Low Skills Cause Procrastination - <AUTHOR> http://chestergrant.posterous.com/low-skills-causes-procrastination

<comment><USER2> Strong disagree. I procrastinate out of boredom, not insecurity.

When I'm engaged, even if it's new territory, I'm on fire.

When I'm bored, it's painful to get through certain things, and it makes doing the dishes or laundry look appealing!

For most people, procrastination is a lack of will power to do that which we do not wish to do even though we know we must.

As an side, for just about all people, drugs like adderall and friends WILL help you be more productive, though it comes with its own consequences (lack of creativity in some, jitters, easily agitated, loss of apetite, etc.). And I do mean it would help just about anyone who took it, not just those diagnosed with ADD.

<comment><USER3> Counterpoint: Player psychology in every video game, ever. If an overwhelming amount of features are presented all at once, most players quit before reaching the "good parts." Cognitive overload. I have watched players literally squawk in distress because an otherwise simple game gave them too much, too quickly.

Hence design strategies now tend towards ultra-gradual tutorialization with areas of instant gratification. Designs relying primarily on player discipline to master the content or make optimal decisions(notetaking, mapping, manual arithmetic) have all but disappeared, leaving those mechanics that allow success to feel intuitive and perpetually within reach.

Once basic mastery appears, something else happens: Players start willingly doing boring, tedious things in an effort to carve out the "last bits" of improvement. Micromanagement, speed-runs, grinding, statistical analysis, etc. The key thing is that these aspects only appear towards the back-end of the game's skill progression, after players already have confidence in prior technique.

And as it happens, the same is true of most technical endeavors - building on the fundamentals is how you grasp more complex stuff.

For me, there's usually a long period of "book study" where I nibble around the edges before I go in and attack a learning problem head-on with lots of practice. This process, though it has some caveats, lets me work from preexisting relationships more easily and adds "insurance" that I can retrieve value from all practice time.

<comment><USER2> Agreed, but what you describe and what you say you do are not procrastinating.

One observation is that procrastinators are rarely delusional about what they (are not) doing. It's a genuine lack of willpower or a feeling of apathy. Neither of which are symptoms of low skill.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The author thinks that CSS and Javascript are boring because he doesn't know enough to get to the flow level. I disagree. CSS and Javascript are boring because they involve a lot of task-switching and trial and error. Stuff like, "Oh, this should be not be floating to the left" and "uh oh, the code dies in IE with no error message".

I don't think ignorance is _the_ reason people have trouble writing Javascript. I think it's because writing Javascript for the web sucks. (I like node.js 1000x more than Javascript for the web. But it's the same programming language.)

<comment><USER5> It doesn't help that there isn't some 'central' place as a resource for Javascript (e.g. php-docs for php, python-docs for python, ruby-docs for ruby, etc). Where are the Javascript docs?

<comment><USER6> Mozilla developer center? <https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Guide>

They even changed their design. I'm surprised nobody talked about it.

<comment><USER5> I know about the MDN docs, but:

\- No offline version of the documentation.

\- No distinction between Firefox-only features. (as others have mentioned)

\- No mention of Chrome/Safari/IE-only features.

Are the MDN docs _really_ seen as the 'canonical' reference to JavaScript or are they just the most accessible reference?

<comment><USER7> The MDN is of course specific to Mozilla.

If you are interested in the official standards, please have a look at my other comment where I summarized them:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2045151>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I respect your reasoning but I have to disagree. As a programmer when I am stressed or worried then I am working on the issue non stop until it's solved.

When something is easy you aren't stressed thus you aren't going to work on it immediately. When the issue becomes something stressful, because of time, that's when you begin working on it.

Therefore I'd have to say that we are pushed to work hard when we are stressed whether it's having low skills or having very little time.

I'd say when you are able to finish your project in a short amount of time, that shows you have a high level of skill, but if you have low skills and start it immediately and give the same results that shows a high level of skill in the form of determination.

<comment><USER9> "I am working on the issue non stop until it's solved"

If it is a genuinely difficult problem I've found that the most productive approach for me is to ensure I have all the facts in my head and then go and do something else _completely_ unrelated. Usually some kind of solution will present itself at 3am or while I'm having a shower....

Of course, this approach doesn't work with all problems but it certainly beats hitting your head off a brick wall.

<comment><USER10> It depends on the kind of problem. Your system works great for a concept problem; but for a detailing problem, especially a tedious one, you just have to keep hammering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life (Masterminds Series) (Paperback) Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

</comment><comment><USER12> I agree with this. I'm still quite new to development (around 2 years since i began learning) and sometimes It's way easier to read another book or article or whatever than actually do the job because I don't have the experience to execute the task at hand so I "prepare" - whether productive or not. It's a habit I'm trying to break and reading this helps knowing i'm not the only one.

</comment><comment><USER13> Maybe procrastination is just another word for planning for a programer.

<comment><USER14> Was talking with some friends about conferences and preparing a talk. One fried says that JavaOne requires slides in advance, forcing you to get them done by a fixed deadline. "Without that deadline you just procrastinate."

My other friend replied, "You say that like it's a bad thing."

Procrastination gets a bad rap. I think of it as "late-binding for ideas". Like late-binding in software there's some overhead and it's not always the best choice, but demonizing it is bullshit Protestant work ethic run amok.

<comment><USER15> I think real procrastination richly deserves the rap it gets.

If you've ever found yourself frantically slaving away at priority # 10392 while priority # 1 goes all to hell, and you're miserable because you know exactly what you're avoiding (and what it's costing you), you'll have some idea of why procrastination has an evil reputation.

I think your point is more that "be the labor great or small, do it well or not at all" is absolute crap advice. I'm absolutely agreed with you on that. There are also tasks that _should_ be delayed, because they may change or even prove unnecessary if you put them off.

Procrastination, though... chronic procrastination (and a whole slew of psychological defenses that grew around the basic action paralysis) has pretty much destroyed my father's life, work, relationships, etc.. I've had my own issues, though I do a lot better now than in the past.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Being bored is certainly a big reason for procrastination, when you know exactly what needs to be done and it's just a matter of putting keystrokes to the keyboard I tend not to be terribly motivated (a trick for these cases is to trick yourself by having an interesting podcast or video on in the background)

Another big reason however I've found is being in a state of "overwhelm", when you have a too large array of problems and tasks it can easily led to procrastination since the problem seems insurmountable. The only recipe for this I've found is to concentrate on a small aspect of the problem/solution and start there, then start on the next and so on

</comment><comment><USER17> It seems to me that procrastination is possible in just about any quadrant of the map except the top right. Relaxation can cause procrastination, albeit a more pleasant procrastination than apathy or worry. If anything, I'd argue that relaxation causes worse procrastination because of the "I've got everything under control" feeling it gives you.

</comment><comment><USER18> What if your skill at learning new things is high?

I sometimes think I'm using a specific skill, when I'm really using skills of learning that specific skill.

Once I've accepted the reality of my situation, the learning is enjoyable... even to the point of "relaxation/control/flow".

</comment><comment><USER19> Trouble is in a startup you always try new things you are not skilled at.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is the most depressing thing to read while procrastinating.

</comment><comment><USER21> I love the diagram. Z

<comment><USER22> The thing i find interesting about the diagram is that it feel like the center point should be some sort of balance point, but in fact it is just medium skill with medium challenge lacking a descriptive word.</comment></comment>


Yahoo Front Page, 2000 - <AUTHOR> http://web.archive.org/web/20000303000153/http://www2.yahoo.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Remember when 1024x768 was considered a big screen resolution?

<comment><USER2> Better yet, remember when Yahoo! was a directory and not a search engine? It's really too bad curated directories don't scale well.</comment></comment>


My Facebook Account is Mine, not Yours - <AUTHOR> http://www.soft32.com/blog/platforms/web/my-facebook-account-is-mine-not-yours/

<comment><USER2> No, your Facebook account belongs to Facebook. The content you post belongs to you with distribution rights granted to Facebook. Additionally free speech is protected from the government's interference, nothing is in the Constitution about protection from private enterprises.

<comment><USER3> I came here just for this comment.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the validation. I don't know if it is the blog-spam that infests all of these types of forums, or if it that people really think a for-profit corporation owes them free stuff in perpetuity. PR people, though, call me "cynical" ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > The LAST time I checked, this was still America.

As a foreigner, when I read this, I think "so why are you surprised?"

Nationalism really irks me.

<comment><USER5> I don't understand, are you saying he shouldn't be surprised such things happen in the US? If so, I would agree since things like that happen all the time.

What's wrong with nationalism exactly? Since, like most things, there are various degrees of nationalism do you dislike every example of it? If I like the country I live in but disagree with some of its policies, am I still an irksome person in your eyes?

<comment><USER6> nationalism : (a definition I picked): "a sentiment based on common cultural characteristics that binds a population and often produces a policy of national independence or separatism."

In other words, Nationalism is a big myth. There are no common characteristics (or then, VERY few) that everyone shares in one country, let alone in a single village. This is an idea created by politicians to turn one country's people against others. Liking the country you live in does not equal to nationalism, God forbid.

<comment><USER5> What was I downvoted for? I had a legitimate question.

