seem intimately aware of the gratuitous downvotes on HN. Why is pointing it out considered a faux pas? Why should we be goaded into not bringing it up?

<comment><USER5> The guidelines ask you to not do it.

People commenting are asking you to not do it.

Saying thigs like "I expect I'll get downvoted for this" _guarantees_ downvotes - but those votes are for that part of the comment and not for the rest of the comment.

I've seen people say "I expect I'll get downvoted for this" but then say something bland and uncontroversial.

<comment><USER2> They say resist it, which is materially different from saying not to do it. Goading is another story entirely.

I will add that in practice, adding this defensive layer has had the opposite effect, it has resulted in more compassionate voting, rather than more downvotes, on my comments, which reinforces why I did it here and have done it in the past, so I question why it's such a big deal, to me, the big deal is the fact that there is an expectation of surprise downvotes, that you can't expect a discussion without driveby negative feedback is a sign of a very toxic community.

Since this is a point of contention, though, I'll try to resist in the future, but I still call out to anyone to ask of the community – why do you downvote so readily, rather than upvoting equally as readily? Check out the Wikipedia article for critical positivity: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_positivity_ratio](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_positivity_ratio) – there's no reason we can't make HN a positive environment.

<comment><USER4> _why do you downvote so readily, rather than upvoting equally as readily?_

They don't. The vast majority of users have positive karma scores, including yourself. You just can't see positive votes for other users, as they're invisible. You're arguing from selection bias here. If you are interested in a higher quality conversation, then try out those guidelines.

You may also want to find better links when you want to support your argument - that wiki page starts out _" The critical positivity ratio ... is a largely discredited concept"_, and most of the article is spent arguing against it.

<comment><USER2> Yep, the mathematics behind it are discredited, I hadn't seen this development, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The US is a weirdly moralistic society. It is almost as if Americans pride themselves on punishing people as severely and brutally as possible. Perhaps in order to reinforce in our own minds how righteous a group of people we are.

18 years is absolutely insane. Utterly, terrifyingly insane. That's more than murder gets in many countries. That's more than rape gets. That's more than terrorism gets.

How long before someone just automates building these sort of websites on a prepared template. Who'll be punished then?

<comment><USER7> > 18 years is absolutely insane. Utterly, terrifyingly insane.

Why exactly are you terrified?

> That's more than murder gets in many countries. That's more than rape gets. > That's more than terrorism gets.

Orange and Apples.

In my understanding Kevin Christopher Bollaert developed a business case where he invited people on a global scale to harm other people. Then in a second step he took advantage of the miserable situation of those victims.

Why do you and other people in this thread fail to see the highly destructive element of this crime? The problem is not just the quality of the crime, where victims experience severe violations of their privacy, it's also the potential quantitity because this business model is only successfull if a lot of people participate.

<comment><USER8> Not them but...

> Why exactly are you terrified?

Because disproportionate punishment on one crime could result in disproportionate punishment on another. In particular with how the US has been fearmongering "cybercrime" recently, before we know it someone gets a 10+ year sentence for an SQL injection.

> That's more than murder gets in many countries.

>> Orange and Apples.

Indeed it is. So why is apples getting a similar punishment to orange? That's the problem, that they are orange and apples, but yet get punished the same. Where is the logic in that?

> Why do you and other people in this thread fail to see the highly > destructive element of this crime?

That's a strawman. Nobody is arguing that he shouldn't have been jailed, nobody. Therefore there is no way you can claim that people think what he did isn't "highly destructive." They just don't think it is on the same "level" as murder, multiple rapes, or beating two people to within an inch of their lives.

You know what else was highly destructive? Wallstreet fraud. How many people lost their jobs? Lost their homes? Literally committed suicide? And how many of them went to jail for a single year let alone eighteen? None.

The legal system is corrupt and inconsistent. That's a genuine problem and one people are right to complain about.

<comment><USER9> > one crime

Since there were thousands of separate victims, I think that thinking of it as _" one crime"_ doesn't really do it justice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ok, bad guy, but that sentence is insane. 18 years!?

<comment><USER11> I feel like some information is being left or.

What was the nature of the counts for identity fraud?

<comment><USER12> I think the extortion part is probably a bigger factor in sentencing than identity fraud.

Soliciting compromising photos, and then extorting people to have them removed. He effectively started a criminal organization. A stupid, poorly hidden white collar criminal enterprise, but one nonetheless. Not much different from sending muscle to collect protection money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 18 years! The guy surely deserves some correction but 18 years? That's more than most murderers get where I'm from.

<comment><USER14> Don't you think that murderers getting less than 18 years is the real problem?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I can kind of understand the extortion charges, but from what evidence did the charges of identity theft stem? Seems like an unusual charge unless he was involved in doing more than just hosting revenge porn.

<comment><USER16> Looking at older articles I find:

 _authorities say he ran afoul of state laws against identity theft, which prevent even simple personal information like names and addresses from being used "for any unlawful purpose, including with the intent to annoy or harass."_

Sounds like the legislature mixed in some privacy crimes and gave them a misleading name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> File this under "On personal level I like the outcome, but I am troubled enough by the way we got there and the wider implications". 18 years is just absurdly high.

</comment><comment><USER18> Shouldn't the people who _posted_ the photos be really paying the price? My guess is that the guy's lawyers might have invoked the strong defense that they were just the hosting company, they didn't created or owned the material and that they just wanted to allow their users to express with freedom. I guess the core mistake he made was not allowing "Flag this" button on his website because obviously he wanted to monetize this and that would have made his defense very weak because it simply means he was running a public exhortation service company.

When you do think about legally risky startup ideas, one way to figure out the "badness" is to use the old world analogy: Let's say you ran a company in 1960 that accepts nude photos of your ex by postal mail and makes call to your ex that if they don't pay $300 then the photos would be in newspaper. Would you be punished for running such company? Of course, you will. However 18 yrs is insane. Looking at his income of $30,000 looks like he probably managed to get money from 100 victims. Considering 1 week of pain to get it removed, this still would come out to ~2 years in prison. To compare, people doing Enron billion dollar frauds got less than that.

<comment><USER19> > Considering 1 week of pain to get it removed

I think you haven't really been following these cases. To his victims, it was far from "1 week of pain"... his actions cost people their jobs and damaged their relationships. 100 victims only counts the ones who paid, I suspect many wouldn't. You can argue that the posters should pay the price, and they should, but Bollaert is also culpable. Just like I would be culpable if I offered a "bank robbery getaway driver" service.

And let's be honest here, the masterminds behind Enron didn't get the punishment they were due. But they were rich and well-connected. Miscarriage of justice, sure, but a bad comparison.

It's 18 years because US prosecutors want to set an example for a new category of cases, and this guy is neither rich nor well-connected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wonder what sort of sentence he might have had if he'd plead guilty: [http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-revenge-porn- ver...](http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-revenge-porn- verdict-20150202-story.html)

</comment><comment><USER21> Does the U.S have victims of crime compensation now that there has been a conviction?

<comment><USER22> California has crime victim compensation, but only for certain violent crimes; neither extortion nor identity theft qualify. [http://vcgcb.ca.gov/victims/](http://vcgcb.ca.gov/victims/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wonder how much it was taken into account that a significant "part of the damange" was done by people posting the photos.

His platform was merely an enabler and the nude photos could have been also posted elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER24> The article did not show the defense argument.

</comment><comment><USER25> [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/03/kevin-bollaert- reve...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/03/kevin-bollaert-revenge-porn- sentenced_n_7002364.html)

 _Bollaert earned about $900 a month in website ad revenue and collected about $30,000 from victims._

Ha ha ha. Yelp and the Better Business Bureau laugh at him. This guy was an amateur in the extortion business, that's for sure. And he's paying for it with 18 years! Can you believe it? 18 years! He should have raped a nun while he was at it and got 19 years instead.</comment>


Show HN: Compile-time typechecked Akka actors - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/knutwalker/typed-actors <comment><USER2> Why would you name it this? A feature by this name already exists as part of akka. That's confusing and hard to find via google.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is rather cool and makes me want to look at Scala again if only for this. Is this what is known as a "killer feature"?

</comment><comment><USER4> This looks very cool. Does anybody have any experience using Typed Actors? Or with Akka Typed?</comment>


Writing Effective Welcome Emails - <AUTHOR> http://www.vinaysahni.com/11-tips-for-writing-effective-welcome-emails <comment><USER2> Every web site I sign up to these days, I'm 100% certain that from that point forward I will now be spammed by them on a regular basis. It's a simple fact of the modern web now and I despise it. But when those emails look like this one, I hate them even more. Why? Because a normal form spam mail is easy to recognize. I can hit the spam button in under a second. But when they use my first name, sound all happy and cheery, and talk like they're my best friend, I have to actually read the first sentence to see that it's spam. It not only takes me longer, but it makes them seem even worse. To me an email like that doesn't tell me they are more interested to 'engage', but instead that they want to trick people to read them. You know what I want? For them to never send me any email unless I specifically request it.

<comment><USER3> If you're using gmail or google apps just add a +words to your email and then you can set up easy filters and figure out if anyone is selling or renting your information.

e.g. email@example.com --> email@example.com

<comment><USER4> Here is the method that I use, which has been extremely effective for me.

