Netanyahu, Saying Palestinian Mufti Inspired Holocaust, Draws Broad Criticism - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/10/22/world/middleeast/netanyahu-saying-palestinian-mufti-inspired-holocaust-draws-broad-criticism.html <comment><AUTHOR> For background about the Grand Mufti: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haj_Amin_al- Husseini](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haj_Amin_al-Husseini)

Even though he had been sentenced for 10 years in absentia by the British for causing the 1929 Hebron riots that killed over 70 Jews, he was later appointed The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. According to historian Paul Johnson, this appointment is the cause of the conflict today. After WW II he was captured by the French in Berlin and both the British and the Serbians wanted to try him for war crimes but the French let him go to appease the Arabs.

While the Palestinians blame the Israelis for their plight and for not having a country, the true cause was the decision of their ancestors and Arab nations to follow his leadership and to attack the new state of Israel while turning down their own state.

<comment><USER2>
      > For background about the Grand Mufti:
      > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haj_Amin_al-Husseini
      > ...
      > ...
      > While the Palestinians blame the Israelis for their plight and for not
      > having a country, the true cause was the decision of their ancestors and
      > Arab nations to follow his leadership and to attack the new state of Israel
      > while turning down their own state.

Right there, in the wikipedia article, follow the link in the first statement to Mandatory Palestine ...more than one way to skin the cat to suit one's political biases. Anyways, that's all I'll ever say about this.</comment></comment>


Doomsday Clock Moves Closer to Midnight, Signaling Concern Among Scientists - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/26/science/doomsday-clock-countdown-2017.html <comment><USER2> Dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13493396](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13493396)

</comment><comment><USER3> Posted at least 6 times in the last day...

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Doomsday%20Clock&sort=byDate&p...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Doomsday%20Clock&sort=byDate&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)</comment>


Some music in Haskell - <AUTHOR> http://yaxu.org/haskell-hack/

<comment><USER2> Thanks for posting this. I saw his earlier version of this and went hunting for it the other day to no avail.

Giving people the ability to create interesting art with code is too cool.</comment>


Canonical plans to switch versions of Ubuntu to its new Snappy package manager - <AUTHOR> http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/more-stable-future-ubuntu

<comment><USER2> Question, how does this work for stuff like Heartbleed? Do you have to download a diff for every single app that uses OpenSSL? Or is it smart enough to grab one copy of the new library? For that matter, is this going to mean you need to wait for each application to get a new version of openssl in it's "package"?

</comment><comment><USER3> I have been hoping for something like this for some time. I do wonder how large the duplication will be if every app includes all of its dependencies. Maybe some core libraries will still be shared?

The article mentions cryptographically signed packages as a new feature over APT, but APT has had that for ages.</comment>


Selfies push more toward plastic surgery - <AUTHOR> http://www.journalscene.com/article/20140404/SJ01/140409814/1059/selfies-push-more-toward-plastic-surgery

<comment><USER2> Interesting how Dove takes the opposing view:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFkm1Hg4dTI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFkm1Hg4dTI)

Makes me wonder what the net effect of selfies/social media has been on our collective self-consciousness.</comment>


Software Development Trends of the Past Decade - <AUTHOR> https://blog.arctype.com/5-things-that-defined-software-development-this-decade/ <comment><USER2> "[Javascript] has dramatically improved developer productivity by allowing developers to write both client-side software and backend services in the same language."

I see this mentioned a lot as a theoretical advantage, but I don't really see this happening much. It doesn't take that much to switch between, say, Javascript and Python, or Ruby, or PHP, or whatever. Most web scripting languages are, sure, different than Javascript, but it's not like the difference in switching to SQL or R or CSS or something. I don't really see, in either myself or others I've worked with, much of a bonus from using the same language for client and server side.

<comment><USER3> Context and tool switching which can sometimes lower productivity of done often actually does happen. When using JS for both client side and server side it doesn't. From a position of having done both several times in the past years I can tell you it does help

<comment><USER4> I also think it is easier to get started with as onboarding is much simpler as the base language is the same. Going from Android to iOS development was much harder than going to JS to backend development with NodeJS</comment></comment></comment>


Pros of Conses – Lesson learned about lists in Erlang - <AUTHOR> http://vid.bina.me/tools/pros-of-conses <comment><USER2> It's worth noting this is far from unique to Erlang. Any language that models lists this way (Haskell and Lisp immediately spring to mind, but there's plenty of others) share this property.

<comment><USER3> What do you mean "lists this way"?

A list is always a linked list, simply of doubly, and that's the name that defines the datastructure. If you want an other complexity for such-and-such operation use another datasctructure. Be it stack, array / vector, tree, trie, …

Lists are lists in C++, Erlang, Haskell, Obj-C, … If one calls a PHP `array()` or a JS `[]` a list, it's not right in the CS sense, but it's correct in the general sense I guess.

But then again, this is something one learns with time.</comment></comment>


Meet Apple's "Liam" the iPhone recycling robot - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/03/21/apple-creates-robot-to-rip-apart-iphones/ <comment><USER2> Makes me wonder how far away Apple is from a robot that can disassemble an iMac, replace its 5400 RPM HDD with flash storage, and then reassemble it.</comment>


Going with the Flow of Traffic - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/going-with-the-flow-of-traffic-1541612159 <comment><AUTHOR> Interesting article from the WSJ about mathematicians using computational fluid dynamics to alleviate traffic congestion.

You can find a non-paywalled link here: [https://outline.com/YtjyvH](https://outline.com/YtjyvH)</comment>


Uber, Lyft drivers manipulate fares at DCA causing artificial price surges - <AUTHOR> https://wjla.com/news/local/uber-and-lyft-drivers-fares-at-reagan-national <comment><USER2> I dont see how Lyft gets off calling this fraudulent. Seems to me it's the system working as intended, and as it should.

Drivers dont want to drive for under a certain value, so they simply inform the app who adjusts the value to fulfill demand. Seems like its what you want to happen.

<comment><USER3> And it only works as long as all of the drivers in an area agree: one or two drivers who don't join the scheme, and it doesn't work.

<comment><USER4> Not all. The large majority, but not all. There are very likely one or two drivers in the area that don't participate, simply because they aren't in the parking lot at the moment they orchestrate the mass logout. Surge pricing is about supply and demand, so if expected demand is high (like at an airport) they need a lot more than one or two drivers.

<comment><USER5> I don't think it even necessarily needs to be a large majority. It just needs to be enough such that the remaining drivers aren't sufficient to meet demand. Depending on circumstances, that could require anywhere from one driver to all of them.

It's a great illustration of how supply and demand work to determine prices.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, agreed, but these guys are going for maximum rate, so they have to get as many as possible.

<comment><USER5> Indeed. And as the rate grows higher, there's ever more incentive to defect from the scheme. This should be a case study taught in Economics 101, it's so pure and clear!

<comment><USER6> Well, yes. It will settle at the rate they're actually willing to be paid, not the one their "employer" is setting for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This seems like it could also torpedo their Contractor vs. Employee argument.