Anyway.

I see what you're saying now and I would have to tend to agree if that is your definition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> IANAL, but it sounds like Facebook's own TOS require them to close the account of users who have given away their password, whether to an employer, spouse, friend, or anyone else. Obviously Facebook would be killing its' advertising profits with that course of action, given the number of accounts that would purportedly need to be closed.

Asking for access to a prospective employee's Facebook seems like asking for access to their car trunk or their home bathroom. Why don't companies try this?

Is your Facebook account your personal property? What about your information after you've placed it on Facebook?

<comment><USER8>
      Asking for access to a prospective employee's Facebook seems
      like asking for access to their car trunk or their home bathroom*

A peripherally related topic, but how is asking for a drug test _unlike_ asking for access to my home bathroom?

<comment><USER9> A drug test is a positive/negative thing where there are well-defined margins and error bars. The employer can say with reasonable certainty that X is a drug user and hence pass judgement on that.

A Facebook login is NOT a positive/negative test - it's more of a "does this person behave well in general" which is a highly subjective measure. What's worse, it's conflating the private and work spheres and letting the employer pass judgement on X's personal life, regardless of how well X can compartmentalize.

The key difference is that drug users usually can't compartmentalize their addiction. Most people can usually compartmentalize their social behaviour. "Usually" is the key word here - there are always extreme counter-examples.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Time to start denying you have a Facebook account all together, hook it up to a specially made email account for Facebook, don't add a profile picture & don't add friends from work to your network I guess.. Where's the world coming to?!

I might be mistaken - but doesn't this break the United Nations Agreements on Human Rights?

</comment><comment><USER11> Could employers ask me for my password by default? I mean would it be legal reason to fire me if I not give it to them? Coming from Germany, I am not sure, here apparently it is not so easy to fire somebody, but in the US it might be so easy that it doesn't matter. That is, they don't have to give a reason, which means not getting a password could be a reason?

Otherwise I wonder if in the future it will be one more thing to watch out for in contracts.

Another aspect: if an employer would be willing to fire you over such a thing, your profession is probably not in very high demand and you should consider switching.

</comment><comment><USER12> As far as I can see, this is just a lot of political posturing. Such a law would have little impact, because the feared scenario is already against the rule. It violates the Facebook T&C for both the account owner to share the password, and for the prospective employer to use it. And surely it's already illegal for an employer to require a candidate employee to violate such an agreement as a condition of employment.

Just because something needs to be done does not mean that we need to have the government do it.

</comment><comment><USER13> "Don't get me wrong. I'm not going to go on some freakin' tirade here about first or fourth amendment rights. "

...

"The LAST time I checked, this was still America. The last time I checked, I was afforded the right to speak my mind (First Amendment). The last time I checked, I was protected from unlawful search and seizure or demands on my privacy (Fourth Amendment)."

Umm...

</comment><comment><USER14> Thoughts on this?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3797771></comment>


Why didn't you launch in 2013? - <AUTHOR> http://justinjackson.ca/why-didnt-you-launch-in-2013/ <comment><USER2> I'm doing everything solo. Not by choice, but I moved to a different city, away from my usual network. Haven't found the right people yet.

Distractions from contracts (inevitable if I want to pay rent)

I'm working with technology that's new to me.

Also, it was a lot harder than I thought. My prototype was banged out in about 72 hours; I assumed the product would be a few months at most.

<comment><AUTHOR> Have you started building an audience? (ie. connecting with people that would be users of your product?)

<comment><USER3> Justin, your audience is here. Your products are "shovels for the gold miners", or simply motivation. I've listened to your podcast and mostly enjoy it. However, what you're selling, and what your advice caters to, doesn't really go far enough with people who sell other types of products, other than the "shovel sellers."

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/product- people/id5853909...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/product- people/id585390927)

Maybe you could dig deeper and go beyond the "motivational" stuff? Of course, I do like a weekly dose of motivation.

<comment><USER2> Oh yeah, I'm aware this guy is just here to sell his $10/month network of entrepreneurs. To be honest, it's not hard to find other solopreneurs struggling - I already connect with people this way for regular check-ins, and for much of 2013 I even set up a regular Google Hangout to do that.

But it is at best a minor help, at worst a distraction. It doesn't come _close_ to replacing a cofounder who will force you to talk through important issues, who will dive deep with you into the product.

I answered the question because it was worth crafting an answer, for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> There have always been communities and clubs for entrepreneurs + tech folks (Rotary, Chamber, Homebrew Computer Club).

I wanted to recreate that feeling I get when I'm hanging out at a conference (in the hallway, after sessions) with other attendees. Being able to talk to smart people, exchange ideas and tips, on a regular basis is super helpful.

<comment><USER2> Fair enough but that doesn't really correlate with willingness to spend $10/month on some site that doesn't already have a reputation.

These sorts of things need some nucleus to form around, some other reason for being there that attracts smart and creative do-ers, and that will repel wannabes and service providers (lawyers, accountants, etc). Often I find the best "networking" happens at events which are completely unrelated to anything businessy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, I agree.

The "nucleus" of our group were smart people I'd met through my podcast (Product People). We only let 5-10 people in at a time, and the monthly cost itself keeps most trolls away. ;)

The group has a great diversity: everyone from people building their first thing, to folks that have already built big (million+ in sales) businesses.

Clearly, choosing a group to belong to is a pretty personal choice. Our group isn't going to appeal to everyone. ;)

(And correction: it's actually $20/month! There are other active + healthy communities that are $34-$100/month out there as well)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Alot of delays, some of them my fault . This is alot harder than I thought it would be and I knew it would be hard coming into it . Someone told me this would be the hardest thing Ive ever done in my life , which is saying something considering my life. Hope to be up by February of next year. This was a really good post btw alot of helpful info Thanks

<comment><AUTHOR> You're welcome.

What was the hardest part for you?

<comment><USER4> Im learning how to code and contracting a developer to build the product at the same time. This coupled with being a "singlish" founder and all the things that come with that have been the hardest

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cool article. I'll take his prompt.

So I kinda-sorta launched in 2013. Not the big project I hoped to launch, but an unrelated side project that distracted me from the big project. Should still have serious profit potential, but I made certain assumptions about the support infrastructure that panned out to be incorrect despite early evidence contrariwise. I'm now working to recover from that, and developing more robust stratagems that technically I probably should've handled earlier. It's a bummer because it's going to make things take longer to get off the ground than I would've liked, but we are launched and accepting payments. It's just that no one has chosen to disburse that payment yet. ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. I'd love to see what you launched. Could you post a link?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> 2013 is not over :) . I am still aiming to release my V1 before 31 dec.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice! Do you have a landing page up we could look at?

<comment><USER6> Thank you. Here it is

[http://www.wrinq.com/](http://www.wrinq.com/)

It is not much at all just a description of what wrinq is going to be. But I am making progress every day.

<comment><AUTHOR> This looks interesting. Are you going to launch with private messaging, and then move to private audio/video calls?

Quick recommendation: I'd recommend an email signup form. I (personally) would be interested in knowing when you launch.

<comment><USER6> Yes. I will launch with private messaging. The reason for this is that websockets are supported in all the web browsers where as web rtc is only supported in two.

I am also planning to build chrome and Firefox apps to support native like experience on desktop and hopefully (when it works) on mobile.

Thanks for the suggestion. I will put up an email collection form today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The 2 things that stuck out for me in 2013 is

1) Carving out time and sticking with it - not rescheduling it for someone else, totally agree you need to lock your self down for making it a priority and finishing an idea

2) Which you mentioned is underestimating the time - 3 weeks was really 3 months for you. For me, I totally do this and work hard semi-launch something, test it and before I know 2 months have passed. Need to iterate faster and go hard.

Great stuff - super excited for 2014 and JFDI :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Because we ran out of runway while bootstrapping, and the stress finally took out the founders (in rather dramatic fashion).

It's not all lollipops and blowjobs out there--sometimes you just get dealt a bad hand.

EDIT: Which isn't to say I hadn't tried before and wouldn't try again. It's just very easy in this bubble for people to ignore the visceral truth that _starting a company is hard_ and that success is far from guaranteed.

</comment><comment><USER9> JFDI[1] is also the name of and Incubator out of Singapore, run by Meng Weng Wong[2]. Meng is the founder of Pobox.com

1\. [http://jfdi.asia/](http://jfdi.asia/)

2\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meng_Weng_Wong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meng_Weng_Wong)

</comment><comment><USER10> I, both, launched and didn't launch a few a projects in 2013. The main difference between the one that launched versus the few that didn't was I couldn't either validate the idea or concept to myself, even though there might have been a market for it.

</comment><comment><USER11> >Your idea was too big

Way, way more complicated than I anticipated. Also serially getting disgusted and starting everything over every few months hasn't helped. And getting distracted for weeks on end by ancillary projects. And deciding I needed to write my own framework.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's not too late!! We're students and right now is productivity time :)

</comment><comment><USER13> Honestly, the answer is internet addiction.