This is a Gmail filter that will leave in your inbox ONLY emails that are from people you specify, AND emails that haven't already been labeled from some other filter rule:

      Matches: (label:inbox has:nouserlabels -from:(firstname.lastname@example.com OR firstname.lastname@example.com OR ... ))

      Do this: Skip Inbox, Apply label "_Non-VIP", Never mark it as important

Boom!

Now I never get emails to my inbox unless they are from my girlfriend, family members, friends, and other important people. This has the added benefit of also meaning that I never get email notifications on my phone unless they are from the important (and _REAL_ ) people I specified above. (And obviously I can add easily emails to the whitelist if necessary.)

The other benefit is that this WILL take into account any other filter rules you have in place. And also no need to worry about signing up for services with +emails.

Before you post that _zomg this would never work for me_ , please don't. This works extremely well for me and it might work well for someone else so I wanted to share. If you have a way to make it even better, I would love to hear it!

<comment><USER5> Out of curiosity, how do you handle whitelisted people changing their email address? My dad recently switched from Y!Mail to Gmail, for instance.

<comment><USER4> I simply change the filter.

The first time I see an email that gets filtered that I don't want filtered in the future, I simply add that email to the whitelist. It takes me 15 to 30 seconds, and now it is set forever.

A) Gmail filters aren't etched in stone. They are easy to edit. Much more so than Outlook anyway.

B) The impact of not seeing an email on my phone for an hour or two because I didn't get an Android email notification is near zero. The important people are already whitelisted, and for those emails that aren't, they're never 100% urgent and can wait an hour or two until I check my labels in one batch session.

This works extremely well for me but YMMV.

Does that answer your question?

I'll give you a +1 Upvote for apparently the only person who read my post haha, and that bit of insight into what might not be clear.

<comment><USER5> The problem is that the new email address would get filtered out of the inbox and I wouldn't see it, if I understood the filter correctly. My dad would have had to let me know through some means other than email.

<comment><USER4> Ah, I think there may be some confusion as to how Gmail works. The purpose of labels in Gmail is that you can click them and see all the emails with that particular label. This is analogous to a folder in Windows XP or Windows 7 with files in it.

You may be confusing "filtering" with "deleting", where this is definitely _NOT_ the case. The point of my above post is that inessential emails skip my inbox until I _CHOOSE_ to click the label (when I have time), and then I see the inessential emails all at once.

I do this several times per day, so there is no risk of "missing" an email. In the case of getting an email from your dad at a new address, I would click the label at lunch or whenever convenient, and boom, there it is.

Just because an email is not in your "Inbox" doesn't mean it is gone forever.

Does that make sense?

\-----

I did a bit of research and below I inserted some snippets from the official Gmail Help pages that would be good to read over to understand more about what I am getting at:

\-----

<https://support.google.com/mail/answer/32608>

      Deleting unimportant mail is a great way to free up some of your storage,
      but with Gmail's free storage, you can probably keep those messages,
      too! If it's possible that you'll need a message or conversation in the
      future, we recommend archiving.

      Archiving mail moves messages out of your inbox and into your "All Mail"
      label for safekeeping-- you won't be bothered with extra messages
      cluttering your inbox, but you'll still be able to find a message if you need
      it six years from now!

\-----

<https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6576>

      Archiving lets you tidy up your inbox by moving messages from your inbox
      into your All Mail label, so you don't have to delete anything. It's like
      moving something into a filing cabinet for safekeeping, rather than
      putting it in the trash can.

      Any message you've archived can be found by clicking the "All Mail" label
      on the left side of your Gmail page. You can also find a message you've
      archived by clicking on any other labels you've applied to it, or by
      searching for it.

      When someone responds to a message you've archived, the conversation
      containing that message will reappear in your inbox.

\----

<https://support.google.com/mail/answer/118708>

      Labels help you organize your messages into categories -- work, family,
      to do, read later, jokes, recipes, any category you want. Labels do all
      the work that folders do, but with an added bonus: you can add more
      than one to a message.

      Only you can see your labels, so whether you mark a message with "Best
      friend" or "Read later," the sender will never know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great post. I recently rewrote Planscope's welcome email (original here: [http://copy-cat.co/blog/a-followup-email-that-actually-works...](http://copy- cat.co/blog/a-followup-email-that-actually-works/)), and this time around really emphasized point #9 of yours: providing onboarding tips.

If you don't have a big, fat textarea on your cancellation page that asks people why they're canceling, stop whatever you're doing and spend 30 minutes adding it.

Once you have enough cancellation data, you should know why a lot of people who sign up for a trial cancel within the first few days. Recycle that feedback directly into your welcome email (and in-app onboarding), and aim to eliminate as many confusion points as possible while continuing to reinforce your product benefits.

For the curious, here's the new email template I'm using: [http://glui.me/?i=h5f7alhn92c131t/2013-05-07_at_9.52.24_AM.p...](http://glui.me/?i=h5f7alhn92c131t/2013-05-07_at_9.52.24_AM.png/)

<comment><USER7> You have an infestation of apostrophes in some of your plurals! I wouldn't want someone to stop taking you seriously because of a few typos (you have "Monday's" and "customer's" instead of "Mondays" and "customers").

<comment><USER6> Good point! Thanks. Serves me right for writing them in a bar in the center of a Vegas casino :-)

<comment><USER8> I can't find the article now, but I'm positive I have seen cases of higher open/click rates in emails with grammatical errors as it seems more "human" and less a template.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Studies have shown that people love to hear their name.

That's not, it seems at the moment, what that study said. It seems to say that areas of the brain responsible for self-representation seem to activate when people hear their own names:

 _> 3.4. Conclusions

> The findings of this simple paradigm are consistent with the findings in the > literature. There is unique brain activation specific to one's own name in > relation to the names of others. In addition, the patterns of activation > when hearing one's own name relative to hearing the names of others are > similar to the patterns reported when individuals make judgments about > themselves and their personal qualities, and include the regions of the > medial frontal cortex and superior temporal cortex near the temporo-parietal > junction. These results will enable us to study young children and even > infants' responses to their own names in order to see when self > representation first occurs.

<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1647299/> _

It may, of course, be true that people like to hear their own names. It seems rare for someone to go bankrupt gambling on how interested in themselves people can be. But just the same...

<comment><USER10> Personally I hate it when my name's overused; it makes me feel as if I'm talking to a pushy sales guy / the person using it gets a high score on either the "creepy" or "slimey" meter.

"John, I'm so glad you downloaded a copy of MegaThingyFoo. I know that you, John, like myself must have to struggle with generic problem which MegaThingyFoo is supposed to resolve. John; if you could provide me with some feedback on this product I'd be eternally grateful." Eugh!

I have a feeling that as soon as these studies are made public they begin to effect their own findings - i.e. those who can take advantage of the findings do and for a while this works. However as this becomes standard people build up a social immunity to these tricks (either through familiarity with the texts (social vaccination) or through exposure to the users of such techniques (previous infection).

I'd be interested to see a fake study published which claimed something like "People who wear yellow ties generally make 1% more sales", when in fact genuine studies show that tie colour has no effect. 5-10 years later repeat the genuine study and (assuming this fake knowledge went viral) I suspect you'd find people who wore yellow ties would fall behind other tie colours on sales.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I appreciate the body text of his e-mail, it does feel personal and engaging. However, I wonder if I would have gotten as far as reading the body of an e-mail had it come with the subject line "SupportFu is going to change your life - let me show you how." The subject just reeks of spam.

A better way of structuring the subject line to get my attention would be something a bit less "Enlarge your penis - let me show you how"-ish and a bit more along the lines of "On using our tool" or "SupportFu introduction." They might not be as striking as far as subjects go, but I would not be as quick to dismiss them as spam.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is good advice. We've been sending emails like this for a long time. The method is fairly low tech. Pull list of new customers > file.txt and then newcustomer.sh < file.txt

Most importantly though a few points. Even if you aren't doing a personal email (because it might not scale), even if it's not suppose to be personal make sure to have it come from a real person where if someone has an issue they feel that if they write back a real person will read _what they say_. Of course if you have 29 million customers this might not apply (say free product) but then again you probably won't be reading HN right now anyway.

Separately, nothing is a bigger turn off (to me) that getting a letter from a company appearing to care but not being signed by anyone other than "support team" or being signed by a person who has a non person sounding email address.

</comment><comment> deepak-kumar Being a business development guy I have seen a pattern that personally written email will get you a positive response rather than a formal HTML template email which people tend to ignore without even reading it. Very well summarized article. Thanks for the share.

<comment><AUTHOR> I find that I barely skim heavy branded emails thinking it's just marketing stuff. Plain email always gets more interest from me.

On that note, this is something I also considered heavily when building Supportfu - all outbound replies mimic a traditional modern email client, graphical branding isn't even an option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have never answered this type of email. Why? Because at this stage, I don't know your product, and I don't want you to annoy me (you may not think it's annoying, but really, it is).

That being said, I sent spontaneous feedback emails exactly twice:

\- The first was to the guy who wrote the 'learn you a Haskell for great good' free online tutorial (now book, website is still free). I just wrote to let him know that his tutorial was awesome and that it was the only tutorial I'd read that made sense of monads.