Contractors get to set rates, employees don't. So you can't say they're contractors AND accuse them of committing fraud when they try to set their own rates.

Now if only someone would develop an app that does this for entire cities. The app could be their version of a union.

<comment><USER8> Under the theory that Uber/Lyft employees are contractors and allowed to set prices, wouldn't coordinating ("conspiring") to do so en masse be considered price fixing?

Personally I think they should be considered employees, but a pro-management federal prosecutor could make some trouble for them.

<comment><USER7> On that note, does it make a difference that they're collectively _refusing work_ rather than collectively _setting prices_? Uber and Lyft are still the ones actually setting the price.

In the end I don't think it will matter, Uber and Lyft could probably code around this pretty easily if it started to affect their bottom line. When they see 100+ drivers in the same place go offline within X seconds of each other, it's a pretty clear indication that there's coordinated action taking place. They probably have enough data from drivers' phones to see that they're sitting still waiting to go back online.

I just hope they don't decide to make an example out of these drivers by banning them...

<comment><USER9> Refusing to sell a product or a service below a specific price is literally what setting prices is.

<comment><USER10> Sounds like forced labor to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> News flash: if you go out of your way to classify your entire workforce as contractors, you don't get to decide when they work or not. It turns out this has consequences on both sides.

If Lyft wants to decide when their drivers are working, there's a process for this:

1) Hire employees

2) Give them a schedule

3) Pay them hourly plus mileage

<comment><USER12> And suddenly Uber/Lyft are like any other Taxi company just with a massive valuation.

<comment><USER11> There's probably a balance to be struck, because part of the ridesharing design's efficiency is that if demand drops they can drop their rates paid to drivers, and the drivers who don't want to drive at those prices will stop.

So if Lyft starts to say "we always want X drivers available as a base load, and we'll open up to contractors to fill in the demand spikes" it might make the contractor role too unreliable for anyone to bother doing it. At the very least, their costs would go up for both the employed drivers and the extra contractor drivers. Since their valuations comes mainly from a cheap labor pool, that presumably kills it.

But in the current situation, if all their drivers at the airport sign off and say "I'm not driving at these prices," you get surge pricing to make it worth driving, that increases costs too. That's what happens when you're buying labor from independent contractors - if they don't want to sell it to you at a particular time for any reason, they don't have to.

The real question here is "If Lyft recognizes when these organized sign-offs are happening, calls their bluff, and refuses to activate surge pricing, what happens?"

Do the drivers really refuse to drive at the regular pricing and go home? Or do they all give in to a more tamper-resistant algorithm and keep driving at regular rates?

<comment><USER13> Can we please stop referring to these services as "sharing"? Lyft actually started as a company that coordinated the sharing of rides, i.e., no money was involved. But the "sharing" pretense has long since past for all of these companies.

<comment><USER14> We need a new word for "taxi companies with cute apps, unsustainable pricing/wages and lots of Silicon Valley venture capital propping them up" to distinguish them from old-school taxi companies if we're gonna quit saying "rideshare".

Any suggestions?

<comment><USER15> I prefer unlicensed taxis.

<comment> crooked-v While this is accurate, I think the subtext of it conflicts with the common anecdotal claims (including mine) far preferring Uber over actual licensed taxis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is really curious, in that it appears to be a normal strike for higher wages, except it's being coordinated on an hourly basis for just a few minutes until the company agrees to pay more!

Contractors can decide when and how they want to work, and therefore determine the price at which to sell their labor at, so to me it seems they are simply exercising their rights here. Like others have mentioned, if most drivers don't choose to participate, then this "scheme" wouldn't function.

<comment><USER17> Not 100% sure I'd call it a strike but its just the free market working quickly. I have a feeling though this will spread around the world and be adapted by drivers in many other countries. I've traveled a bit in South America and Uber drivers there really do earn barely anything - I dont know how they afford the gas - e.g. 1/2 hour trip for $3-$4.

<comment><USER18> I've also traveled in South America and relied on Uber heavily. I talked with a few drivers, and they all found Uber to actually be worth it. For example, Colombia's minimum wage when converted to 40hrs/wk/month comes out to ~$1.50/hr. It's not a bad gig there, and the cost of living is relatively low. The bigger problem is the danger of driving for Uber, as taxistas are not a fan of Uber drivers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Few things interesting here -

One is that the workers are getting paid more per the algorithm that these companies designed to charge customers - that is, they are getting the company to facilitate higher payments but the company itself isn't being charged more! So in that case, the drivers are simply arguing that uber/lyft are artificially undervaluing their time because clearly these passengers are willing to pay 15% more to them to get home...

\--

It is telling to me how often Lyft/Uber/et all emphasize that their philosophy is that these gig economy jobs are just something you do a tiny bit extra to get some extra cash in your pocket. That is they are designed to be a small supplement to the job that provides you with most of your income, so hey, we don't really have to worry about working conditions, etc.

But I'm not sure I believe their stats. Over the past few years it is nearly 100% of the drivers I get that are doing it full-time, and many/most of the "teacher moonlighting for extra vacation money" type drivers have given way to lots of former actual taxi drivers who quit their taxi company and now work both uber/lyft.

<comment><USER20> I wouldn't be so convinced that passengers are willing to pay these surge prices to go home. Sure, the first time a passenger encounters this artificial surge, they're already planning on taking uber/lyft home so they'll pay it because they probably don't have another option immediately available. But the next time a passenger arrives at DCA (could be a month or two), they might remember uber/lyft is expensive when they land so they would have arranged a different option to leave the airport. Consumer reaction to prices changes may not always be immediate. These drivers are operating in their own interest in the short term but who knows if they are in the long term.

<comment><USER21> 100%. I fly out of DCA/IAD, and each time weigh the options of parking at the airport and taking a rideshare service. Last time I used Uber from DCA it was much more expensive than I expected, and have been parking there since.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "On average, Lyft drivers earn over $20 per hour."

I wonder if this figure takes into account all the waiting time, or just driving time on the app. If it is the latter, then that's a pretty scummy thing to say, considering that most drivers spend less than a third of the time actually driving people to their destination, putting the actual number closer to 7.00 an hour.

<comment><USER12> Also does that include repairs, depreciation, insurance etc. of the car? What about fuel?

<comment><USER23> It doesn't. After expenses/taxes deducted, they're making less than minimum wage. To me this just shows how much financially illiterate many Americans are; zero foresight beyond the amount in their bank account at any given moment.

<comment><USER24> One of my lyft drivers had their car in the shop for 6 months (some dispute with the kia dealership, they assured me that their lemon lawyer would recover the car soon) and the car they were driving for lyft was a rental from enterprise. Desperate people are taking these gig jobs and it's scary how far in over their head some of them are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> When low paid workers coordinate their efforts to increase their pay it's called an "artificial price surge" and allegations of fraud are thrown around.

When highly paid executives, investors, and board members coordinate their efforts to increase their pay what does the media call it?