</comment><comment><USER14> We actually "launched" as a _company_ [1] way before 2013, but now that I think about it, 2013 was significant for us in that we only really had a product "for sale" this year. We announced[2] LA (Limited Availability) of two of our products in 2013. We had hoped to close our first deal in 2013, but barring a miracle in the next week, that isn't going to happen. But going in 2014, things are looking very encouraging.

So, given that, I'd say that the following points from TFA resonated with me:

 _Your idea was too big_

What we're working on is big, and as a result, it's taken what feels like forever just to get to this point. In hindsight, we might could have decomposed things a bit more, and done more to look for a way to get traction with a subset of the overall vision. And that's an adjustment that we are actually still looking into making. In 2014, we'll probably launch a SaaS version of our Information Discovery Platform, tailed for use as a "sales intelligence" tool, and targeted at sales teams. We've gotten some very positive feedback on this idea from a number of sales teams, so we're pretty excited about that. Had we decided to go this route sooner, we might be a lot better off now. But, hindsight is 20/20.

 _You didn't build an audience_

We only started _really_ "working" social-media with an eye towards specifically trying to grow our audience, in 2013. I mean, we had a blog and a Twitter account and a Facebook page and the gamut all along... but last year we started taking it seriously. What I have come to realize is that growing an audience is a lot of work, but it _is_ somewhat predictable. There are things, that if you do those things, will result in more Twitter followers, more mailing list signups, etc. We haven't dived full-bore into "growth hacking" but are definitely seeing the importance of these ideas.

The other thing we hope to do in 2014 is more marketing efforts, including: presenting at user-groups and Meetups that relate to what we do, hosting Google Hangout sessions, and/or Twitter "live chats" on topics related to our domain, still more "content marketing" via our blog, and maybe even writing and publishing a book (or two).

 _You tried doing it alone_

Did that for the first year I was working on Fogbeam, but we've grown in fits and starts. IMO, you should invite people to join you when the time is right, and not _just_ to say you "aren't a solo founder". We have three members on the founding team now, and a fourth person we're talking to about joining up to do sales. It's taken time, but we've been patient and looked for good fits.

[1]: [http://www.fogbeam.com](http://www.fogbeam.com)

[2]: [http://fogbeam.com/news.html#press_release_08282013](http://fogbeam.com/news.html#press_release_08282013)

<comment><USER15> Can I ask the thinking behind how you name your products?

I had some difficulty understanding what you are selling - a groupware suite with API integration? If all your sub-products make sense used as part of a suite, why not talk about the suite and it's capabilities, rather than a collection of products with strange names?

(hope this is useful feedback, good luck!)

<comment><USER14> _Can I ask the thinking behind how you name your products?_

Sure, it's all based on our overall branding theory. The company name is "Fogbeam Labs" and the logo is a lighthouse, and our (current) slogan is "Cut through the information fog". So everything is based on ideas around light, illumination, and helping people see what is currently unseen. Given that, Quoddy, Heceta, Neddick and Hatteras are all named after famous lighthouses.

At one time we debated using a model where those names _would_ be more like "internal names" and would be the name of the Open Source project, and then using a different name for the "branded" commercial release. Something like the way Red Hat use "Fedora" for their upstream distro and "RHEL" for their branded release, or "Wildfly" for the upstream JBoss and "JBOSS EAP" for the branded release of that.

But when we sat down to think about doing that, we kept coming back up with scenarios like

"Quoddy" -> "Fogbeam Enterprise Social Whatever"

or

"Hatteras" -> "Fogbeam Business Event Engine"

and nobody on our team liked "Fogbeam Enterprise Social Whatever" and the ilk.

So we decided just to use the "base" names, and tag "Enterprise" onto the end to discriminate between the underlying OSS project and the commercially supported releases.

"Quoddy" -> "Quoddy Enterprise"

etc.

Is it perfect? Probably not, but we're running with it for now. If it doesn't seem to be working, we may revisit it.

As an aside, I did learn one important lesson during all this... at one time, I was trying to be too cute with using lighthouse related terms, and we had a project named "Screwpile". A little later, one of our advisors pointed out that "it makes sense if you know what screwpile means[1], but nobody does, and if you don't, it just sounds ugly, almost vulgar even". And then I realized just how bad that was. We yanked that and renamed it "Fogcutter" instead. :-)

 _I had some difficulty understanding what you are selling - a groupware suite with API integration?_

I try to shy away from using the term "groupware" because it has existing connotations that don't necessarily apply to what we're doing. I'd probably say a "suite of knowledge management tools" over saying "groupware", but we are kind on the boundaries of the existing terminology to some extent, so we're still iterating on the terminology to use in our messaging.

But basically, we have - in Quoddy - an "enterprise social network" (kinda like Jive or Yammer), but with much better support for integrating with other enterprise applications and knowledge sources, and using semantic integration to fully unite knowledge and information across disparate sources, so we can provide relevant context at the user's fingertips when they are examining any given event, task, or piece of content.

Neddick, on the other hand, is like "Reddit for the Enterprise". It's link sharing, social news, and that sort of thing, but - again - tailored more to be useful as a tool within an organization.

 _If all your sub-products make sense used as part of a suite, why not talk about the suite and it 's capabilities, rather than a collection of products with strange names?_

That's another place where we're still exploring what's going to make the most sense. Are people going to want to hear about (and buy) the entire suite, or are significant numbers of people going to want one piece, or the other, but not both? We don't know the answer to that yet, so it's all still in a state of flux. Ideally, as we learn more about how people react to this, the messaging and branding will become more clear.

 _(hope this is useful feedback, good luck!)_

It is, and thanks!

[1]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw- pile_lighthouse](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw-pile_lighthouse)</comment></comment></comment>


Flat-UI DMCA "Designer News" Comments Conversation - <AUTHOR> https://news.layervault.com/stories/1992-layervault-whats-up-with-the-dmca Pretty interesting convo going on at DN -- lots of designers joining the more open side. <comment><USER2> I wish I was allowed to make an account with DN so I could tell them they ripped off HN's entire setup.... but they are invite only. Where do we stop copyrighting if it interferes with good design i.e. consistency?</comment>


PriceZombie is shutting down - <AUTHOR> https://www.pricezombie.com/announcement <comment><USER2> The issue here wasn't that they were just using Amazon's API and then lost access. The Amazon TOS says _don 't store and display our old prices_ and, per the post, that's what PriceZombie was doing.

The lesson is that if you're doing something in violation of a partner's TOS and start to negatively effect their business, the partner is well within their rights to cut off access. Whether other businesses have or haven't been slapped down is only a secondary question.

<comment><USER3>
      The Amazon TOS says don't store and display our old prices

How is Amazon fine with CamelCamelCamel [1] then? It seems like they make money off Amazon affiliate links too.

[1] [http://camelcamelcamel.com/blog/how-our-price-checking- syste...](http://camelcamelcamel.com/blog/how-our-price-checking-system-works)

<comment><USER4> They probably just haven't been caught yet. Amazon is massive and has tons of people who use their Affiliate API. There's probably a small enforcement team that looks at stuff like this. Price Zombie might have just gotten large enough to show up on their radar.

<comment><USER5> CCC has been around for a very long time. That seems very unlikely they 'haven't been caught yet'.

<comment><USER6> Well, PriceZombie was around for a long time too and they 'hadn't been caught' until recently. So maybe it's not unlikely

<comment><USER7> This is circular logic. Maybe there's another reason altogether.

<comment><USER6> It is not circular logic, but proof by contradiction.

>Maybe there's another reason altogether.

That's what I'm thinking as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It is against Amazon's interests to have price comparison these days. Early on in my computer shopping days I'd hit pricewatch and buy from random vendors based on price. Eventually this company called Newegg often had the near the lowest price always and had great service. I soon went to shopping at Newegg consistently without bothering to go to pricewatch. Newegg could have raised prices slightly but I did not want to waste time with untrusted vendors.

The same is true with Amazon now. Once they started selling essentially everything at often the lowest prices, I switched to buying from them almost exclusively. Then Prime came and things came to my home within 2 days guaranteed. Now almost everything I buy comes from them. Mostly I do not bother to comparison shop. But sometimes Amazon actually has grossly inflated prices on things. I believe this is where a lot of their margin comes from. I am not going to waste my time going to 10 different sites to shop around, but with price comparisons like camelcamelcamel I can tell that the item went up 50%. Amazon is likely to lose business more often than not on price comparison sites because many people would just go to Amazon and buy in most cases, but if the price comparison site shows a bad price they will lose the business.

<comment><USER9> I never got Prime because the yearly cost of it (even before the price went up) did not amortize to an acceptable shipping cost. I take the slower free shipping because I'm not impatient or buying on impulse.

So I've never been locked into Amazon and always been free to shop around. And I can absolutely confirm that Amazon is no longer the "default" winner on price. Sometimes they are, but often not. I don't even have to spend a lot of time shopping around to find this. The same deals are everywhere now.

<comment><USER10> Walmart still meets or beats them on price many times and I can buy online and pick it up on my way home which is effectively same-day delivery.

<comment><USER11> That requires leaving the house though. Even worse, it requires _going in to Walmart_.