\- The second was to Hipmunk. Again, after using Hipmunk for the third time or so, and having such a great and painless experience, I sent an email saying how much I appreciate the service, and thanking them for keeping it free (although I'd gladly pay for it).

I guess you could say that neither my emails contained feedback. In both cases, I felt that it would be a shame if these people stopped doing what they're doing, thinking that nobody cares (I know, Hipmunk is not gonna go away, but well, I guess was just not rational)so I just wanted to let them know that I found there work remarkable.

What I'm trying to say is that the best way to get feedback from users without pissing them off is simply to do something that they really really like, and that they want to you to keep improving.

<comment><USER14> "What I'm trying to say is that the best way to get feedback from users without pissing them off is simply to do something that they really really like, and that they want to you to keep improving."

To me, the type of email you sent is the most useless email I could receive. It contains: nothing I can help you with; nothing I can improve; nothing that you had a problem with... it's empty kudos.

Secondly, it's very difficult to create something people "really really like" without asking them why they don't like what you are currently providing. And since people don't care about products they don't like, they will rarely tell you what's wrong if you don't ask... they'll just leave, and you'll never know why.

To improve your email, instead of simply telling them that their service was great.. tell them what your favorite feature was or what was the most helpful about their service. At least that will give them some idea of why you liked it, and it might give them some idea how they can improve other parts of their service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> My one comment would be, I wonder how the customer feels receiving a message from the Founder of the company. One of two possible reactions:

1) Wow I'm really special to receive personal attention from the founder.

2) This company must be small potatoes if the founder has time to be writing emails.

I wonder if you could follow up with an A/B test, same exact message from you and from a "Community Manager"

</comment><comment><USER16> I agree that where possible one should be as personal as possible in email correspondence, but this does not scale well. If you start getting 15 (that's fifteen, not fifteen thousand)or more signups per day, being personal approaches a full time job.

I suppose the crux of the matter is honesty. If you try to automate individualised emails, that comes off as a bit sleazy and 'markety'. In this case I think it would be of net benefit to make an auto response email read like an auto response email, in the same spirit as you do with the personal hand written versions.

<comment><AUTHOR> The only part that isn't automatable (and therefore scalable) is adding something unique in the email. Skip that part and it scales fine.

One approach I've been thinking of is to have the system automatically send the email but have a mechanism in place to selectively disable for single email. This would allow me to be more personal where desired but still have a decent default being sent out in within the ideal window.

<comment><USER17> Exactly. We do this with matchist (<http://matchist.com/talent>). We're not trying to be sleazy, as the GP suggests. Instead, we're trying to be as personable as possible while at the same time, growing the business in a healthy way and providing more value for all our customers.

<comment><USER16> Hi there [enter your mark's name here] old friend...is what I refer to as 'sleazy'. A strong term I admit, but if you are going to send me an auto response, don't pretend like we're close buddies.

I would respect more something like 'You are the 159th signup we had today, send an email to [a real person] to request support.'

Perhaps I am just an outlier.

<comment><USER18> You are an extreme outlier and nobody looking to drive user engagement would ever write that email. But, then, nobody would use "old friend" in a welcome email and nobody reputable considers them "marks" so I am curious where to procure one of these windmills at which you are tilting.

These emails are targeted toward normal people, not social-discomfort- masquerading-as-efficiency people (because there are still a lot more of the former among developers than the latter) and normal people respond favorably to the appearance (which becomes the reality) of being valued and appreciated by people who they are looking to do business with.

That's why they work: because they connect at a real level. And it's not "manipulation" or any other carefully chosen fear-word any more than any other communication method is; it's simply--literally simply--how people are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> OP here. I try to establish "first contact" as soon as possible as it helps identify gaps in the product & helps answer the question "What should I work on today?" ..

What else works well for increasing early feedback?

<comment><USER19> I find this generally helpful and I like the attitude of these emails, but you are making a massive mistake that every single one of those websites which do the same thing make as well - you don't provide a clear and quick way to be removed from your mailing list.

This should be in every email, a simple link or even asking to reply with the word "unsubscribe" in the subject.

If you don't do this a lot of people are going to think you're spamming them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Not a bad start, but it could still use some work. When people sign up for something, they still have a lot of questions. Address those by including links to FAQs or sending them an users manual. That will increase your numbers by a good amount. Plus, you can upsell without much problem.

An email subject that tends to work well with this approach:

"Here are some helpful links to get you started with $name."

<comment><AUTHOR> This is the next step for me - providing additional onboarding tips. The questions I get in response to the current email identify gaps in documentation and clarity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> These emails work staggeringly well.

Most responses are "I'm OK thanks", but people think they're genuine enough to respond to.

Even when automated, I've still seen many tech founders, nevermind lay users, responding to these as if they've been personally touched.

<comment><USER22> The 'tech founders' are likely to be responding to see what happens next, because their intrigued by the idea - not because 'they've been personally touched'.

Source: I reply to all of these for exactly that reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Thanks for the post. They are simple but extremely helpful and not always apparent tips. Courtesy and personal conversation gets you a long way.

</comment><comment><USER24> There is good advice there for many other applications, like writing to a bank or public official.

</comment><comment><USER25> #5 "Echo their name back at them"

That is literally a specific advice to write low-quality "porn" content that stimulates superficially and then trigger an anger/betrayal reaction.

These "tricks" are copied straight from a used car sales lot, and we hated them there too.</comment>


Apple's manufactured scarcity, free publicity, playing for the analysts - <AUTHOR> http://armdevices.net/2011/03/12/apples-manufactured-scarcity-free-publicity-playing-for-the-analysts/

<comment><USER2> Even Gruber, who previously dismissed every Android phone with line based logic:

 _"There will never be an Android phone that people line up for like they did for Windows 95 — or like they do today, once or twice a year, for major new products from Apple."_ [1]

and hyped the Verizon iPhone, not on sales, but on its ability to generate lines:

 _"Is it going to be a lines-around-the-block situation, like the last four summer iPhone debuts on AT &T? Or is it going to be un-sensational — on the grounds that the sort of people who'd wait for hours in line to get an iPhone as soon as possible already have one on AT&T?

I'm going to say it'd be an event. I don't think the lines would be as long as they were this summer for the iPhone 4 on AT&T, but I think there are going to be lines — especially in places where AT&T service is poor, like New York and San Francisco."_ [2]

seems to have twigged that Apple manufactures these as part of its symbiotic relationship with the media:

 _"Can't help but think that pre-orders (such that they'd arrive in customers' hands tomorrow) weren't available because Apple wants to see lines outside Apple Stores around the country."_ [3]

[1] <http://daringfireball.net/2010/12/emotional_rescue>

[2] <http://daringfireball.net/2010/08/n92>

[3] <http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/03/10/ipad-2></comment>


Ask HN: Contract for freelance work - plate-it

When you guys do freelance programming do you have a contract that you send to your client?  Should I consult a lawyer or is there a more canned contract I can use?  I just want to be protected on things like delivery date, price, etc.  Any thoughts. <comment><AUTHOR> There are a couple of good templates you can use over on Agree2:

<https://agree2.com/masters/public>

One of them is described in detail here:

[http://blog.extraeagle.com/2009/03/11/refactoring-the- consul...](http://blog.extraeagle.com/2009/03/11/refactoring-the-consulting- agreement/)

Full disclosure, I am one of the cofounders of Agree2.

</comment><comment><USER2> Yes, I use a contract. Depending on the work, yes, I will consult a lawyer. I had a client that, for $1000 advice-based contract, had a never-ending clause that said something to the effect of, "You are liable for all of our attorney costs and damages in the event something goes wrong." You need to watch out for stuff like that and that's often where the attorneys come in handy.</comment>


Lawsuit: Waze owes 'open-source' programmers $150 million - <AUTHOR> http://www.haaretz.com/business/.premium-1.582575

<comment><USER2> Maybe more background to add to the story:

Originally, the source code of Waze clients was released under GPL, which AFAIR it was as branded as a part of the _community-based_ map app.

But the company chose to _not_ release the source code after v3.0. This is quoted from one of my emails.

        In reply to your inquiry "Hi, where can we get the latest waze code?":

        Thank you for your feedback.

        You can find source code for the old versions (up to 2.4) on our wiki - waze.com/wiki

        Version 3.0 and higher are no longer under GPL, and at the moment we are still considering if and how we will share the code for these versions.

        Best regards,

I guess Waze either 1) has obtained the agreements of all open-source contributors, or 2) has completely rewritten all related source code.

<comment><USER3> They're apparently being sued over the crowdsourced map content, not the code. The article says:

 _" The claimant in the lawsuit is Roy Gorodish, an Israeli accountant who participated in Freemap Israel, an 'open-source' project to map the country using free software called Roadmap 1. Gorodish, represented by attorney Yitzhak Aviram, says in the lawsuit that Waze's maps were built by daily updates by the community, not solely by Waze programmers. ...