<comment><USER26> Price fixing, predatory pricing, bid rigging, collusion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> As Charles Munger said "Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome".

</comment><comment><USER28> As much as I would be displeased if my fare were manipulated, I can only blame Uber and Lyft for this. They created an incentive for drivers to act as a unit, and groups of drivers are figuring it out. Really makes you long for the transparent, posted pricing of municipal taxis

<comment><USER29> >> Really makes you long for the transparent, posted pricing of municipal taxis

...Absolutely not.

I live in Malta, where Uber does not exist, but similar services do + local regulated taxis.

It is extremely clear who gets a rating and who does not give a f### about reputation and repeat business.

The only ones who use the real taxis here are tourists. I don't know anybody local (expat or native), who would use the "real" taxi company.

<comment><USER30> Taxi's are not allowed to price gouge, they also cannot refuse you service, etc, etc. I don't see that as a bad thing.

<comment><USER31> Depends on the state. Also, the GP mentioned Malta, which isn't the US.

<comment><USER30> They mentioned Malta but they were responding to a comment that was made in a general context. There are benefits to having a regulated taxi system. Saying that unless those benefits are realized at every single place on earth, they don't mean much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I can think of a ton of technical ways Uber and Lyft can combat this. And they probably will. And they'll be short term happy and long term foolish. Because they're treating the symptoms, not the cause.

<comment><USER33> I assume you're proposing that the cause is 'low' wages. So let's say drivers earned an average of $50/hour. This would put them in an income bracket such that they earn more than 95% of Americans. Do you think that people would not then exploit a legal angle to bump their earn up to let's say $70/hour, if they found out a way to do so?

<comment><USER34> Once you account for self employment tax, gas, wear and tear on the car, and a total lack of job benefits, an Uber driving being paid $50/hour probably makes less than someone getting paid $25/hour in a steady job. For sure they would be making wayyy less than the top %5 of Americans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm not a lawyer, nor do I agree with what I'm about to say, but the drivers need to be careful, because they might run afoul of collusion.

Since they are all independent contractors, they are "rivals" in the same industry, so with all of them cooperating to increase fares for their benefit (and based on my understanding of the law), they are technically colluding.

<comment><USER36> They should just form a union. Contractors can form one - they don't get _all_ the privileges (for example, the employer isn't legally required to bargain with them, and can retaliate against strikes) but it'd probably permit this sort of short-term work stoppage.

<comment><USER35> Depends on the state, but federally, independent contractors are excluded from the right to form or participate in unions as defined by the National Labor Relations Act.

EDIT: independent contractors are excluded from the protections of their union actions.

<comment><USER36> [https://cwa-union.org/about/rights-on-job/legal-toolkit/my-e...](https://cwa- union.org/about/rights-on-job/legal-toolkit/my-employer-says-i-am-independent- contractor-what-does-mean)

> As an independent contractor, the terms and conditions of the work you > perform are set out in a contract between you and the employer. Even though > you are not considered an "employee" under federal labor law, you may still > join a union. However, you should keep in mind that a unit of independent > contractors is not subject to the same privileges and protections as a > regular union bargaining unit. For example, an employer is not under the > same obligation to bargain with a union regarding contract terms for an > independent contractor that it is to bargain over issues affecting its > regular employees. Also, an independent contractor who went on strike would > not be protected from employer reprisals under the National Labor Relations > Act.

Plenty of contract plumbers, electricians, etc. are members of unions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I have no issue with them not being available and having rates go up. that is what they system should do. I know uber/lyft drivers that turn off the app after drops off in areas they like being so that they don't get prompted to take a nearby fare.

I do find it annoying that these drivers are upset at the fees. Look, before then all you could do is work for a taxi service and they make uber and lyft look like saints for the most part. you are free to work for whomever you want and you got into the deal knowing what it was.

<comment><USER38> _> You are free to ride with whomever you want, and you got into the deal knowing what it was._

This cuts both ways, though. Taxis still exist! If you don't want to take Uber or Lyft, you are free to take a normal taxi, use public transportation, arrange your own ride, etc.

<comment><USER39> Or use one of the dozens of local competitors that are popping up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> "Over 75% drive less than 10 hours a week to supplement existing jobs. On average, Lyft drivers earn over $20 per hour."

These statistics could be very misleading. For example let's say one driver works 4 hours, another 6 hours, another 10 hours with all three making making $25/hr and the final one works 80 hours making $10/hour. In this scenario 75% of drivers are driving 10 or less hours a week and the mean driver hourly rate is over $20. However 80% of the hours driven are by one driver making $10/hour. This one driver is clearly the workhorse of the ride-sharing company making the bulk of the profit.

</comment><comment><USER41> Oh man these guys think this is fraudulent? They should come to China. When rebates were all the rage, where the ride hailing companies would pay drivers subsidies, they developed software that could fake the GPS address on the phone and pick up fake rides without actually driving and get massive rebates

</comment><comment><USER42> I don't like the word "manipulating". It is like a trade union negotiating better terms. If they do it voluntarily without intimidating the drivers then I don't see any problem. They should not feel guilty.

Also, in a Lyft's statement:

> Over 75% drive less than 10 hours a week to supplement existing jobs.

I wonder, are those 75% working part-time or full-time? It must be tiring driving 2 more hours after 9-hour working day.

</comment><comment><USER43> I've always been fascinated by the way Uber has implemented their market dynamics using surge pricing. Uber isn't a market for rides in the way that, say, a stock exchange is a market for stocks. There aren't drivers setting their asking price and riders making bids, nor is there an order book where matches are made at a clearing price, and understandably so - I can't imagine how to build a comprehensible UX around a "true" bid-ask marketplace.

Instead, Uber presumably has historic estimates of the supply and demand curves at different locations, different times of the week, different passenger / rider populations (business travelers or tourists?) and then uses the measured "true" supply and demand to find a clearing price, and therefore decide whether or not a market is going to surge.

The UX of surge is important too - the raison d'être of surge pricing is to bring more drivers to an undersupplied market. That means that when you detect a supply or demand shock that would lead to surge pricing, you want to increase the surge as quickly as possible to send out the "we need more drivers" signal, because there's a latency in getting more supply (drivers have to relocate). Conversely, Uber doesn't want to drop the surge price too quickly - they want downward movement to be sticky - because you don't want to tell drivers "there's more money to be made over here" just to renege on that promise before the supply can even get there.

So if surge is sticky on the way down, these drivers may have found a way to exploit the pricing algorithm - simulate a price shock then reap the rewards. If surge were not sticky on the way down, this strategy might be much less effective - a few drivers would get better fares, but the market would return to equilibrium faster.

None of this is to say that you can't have cartel behavior in a "bid- ask"-style market too, but I suspect this is a "hack" of Uber's pricing UX as much as anything else.

</comment><comment><USER44> That's one clever way to unionize...

</comment><comment><USER45> This seems like a logical outcome considering the company and contractors have an increasingly disconnected and at times adversarial relationship.