<comment><USER12> A lot of Walmarts have drive up grocery loading now. Order on the app, drive up, they load your groceries into your trunk, and off you go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _Our appeals to Amazon affiliate program administrators (firstname.lastname@example.com) and even Jeff Bezos (firstname.lastname@example.com) were either ignored or answered incompletely, leaving us wondering if anyone was listening_

I was once in a room with Dave McClure and a ~50ish companies he had funded. He announced that he was taking a tour of partnership teams at two members of AppAmaGooBookSoft and asked for who wanted to come with. A handful of hands were raised.

Dave McClure got frothing mad, and not his normal frothing character mad, but I think actually angry.

"LISTEN UP. 80% of you are building on these platforms. If you do not have a direct line to God at their HQs you ARE NOT TREATING THIS LIKE A BUSINESS. You will %(#)%#0 fail. If you are working with one of these companies, and you are not on that bus, you are dead to me."

I don't think I'd phrase it like that, but the core message is exactly correct. The standard platform deal is, indeed, in the event of an issue you can write to an inbox that no one reads. You _do not want that deal_.

You should, as early as practical, identify _an actual human_ inside the mothership and convince them to like you. You should then lateral from that actual human to other actual humans so that you do not lose your beachhead if your actual human is re-assigned. If you do not do this, when you inevitably have a problem, you will be reduced to taking it to the HN front page and hoping an actual human takes pity on you. Pity is a much less likely outcome than convincing an actual human than you are scads better than their median semi-anonymous participant in the partnership program, which is pretty easy, because their median participant is terrible _and all processes are designed to treat them as such_.

I am aware that this some people will perceive this as unfair because getting better-than-publicly-available access to one's business partners seems like you're at a position of advantage vis-a-vis the people who can only send mails to /dev/null. Is this an advantage? Yes. If you believe this is an unfair advantage, I would strongly counsel you to negotiate honestly and in good faith with your counterparties at your largest business partner and source of existential risk, and not worry so much about other putative businesses which are not sophisticated enough to negotiate honestly and in good with faith their core suppliers.

<comment><USER14> I'd strongly urge that in Amazon's case this advice is functionally irrelevant as they aren't a reliable business partner that reacts in a consistent way when it comes to MWS operations regardless of who you know that works there unless its Bezos himself.

<comment><USER15> I agree. The advice by patio is generally sound, though in this specific scenario, I don't think Amazon would ever care. PriceZombie offers negligible profit compared to the billions Amazon makes. Even spending 0.5 seconds on their case is a waste of their time.

<comment><USER16> I don't agree with that at all. We have to guess how much transaction volume PriceZombie sends to Amazon, but $50k/month isn't an unreasonable estimate (probably very low). It is totally worth a couple hours of a support person's time to deal with the source of $600k of annual revenue.

<comment><USER17> I wouldn't be so quick to disagree.

I spent 2 years generating over $1mil a year in sales through the Amazon affiliate program - to be dropped without warning or contact. No amount of follow up and attempts to contact my, previously very accessible, account rep resulted in anything. Not even an explanation on why my account was closed, outside of being told that I could take legal action (in the state of Washington) against Amazon to collect on the nearly $40k in yet-to-be-paid earnings.

<comment><USER16> I disagreed that it 'would be a waste of their time'; not saying they'd act rationally. In my limited experience it seems like they don't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> All the comments on "don't rely on 1 customer" are correct, of course, but I'm more interested in how, as far back as the 80s, we all believed in the magic of having something show us the best price for an item. Now, sure, it may often be Amazon, but not always, and they don't carry everything.

So, multiple price engines come and go. Why? Because consumers won't pay for them, and so they rely on kickbacks from merchants. Same for Travel sites/aggregators, and for review sites: You either get folks to pay for them (of which Angie's List was the only kind of success) or you get vendors to pay you (Yelp, any affiliate aggregator (Creditcards.com, etc.), price engines).

I guess I wonder: I love CamelCamelCamel, I loved PriceZombie, I loved PriceRunner and Jango and all the rest... but they keep going away. Google killed google shopping comparisons, as did the other portals. We can probably all think of ones we used that are all gone now.

What kind of service would one have to create that grabs prices but can charge consumers so it's not depending on affiliate vig? And given that many merchants are creating terms of service to block displaying of their prices (we see this also in the travel industry), will one of the earliest dreams of the internet, that of a flat marketplace where I can evaluate all players and their pricing and pick the best store for me, still fail to come to life?

It feels like online shopping has become a big mall, where I have to go to as many sites as I can find til I get tired and just buy the thing at the most recent site (or just trust that Amazon is the cheapest). I hope we can avoid this fate.

(Update: fixed typos)

<comment><USER19> What's wrong with Google shopping? I've found deals using it, it's had greater than zero value for me.

>What kind of service would one have to create that grabs prices but can charge consumers so it's not depending on affiliate vig?

I've got a handful of ideas about this and have been considering a startup along these lines. I think that you need to take control of the actual purchase, so then it's just "Oh, I paid less than I expected, some may have gone to the middleman but I still win" instead of "I paid money to X for the purchase and to Y for finding it for me" and feel somehow losing out for not finding it yourself. If anyone wants to discuss this I added an email to my profile.

This is kind of like what Jet was doing when they first launched, although they've stopped it since, apparently because stores didn't like it.

<comment><USER20> > What's wrong with Google shopping? I've found deals using it, it's had > greater than zero value for me.

The Google shopping that exists today is not the same service that was originally launched. It used to function more like a standard search, but limited to all online stores. So long as there wasn't a robots.txt, Google was index the site and include the product in their shopping results. So basically like standard search, but with logic to determine if a site represented a store.

Then Google modified shopping so that it was opt-in for the retailers, meaning a large number of stores were no longer included. To be included in Google shopping now a retailer must have a Google merchant/adwords account. It's more of a curated search now.

Nothing wrong with it now, but it used to be great for finding hard-to-find items or items that were mispriced by less sophisticated retailers.

<comment><USER19> I know that they moved to paid inclusion, but as I said, it's still useful. GP said it was "killed", and that seemed too much.

<comment><USER18> Killed from it's original vision; the remaining is a shadow of what it was. Big shadow, admittedly. But fair point, my hyperbole may have gotten out of control.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This sucks, but unfortunately is something that is not unlikely to happen when one's whole service is hosted or relies on a third party API for its data. I recall something similar happening with a service that relied on the Google Maps API to draw coordinates or something. And Google pulled API access because the service was too similar to what Google Maps did with trip directions, or something.

Unfortunately this is a reality of basing, or largely basing, a whole service off of a third party.

<comment><USER22> The point here is not that they're relying on a third party, but the fact that Amazon banned them from the api while their competitors/alternatives can still use it without constraint.

<comment><USER23> Isn't that a bit like complaining to the police officer who pulled you over that other people were speeding, too?

<comment><USER24> As far as I understand it, this is different because they were "previously told we were in 100% compliance with the rules"

So, it's more like a cop pulling you over even though you weren't speeding.

<comment><USER25> I think you guys are stretching the analogy way too far. As I see things: it's a private matter and doesn't map well onto a public analogy.

The bottom line is that Amazon can deem it acceptable to allow behavior one day, and change it's mind the next. If you systematically rely on your partner's humor, you're doing something wrong.

<comment><USER24> I agree its allowed for amazon to do this, but its still a dick move

<comment><USER25> Right, and that's the point! If you're systematically in a position where you have to worry about "dick moves" from your partners, you're doing something very, very wrong.

Amazon might be dicks, but not to the extent that PriceZombie is foolish.

(I get the sense we're saying the same thing, though :) )

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> YC partner Aaron Harris had a similar problem with his first startup[1], and is a lesson for all startups:

It's risky to rely on one customer for the majority of your revenue.

90% of PriceZombie's revenue was dependent on affiliate revenue, and thus Amazon. Similarly, virtually all of TutorSpree's revenue was dependent on SEO, and thus on Google, and when Google changed their algorithm, they saw a similar fate.

[1] [http://www.aaronkharris.com/when-seo-fails-single-channel- de...](http://www.aaronkharris.com/when-seo-fails-single-channel-dependency- and-the-end-of-tutorspree)

<comment><USER15> This is part of the risk of startups/business. This is like the opposite of survivorship bias...

Think about all the successful companies out there that DO depend on third parties:

\- Buffer (Twitter has a bad day? Cut their API access off!)

\- Candy Crush (Apple hates them? Remove their apps!)

\- RetailMeNot (Google thinks they're spam! Delist them!)

\- DuckDuckGo (Bing hates them? Cut off their API access)

\- Heroku (Amazon has a bad day? Cut off their AWS Access)

\- MailPlane (Google doesn't want Gmail apps?! Cut them off!)

<comment><USER27> Just because these companies are doing well _today_ says nothing of the potential impact this (still very present) risk holds for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Honestly I'm (selfishly) kind of glad that they're shutting down, as awful as that is. I browse Reddit a lot and the fact that every single time somebody posted a product, there would always be a PriceZombie bot commenting bugged me to no end.