Gorodish says that when Freemap started, Shabtai, Shinar and Levine gave community members a document saying that the project was owned by the community. Later, when Waze was founded, the three men unilaterally changed the terms of the agreement in what amounts to intellectual property theft and copyright infringement, he says."_

If they violated the GPL on the code, they could face a separate lawsuit from the code's developers.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> [Mirror of the paywalled version: [http://pastebin.com/LL8d5u1L](http://pastebin.com/LL8d5u1L)]

<comment><USER4> Flagged. Pirating content from behind a pay-wall isn't ok. If you don't want to pay for the content then don't read/upvote it.

(You can of-course write up your own article based upon what you learnt from the underlying article)

<comment><USER5> Totally agree on the content stealing, but the fact that an article most people can't read got so far up the front page is also worrying.

<comment><USER6> Shouldnt the conclusion then be that apparently enough people can read it to make it worth a HN frontpage listing?

<comment><USER5> It looks like you got downvoted a bit for saying this, sorry. You're totally right. If enough people /can/ see it that it can get to the front page then fair enough. I was feeling a little more cynical earlier, assuming that the voters hadn't read it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lionel Messi completely deserved to win the Golden Ball - <AUTHOR> http://babb.telegraph.co.uk/2014/07/lionel-messi-completely-deserved-to-win-the-golden-ball-because-he-was-brilliant-at-the-world-cup/

<comment><USER2> Too bad it wasn't a team full of Messi's.</comment>


Show HN: Find names that sound like other names - <AUTHOR> http://namesthatsoundlike.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Built this tool after my wife and I found ourselves wishing for something like it while pregnant with our first baby. Type in a name, and you'll find others that sound similar.

Really interested in hearing thoughts/feedback from the community... Also interested in how the site holds up under load.

Thanks!

<comment><USER2> nice tool, bookmarked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice! What's the thought process behind the recommendation? Are you using spelling similarities, or something like that?

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually used a tool from CMU (link below) to convert the names to their pronunciations, represented as a series of phonemes or sounds. I then simply compare the similarities in the sound representation of the different names. It's an extremely simple algorithm, but it works pretty well.

[http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/tools/lextool.html](http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/tools/lextool.html)</comment></comment>


Atom 1.2 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.atom.io/2015/11/12/atom-1-2.html <comment><USER2> I'm pretty impressed how fast Atom has evolved in every way, be it performance or plugin system (I was skeptical last year). Its pretty powerful no doubt, but what's really cool about Atom is how quickly you can get started with it. I recently started learning Haskell. Typically I live in Vim, but I was feeling lazy to set up all goodness, so I just randomly started Atom and installed Haskell plugin. And it was so quick and so nice! Auto-completion, linter, type hints all working out of the box. And if you don't like something, like in my case start auto-complete as soon as I type, you could simply disable it from settings.

I don't know if I will leave Vim for Atom, but its certainly a great tool. If some newbie asks my opinion on what editor/ide to use, I will be inclined to say Atom as its so easy to get started with.

PS> And seems like they finally fixed the hidpi issues with this release!

<comment><USER3> You could probably use vim inside atom through neovim and this project: [https://github.com/carlosdcastillo/vim- mode](https://github.com/carlosdcastillo/vim-mode)

I haven't personally tried it yet, but something like this will certainly be a good option in the future.

<comment><USER4> Doesn't give you the whole suite of vim keys but for average vim users this should be okay. Saying this from experience.

<comment><USER3> It does give you all the suite of vim keys (or it should). It uses neovim's API to connect to neovim. You can even use (neo)vim's plugins because the commands are processed by neovim, not by Atom. In other words, the plugin acts as an interface between neovim and Atom; thus, everything you have in neovim you have it in Atom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I dream of the day someone shows me a text editor I can be more efficient in than Vim. With a ~30 line .vimrc I can work on the vast majority of the machines on this planet without any trouble; the appeal of editors like Sublime and Atom simply baffle me.

For context, I was a sublime user until about 2 years ago, and prior to that I worked in Notepad++.

However, I rarely work outside of a terminal. So this definitely guarantees a clear bias.

<comment><USER6> Have you tried doing iOS development? That would suck without XCode (even though XCode itself sucks)

<comment><USER7> Why doesn't anyone create a viable, open source XCode alternative? Are all the libraries proprietary?

<comment><USER8> JetBrains has an IDE called AppCode, an alternative to Xcode (not open source). But it still relies on Xcode for distribution and the UI designer, and it lags far behind the update cycle of Xcode. And that is a commercial company with steady revenue dedicated to making IDE. Imagine the difficulty of an open source alternative.

<comment><USER9> Honestly, if you were willing to rely on the undocumented SourceKit API then you wouldn't have nearly this many problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Another POV here, I moved from Visual Studio after using it for over 15 years. For me, Atom is fucking fast. Lack of UML diagramming, database designer and TFS integration is a blessing in disguise.

<comment><USER11> I love Atom. I've been using it since the day it was announced. But I don't use it for the speed. It still chokes on huge files. When I need to open something big, I reach for Sublime, and it handles it with ease.

<comment><USER12> Why do you prefer Atom over Sublime Text (except when you need to open a big file)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've been meaning to give atom a months worth of working with but am not sure if it's worth moving over to from emacs. I do like how simple its packaging system is. Any major complaints from users?

<comment><USER14> It's still unbelievably slow. That's why I still use Emacs and occasionally Sublime Text for things like HTML.

<comment><USER15> That's odd. I am replying here, although there are a number of atom-is-slow comments throughout the thread. I don't find it to be slow with normal-sized sourcefiles. By "normal", I mean less than, say 5kb of text per file. Big files I do avoid in atom, but they tend to be rare in my codebases.

I don't use a ton of plugins, just tag matchers, minimal, and linters. I do all my build tooling (gulp for js/web dev, mavensmate for salesforce, etc) outside of atom, so maybe that helps.

Of course, the only real benefit I feel over sublimetext is in plugins. Linter support in atom is (IMO) better than ST. For actual code editing, they're all similar enough once you learn key bindings and whatnot.

I will say: being proficient in vi means I can work on ARM devices (Chromebooks with crouton), because neither ST nor atom work on arm. Yet, from the atom perspective, or ever from the ST one, which is the other reason I like the atom project. Loftier, FOSS goals.

<comment><USER16> >I don't find it to be slow with normal-sized sourcefiles. By "normal", I mean less than, say 5kb of text per file.

5 thousand bytes is pretty small. It is 122 _lines_ of text if we use the average bytes per line of some code I have lying around (Emacs Lisp, exactly one byte per character, lines limited to 80 characters). For comparison, the average lines per file in the code I have lying around is 233.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Atom 1.2 is just two weeks from 1.1 (released on October 29). That was fast :)

</comment><comment><USER18> Hold on, let me just update my GPU driver so I can run my text editor</comment>


Sailfish opens its HW adaptation code for Sony Xperia - <AUTHOR> https://blog.jolla.com/xperiax-open-source-hw-adaptation/ <comment><USER2> This brings up one of the more frustrating things manufacturers do, what exactly is a Sony Experia X? The website for my region ([https://www.sonymobile.com/au/products/phones/?cpint=mn_sony...](https://www.sonymobile.com/au/products/phones/?cpint=mn_sonymobile_smartphones)) lists:

* Xperia X

* Xperia XA

* Xperia X Performance

* Xperia XZ

* Xperia XA1 Ultra

* Xperia XA1

* Xperia XZ Premium

I have no idea what the compatibility is like between these phones. Are they all variation on a base phone or radically different? Is the X the latest or is the Z? Are we going backwards through the alphabet? There's a lot I dislike about apple, but the one thing they get right is limiting their SKU's.

<comment><AUTHOR> AFAIK only model F5121 is officially supported. There has been speculation, which other models should be close enough, but I'm not aware of any confirmed information. [https://together.jolla.com/question/164016/sony-xperia- x-f5](https://together.jolla.com/question/164016/sony-xperia-x-f5)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wow, this is great news. I'd pretty much given up on sailfish ever being meaningfully open - let's hope it's not too little, too late!

</comment><comment><USER4> Forgive the Android newbie comment.

I'm interested in installing a custom rom on a Moto G5. I've heard that Lineage is my only option, but also heard that they don't have a great history of security updates.

Are there any other options out there?

</comment><comment><USER5> Thank you!</comment>


End-to-end Internet of Things cloud platform - <AUTHOR> http://litmusautomation.com

<comment><USER2> Like MAAS from Ubuntu? But Closed Source and with vendor lock in?</comment>


Has online piracy reached a tipping point?  - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10222810-93.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20 <comment><USER2> They really don't get it, do they:

 _I'm not fussed about whether it's free or not, it's convenience that matters._

When my girlfriend and I would like to watch a movie that's no longer in cinemas, I don't care if it'll cost me a couple of euros if it only takes a few clicks to start the download, and the connection is good enough that we can watch it a few hours later. Just the fact that I don't have to look at porn ads on some torrent site ghetto would be worth money to me.