The entire gig economy is based on shifting risk onto the contractor (demand changes, benefits, protections regarding injury / illness)... and to some extent onto the consumer too.

</comment><comment><USER46> Both companies claim that drivers are independent contractors who can drive when and where they want, so how can they say that these drivers are in violation of anything?

</comment><comment><USER47> Uber/Lyft probably knew this was going on already, but since it increases revenue, probably was looking the other way. It's going to be hard to ignore this now that it's getting media attention.

</comment><comment><USER48> The only economic model that make Uber and Lyft make sense is if drivers are willing to take low pay (considering all their other costs). If they make more money than cab drivers, the whole model falls apart, because then cabs will be cheaper and the service won't be competitive. (Granted, the lack of having to pay for medallions saves them a bunch of money)

I think the only long-term business plan that makes sense for them is black cars, or people who don't want the hassle of Taxis.

<comment><USER49> Keep in mind that uber was successful early on not because of price, but because it was significantly more reliable then a cab. I was willing to pay a bit more then a cab to get to the airport because I knew I could count on that uber to arrive at my house on time.

Uber and Lyft are not trying to be cost competitive with cabs; they are trying to be cost competitive with public transit.

<comment><USER50> I'm still convinced that the only innovation that ever happened in this space by Uber was the guaranteed ride. They chose to fight (ok, ignore) the taxi regulations, but from a features perspective the taxi apps already did all this. The difference was that any random person off the street could still flag your cab so in practice you rarely got a taxi if you weren't in a "hot spot". Reliability matters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I've definitely experienced this at DCA, and it's worth nothing as well that it sometimes take _hours_ to get out of the airport due to the insane traffic jams right around the terminals and in the parking garages. DCA has gone from my favorite airport to literally my least favorite over the last year or so. I've been using Dulles instead even though it's way less convenient.

<comment><USER52> DCA is also one of the easiest airports in the US to access the metro(public transit) out of the terminal. Is there a reason you just don't hop on the yellow line and get off at a less congested stop closer to your final destination?

<comment><USER21> Metro's hours are usually the problem for me, usually getting to the airport after the last train has left.

<comment><USER52> Absolutely, but in that case, the issue about extreme traffic congestion is much less likely. Even though traffic in the area can be difficult at times, 1AM seems like an unlikely time to run into that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Sounds like a cartel. Where parties mutually agree to cut supply to keep prices at a certain level.

<comment><USER54> You forgot the kicker to the definition of a cartel: "restricting competition".

The events in the article do not indicate that they are somehow prohibiting other drivers from accessing the platform. While it's certainly possible they're strong arming the drivers at the airport, overall they're not restricting someone from signing up to become a Lyft or Uber driver.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> > They can't afford to pickup people at Reagan for $4 in rush hour traffic.

Are they really getting paid $4 to give someone a ride? That seems so low that drivers would be incentivized to find another job.

<comment><USER32> I'm not sure if the number is accurate but I do know how amazingly stubborn humans can be in finding a new job. I've had people refuse to quit a job that they groan about every day when I've offered them almost double the salary to work elsewhere with far better terms.

Humans are risk averse and those who live paycheck to paycheck are especially so. It defies logic until you consider that their fear of the unknown + small chance they end up with no job has a massive adjustment weight applied to it in their minds.

<comment><USER56> Maybe that's all true, but it doesn't really make sense for Uber/Lyft. They could go back to their job driving whenever they wanted.

<comment><USER32> You're applying a healthy dose of rationalism to this. I don't have the answer but I think there's a possibility that you can't expect rationalism when you're asking people to walk away from the major pattern in their life which puts food in their kids mouths.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> I don't quite understand this:

"The lot fills with 120 to 150 drivers sometimes for hours, waiting for the busy evening rush. "

Are they saying drivers site and wait for hours to do this?

<comment><USER13> Some people actually do not want to be at home (I once had a taxi driver who drove us from Manhattan to Brooklyn, then waited for us to go home, hours later, all the while texting his family that he had to keep working).

Also, leaving the car turned off and waiting in a lucrative parking lot saves gas, wear and tear on the car, and drastically decreases the opportunities to get into an accident. All in all, it is not a bad plan. Taxi drivers have done this for years (which is, ironically, probably one of reasons Uber got started in the first place -- in SF it was almost impossible to get a cab, because so many cabbies just wanted to get airport fares).

<comment><USER58> The driver could be doing elance and mechanical turk work while waiting for your ride home!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Experienced this at LAX - another driver called my driver, commenting "It's at 3.5!!" \- well played, I don't fault them for this at all.

</comment><comment><USER60> [https://callaride.com](https://callaride.com) is launching next month (local to the Tampa Bay, FL area only for now), and one of their key differentiators is giving drivers the ability to set their rate. There will be minimums and maximums in-place, but they will have more control than with Uber or Lyft.

Note: I am a third-party PM working with the web and mobile application teams.

</comment><comment><USER61> I think many people are missing some facts from the article. They aren't so much going on "strike" as they are just turning off their apps on masse 5 minutes before plane lands to trigger surge pricing, and then turning back on to catch the passengers at surge pricing. Obviously customers are still choosing to accept such fares, but may not know that the real price (if they wait a bit) would be much lower.

</comment><comment><USER62> Seems like a small software tweak is all it would take to obliterate this tactic, like updating surge pricing every time a driver logged in.

<comment><USER13> The whole point of surge pricing is to get more drivers on the street. If they decrease it that quickly, then there is zero incentive for a driver to leave their house and get in their car and get out on the street, because by the time they do that, the prices are back down.

<comment><USER63> In fact I am surprised it reacts as fast as the article describes.

<comment><USER38> I assume it's a combination of that and the sudden demand of a plane full of people all opening up their apps to look for a ride simultaneously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Why does everyone assume the workers are screwing Uber/Lyft?

Uber/Lyft make more money this way. The passengers are getting screwed.

</comment><comment><USER65> What's the rational for percentage based fees? The technology cost for a 4 mile ride is the same for a 50 mile ride.

<comment><USER66> It's not just percentage based. There is a fixed booking fee sometimes as well.

<comment><USER24> Some cities seem to get far better rates too. In Boston most of my trips were around $4-5, maybe closer to $15 to get to logan. When I was in Columbus it was like the trips were arbitrarily twice as much, hovering $7-10 for similar distances. Miami probably had the highest rates I've experienced (Like $25+ to get to the other side of the biscayne bay), traffic was terrible as well so I wasn't as shocked, but it seemed much higher than going a similar distance in LA. I was still able to get rides in 10 minutes in most cases everywhere, so it wasn't for lack of free drivers, it seemed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> They can just counteract this by refusing to turn on surge pricing if they detect a large number of drivers disappearing if they predict that they'll come back shortly. Should be easy to predict that pattern and counteract it, unless the drivers are willing to skip work for an extended period of time.

<comment><USER68> But why should they?

Both Uber and Lyft also profit from this because in the end it's the customers who pay the difference.

So I don't really see either of these companies wasting time and effort on fixing this "problem".