<comment><USER29> I've found that very helpful. Otherwise, I feel like I'm gambling when I buy something on Amazon. I could be getting the lowest price, or the highest. Amazon's price games are the worst (I know all stores do that to some extent, but Amazon's price swings are much bigger.. +-75% anecdotally)

<comment><USER28> Yeah, I guess I'd rather search myself if I'm actually considering buying a product. And most of the time, if I'm participating somewhere, I'm not actually looking for purchase advice myself, just reading, helping out, or discussing.

<comment><USER29> I guess I'm pretty often looking for purchase advice in a lot of the subreddits I frequent. Helpful to get advice from people with domain knowledge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> "However, our appeals to Amazon affiliate program administrators (firstname.lastname@example.com) and even Jeff Bezos (firstname.lastname@example.com) were either ignored or answered incompletely, leaving us wondering if anyone was listening. "

This is pretty standard for Amazon marketplace seller services. They take a 16%+ cut of all of your sales and have absolutely nobody to help you when your account is banned or disabled by one of their auto bots.

This happened to a client of mine a few years back. Near 100% feedback, complying with every rule, and one day they get the ban hammer (for a claim that was later withdrawn by the original person that filed it).

Amazon withheld $50,000 for over 3 months while they were 'investigating'. After 3 emails where Amazon responded with canned responses, they said the matter was 'closed' and all future emails would not be answered.

Do NOT do business with Amazon. You will end up sorry and probably without a business. As as an associate or marketplace seller, they own all of your clients and you are responsibly for anything bad that happens. When you get kicked, they have all of your data, your clients, and your money for 90 days.

On top of this, they compete with their own marketplace sellers (unlike Ebay) and use all of your sales information to undercut you. I witnessed it many times with the above client.

This should be against the law. I think the only reason they haven't been sued out of existence is because their so big.

</comment><comment><USER31> Feel bad for them really. But this is a classic example of the risk you undertake running a business where you core depends on a third party. It is astonishing that they lost 90% of their business just due to amazon closing their affiliate account.

<comment><USER4> I saw a girls startup plan that involved exclusively using Facebook. I was like, "You really need to support Flickr, Twitter. You shouldn't depend on one source for your customers to pull photos." She said they were just going Facebook because it was the quickest route to get a deliverable product. She obviously wasn't an engineer and I'm sure any software dev will tell you if you support at least two services, you'll write code in such a way that's expandable to many (more modular, classes for each service type). Even if that 2nd service may not have any customer base, it's worth the implementation cost just to have.

This doesn't really relate to this story as Price Zombie did utilize many different sites, but it does show just how big the giants are (like Facebook/Amazon) that even if you try to support lots of different sources, one of them can make or break you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Here in Austria, Amazon pays the major price comparison website to be listed: www.geizhals.at

And I hear it's not cheap for them.

<comment><USER33> Well, being listed on a price comparison website is basically advertising, and can funnel a lot of traffic to Amazon if they are often the cheaper or better choice. This service just used referrals to make a bit of money instead, probably because there's a lot more price comparison website competition in the US and Amazon doesn't want to fund them all to get listed.

They get away with it too, because a price comparison website is not feasible without having amazon as one of the shops.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> As others here have noted, the affiliate game is a risky one. You are in essence a sales rep for whichever merchant(s) you work with. A merchant has ZERO legal obligation to continue working with you, and can often discriminate against you as they see fit, terms be damned.

If you don't own the relationship with your primary source of revenue, your business is built on a rocky foundation, and if the weather is fickle enough, you can be washed away overnight.

Having been an affiliate, managed an affiliate program, and worked with an OPM to manage the program, I can say that stuff like this happens all the time in the industry, and that's why the #1 rule for affiliates is "diversify diversify diversify."

</comment><comment><USER34> If your objective is to write a crawler that parses pricing information from a third party web site, then write the crawler. Relying on the third party to provide a consistent API that can be remotely communicated with is setting yourself up for failure. These companies can quickly ban you from their platform when using their API. At least by writing the crawler yourself, you're making it much more difficult for them to do this. Another lesson is that building a business model around the availability of a third party is also a recipe for failure.

<comment><USER35> > building a business model around the availability of a third party is a > recipe for failure.

Rather, I think it's that a business model that is not complimentary to the third party is the problem. E.g. Amazon doesn't want historical price tracking for as it could lead to folks discovering price manipulations and a decrease in margins. So, that's the issue--the business was not a compliment. Let's imagine a startup that was generating new sales from a long tail market segment too small for Amazon to target directly, then that's a good business model as it compliments Amazon and leads to new sales they wouldn't otherwise see.

TLDR if you rely on a partner, make sure your business helps their business.

<comment><USER21> Which is a great strategy, until the business releases something that duplicates your functionality and cancels your access.

<comment><USER36> If your product was well made and fairly priced, they would never need to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Probably too late to comment (what a shame discussion is so time limited) but what interests me about this story is that they call out hosting costs as the reason to shut down.

I would love to see numbers from this operation, like we saw after Everpix. I would love to understand the scale, if it really would cost so much to host it?

So perhaps the actual take away is they didn't really violate the ToS as it is written, but they got kicked out and should have known it would happen. They may have been targeted because they show competitors pricing. Either way, it's sad to lose the service, but hard to chase those customers, because the customer won't pay. They are trying to sell the IP and maybe the company, and apparently there's some sturdy tech with broad applications!

What's so tricky is the dispute isn't about API access for the latest pricing, but rather their affiliate revenue. That can be canceled for any reason at any time, so that they still get the API and could find other revenue streams is a key point. They are not "entitled" to Amazon affiliate revenue, so then the question is -- where's the story?

</comment><comment><USER38> Damn, this is exactly what I've been looking for for the last year. Any alternatives?

<comment><USER39> im working on [https://percht.com](https://percht.com) (it's still early)

<comment><USER40> It's giving me a 502 bad gateway :(

<comment><USER39> ...fixed

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Padmapper was forced to shut down too by Craigslist.When are we going to learn that this type of business model is unsustainable? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4149455](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4149455)

<comment><USER9> Yeah if you're just regurgitating someone else's data you haven't really created anything. You might leech some money off someone else's marketplace for a while but don't expect it to last.

<comment><USER42> >if you're just regurgitating someone else's data you haven't really created anything

If you're regurgitating in a manner that is beneficial for both parties _and_ the customer then I'd say you've created something extremely valuable. Just ask Google.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I find such actions puzzling, in a world where (charge per click) CPC advertising no longer works due to click fraud, (charge per action) CPA advertising offers a sane alternative. Only pay for the actions of customers, if someone buys, you pay, if they don't, you owe nothing. And yet CPA is treated like a really off color way to feed a few pennies to bloggers.

In this case Amazon doesn't like past prices being stored and shown. Ok, I get it that doing so exposes sellers who price high during "rush" seasons and low during "off" seasons, or the difference in price quoted to a Dallas IP address versus one from San Francisco, but shouldn't those sorts of shenanigans _be_ exposed?

</comment><comment><USER7> They note that Amazon is "afraid of services that compare their prices with other stores".

It's more likely Amazon just doesn't see the value. Why would they want to pay a company to drive traffic to Amazon, only when Amazon's prices are lower? Otherwise, they actively drive traffic to their competitors? Amazon is not in dire need of traffic, and with their algorithmic pricing, information is an advantage.

Perhaps there is a business case that can be made. But, OTOH, it doesn't strike me as irrational that Amazon would rather not.

</comment><comment><USER44> Amazon associates is corrupt and not worth your time or its existence. They will wait until day 29 of 30 then shut down your account (after they collect revenue) and find any reason to shut your account down. They have no obligation to state a reason in their email to you. It's a scheme at its finest, unless you are willing to settle for working 8 hours a day for 20 dollars a day capped.

</comment><comment><USER45> Can you create this a self hosted application? Then Amazon can't really track this ( i suppose).

They should suddenly start tracking thousands of affliates and you could earn some money from it :) ( i suppose)

Eg. Something like [https://sendy.co/](https://sendy.co/) , i believe they earn plenty of money also :p

<comment><USER46> Chrome extension for scraping and affiliate link placement?

<comment><USER47> They wrote that into the Terms of Service a couple of years ago. I know because I created one before the rule change and had to remove that part.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Dear PriceZombie:

I will pay you $ _x_ a year to keep your service functional. Go figure out what _x_ is, given the number of active users you have , and what it costs to keep the service open.

Also, email me at firstname.lastname@example.com. I am a service provider, I might be able to help you cut down your cost of operating.

</comment><comment><USER49> I am going to miss their price protection tracker that emailed when the price dropped within a certain period of time following a purchase. That let me get the difference refunded by my credit card company.

</comment><comment><USER50> This is such a shame... I really enjoyed PriceZombie to display old prices, even though they shouldn't have been doing this. I wonder why Amazon changed their mind after 3 years?

</comment><comment><USER51> Im guessing the reason you were canned was less to do with historical pricing and entirely about the fact you let them compare with other sites.

I am fairly certain amazon hates that with a passion and is in fact why you dont see that feature on CCC.

Also, Its my understanding that all of these price comparison sites get a severely discounted affiliate rate from amazon- Something like 1%

</comment><comment><USER52> This is sad. I really feel for them. I'm making a similar website for another country and am planning to bring it to the US later this year. It will largely fill the gap of Price Zombie. Big shoes to fill, though.