Right now, it depends on what country I happen to be in whether I can download a movie from, say, iTunes, at all. (I can't at home, certainly) But wait, I don't even want to "buy" a movie off iTunes, as that would force me to watch it within 24 hours. _If I wanted to have my life scheduled by the entertainment industry, I'd watch TV._

We're finally at a point where I can buy non-DRM _music_ if I jump through a few hoops and lie about where I live. Except of course it's easier and _inexplicably costs almost the same amount of money_ to just order the CD from amazon. Okay, it takes 2 days to arrive, but music usually isn't as spur-of- the-moment as "let's watch a movie!" Plus, I get a nice booklet (if the artist cares enough to persuade the label to spend a few cents on presentation) and I don't have to worry about backups once the CD has fulfilled its original purpose of facilitating a rip to FLAC and moves into the CD rack, rarely to be touched again.

I don't see how they _wouldn't_ make a killing if they sold downloadable, DRM- free movies for about €3-4, albums for, say, €4, and TV series episodes for 50 cents to 1 euro. Sure, it would destroy the industry of shops that sell DVDs, but amazon and play.com are doing that already.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, paying online is also quite an inconvenience if you live in an area where credit cards are an exception, not the norm.

The Dutch banking sector solved it quite nicely by creating an online payment system (supported by almost all banks) that's well integrated into their online banking systems[1]. It works for the national market, but when your browsing crosses the border, you're back into the territory of the infernal credit card.

In this country, the credit card is often seen as a road to debt and as insecure. The banks' system is seen as much more trustworthy. Even if it doesn't support chargebacks, where the CC does...

I suppose that moving from no-risk piracy to risky paying is a hurdle in and of itself, even if the risk is just perceived.

[1] It's called iDEAL. It even has a Wikipedia page in English: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEAL> It never ceases to amaze me how often my countrymen translate their national quirks into English...

<comment><USER2> Credit cards are pretty rare in Austria, too. (I blame the banks in part; getting a CC here has been a nightmare for me and has taken over half a year!) Amazon seems to do fine regardless, as they've just adapted to the local idiosyncracies. iTunes seems to solve it with gift vouchers. (the latter presumably being especially useful for kids)

Come to think of it, there must be a substantial market for painless pan- European payment processing. Hmm! Or has this been tried and failed many times before?

In any case, to address the micropayment angle, you could optionally pre- charge your account with a certain amount of credit and slowly use that up. I'm sure this sort of thing could be solved, given enough demand. The problem seem to be the copyright holders, though, so I have little hope.

<comment><USER3> _> Credit cards are pretty rare in Austria, too. (I blame the banks in part; getting a CC here has been a nightmare for me and has taken over half a year!)_

There's also a fee associated with having a credit card here, so unless you use it a lot, it's generally hardly worth your while.

Amazon either completely ignores the Dutch market or it doesn't get a foot in the door. amazon.nl redirects to amazon.co.uk. There is a Dutch competitor[1] that's pretty big here. Before iDEAL they just worked around the whole credit card mess by sending bills[2].

 _> Come to think of it, there must be a substantial market for painless pan- European payment processing. Hmm! Or has this been tried and failed many times before?_

There has been a very small scare here that a system like that (in the context of the Single Euro Payments Area[3]) might supersede the local iDEAL system by an inferior system. I'm not aware of any previous attempts on pan-European payment systems. There have been some attempts on the Dutch national market before iDEAL, but most of them failed (presumably because if it doesn't have the support of all major banks, the market will end up fragmented).

[1] Bol.com

[2] The Dutch "acceptgiro", you just fill in your account number (if that hasn't been done already), sign it and send it to your bank. Surprisingly, there isn't an English Wikipedia page for it :-)

[3] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Tipping point my ass.

Saying something in the newspapers doesn't make it true. Those industries are going the way of the dodo, whether they want to or not.

</comment><comment><USER5> Huh, from the title I expected an article about tipping the other way.

The general population is learning how broad, expansive, and one-sided copyright law has become. Learning the extent that governments are on the payroll of big media corporations and how the laws, treaties, and enforcement are largely to protect thier bottom line.

People think it's absurd to be sued for signing happy birthday or reading a book outloud to their child.

<comment><USER3> _> People think it's absurd to be sued for signing happy birthday or reading a book outloud to their child._

When did _that_ happen?

<comment><USER5> <http://www.snopes.com/music/songs/birthday.asp>

<http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090210/1014293724.shtml>

Either are actually crimes, punishable with 5years and/or $250,000 per incident. Since copyright violations are one of the few civil matters that the government has been conned into making illegal. But you are extremely unlikely to be prosecuted. Unlike restaurants (bday) and Amazon ("performing" a book).

<comment><USER3> From that Snopes link:

 _> Does this mean that everyone who warbles "Happy Birthday to You" to family members at birthday parties is engaging in copyright infringement if they fail to obtain permission from or pay royalties to the song's publisher? No. Royalties are due, of course, for commercial uses of the song, such as playing or singing it for profit, using it in movies, television programs, and stage shows, or incorporating it into musical products such as watches and greeting cards; as well, royalties are due for public performance, defined by copyright law as performances which occur "at a place open to the public, or at any place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances is gathered." So, crooning "Happy Birthday to You" to family members and friends at home is fine, but performing a copyrighted work in a public setting such as a restaurant or a sports arena technically requires a license from ASCAP or the Harry Fox Agency (although such infringements are rarely prosecuted)._

That's what I wanted to know. Actually, I wanted to know about people being sued over singing "Happy Birthday to You" to their child, but I suppose the answer is more or less given in the fragment I just cited.

Your other link is about the Amazon Kindle. Hardly a parent reading a book out loud to their child. It's followed by some highly opined speculation that you can't read a book to your child, but that's not a source of somebody being sued for reading a book to their child.

I suppose that also didn't happen, since it would be more or less the same as singing "Happy Birthday to You" to your child, which your source Snopes already said was okay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I fully expected this to be an article about piracy going the other direction.

<comment><USER7> well, it is. they just try (and fail) to make it appear otherwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "There might be just a point here where the culture is changing on what's legitimate behavior online," said Mike McCurry, the former White House press secretary under President Bill Clinton and co-chairman of Arts+Labs, a collaborative group of technology and media companies. "I think perhaps something of a tipping point has been reached where people are finally saying that activity we thought was just okay or skirting around the edge has tipped over into something both dangerous, criminal, and unfair."

</comment><comment><USER9> Duplicate of

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=569398></comment>


On shortened field names in MongoDB - <AUTHOR> http://blog.boxedice.com/2010/10/23/on-shortened-field-names-in-mongodb/

<comment><USER2> I'll further focus on one point in the post: The author took it as a given that the code with short column names was "less readable". Why? Surely he wasn't repeating the literal field names again and again in the code?

In the last DB-intensive project I worked on, we used constants in the code that had to deal with column names. This was extremely useful when changing our database schema -- no names to hunt down and change, just change the name in the _one_ place it was used in the code.

In this case, this method gives you both a readable name in your code and a short name to repeat in the DB.

Just a thought.

<comment><USER3> This Mongo console is pretty useful for poking around in your data during development. Usable field names help there.</comment></comment>


One-hour Project: really fast timer - <AUTHOR>

It's taken me all four years of college to realize that my productivity and interest usually tail off after about an hour of distraction-free work. Lacking time to do a weekend project, I threw something together in under an hour.<p>Your turn to make something marginally useful in http://quicktick.me/1h<p>(Also: http://quicktick.me/3h1m4s, http://quicktick.me/5:14, http://quicktick.me/111:22:33, count up by not specifying a duration.) <comment><USER2> Seems a lot like <http://steep.it/300> which I really like. So not to say the idea isn't good but has been done :) They are also the makers of <http://e.ggtimer.com/> which uses the same "engine".

<comment><AUTHOR> Hadn't seen that. Doesn't show up when searching for "timer" or "countdown". If I'd seen these, probably wouldn't have wasted an hour.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I do prefer your title time implementation over steep.it or e.ggtimer.com ebcause I can actually see the time remaining even with the ususal (10+) amount of tabs open. Cool project for an hour, really could use the audio alarm though as already mentioned.

</comment><comment><USER4> Two more marginally useful things. 1. not seeing seconds skip - there seems to be a bug. 2. Some sort of audio alarm. If I'm using a timer, I am not looking at it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't bother to test in anything besides Chrome on Mac. I was going to put in an audio alarm, but then I'd have to put in a button to disable audio, then I'd have to make it look pretty, and find a good alarm sound.

That feature is on my todo list, as well as email notification, persistent countdowns (you go to /23h and it'll redirect you to a permalink for that timer), email/SMS notification. Next time I have an hour to dedicate to this, I'll them done.

I always have a browser open, so being able to see the countdown status in the titlebar was sufficient for my needs. If I really wanted something to alert me, I'd use my phone in case I step away from my computer.

EDIT: Yeah, looks like Firefox performs awfully with this.

EDIT2: seems to be fixed on FF now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> simple fun idea

</comment><comment><USER6> fun idea :)</comment>


Oklo (YC S14), maker of 'micro' nuclear reactor, aims to prove doubters wrong - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/california-developer-of-micro-nuclear-reactor-aims-to-prove-environmentalist-doubters-wrong <comment><USER2> The whole article reads like the punchline for another joke involving Admiral Rickover's famous letter. (We had a thread on this same topic, involving a company mentioned in this article, not three months ago, and a thread on Admiral Rickover's letter two weeks before that!)

"An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap (4) It is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very flexible in purpose ('omnibus reactor'). (7) Very little development is required. It will use mostly off-the-shelf components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now."