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> I've heard about this tactic from people working at Uber years ago. I think they're aware that it happens. The way it was described to me is the Ubers are in a line at the airport and each car signs off except the very first. That way rides keep coming and the first person in line gets surge pricing

<comment><USER58> This seems easy to fix on Uber/Lyft's side --- to recognize that they don't need to maintain book depth. At the airport, since passengers are effectively queued up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> This is an age old hack. I'm not sure why this is being reported as new.

They did this since the early days of Surge Pricing.

</comment><comment><USER71> Don't Uber and Lyft lose on every ride? I wonder if the increased fair caused by this cooperation makes the average ride profitable. Perhaps the price of a ride is more elastic than Uber and Lyft think? Especially at airports.

</comment><comment><USER72> Unionization and striking for the gig economy. You love to see it!

</comment><comment><USER73> This is hilarious. Props to the drivers. Capitalism at it's finest: assumption of information imbalance.

If uber and lyft do nothing, this behavior will autocorrect itself: expect a few drivers to rebel/revolt after the news of the behavior spreads. Keeping the secret will get harder and harder.

<comment><USER74> But it doesn't have to be secret, ad defectors only hurt themselves by accepting lower pay for the same fare. That seems like a strong incentive to play along.

<comment><USER73> Exactly, but at some price point, for a certain individual, the acceptance of the lower fair is a better deal to bc of a guaranteed outcome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> I've seen something like this predictably happen with Grab in my office area in Singapore. At 5 you suddenly can't get cabs. You can at 4:55.

</comment><comment><USER76> All this discussion about employee/contractor situation or possible collusion won't matter after Uber/Lyft close this loophole and this can be done easily. It makes no sense that the drivers would allow the reporter to publicize this trick.

</comment><comment><USER77> Human dis-ingenuity has to be admired, beautiful!

</comment><comment><USER78> Ahh, the qualities of competitive markets. If theres antitrust laws, there should be similar policies from the workers' side as well.

<comment><USER31> So we should go after strikers because they're depriving their employer of money?

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> Seems to me that if they're contractors they should have the ability to set their own rates. What's unfortunate is that they have to trick the app.

<comment><USER80> If Uber was a true platform with sellers able to ask for a price the wouldn't need this indirect means of influencing it.

<comment><USER58> That's not true. The cabbies would still need a way to pressure each other to not accept lower fares.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> I wonder if this is legal?

With the drivers classified as independent contractors rather than employees would cooperation between drivers to manipulate prices run afoul of antitrust law?

<comment><USER42> Is not a ridesharing company the one who sets and manipulates the prices?

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> I personally believe that driver's compensation is a valid discussion, but defrauding the system is not the way to do it. Uber/Lyft should just carefully identify and ban the cheaters and the lesson should spread as efficiently as the planning to cheat.

<comment><USER5> How is it fraud?

<comment><USER83> I would imagine he sees it as fraud because these are drivers who are ready and willing to drive and are waiting on fares but are not indicated on the app as so.

So when someone uses the app to find out about nearby rides, it shows no one, then it ups the rate to try and lure further drivers. Or the few drivers that are on the app currently. Then when the price is "right", all the waiting cars turn on the app at once to get the "surge" price.

These people are exploiting the rules of the system to violate the spirit of the system. The more available cars, the lower the price.

The more people find out that drivers are doing this, the more likely some form of retaliation will follow.

Either users will just start using cabs again because the price is no different or they'll do something else. Like give default bad reviews to any airport trip that they suspect of manipulating surge pricing.

<comment><USER84> Drivers are _not_ ready and willing to drive. They are ready and willing to drive _for a higher rate_. Lyft and Uber provide that higher rate when there is sufficient demand and insufficient supply. Working as designed, yo.

Multi-billion-dollar companies do not need you to cape up for them. Somehow, _somehow_ , they will survive against those mendacious poor people who have found a way to represent their requirements to the company.

<comment><USER83> Where did I say this was a good or bad thing? Nowhere.

I described things that could happen if the practice becomes too exploitative.

Also, I can see the argument that it violates the TOS for the drivers. The drivers agree to drive for the price determined by the service. They are then using exploits to manipulate that price.

If they don't want to drive for X fare, then they shouldn't be in their car.

And this is an incredibly complicated situation because there are at least three different principles involved. The driver, the company, and the passenger.

In some way, the passenger is being taken advantage of. The passenger _also_ has a contract with the company. And that part assumes that the price is determined fairly and not being manipulated by outside forces.

<comment><USER84> _> Where did I say this was a good or bad thing? Nowhere._

You didn't. But nobody perturbs that many electrons if they don't have an opinion on the topic (and I'll be real, I've got one too but I'm not trying to cloak it in neutrality). And then we get this:

 _> In some way, the passenger is being taken advantage of. _

This is nonsensical. It also proves out the hunch I expressed from my last post, so thank you for doing the legwork for me.

As to why it is nonsensical: the passenger is in no way being "taken advantage of", except insofar as Lyft and Uber already commit obvious fuckery on the regular. The prices are "being manipulated" all over the place--I get different prices on Uber than my girlfriend does when we're standing next to one another!--and there is no expectation that "outside forces" (oooooh) are somehow kept out of it.

The passenger is being given a price at which they will be transported. _That 's it._ The driver is being given a rate at which they will do the transporting. _That 's it._ If they both agree, the ride happens and Lyft/Uber take their cut. This is how a two-sided market maker is supposed to work.

I don't know why it would be okay for Uber and Lyft to fiddle-fart with prices but it's not okay for drivers to say "I won't drive for less than $X". Why are you choosing to shade, to preferentially "see the argument" against poor people when it means that they might make a little money using a market the way a market is supposed to work?

<comment><USER83> > This is nonsensical. It also proves out the hunch I expressed from my last > post, so thank you for doing the legwork for me.

How is it nonsensical? Is the end-consumer just supposed to sit and watch drivers and the company fight to see how much money they can extract from their wallet?

Stop trying to make outside forces seem like some sort of sinister scare tactic. It betrays _your_ bias.

The agreement is that Uber/Lyft set the prices based on the number of drivers in the area. It's ok by the very nature of the agreement both the drivers and the passengers agree to for using the app.

It's ok for the drivers to say "I won't drive for less than $X". What's not ok is saying "I'll sit here and not drive and force a surge so I can then take advantage of a situation I caused." If they weren't at the airport, that's one thing. But they sit at the airport and pretend to not be waiting for fares so they can force a surge. Then they turn on the app so they can both be readily available and get the surge.

Uber/Lyft get their cut either way. The people getting the brunt of the higher fares are the passengers. So dismissing them as a concerned party is only a tactic to defend the drivers.

Are the passengers also not part of the "poor people"?

<comment><USER84> _> How is it nonsensical? Is the end-consumer just supposed to sit and watch drivers and the company fight to see how much money they can extract from their wallet?_

Who says the consumer has to take an Uber or a Lyft at all? They have _exactly_ the same right as the driver to not take a ride. The demand curve is elastic; demand goes down as price goes up. Consumers are not locked into Uber or Lyft. Taxis exist. DCA is connected to two train lines.