</comment><comment><USER53> For PriceZombie and many other businesses, depending on one major revenue source to survive can be a death sentence and at the very least pose an existential risk. Let this be a hard lesson in diversification.

</comment><comment><USER54> It seems kind of extreme to shut down based on that. Wouldn't the technology be useful for other uses? I'd imagine that some would pay for that kind of historical data.

<comment><USER55> The thing is there are other websites giving that historical data away for free. Their affiliate accounts haven't been shut down (yet?).

So PriceZombie just can't compete. Makes me kind of wonder if they were just the "top" website doing this, and so they suffered from too much success.

<comment><USER56> It's because they compared with other services, and Amazon has been raising prices across the board lately, which they don't really want people to figure out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> The lesson here isn't about breaking TOS. The lesson is that if you build a business around a 3rd party API that party can crush you at any moment without reason.

</comment><comment><USER58> Why do they need an account? Can't they just crawl Amazon and get price info? Or is their business only viable if they can collect a percentage of your purchase?

<comment><USER59> Exactly. Affiliate is their only profit. Sure they can crawl and link, but they would get 0 profit from that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> I'd pay (once) for software that periodically ran on my computer, pinging a URL for a price, tracking it locally, and giving me an alert at a change threshold.

<comment><USER61> You could probably make that overnight. Just send a cURL to the page and look for the text of the span with the ID "priceblock_ourprice". Then log that to a comma delimited text file or something.

<comment><USER62> But the real problem would be updating your code every time the appropriate website(s) changed their markup.

In a hosted service that's easy; if you're selling something people download you'll have to ensure timely updates.

<comment><USER61> Which is why, unfortunately, this product can't realistically be a one-time fee.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Why didn't they come to an agreement with one of the Amazon's competitors? It sounds like a logical next step which needs to be taken to survive.

</comment><comment><USER63> This is what happens when you rely totally on third party and then when you grow you ,company will be closed either by a buyout or legal termination.

</comment><comment><USER64> This blog is "loser talk".

</comment><comment><USER65> Let me just ask the $64.000 question. Why did they ever bothered with the API and not just crawl Amazon for whatever products they needed?

<comment><USER6> It wouldn't make a difference: it is their _affiliate_ account was that was closed - which is how they earned money. Affiliate account = getting paid "kickbacks" by Amazon for customer referalls from PZ's site that result in purchases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> The immature part of me would have just done a massive url redirect to a competitor. I would say change the links on the page but that would probably get you in even more legal trouble.

</comment><comment><USER66> > Press: If you're interested in running a news story about our situation and > why Amazon is afraid of services that comparison shop Amazon's prices with > other stores, please contact us at firstname.lastname@example.com

Yeah, that's really going to help your situation.

1) You built your product on top of someone else's service. That's always a rocky road. It is common to read about other companies in your shoes.

2) In the time you were operating you couldn't make a single contact at Amazon in case stuff happens?

<comment><USER67> 1\. PriceZombie was not built on top of Amazon. PriceZombie indexes products and prices in over 100 online retailers. The developers always had the option of using the PZ website as a front end to gather personal shopping habits and other data that is valuable to advertising and marketing companies - which is what many (most?) price trackers do as their primary source of revenue. PZ opted to get their funding from retailers instead. People purchased mostly from Amazon, therefor when Amazon pulled their affiliate program funding dried up and PZ had a choice - go to the dark side, close up, or sell.

2\. They had many contacts, some of them quite high. PZ is a very ethical and methodical company. They dotted their i's and crossed their t's. They had an open dialog with Amazon where they were repeatedly told, in writing and on the phone, that they were in full compliance and there was no problem. The problem with Amazon is inconsistent and arbitrary enforcement of their own rules.

The developers are in discussions now with companies that want to purchase the technology - including my own, though I don't think we can afford them. This is no garage set up by comp sci students. The developers have impressive credentials and they have created a very impressive system that has wide application to other uses.

<comment><USER6> > PriceZombie was not built on top of Amazon.

Not technically for the reasons you stated. However, it is evident that PriceZombie was financially built on top of Amazon's Affiliate program. It's hard to argue against that when Amazon contributed 90% of revenue

<comment><USER68> That is dictated by where consumers end up shopping. You can diversify to thousands of stores, but if Amazon is the biggest seller, they will get the lion's share of the click throughs and purchases.

What PZ did was show users who shop at other stores, that Amazon was cheaper, and funnel users to Amazon. Sometimes Amazon wasn't cheaper, but I wonder if this is all about to change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> UPDATE: Hey, lot's of downvotes for this post. Would be great if you guys could explain why you downvote.

Sorry, but not much sympathy from me.

1) You knowingly violated the terms of service. Therefore you are denied service now. Nothing to complain about. Honestly, if the API of _my_ website would be intentionally abused in a way that I explicitly exclude in my TOS, I would be seriously pissed. I would probably think about suing you. Not only denying you further service.

2) You whine, bitch and complain because others did not get the same treatment as you. There are also many murders and robbers who are not in prison. If it would not be allowed to put one criminal into prison unless we put them all into prison, there would be no law and order at all.

3) You encourage the problem. By shutting down just because Amazon kicked you out. Why not address the problem that 90% of your revenue came from one single retailer? Why not talk to the other retailers and the users and see if there is a way to work it out? Do the _difficult_ thing: CREATE! Don't beg!

Sorry, if this sounds harsh. I welcome and applaude every tech entrepreneur. But please stand up and fight for the right thing. For a better world. Not just for a bit of profit by bending the rules.

<comment><USER70> They were TOLD that they were 100% in compliance with the rules and that there was no problem. And then one day things changed for no reason.

<comment><USER71> Told by whom? An Indian online chat customer service rep? Some sort of account executive?

<comment><USER68> Associates team is on shore and there is no way to directly contact them. They contact you.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink? - <AUTHOR> http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/When-Did-Girls-Start-Wearing-Pink.html <comment><USER3> One practical aspect of the same clothes until age 6 is that kids grow so fast you need to re-use clothes. In the 18th and 19th century when having clothes made was much more expensive, and the number of children a family had was high, the re-use would have been essential. Any parent today who has had two kids of one sex and then the third comes along of the other sex finds they have a bunch of boxes of things that they don't want to use.

We sought to keep our baby clothes especially and up to about age 3 clothes as neutral as possible for that reason.

<comment><USER4> While boys and girls wore "dresses" till about age 6 or 7, till they were breached[1], they carried gender markers --at least in the upper classes. The clothes were not interchanged. The styles were different and people of the time would be able to identify the gender.

[1][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeching_(boys)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeching_\(boys\))

<comment><USER5> Two differences, fwiw:

1\. Boys more often had square collars. For example, if you look at [http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_children_of_Charl...](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_children_of_Charles_I_of_England- painting_by_Sir_Anthony_van_Dyck_in_1637.jpg), the girl on the left has a rounded collar, while the boy 2nd-from-left has a squared-off collar.

2\. Boys sometimes wore bands ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bands_(neckwear)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bands_\(neckwear\)) ). Due to their frequent use of lace they often are perceived as feminine today, but were perceived as masculine at the time. You can sort of see that on Roosevelt in the linked article. Some clearer examples are visible in the Wikipedia gallery of unbreeched boys: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeching_(boys)#Gallery](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeching_\(boys\)#Gallery)

Source, unfortunately paywalled (and it's a very minor part of the article, so not necessarily worth digging up unless you're interested in the main article subject): [http://www.jstor.org/stable/1923418](http://www.jstor.org/stable/1923418)

<comment><USER6> Both of those gender markers look like they would be easy to alter with a bit of sewing, so the idea that clothing is gender neutral to make reuse easier still stands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am sure with higher infant mortality and bigger families there were massive cost savings in gender neutral clothes for small children. We have our first girl due. I went to the local semi-quality big chain store and a stack of nice pink onesies were on the rack for under $5 (AUD) each. I got them to the self- checkout and found they were all marked down to around $3 which is less than a large cup of coffee around here. So although we will reuse our huge supply of robot, dinosaur and truck outfits, colour coding her gender in public for the benefit of strangers isn't going to be a huge financial burden.

More pissed off with the pink toy aisles. I can buy my boys a semi-decent quality kitchen to play Gordon Ramsey in for $110 AUD on special at the same store available in pastel pink only (all the kitchens stuff has pictures of girls on it and is pink - all designed by or for Americans I guess). A similar gender neutral product in the same store is available by online order only for nearly twice the price. So the boys have a pink kitchen because fuck it - <USER2> cook and women haven't been trapped in a kitchen for decades.

</comment><comment><USER8> Never heard that dresses were gender-neutral for small children in the 19th century. Seems I've seen plenty of old photographs that show boys wearing traditionally "masculine" clothing, though commonly with short pants, transitioning to long pants during adolescence.

<comment><USER9> My guess is that it was very rare but because of agendas, it'll be played up and mentioned to seem as though it was more common than it actually was. Just me guessing... knowing nothing about the subject.

<comment><USER10> Yes, you don't know. This isn't a matter of opinion or guessing; its a matter of established fact, with lots of written and photographic documentation. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan supposedly said: "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." You add nothing to a rational discussion with nasty slander.