Link to the other thread here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22851622](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22851622)

Link to the recent HN discussion of said letter by Admiral Rickover here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22715730](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22715730)

<comment><USER3> Rickover joke was pointed at the competition that could take away resources from him to do R&D for his nuclear submarines.

In this context, Oklo uses private funds. Simple, small, cheap, light, quick to build, flexible, little development are all irrelevant. Safety is the only relevant thing as far as the NRC approval is concerned.

If it turns out NRC deems this reactor safe, and Oklo manages to work out the economics so they make a profit, Rickover for once will not have the last lough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wish them luck, and hope they come up with a stellar energy source. However, I'm not optimistic, and I think most pursuit of nuclear is stubbornness to finally prove the misinformed yokels wrong.

The 80% renewables feasibility study will quickly be out of date, and we will get to 90% or 95% with pure renewables and short term storage. That's because we haven't even really considered much demand side management, and most of the studies vastly underestimate the pace of price decline. And when we have a grid powered by 70%-95% renewables we will find an energy market with a ton of electricity that's getting curtailed--ie energy that is essentially free.

IMHO more promising climate bets would likely be: 1) low capital cost hydrogen production that is cost effective when used highly intermittently, 2) atmospheric carbon capture and conversion to carbon chains for synthetic fuels. The second route is already being pursued by some startups, and they think that they will be able to match the current cost of gasoline with gasoline made from atmospheric CO2 and solar power within 5-10 years.

Atmospheric carbon capture is going to be necessary in a few decades, so we need to start developing the tech now and make it as cheap as possible.

If nuclear could be no mode than 2x the cost of solar, I think there may be some use cases for it, but I don't think there will be much of an economic case for it. If we could site it right next to residential or offices, we could perhaps use the waste heat for space heating, but I can't see that being popular.

</comment><comment><USER5> > He said he thinks that nuclear power will be necessary in any zero-emissions > scenario.

The question in mind is whether there is product-market fit for a small/reliable nuclear reactor that competes directly with mature diesel generators. It sounds like interesting technology; I hope they succeed.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> 2016 Interview: [https://blog.ycombinator.com/jacob-dewitte-oklo- interview/](https://blog.ycombinator.com/jacob-dewitte-oklo-interview/)

</comment><comment><USER6> You know what would be cool? Aircraft super-carrier sized aircaft that uses battery power for takeoff/landing and a few of these reactors for nuclear powered propulsion. Ideallt takeoff/landing from coastal areas away from populated areas but even in case if failure, using multiple small reactors could mean less fallout.

Imagine mach-6+ flights carrying 20K passengers at a time going NYC --> South Asia within an hour or two. Entire town populations commuting to a diffefent continent every day!

<comment><USER7> What could possibly go wrong?

But I am forced to admit that airborne aircraft carriers like in Sky Captain would be very cool. (I guess some people like to call those "helicarriers", but I can't get past the busted etymology.)

<comment><USER6> I mean the risks are obvious, what I meant was small reactors,reactor operated only over low population are at 70k feet and short flight time could maybe reduce the risk enough to make it a practical idea? Instead of thousands of intercontinental flights, small number of arterial flights like this and fast/electric ground transport could help carbon emissions greatly.

<comment><USER8> My general impression of the original nuclear powered aircraft project in the US is that it wasn't necessarily infeasible to make a flying reactor, but shielding for anyone on board would be too heavy, and ultimately there was no real mission that required it so it was cancelled.

<comment><USER7> If you suspend the reactor from a cable 1000 feet below the aircraft, it doesn't need shielding. That might be more practical for an aircraft above Venus. It could keep the air in a balloon warm.

A helicopter or balloon with an unshielded nuke reactor hanging below it, that never needs to land, seems pretty cool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Oklo" is a cute name, but I don't like that it pollutes search terms for [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo) in Gabon, where evidence for a natural nuclear reactor was found.

<comment><USER10> I wish people were more creative with naming things. The other day I searched the letter S and the first thing that came up was some Swedish singer. Or at least have search engines understand guillemets.

<comment><USER11> At least for Google, putting in "X" (with the quotes) used to mean: Search for things containing exactly X. This was one of the best ways to search for technical information (for example error messages) after they made the default search algorithm less precise.

Then later they butchered/removed that too - so all you get now is some generalized garbage for results that is not really relevant to your specific problem.

I guess the problem they wanted to combat is that Google would deliver no useful results at all for overly specific queries, so they made it "generalize" always.

Software development is not really the only sector that has this problem with Google now though, it's just that devs can usually tell that Google is the problem.

Searching for anything specific and technical has become hard.

Google used to be great at finding stuff you needed for work in your field, and sometimes bad at finding everyday everybody stuff. Now it's reversed.

<comment><USER12> disclaimer: I am usually critical of google and for the most part, for bland generic search, have moved away to ddg (usually end up using the 'g!' for technical searches).

Silently depricating bolean operators and quotes was definitely bad for power users but let's be realistic these queries are probably the most resource intensive for google and equally not likely to bring ad revenue.

The bigger issue to me is that even a company like google, with near unlimited resources, seems to be unable to fight off SEO/spam/bots in order to show content with substance to end users. In the last 10 or 15 years this has become scaringly noticeable. The spammers have won the war.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Survival of the Richest - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/s/futurehuman/survival-of-the-richest-9ef6cddd0cc1 <comment><USER2> > _Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly > completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, "How do I > maintain authority over my security force after the event?_

How will these bunker building individuals be viewed by survivors? Inevitably society rebuilds, yet these folks probably won't have anything of value to offer a new community. It's very possible they even lived a life of luxury while everyone else starved.

I think they will be in for a rude awakening when or if that time comes. To that end they're probably not building survival bunkers, they're building tombs.

<comment><USER3> I think if we want to play apocalyptic scenarios, the rich survivors and their clans would devolve into medieval fiefdoms. Security forces would be given honorary titles and authorities over lesser beings while the brain trust would be given aristocratic status. They'd organize raids on other survivors to quell internal unrest and promote unity within the tribe.

The sponsor/ruler's ability to survive the apocalyptic event would be dependent how good they are at political/psychological manipulation/intrigue. I'd say most upper management would survive.

<comment><USER4> If it's truly a post-apocalyptic environment, your "pre-war" wealth won't matter. Nobody will care how many zeros are in your bank's (non-functional) computer database. Your ability to survive and cause other people to survive would be all that counted. I've always thought of it as "having Mad Max skills."

What are your Mad Max skills? If the nuclear apocalypse comes and you survive, what useful skill do you have that will let you continue to live without the rule of law? Can you build a house? Fix a car? Grow crops? Butcher an animal properly? Land an airplane? I've always though everyone should have at least a few of these practical hands-on skills, in case the shit hits the fan. What good are your computer programming skills when there's no more electricity, let alone functional computers? So, you're a social media marketing manager for a global brand? If that's all you know how to do, you'll end up some local warlord's sex slave.

Why would "security forces" listen to some formerly rich corporate CEO? What has he to offer them?

<comment><USER5> You don't necessarily need "Mad Max skills" as long as you're part of a group of people.

The ones to dominate in groups tend to have social engineering skills, or "Ben Linus skills" you could call them.

They don't need to know how to start a fire, or fire a gun, or fix a car. They can just get other people to do it for them -- not for money, but because they can con them in to it, or exploit their weaknesses, set them against one another, or bribe them with promises.

<comment><USER6> Someone needs those skills though.

This is a problem is too small group in a survival situation. A viable group should have the size of a village at least - over 100 people of some diversity.

Otherwise it is very fragile.

Obviously enough resources to start with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers — if that technology could be developed in time."

Can we beat the rush and tar and feather these people now and ride them out on the rail or possibly a one way rocket?

<comment><USER8> > making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind

This almost sounds like a parody

<comment><USER9> Yes, great way to piss off your security people who will (not unreasonably) take the very first opportunity they can to take their revenge.

<comment><USER8> Even more absurd is their confidence that they can leash up hyper-masculine private security contractors - the men who hold the guns and kill for a living.

<comment><USER6> Depends. An actual leader able to convince them and strategize, plus handle logistics would probably do reasonably well. Especially a military commander.

Most of CEOs and managers aren't leaders of this sort - they have to pay people to follow them. The second the deal is bad and they cannot rely on contacts and politics, they are left in a ditch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Apocalypses come and go. In the human times, there has not been one singular event that wiped out a large majority of the population. There have been "local" catastrophes confined to a country or a region which have caused upheaval and changes of who is in charge. They're generally referred to as wars or revolutions.

The things these folks are afraid of will mostly not directly be a danger to them. Massive amounts of money can directly protect you from epidemics, rising sea levels, inadequate food and water, and even nuclear war.

Unfortunately, such events, and others, cause social unrest, which can devolve into chaos and war. This is what they are trying to protect against. It's not rising sea levels per se. It's pissed off and confused people searching for food and water and trying to enact revenge.

There are many strategies for dealing with this. Isolation is one. Pre-emptive cooperation and guild-building is another. Doing whatever you can to keep the social system stable and mitigating reason for collapse seems like a good option as well.

<comment><USER6> There has been one such event very early in history of humanity, Koba supervolcano eruption.