 _> Stop trying to make outside forces seem like some sort of sinister scare tactic. It betrays _your_ bias._

Betrays? You get that I'm totally owning my bias, yes? And that I am not the one who is coloring driver action while ignoring Uber and Lyft's internal price fuckery?

Price fluctuations because Uber's internal model knows that I'll pay more for a ride than my girlfriend will are no more legitimate than this, and yet you just let those slide and focus, for some reason, on those "outside forces".

 _> But they sit at the airport and pretend to not be waiting for fares so they can force a surge. Then they turn on the app so they can both be readily available and get the surge._

So?

That is their only lever for expressing their willingness to work at a given price. If Uber and Lyft provided mechanisms for declaring price levels--"I am only willing to take rides at $X or more"\--then this wouldn't happen. But that would reduce the cheap, high-volume rides that make Uber and Lyft their money, so of course they are uninterested in doing it. So drivers have their lever, and they are using it.

I'm gonna be real for a sec: what you're saying amounts to "they need to work for the rich people at the rich people's price because only rich people get to make decisions."

 _> Are the passengers also not part of the "poor people"? _

Compared to Uber and Lyft: sure! Compared to drivers: _generally not_ ; of course, there are exceptions...but probably relatively few exceptions leaving DCA via Uber or Lyft).

But they don't have to use Uber and Lyft to leave DCA. Consumers have other options that they can leverage. If nothing else, taxis are a nearly hard upper bound on pricing.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


New $70 Input Device is 200x More Accurate than Kinect, Has SDK - <AUTHOR> http://leapmotion.com/#hn

<comment><USER2> pretty sure they will get sued out of existence..</comment>


Show HN: I built a free, simple login service. Would you use this? - <AUTHOR> https://login.land/ <comment><USER3> I agree with kenji's (dead) comment.

I'd rather set up login functionality on my own server. If you use a third party service, their downtime becomes your downtime. Worse, you're injecting another company into your relationship with your users. If that were necessary, I'd choose one the customer was already familiar with, like Google, Facebook or Twitter.

Setting up login isn't very difficult and libraries exist for most webdev languages to make it even easier. It's definitely not worth 5% of my revenue.

<comment><USER4> Login management should be built into the browsers instead. Imagine a UI where you go to log in and instead of a text/email field for login and a password field you get a drop down with a list of your personas that you've created with the option of adding a new one. Under the hood it would use a public/private key pair to authenticate you with the site.

Browsers could implement a service that backs up your personas and syncs them across your devices. Ideally the syncing should be cross browser too and allow me to use my own servers for this if I choose.

<comment><USER5> That sounds very much like the goals of Mozilla's Persona service. While it required a separate service and some JavaScript, the idea was that it could be supported natively by browsers in the long run.

Unfortunately, it was shut down in 2016 due to lack of interest. (Coincidentally, I just spent this past week hacking on its source code.)

<comment><USER6> I wonder if it just wasnt the right time and if the project could be revived in a couple years. It seems like a great direction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If I had some smaller website that I charge nothing or barely anything on, I might. If I had a bigger SaaS product, probably not. I wouldn't say your pricing is necessarily unfair, but paying 5% for what is probably a very small part of the application, I couldn't stomach.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! I'm open to changing the fee – is there a % fee you would be more comfortable with?

<comment><USER8> FWIW: I think the user you are replying to is honest but an unusual case.

5% on payments might be OK until things starts to take off.

Source: I've helped launch a successful business with Shopify and Paypal 10 or so years ago. Maybe could have saved a lot in fees but that solution was so nuch easier than the rest that it was easily worth it.

Edit: the webshop and payment solution was later changed to something less expensive.

<comment><USER7> The way I understand their pricing is that it's whatever Stripe charges plus another 5% on top of that. I'd feel a lot better about 5% flat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am afraid, I would not use it. As others pointed it out, login is such a small part of a system that it's not worth employing a 3rd party service to get it working. Also, using this service requires trust. I personally don't use nor implement FB, Google, etc logins either as I don't trust them.

</comment><comment><USER10> Wouldn't it be "wrong" to teach my users to trust login emails coming from a foreign domain? Also, how do you plan to keep your emails out of spam folders and blacklists? From your website it wasn't clear to me how I would check the login code for validity.

<comment><USER11> I know where you are coming from but it's sad that new service email is assumed to land in "spam". Spam was meant for special, not default.

<comment><USER12> Original intent notwithstanding, defaulting communication to a junk box is absolutely the correct stance given the current signal to noise ratio in email.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is actually a really cool idea. I think the people who are saying they don't want to inject a 3rd party in the middle of their business are missing the point or are working on projects large enough that this doesn't make sense.

A 5-7% overall fee (once stripe's fees are taken into account) could make sense for a lot of small businesses that don't want to manage this stuff, although I feel realistically you could reduce your fee significantly for larger customers.

The fee structure also starts to make a lot more sense if the focus is less on login, and more about making it really easy to monetize your product (different subscription tiers, gating features, pricing suggestions, funnel analysis, a landing page generator, etc).

Regardless I've built side projects before that still have lots of daily active users that I never monetized because I couldn't be bothered to do all the payment and subscription integration work.

If I could start a new project today and know that I have:

1) User management (auth, password reset, etc) which is tedious to reimplement 2) Payments

Working from day one that's a very enticing idea, although you'll need to build faith that your service is reliable and will be around for a long time to get people to start using it.

My email is in my bio, feel free to reach out, I'd love to chat about it a bit more.

</comment><comment><USER14> No.

If my app is small, I'll roll my own or use the free tier from Auth0 or Okta.

If my app gets big, I'll roll my own or pay for Auth0 or Okta.

Like a lot of SAAS ideas, a login service is: too critical to trust with an unknown, already a mature SAAS offering elsewhere, and easy enough to implement yourself if you don't want to pay for it.

</comment><comment><USER15> I like the idea but what benefits do you provide over using SSO with Google and setting up stripe myself? I'm not sure ease of use would bring me to use you over what is currently available

</comment><comment><USER16> I am currently using Auth0 which has all the cool functionality of logging in with 3rd party services, user management, and so forth. I think I am paying them $25/m to use it, something fairly trivial but non-zero.

If I were getting started with logins again, I'd say I could pay you $250 one time just to download all the code, and roll it out on my own systems in minutes. This way I'd have user auth with easiest setup, and no need to reinvent it on my own. Probably.

But, are you just testing things, or is Login.land real? Since your own login system asks for password, instead of email-based auth like you are showing in the screenshots, I suspect that maybe this is just a test :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely early stages – mostly looking for feedback on the landing page / demo!

Agree that it's hard to compete with more full-service solutions like Auth0/Firebase. Maybe there's some variant of this, like self-hosted, that could work :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm currently building a kind of game website that needs a login system.