<comment><USER11> Fantastic quote - I'm going to use that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > _Today's color dictate wasn't established until the 1940s, as a result of > Americans' preferences as interpreted by manufacturers and retailers._

That is the bit of history I'd like to read far more about, from primary sources. Specifically to suss out whether manufacturers and retailers _interpreted_ these color preferences or _manufactured_ them.

Also, it's annoying when sites inject links and other shit into copying and pasting a sentence from the article to quote it elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER13> Now I'm not colorblind but I do know the girl in that first picture isn't wearing pink and OHMYGODTHATSABOY...

</comment><comment><USER14> Related segment on QI:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2f7urmRaRxY&t=2m12s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2f7urmRaRxY&t=2m12s)

</comment><comment><USER11> It's only within the last few Presidential election cycles that the Republicans have become "red" and the Democrats "blue," which is the opposite of what you might expect.

What has "always" been true usually has very definite origins, sometimes quite recent.

<comment><USER15> Am now just waiting for the GOP to adopt the red flag as a symbol and then the great circle of irony will be complete.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Everyone who is not colorblind perceives that there is a special emotion linked to a specific color. This applys to Children as well - they are not emotionless entitiys until the age of 6. They have thier favourite colors afore.

</comment><comment><USER17> It would be nice to return to the times of gender-neutral clothing, and perhaps keep it that way until the child expresses a preference. After all, genitals don't determine gender, they determine sex.

<comment><USER18> That gender discussion is so weird. It seems people who are concerned about being forced into a role because of their gender go to great lengths and mental acrobatics to define some kind of new genders. So they struggle and struggle to actually define new roles they can be confined to.

Wouldn't it be easier to simply not worry about gender at all and simply use your sex in any way you please?

<comment><USER19> > Wouldn't it be easier to simply not worry about gender at all and simply use > your sex in any way you please?

The people who do this fit into the box marked 'genderqueer'.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genderqueer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genderqueer)

<comment><USER18> I don't think so - just because you don't worry about gender boxes doesn't mean you want to live all kinds of gender roles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> My information on why red/pink _was_ associated with males is that red dye is more expensive. Thus the wearing of red is a status symbol.

(Source: talk on Vikings at Jorvik Viking museum/village)

</comment><comment><USER21> _Why have young children's clothing styles changed so dramatically?_

As opposed to all other demographic segments?

</comment><comment><USER22> do you not get the Victorias Secret catalog?

</comment><comment><USER23> It is interesting that some social conservatives (or maybe just non-liberals?) care about consciously enforcing gender roles through clothing. This would seem to imply that they are similar in their beliefs with feminists when it comes to the nature/nurture question: that gender is enforced through culture. But this is usually thought of as a very liberal idea (or whatever I should call it).

Pink as an effeminate color has always seemed kind of arbitrary to me. I just can't see how a color would have a specific gender.

<comment><USER24> Sorry to be crude, but there is a very non-arbitrary reason for pink to be associated with females (and to a lesser extent, blue with males). In fact I always assumed this was indeed the cause for the association - I'm very surprised to learn it used to be reversed.

<comment><USER23> > Sorry to be crude, but there is a very non-arbitrary reason for pink to be > associated with females (and to a lesser extent, blue with males).

You're excusing yourself for being crude? How is this crude?

> Sorry to be crude, but there is a very non-arbitrary reason for pink to be > associated with females (and to a lesser extent, blue with males). In fact I > always assumed this was indeed the cause for the association - I'm very > surprised to learn it used to be reversed.

So what is the non-arbitrary reason? The one mentioned in the article?

<comment><USER25> > So what is the non-arbitrary reason? The one mentioned in the article?

You seem smart enough to have figured out the implication, but I believe s/he meant that the inner portion of the labia and opening to the vagina are pink; the word pink is also used as a slag term for the female genitalia.

<comment><USER23> Well in that case: the penis glans is pink.

<comment><USER25> Sure. I'm not endorsing the theory, merely stating it more directly (or so I think - I might be wrong).

<comment><USER24> You're not wrong, that's what I meant. Well, and that the tunica albuginea is bluish, I believe.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are current karma thresholds? - <AUTHOR>

Can anyone shed some light on this?  I have an irrational need to associate numbers with a goal :) <comment><USER2> At 1,000 karma, pg mails you an autographed copy of On Lisp.

</comment><comment><USER3> I just broke 200 and got the ability to downvote comments...can't downvote submissions though, not sure if that's even a possibility actually

<comment><USER4> Nobody can downvote submissions</comment></comment>


Visualization of Harvey, Irma, and Jose - <AUTHOR> https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/orthographic=-70.17,20.74,2130 <comment><USER2> Note the difference between Pathlines and Streamlines and keep in mind that what you see is not an animation of the actual air movement:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLSmNZm1e0k&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLSmNZm1e0k&feature=youtu.be&t=1870)

</comment><comment><USER3> Harvey has dissipated more-or-less, the one near Mexico is Hurricane Kattia

</comment><comment><USER4> Compare [https://www.ventusky.com/?p=19.6;-77.9;4&l=wind&w=0xIAb9A9A](https://www.ventusky.com/?p=19.6;-77.9;4&l=wind&w=0xIAb9A9A)

<comment><USER5> That's my new favorite.

It's interesting how the wind appears to spiral into the eye near ground level, and out from the eye at 12k meters.

It's like there is a toroidal shape where on the bottom, wind spirals in towards the eye, transitions to the top in the eyewall and spirals out at the top.

<comment><USER6> "rising air in the eyewall follows isolines of equal angular momentum, which [also] slope outward with height" (Wikipedia)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> partial to windy.com myself

[https://www.windy.com/?20.633,-75.498,5,a:q3iI3](https://www.windy.com/?20.633,-75.498,5,a:q3iI3)

<comment><USER8> Whatever that last parameter is on the url, it causes mass rendering artifacts in Firefox/Linux. It works for me w/o.

[https://www.windy.com/?20.633,-75.498,5](https://www.windy.com/?20.633,-75.498,5)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is this derived from [http://hint.fm/wind/](http://hint.fm/wind/) ?

Also, does anyone know how that elbow in the path forecast comes about? Is there something magical about the waist of Cuba that suddenly makes it turn north?

<comment><USER10> "Because of the passage of an upper-level trough to the north, with Irma starting to feel the steering effects of the westerly flow of the midlatitudes." Described in detail with figures here: [http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2017/09/american-versus- europe...](http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2017/09/american-versus-european- models-and.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> *Katia

</comment><comment><USER12> A fun aspect of this site is that you can change the map projection used.

</comment><comment><USER13> Not sure if this is some display artifact, but the most striking thing to me is how strange the wind patterns are in many parts of North America if you zoom out.</comment>


21 Laws of Computer Programming - <AUTHOR> http://www.devtopics.com/21-laws-of-computer-programming/ <comment><USER2> >It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you enterprise software.

</comment><comment><USER3> ...Laws are supposed to be absolute. Many of these are not absolute.

</comment><comment><USER4> I get mixed feelings from this. Some of the "laws" sound like they're trying to be funny, but others a very real.

<comment><USER5> Probably, you're at an experience level that would make some of them real. Wait for the others to become so :D

I'm in the same crowd.

<comment><USER6> How true. I'm sure the laws will seem funny to people not used to programming...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Inside every small program is a large program struggling to get out._

So true!! I've seen tiny self-contained applications turn into huge suites of software that no one - from the developers to the end users - had anticipated.</comment>


Ask HN: I'm a dev and want to collect money from a website. Any tips? - <AUTHOR>

I've written tons of webapps, professionally and for fun, and know all about the software side of it. I'm more curious about what I should do from a... business?... point of view. Do I want or need an LLC? Is there anything I should to to protect myself? What sort of pages should I put on my site (privacy policy, length of data retention without active subscription, etc)?
The answer generally is "lawyer up" but I am not really looking for legal advice. Hoping for more of a bulleted list of "here are the steps to follow to make sure you're doing things correctly." I'm fine if that list includes a "lawyer up" bullet point but it can't possibly just be that.
Thanks for any help!
edit I've an idea for a web app that might actually be useful enough that people would want to pay me for the privilege of using it. I've never charged for any of my webapps before and, though technically know how to do this, don't know about the non-technical aspects. <comment><USER2> I think you're missing how/or what you're going to be collecting money from or for.

<comment><AUTHOR> It will be a subscription for continued use of my webapp.

<comment><USER3> Didn't you set some sort of mechanism to discontinue usage if the payment wasn't delivered by the customer?

I think you will have to detail what is actually going on in order to get a good response here or else you sound like the bad guy who is baiting unaware customers or something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What is your product you will be selling?

<comment><AUTHOR> A subscription to a web service.

<comment><USER4> Details? It is hard to provide advice to an amorphous product.