Very tight evolutionary bottleneck. Likely sparked the first of migration waves out of Africa.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Maybe the author is simply does not fully appreciate the nature of those billionaires' interest.

After all, they are billionaire hedge fund managers. As in investor, when your portfolio is sufficiently large, you invest a significant fraction of it in a way that is consistent with the need to survive an improbable but highly devastating outcome.

If I had 10 billions of dollars, I might invest 8 or 9 of them optimistically or philanthropically. That doesn't mean I can't also spend the remaining dollars and a couple of days per week trying to make sure my family is ready to confront whatever improbable calamity I think they might need to face in the worst case.

<comment><USER12> Do these guys ever have, "fun"?

I don't feel that they ever have fun.

<comment><USER13> Getting a high security bunker built to your specifications sounds like a lot of fun to me.

<comment><USER14> Agreed. I'm a closet infrastructure nerd and could easily see myself losing months of my life to planning some mundane aspect of this thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I read a piece a while ago that basically said that the poor will be the ones to survive an apocalypse (of whatever cause).

Because the poor have always been surviving, since the day the were born. It's ingrained into their being. The rich don't have this instinct to survive, they're detached from it.

Anyway, it got me thinking about the rich people building bunkers in New Zealand.

I don't think they'd last very long to be honest. The farmers will be the ones to survive. The billionaire who's bought a bunker in Queenstown doesn't know how to handle their shit in the outdoors, it's not a boardroom out there. The cocky who's been walking up and down those hills all his life does. He's spent 12 hours a day out there for decades, he's probably hunted more animals than he could ever remember, he's used to being out there and handling his shit. He also probably owns a horse, which is going to go a lot further than a 4wd or a motorbike.

The survivors will survive, not the rich.

<comment><USER16> The poor in cities (e.g. New York City) will be no better off than the rich. They know as little about survival without civilization infrastructure as the rich.

This isn't like the homesteading days. Most of the poor still buy food from grocery stores (with cash or ebt) like anyone else.

<comment><USER17> The poor outside of cities who are not subsistence farmers will be in an equally bad spot. Modern farming has not been an independent activity that can be pursued without external inputs for several hundred years. No fertilizers, no hybrid seed shops, no machinery repair, no fuel or electricity means no farm. Rural residents who can hunt might last a bit longer, but I would put my money on a suburban hipster with an organic garden and chicken coop before I would bet on anyone who farms cereal crops or livestock.

<comment><USER6> They will have it easier to adapt to subsistence farming. They should be at least familiar with basic manual farming techniques and tools. Such people are also familiar with working in groups.

The main problem for them will be, as usual during war and upheaval, personal physical security. Probably access to potable water too as wells fell into disuse. And obviously getting to start - initial plants and seeds.

Machinists should be able to figure things out too reasonably quickly. Reuse is big in most such situations. The more advanced hardware might be less useful or hard to maintain, but again basics are reasonably easy.

<comment><USER17> Really? I spent part of my childhood on a farm and while I could attach the mower to the PTO of the tractor and cut some hay I would not have the slightest clue how to hitch up a team of horses to do the same let alone maintain the equipment. Modern farming is about as related to subsistence farming as web development is to relay logic.

And are those machinists able to do a lot of machining without power or delivery of new stock? You are still thinking several layers of interdependence and abstraction above the long-term reality of a breakdown of civil society -- you should think less industrial revolution and more 12th century technology IMHO.

Of course, now that I write all this out I realize where I would place my bet: the Amish will rule the post-apocalyptic future...

<comment><USER6> 1\. Yes, if pressed to, you would get it, in a better or worse way. At least you know what to do, if not how. You would know which plants are manageable, how to schedule crops, how soil needs to be aerated, watered and fertilized. You can figure out suitable replacements to everything if you put just a bit of mind to it. People, even simple, can pull off feats of intellect when pressed.

2\. The most accessible power technologies are wind and tidal power. Plus you can use human and animal power easily enough. And it is easy enough to make big unwieldy batteries. This is at most 16th century tech with initial development in ancient times and was initially done with ancient equipment. As long as someone remembers how it is done and how electricity and motors work, it would get done.

The hardest part is metallurgy and more advanced chemistry. That took centuries to figure out very well, though a lot can be done with wood or reed.

You can do a lot without semiconductors or with very junk big ones scavenged from about anything. Scavenging plastics is easy too.

3\. The biggest risk would again be personal security and mental health. These risks cannot be avoided but can be mitigated. Medicine would be set back by centuries. Advanced food preservation techniques would be unavailable... Leisure would be very limited at least initially.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's so strange to hear this perennial talk of the apocalypse when factually, we've never lived in a more prosperous, healthier, and better connected world.

Maybe these wealthy people know more than I do, but I've just seen literally billions lifted out of abject poverty and apocalypse-like situations in the last 20 years alone in China and India.

We haven't had a major war in more than half a century. Disease rates are lower than they've ever been. Dying from hunger was a very real thing for the majority of the world, but it's a problem we've erased quite a bit.

<comment><USER18> We had major wars as recent as few years ago let alone half a century. Maybe not in the West and yes it was not of WW scale.

We do live in a today that has more medical advancements than yesterday. But is our lifestyle/life really _healthy_ when looking at it for the long term? Are the widening gaps of socio economic imbalances really good or neutral for our society, again in the long term? And those advancements in science and technology reaching everybody evenly? I doubt all of these.

In Bangalore I drink packaged drinking water in a so called posh residential area. There is a _village_ next to my apartment complex where people drink ground water and if they are lucky the water supplied by municipality. Both sources are unsafe and contaminated. They can't afford the packaged water. They also did not contaminate the water they drink. We (the richer part of the society) did.

I personally believe rich are leaving (now this may not be in a well planned and intentional manner) the poor behind in the race of survival or something like that.

<comment><USER8> The thing is, the people you mentioned in Bangalore didn't even have access to water 50 years ago. India is a great example because the country has progressed on all metrics so much in the last few decades. You don't recognize it because you see such abject poverty in front of you. 30 years ago, this poverty was more hidden in that the country mostly lived in rural areas, far away from cities.

<comment><USER18> 50 years ago that water was not contaminated and yes they did have access to water that was not contaminated. Also, I forgot to add that there was plenty of it too and now there's little.

No, it is not hidden from me. I am from the hinterland. I moved to Bangalore 7 years ago. Before that 4 years in college which was semi rural and before that it was pure hinterland. The divide/gap what we see today was not this wide 10 yrs ago, or 20.

PS. I am not pointing to any specific Govt. Just the modern times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Now that's depressing. On the other hand, it's hedge fund people, not people who are actually doing anything. They fear, perhaps correctly, that someday the mob will come to string them up.

<comment><USER4> Also could be worried that their only advantage in life is that they are already rich. They're not necessarily smarter or better skilled than everyone else. If you reset everyone's bank accounts to zero, the same people would not eventually end up back on top, and that terrifies them.

<comment><USER20> Tbh, I think that's true for most people. I don't know if it's particularly terrifying in itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I need to brush up my highlight reel so I can get paid $50k to recommend cryptos and bunker designs to insane rich people

<comment><USER22> I recall a story about people whose job it is to sail rich people's yachts from place to place because they of course don't do it.

<comment><USER16> Right, they only want to sail them in the pretty places during vacations (Italy in the summer, Bahamas in the winter, etc). They don't want to be stuck on the things for the boring weeks crossing the Atlantic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> All these comments about how the poor will survive, "mad max skills", etc, have got me thinking that the super wealthy would never let it get to that point.

Why wouldn't they unleash their previously created swarm of kill-bots / bio- agents / nano-bots?

Killing the rest of the population is clearly the best course of action for the ultra wealthy.

They don't even have to wait for "the event". As soon as they have sufficient technology to reliably kill 99% of people, what will stop them from doing it?

<comment><USER24> why would you think that these people are just gearing up for a worldwide first-strike holocaust? That's mind-bogglingly conspiratorial.

<comment><USER23> They are willing to put punishment collars on their own security forces... is it really that hard to fathom?

If only a handful of ultra wealthy go down this path, the rest will be forced to follow or risk getting eliminated. It's like the nuclear arms race but without the global fallout.

<comment><USER24> there's a difference between "when things get desperate, what can I do to survive?" and "I proactively want to genocide the entire planet". Shows like the walking dead explore what we are willing to do (and what humanity we are willing to abandon) in the former case. It's not incomprehensible that we would be willing to do inhumane things to survive in an apocalyptic scenario.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > Ultimately, according to the technosolutionist orthodoxy, the human future > climaxes by uploading our consciousness to a computer ...

In Hannu Rajaniemi's Quantum Thief novels, almost all of those uploads become slaves. Processing modules in clusters, serving oligarchs.

<comment><USER26> I personally fear the "I have no mouth but I must scream" scenario.

<comment><USER25> This is a little like that, in that the oligarchs massively duplicate minds, with random tweaks, and then select. That's the basis of the opening line:

> As always, before the warmind and I shoot each other, I try to make small > talk.

They're selecting for cooperation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> >"The future became less a thing we create through our present-day choices or hopes for humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at passively."