I like the idea of going passwordless and just checking an email and clicking a button. That seems low friction. I like that you don't require a credit card from me. I also don't expect to charge users ever so I like that the service would be free.

On the other hand, my hope in building my current project is that I'll show it some people and they'll enjoy it and I'll keep working on it and more people will keep using it etc. If that does happen I'd want complete control over the login system and I'd hate to be in a situation where I couldn't make changes to the system (or remove your component) because my users were already logging in via loginland.

For example, I imagine a future where people love my game it's taking off, but there are problems with your service. If I replace it, I have to figure out a way to preserve the accounts and logins of current users while simultaneously giving a good experience to future users. It seems easier to just do a minimal login system on my own now and improve it as needed.

Finally, if I were in a money making venture, I'd have the same concerns plus I'd realize the cost of 5% is probably disproportionate to the savings - <USER2> would be having to implement a very well understood solution.

</comment><comment><USER18> My first thought when I was going through the page: HN will not see much value in this given it's a highly technical crowd.

I urge you NOT to get discouraged, and to chat with non-technical online small business builders: you'd find many who market primarily on Instagram, who are just figuring out how to get a nice website for their brand.

I see a lot of value if you position your service as a way for them to offer a tiered loyalty program for their customers: i.e. "log-in via loginland, buy on our site and rack up points that you can redeem later!".

Not sure what the integration would look like with their existing website builder stack, but could be fruitful to look into this.

Also, there are MANY brands looking to spin up their first online store for their brand - may even make sense to offer a very basic product listing that lets them sell products and manage loyalty programs easily with their customers.

Just a few suggestions that stemmed from recent conversations with founders of these kinds of small scale Insta-marketed brands.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this comment, it was really encouraging!

Do you know if there's a community where these Insta founders hang out? I'd love to chat with you more if you're open to it, I'm @benzguo on twitter!

<comment><USER18> Hey Ben, yes I'm down to chat (email in bio).

TLDR: Our company's target audience is small brands that market primarily on Insta & Tik tok w/out websites yet - in India. So far, it's been a very manual process to build a list of them. After every conversation we have, we ask them for referrals (interestingly, Insta-based small business owners seem to be well connected in India). There are also event organizers that have insta profiles where they showcase brands that present at their events.

Happy to chat in greater detail, & all the best!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I recently made the toss up between Auth0 and my own system. Ultimately I couldn't bring myself to use Auth0, it wasn't the price but the lockin that got me. Being able to log into a product is a key gate and I don't want to lose control over that even if it is slightly more work in the early days. What's more, it becomes extremely hard to migrate away from.

As someone else suggested in here, I'd be happy to do a one off payment for a system under my control. However, a handing over the literal keys to my product is not something that I'm comfortable doing, especially without reassurances that I can easily migrate away from it. The fact that there are so many good libraries that deal with the most painful parts of this just make the sale harder for me.

</comment><comment><USER10> Your fee example seems either plain wrong or dishonest. If you use Stripe to handle payments, the fee of using your service must be higher than using Stripe directly. But you claim that Stripe would take 35c, but you only 25c.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll try to make this clearer, thanks for the feedback! You'd pay both, the Loginland fee on top of Stripe's rate. (This is a pretty common pricing model for platforms – BuyMeACoffee has a similar 5% rate on top of Stripe). Open to suggestions! :)

<comment><USER10> So it's 2% Stripe fee plus 5% loginland fee = 7%? You repackage and resell Stripe's payment service but tack on more than double their commission?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> A few too many steps, don't you think?

Why would the Login website redirect to Loginland instead of just sending the email directly and displaying an "please check your email" popup? One less page load.

Why would the email redirect to Loginland, not to the original website? OK maybe that's absolutely necessary because of some invasive anti-privacy user tracking, but even then, why would Loginland website tell you to _close_ the window and go back to the _original_ window (what if the user closed it already??), which would only then redirect to original website?

Seems like a lot of ceremony for nothing.

</comment><comment><USER21> No:

\- for trivial projects, I don't want them to stop working one day

\- for more serious services, moving login to a third party is a huge risk. The upside isn't worth the risk. Even if it did your pricing is way too expensive, but that could be fixed.

<comment><AUTHOR> That makes sense – I've had the same feeling, but was curious if there was a niche, hence this post!

Is there a price point at which you would consider using something like this?

<comment><USER21> No, not me personally, however if someone lacked the skill to build a login system _and_ lacked the risk aversion to outsourcing it (which I'm guessing is not uncommon because that risk aversion comes with experience) then perhaps there is a market at the right price.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'll comment in an end user standpoint. I'm not trying to debunk your idea. I know, having an idea and acting on it is a hard thing and kudos for that. I would love easier login process on every site.

I don't know your likely use case or target market. So I'm using an imaginary one based on my usage.

Disclaimer: I'm not your average user. I use password managers heavily. But on the other hand every browser have some kind of integrated password manager.

My imaginary scenario has these assumptions: \- This website relatively simple and offers unimportant service because otherwise it's not a good practice to use this service. So my security need relatively low. \- I'm using this site relatively often. Maybe a few times a week. Otherwise these points are not that important.

My imaginary scenario has two cases: \- I'm using my regular PC & Browser On a website using this service, I always have to open my email address and click a link to approve login. And if there is a "Remember Me" option only the first time. So my cumulative additional cost between somewhere 1 - infinity extra steps. On a regular site, I'm already in here. I'll just hit a key combination for password manager and I'm done. And if I'm using browser's password manager I'll probably just need to click login. \- I'm using a new PC and/or a brand new Browser/Profile My email address has 2FA active with a really complex password. This just caused me unnecessarily 3 step instead of 1 to login.

</comment><comment><USER23> First thing I noticed, hovering the big "Get started" button did not change my mouse cursor to a link-pointer. Just a small suggestion :).

Edit: Also, after clicking on "Get Started", the first field (email) should be in focus so the user can start typing, without having to move their mouse and click it first.

Edit 2: I love the simplicity of this tool. The interface is pretty good (but not yet great). How can I contact you?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the polish feedback, this is helpful! Feel free to get in touch on Twitter: I'm @benzguo

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Anything that requires me to traverse through different applications to login to a website, unless it is managing my money or very sensitive personal information, is NOT SIMPLE. And for those which require more than one app to login, I much prefer tried and true 2FA apps like google authenticator or Authy or RSA tokens etc. Email is inherently insecure. Why make my 2FA an email?

</comment><comment><USER25> The flow is really confusing.

You enter your email, get taken to a page that tells you to open the email. If you close that page then you can't login even after clicking the link in the email as you need to leave that tab open, open a new tab for your email, open the link in the email, close that and go back to the original login tab.

Why can't you just click the link in the email and you login?

</comment><comment><USER26> It's not free if you ask for a share, therefore the title is misleading. Maybe title "I built a simple login service" would be more fitting. However, I would need to question simplicity as checking your email is far away from simplicity UX wise. I wouldn't use your service if you would pay me to use it. Comparing your service with Stripe is just ridiculous...