<comment><USER5> I guess it's [http://slid.es/](http://slid.es/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Regression without negative examples - <AUTHOR> http://efavdb.com/methods-regression-without-negative-examples/

<comment><USER2> Title should be " _Logistic_ regression without negative examples." Confusingly named as it is, logistic regression is a classification method, not regression. Regression does not have positive or negative examples by definition.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, thanks. I'll change the name. Happy holidays.</comment></comment>


Bird raises $275M Series D round at $2.5B valuation - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/03/bird-raises-275-million-series-d-round-at-2-5-billion-valuation/ <comment><USER2> I honestly wouldn't mind buying a bird scooter to own. I bought a Segway ES4 and it doesn't come with the extra reinforcement the scooter services add after-market around where the pillar connects to the board and is constantly coming loose. Birds always ride really nicely.</comment>


The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dominance of the Stubborn Minority [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://fooledbyrandomness.com/minority.pdf <comment><USER2> Last HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10567630](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10567630)

135 points | 21 days ago | 52 comments

</comment><comment><USER3> In software: [http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LeastFlexibleProtocolWins](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LeastFlexibleProtocolWins)

<comment><USER4> Depends on your perspective. Within a single connection, the most flexible protocol adapts to the least flexible one, but the flexible protocol wins more: it gets to connect, which is more important than the details of how you connect; you just need something you can both agree on. But the flexible protocol will be able to connect with other inflexible protocols, which the inflexible protocol can't.

Easiest example: HTML. Browsers are far more lenient towards bad HTML than they should be according to spec, because it lets them display more websites. Inflexible browsers lose to flexible ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." \- George Bernard Shaw

<comment><USER6> _Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man._

This quote appears here regularly and while I generally agree with the underlying message we should put on our nuance-goggles and consider the amount of energy expended by reasonable people repairing the unreasonable person's path of destruction, and that the progress gauge can go backwards as well as forwards.

<comment><USER7> should be perfectly fine to hold extreme opinions. Bayesian distributions suggests that extreme opinions will be unpopular, and will not find much evidence from the real world, and will be less likely to gain mass following.

<comment><USER8> If only humans were rational bayesian reasoners...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Taleb's point is true, but the style in which he makes it is rambling and inelegant.

Let's hope this is a pre-print of "Skin in the Game" and this gets fixed up by an editor.

<comment><USER10> He recently polled his Twitter followers about that: [https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/672057419841806337](https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/672057419841806337)

      25% Issue as pamphlet
      30% Keep in SITG
      15% Randomize
      30% We're tired of polls

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interesting example here, in Romania, where a very small but vocal minority (atheists and agnostics, 0.2% of the population) have a constant political fight against public funding of religious cults (18 officially recognised), that is the ~0.2% of the annual budget. One of the many points raised is that its their money too and churches should fund themselves from donations, which in turn, should not be tax free.

<comment><USER12> Is that public funding through tax rebates? American "nonprofit" organizations (including churches) enjoy tax-exempt status.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think they call this tyranny of the minority and accepting it can be a slippery slope.

</comment><comment><USER14> What is mainsteam? It's the agreement dependent on subject by an ever- changing, large group of people of what is normal behaviour or what is outside of that. It's ever-changing and by nature made up of lots of different groups of people agreeing on one particular thing at a time.

I've always held a view that minority groups can be some of the most conservative groups around - this is how they persist in a culturally fluid world, by conserving who they are regardless of the social outcome when tested. So I find it wrong that some groups attach themselves to requests from society that are liberal in nature when they are entirely conservative in their own behaviour. But then again, who can fault them? Well, we can.

The definition of "well adjusted" would suggest someone who is open to change. It also suggests a middle-of-the-road approach, although I can't and won't go into too much detail there since that phrase is subjective, but in the understanding that most people will agree with me, I'll make this statement: the most successful people tend to be well adjusted, at least until they reach the pinnacle of their success and their various personal flaws become highlighted through either stress, response to success or simply by way of being more visible.

Because of this traversal of the median range of human behaviour, minority groups are naturally held back. This isn't a social bias ending in -ism, the less successful one is at navigating different groups of society, the less likely one is to be successful. Opportunities shrink. For those of us without strong or singular identity, the world opens up.

And yet we need these outliers - every so often, they come up with new ideas that mainstream humanity wouldn't have thought of on their own, or someone deeply useful simply strongly identifies with a minority group. No matter how unsuccessful their peers seem to be, we have to retain them. But right now we're pitching minority group versus minority group in the only battles they hope to win or lose. This is the way cultures live or die in a pecking order that risks homogenizing differences we sorely need.

My opinion for a long time was simple: fit in or get out. This isn't the way I think any more. The behaviour of key minority groups sometimes offends mainstream-us on a personal level but they represent no real risk to our own hegemony.

So we already know that society works. It has worked for the majority for a long time and minority groups have only seen that situation improve for them. But now they suffer under the inability to progress where there is no more room to progress. We had a wonderful century of massive wins for all of us, but especially minority groups. But it's hard to keep up that progress, eventually you're nitpicking over small details and pointless social mores.

This century might see the end of minority progression, simply because there will be no room left to progress as we have in the past. At some point mainstream society is going to get a new gift: universal tolerance. It could happen within our lifetimes, but likely it'll require those of us older than our late teens to expire to for it to truly pervade.

The concepts we're all dealing with today are already old-fashioned. Minority groups who survive by being intolerant themselves can't last in the face of the movement they kicked off so long ago. This is a blip in history - 20 or 30 years of angry minority groups and a shrinking of groups that survive on intolerance in general. I've carefully not named any, but feel free to to some mental algebra and fill in the blanks with whatever you like. It'll still hold true.

<comment><USER15> Get tolerant or get wrecked sounds great until you look at the details (especially the asymmetric-nuclear-etc ones). Still, well said (not sure on "we need differences" \- that's conveniently kumbaya; I'll settle for "eradicating all differences = monstrous bloodshed so don't do it").

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Anatomy of HATE; If you're not from my caste/religion, you're non-human to me; [http://wh.gov/iyhMK](http://wh.gov/iyhMK)</comment>


What would the job market look like if the current tech bubble suddenly popped? - <AUTHOR> Let's assume we're currently in a tech bubble and it burst rather than deflated.<p>Which types of jobs, companies, demographics of the workforce, locations, etc would be hardest hit? <comment><USER2> Well I lived through the early 2000's tech crash and the 2008 financial crash while working in both industries and to be honest, things weren't as bad as alot of people made them out to be.

For one, big companies continue to hire.

Remember when sama came out and made his are we in a bubble bet ([http://blog.samaltman.com/bubble-talk](http://blog.samaltman.com/bubble- talk)), one of the things he bet on was the valuation of the big companies. Actually his entire bet seemed weird as his first two of three predictions were things that actually tend to happen from a burst bubble. His 3rd prediction was the only one that actually seemed like he was going out on a limb of any kind.

In a burst bubble, these companies actually tend to do pretty well. Lots of great people are available and these companies have figure out their business model so the fundraising crash doesn't tend to hurt them near as much.

If anything, the best up and coming companies tend to do well as VC's close ranks and put their money behind their best bets rather than spread cash around. And as mentioned above the established players do well as they have cash to ride things out and grab the amazing people who are suddenly looking for work.

Big boring companies also keep hiring. General Electric will always need tech workers and while their order book will slow down, they have lots of reoccurring revenue that helps them get through crashes.

Also, I'm going to assume you mean in silicon valley as you didn't mention a location, I think location is still pertinent. As much as we live in a global world, I think most hiring is still local.

As to which jobs get hit, with tech jobs salaries dominate expenses so you really have to cut head count to move the needle when reducing expenses. This can mean senior people go before junior but that's often a penny wise pound foolish view. It means you live through the next quarter but slowly circle the drain as you can't hit your new targets and the vicious cycle continues.

Marketing often goes first, then sales, then tech jobs for non revenue generating features, then, well if you are laying off engineers that work on revenue generating products you are really shuttering the company at that point.

The two demographics I have seen have trouble getting hired in the worst part of a crash are:

\- new grads

\- older workers

Employers get alot more picky, yes they can get pickier than they currently are. The former candidates have no experience and are competing with "seasoned" 20 year vets for the same jobs and the later often price themselves out of jobs or don't have the perfect skill set(read ageism).

<comment><USER3> I can second this. I graduated right after the 2000 dotcom crash. Intel paid me not to show up for the job they offered me. I had a very hard time finding work. I spent the summer learning new things, and eventually I was able to start some consulting work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The recruiting world changes a lot. It goes from trying very hard to find ANY somewhat qualfied candidate to having so many resumes on your desk that you cant keep up. Recruiters have to go from being trying to contact a lot of people to being able to tell who is actually skilled from all the people contacting them.

It's interesting. Recruiters, third party and internal, also tend to be the first to go when a bubble burst.</comment>


Ask Me, Not the Media, What It's Like to Have Schizophrenia - <AUTHOR> http://themighty.com/2015/06/ask-me-not-the-media-what-its-like-to-have-schizophrenia/

<comment><USER2> I went public with my dchizoaffective disorder as a result of the Heaven's Gate mass suicide in San Diego, in 1997.

My objective was to point out that reality is not as concrete as it seems.

[http://www.warplife.com/mdc/books/scizoaffective- disorder/](http://www.warplife.com/mdc/books/scizoaffective-disorder/)</comment>