I think this pretty accurate. The author clearly doesn't agree and feels that this is a false choice VCs have made. I don't agree. I think the author overestimates the degree with which we (the human race/or any intelligent beings) can "create" solutions. Solutions/Inventions are not created, they are DISCOVERED. With the invention of Fire, the wheel, the internet or even facebook, the potential arrangement of atoms which lead to that invention were always there: we didn't create those things, we merely discovered it. There's such vast oversupply of talent creating things everywhere: 100s of projects are submitted to product hunt every day (sure that aspect can be considered creation), but figuring out which ones are usable and which ones will be used, consumed and monetized and be successful: that is Discovery.

<comment> Spartan-S63 That oversupply of talent is also being directed towards 100s of projects that are hoping to be successful. How much of that talent would be better allocated to basic research and discovery? How much further would that propel us if we redirected more of our focus from commercial gains to satiating human curiosity?

<comment><USER16> >How much of that talent would be better allocated to basic research and discovery?

Probably very little. In my experience, there is limited overlap between interest in basic research and interest in making things with immediate use. People interested in the latter will suck at the former because they will not be motivated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Instead of ""How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?" How about

How can I protect the most possible people and build the best functioning society post collapse to ensure the survival of myself and my progeny.

This gives the lie to the idea that the captains of industry are great men they aren't great men they are toads towering above our lives and yet beneath our contempt.

<comment><USER28> How about just selling basic farming equipment to the new communities that arise from the ashes?

Quality gardening tools will go a long way in the post-apocalyptic world, I think. And doing so is far less likely to earn you a place in the guillotine, than being a bunker-resource hoarder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> "Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, "How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?"

The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.

This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew."

Wouldn't the guards simply torture you until you opened all of the locks?

<comment><USER30> Or just shoot you and cut the locks. There's nothing that is accessible to only one person.

<comment><USER31> Put in fail deadly devices - e.g., thermite burners or bombs.

Putting in a wrong password, or excessive physical damage, will cause it to trigger, destroying the valuables.

<comment><USER32> If you're alone you will make mistakes. If you're not...then you're back to trusting _some_ people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Good short essay by Douglas Rushkoff, interesting what billionaires are really worried about.

For a long read, I recommend Rushkoff's books, like 'Throwing Rocks at a Google Bus', etc. A common theme of his is supporting local businesses to support companies like Amazon from ending up destroying most competition.

</comment><comment><USER34> These people are extremely naive. They are thinking after The Event, they'll emerge from the bunkers to magically functioning society and rebuild everything from scratch into anarcho-capitalist utopia without that pesky government.

In reality, the landscape would likely be filled with neo-feudal warlords and gangs fighting for control, competing and looting everything in sight - without the interest to rebuild or maintain anything: same short-term interests they apply for natural resources with extra urgency of survival and competition.

Without a functioning government and democracy civilization reverts to earlier tribe-like patterns of power, which don't allow for a collaborative society to exist in one place. All the former wealth and social connections they have wouldn't amount to much, the bunkers can't exist forever even if they have thousands of years in supplies.

They'll be found and opened by other survivors to loot resources or just exploded to prevent competition. They don't expect the world treat them as part of zero-sum game they play with it. They taking the bet people will not change or respect earlier laws and customs.

The author idea that preventing The Event is a more viable strategy is dismissed, because its obviously cheaper to bet on smaller projects and its contrary to egoistic drive. They're not concerned for the course of world history, they're concerned with their personal little world.

The world electricity generation,transport, water supply and food production networks can't be replaced at smaller scale: internet and communications that glued the people together would be replaced by slower methods and disconnect the world. They are even unlikely to survive without modern air conditioning and clean water, which will disappear with electricity - even if electricity exists the new owners of plants will dictate its prices and availability.

A few post-apocalyptic novels touch the idea of elite emerging from bunkers totally unprepared for the disaster world they avoided, until the resources run out.

<comment><USER35> > A few post-apocalyptic novels touch the idea of elite emerging from bunkers > totally unprepared for the disaster world they avoided, until the resources > run out.

Interesting! Any recommendations?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> People have been predicting an apocalypse in the short term for a long time now. Remember "The Shape of Things To Come", and "The Limits To Growth"?

<comment><USER37> The models from "limits to growth" have been disproved? This would be good news. Please post a link.

<comment> sl-1 Last time I checked, the models presented in the "Limits to Growth" seem to be tracking the situation pretty well. Here is a paper about it (not mine) [https://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/00...](https://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/2763500/MSSI- ResearchPaper-4_Turner_2014.pdf)

<comment><USER36> It predicted running out of oil in 1992, for example. Besides, we will never run out of oil, just like we never ran out of wood nor whale oil.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


US Soccer claims being a male player requires more skill - <AUTHOR> https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/11/us/us-soccer-federation-court-document-trnd/index.html <comment><USER2> I don't think you can ever truly have equality with separate leagues.

Segregation is inherently unequal. We learned this in school with Brown v. Board of Education.

<comment><USER2> Or even more specifically to the article's point is equal pay

Ultimately my question is how do you quantify equal pay when the leagues have entirely different pay structures?

Since these the leagues are on different contracts with different pay structures, we are effectively comparing apples to oranges.

"Men's team players do not receive a salary from US Soccer, and they are paid only when they are called up to play for the men's team, according to the filing."

"US Soccer is required to "pay a $100,000 annual salary to a minimum number of 'WNT Contracted Players' each year" even if they do not play for the national team."

It doesn't seem like it's possible to have equal pay with entirely different pay structures.

If what was being advocated for was equal pay structures then I would understand.

But if they are only advocating "equal pay" then we need to spend some time to define what "equal pay" even looks like for people on entirely different pay structures.</comment></comment>


Facelette: Chat Roulette for FaceTime - <AUTHOR> http://facelette.com/ <comment><USER2> For what it's worth, I whipped this up in about an hour. It just keeps track of who's actively looking for a FaceTime hookup and grabs one.

Coincidentally, this entire app is dumb as hell. I love it so much.

<comment><USER3> I predict a $50 million buyout offer by the end of the week. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Needs it's own email validation system otherwise you just type in crap and harvest the email addresses.

I would use FB Connect to validate the user, show a profile pic, and create a less anarchic community compared to (chatroulette)

<comment><USER5> I can definitely see why you'd need a profile picture when you're about to randomly video chat with someone's face.

Sometimes simplicity is a virtue. It's supposed to be anarchic.

<comment><USER6> Making visible a picture of the user, and by extension their real identity, primes them for social interaction other than showing their penis to the other party. It is a "power of nudges" sort of thing. Sure, you could trivially get around it, but taking one's clothes off is fairly easy _and yet we don't_.

There are definite community and marketing advantages to clothing being worn in the overwhelming majority of all interactions on your site. If that is not the case, that defines your site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Facelette - Easiest way to harvest emails for people who own "i" products! <http://facelette.com/queue>

</comment><comment><USER8> Would there be any way to have it verify that it can establish a Facetime connection? That'd serve the purpose of validation perfectly without needing to have people confirm their address or anything.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'd love to try it, but unfortunately I don't own a Mac, nor an iPhone. Besides, I wonder how long it'll take before the perverts take over Facelette, it hasn't happened yet I presume?

For people without 'Apple products and stuff', try <http://www.blurrypeople.com> instead.

</comment><comment><USER10> You should really make users verify their email addresses.

<comment><USER2> I really like the low barrier of entry (ie, no verification). It could be cool to see a more "legitimate" take on all this, but for this quick proof of concept I love how brain-dead simple it turned out. I mean, you're randomly video chatting with strangers, how stringent do you need to make it? :)

<comment><USER10> The point is that you aren't forced to give anything up in return for another person's email address.

I can input "firstname.lastname@example.com" and get as many email addresses as I want.

I could also put in someone else's email address and they would potentially start getting random FaceTime calls.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks like the users are mostly fake or don't respond.

</comment><comment><USER12> Would be cool to pair it with a service that generated an ID with apple for throwaway usernames. Has apple blocked all the mailinator domains?

<comment><USER2> I've talked to a couple from @mailinator domains today, so that must still be legit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Or just use mine. <http://www.squarechat.com> Shameless plug

<comment><USER13> or just <http://squarechat.com/hackernews> to get into a room with others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Do I have to have FaceTime running to get an invite?

<comment><USER2> Nope; Apple must have something running in the background listening for incoming connections. FaceTime.app will open with the Accept/Reject box when someone calls.

<comment><USER14> That's pretty baller.

<comment><USER15> It really is. I was playing video games a few hours ago, and had my laptop open to read stuff between matches. I got a FaceTime call, and was able to reach over, click accept, and say "Hey Kelly, I'm playing some Halo right now, what's up?"

It was actually a way more pleasant experience than trying to do the same thing on a phone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Can't get it to work whatsoever.

</comment><comment><USER17> nice ... could be a fun concept on a bored night!

</comment><comment><USER18> This will probably create too much traffic on 'facetime server' or whatever apple has. Degradation on quality of video is what I expect if Facelette picks up popularity.

<comment><USER2> As the Facelette proprietor, I agree that Apple's FaceTime server capacity is the probable fail point, and guarantee that my freebie Heroku instance and shabby code is virtually infallible.</comment></comment>