<comment><USER27> the login is free, the payments are not, but the title didnt say anything about payments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I can definitely see myself using it when creating an MVP, but longer-term I'd probably set one up myself.

In terms of the pricing, it may be worth considering a cap (e.g. 5% on successful payments up to a maximum of $Y a month), otherwise, you might find that your entire userbase ends up being comprised of early-stage projects that are making little to no money.

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm surprised you're not dog fooding: [https://login.land/login](https://login.land/login) :)

The page leading to login is a bit too plain. Makes more sense to point to /login instead of [https://login.land/admin](https://login.land/admin)

</comment><comment><USER30> It seems interesting but does the user have to check email any time he/she decides to log in to my service?

If so i don't consider it interesting.

I would consider very interesting something similar to firebase authentication without having to include all the google privacy killer stuffs and for free.

(Edit: i didn't read the text where you explain how you make money)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! Currently passwordless email confirmation is the only supported login flow, but I'm thinking about building alternatives like Twitter OAuth, or a password based flow.

Does the pricing model make this less appealing to you? Open to adjusting it!

<comment><USER30> Well since i'm interested only on the auth part, it would be ok for me and if i had to charge i would implement Stripe my self in the project so i'm not sure you will be able to raise a lot of money

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> As a software developer, I wouldn't use this service. But if I was someone without my skillset trying to build a no-code / low-code MVP, I definitely would try this out! I think that may be your sweet spot. I don't think HN is your ideal audience.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I've been thinking that too. Low-code definitely feels like the space for this, and I just need to go find that community :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is really cool, and its an interesting way to try to monetize what would otherwise be a relatively small service.

The big issues here are trust and security. Before using a third-party login, especially if it isn't one of the big ones, I would need to understand more of how it is handling the data. A breach in your service translates directly to a breach in mine, and the intro page does not describe many of the details.

Does using your service offer the end users any benefit compared to a third party login or built-in login service? As it stands, it seems like they will be giving their email address to yet another company, which may erode their trust in my own service.

</comment><comment><USER32> No.

Google signin is used because of Chrome/Android(Or browsers in general because of Google account which many people have it atleast because of Gmail).

Apple ID( their login ) is useful because of Apple ecosystem which constitutes IOS,MacOS,etc.

So,there is no appealing reason to use your product. What if it is down in future? Also,it's closed source and not federated.

I am interested in federated login system(Probably OpenID based?)

Think it like a single self hosted login system for all Gitea(which may happen in future)/Gitlab instances or federated open sourced self hosted(or company hosted) alternative to Google signin , speaking common protocol.

<comment><USER33> Actually what I would want is a system like OpenID but using SASL instead of the web browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The market you want to target is people who aren't software engineers but want to run a simple website. The gulf for someone who just wants to serve a static html site but wants to have some content that requires secure access is huge right now.

Consider the use case for a person buying woodworking plans from a website. Payment required to access pdf plans, but the owner of the website wants to set it up once and not worry about it, and not to have to learn anything more about coding than they have to.

</comment><comment><USER35> I believe people call these "magic links" or "magic URLs". There is definitely a market for it, I recommend searching for competitors and see what you're up against.

</comment><comment><USER36> I tried setting up an account and got a Firebase error, but generally the answer is no. Sorry.

I'd have to have faith that your implementation of the login flow is more secure than one I could build or get elsewhere. Any weird security smells (like the login page differentiating invalid user email address from invalid password and leaking Firebase errors to the user) are going to lead me to believe that the code hasn't been reviewed from a security perspective.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! This is definitely early stages – mostly looking for feedback on the product and landing page, but I'm definitely embarrassed you ran into that Firebase error! I built the admin side using Firebase auth to get started, but have been planning to move it over to Loginland...

<comment><USER37> I think you really need to do this before expecting people to use your service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I would only use it if I needed to create a quick MVP/PoC but then I'd fastly run to implement it once the idea is validated. In addition to the reasons already mentioned here, I'd say login is one of those features every language has a ready-to-use library for. Also, it might be that a certain ACL is required too, which is typically very specific for your domain.

</comment><comment><USER39> Facebook had a free simple login service, over email and SMS as well. Until they shut it down.

</comment><comment><USER40> But it's not quite free.

<comment><USER41> It is free to you if your product is free to your user.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Hi benzgou. It seems login.land is down. What happened?

</comment><comment><USER43> Interesting monetization strategy of integrating payments into the flow.

</comment><comment><USER44> While I like this a lot, I don't like the idea of creating a new customer in Stripe every time someone signs up as a free user. Perhaps this works better for other types of businesses.

</comment><comment><USER45> No. The login flow is too tedious for the user. Too many clicks.

</comment><comment><USER46> The redirect should happen automatically when they click the email, you shouldn't ask the user to shuffle around their tabs after that point.

</comment><comment><USER44> Firebase: No Firebase App '[DEFAULT]' has been created - call Firebase App.initializeApp() (app/no-app).

</comment><comment><USER47> Honestly I don't see any scenario where this service would add value, on the contrary.

</comment><comment><USER42> login.land seems to be down. What happened?

</comment><comment><USER48> If I would use a an external login service it would need to be fully featured:

\- GDPR compliant \- (multiple password) recovery processes. \- user account hacking protection (with notifications) \- two factor authentication. etc.

</comment><comment><USER49> Open source it.

</comment><comment><USER50> It's a fun project, and kudos for shipping something at all!

My honest feedback:

There are already a host of services that do authentication, and a host of services that do payment and subscription management, and the leaders in each of those spaces are actually quite good. Loginland currently sits in the middle - it's not the best authentication system, nor is it the best payment system. It's just a little bit of both.

So, how do you combine the individual value of those services into something that is distinctly valuable? An interesting example in this space is fast.co. I have no idea if they will ultimately be successful or not. However, they verticalized specifically to e-commerce and combined login + checkout to a single step that is significantly easier/faster for the customer than a conventional checkout process. The pitch to the seller is: higher conversion rate, meaning more revenue (and we can potentially reduce fraud in the process). Among other things, they do this by opting for a fixed-time instant cancellation window after the order, rather than putting up a confirmation page beforehand. They use the strength of the identity system to streamline the checkout process, which is a unique merging of those two things that provides real value. There's also not much downside, as the traditional e-commerce customer doesn't associate much value with customer identities in the same way that a SaaS platform might. As it currently sits, I don't see that value unlock for loginland, so it feels like a mushy middle position.

Another direction here is thinking through how media is monetized. Right now, most major news publication (NYTimes, Washington Post, BBC, etc) have login and identity management mostly for managing subscriptions to news content (the identity itself isn't a ton of value to these companies). I believe there is probably a business that can be built around offloading identity and payment for these companies (customer has a relationship with loginland, loginland can get me into Washington Post content in a single click). Helping news companies shift more of their revenue from ads-based to consumption based or recurring would be huge. This business may already exists in several forms (I personally know a founder that started one which ultimately did not work out), but is another example of a vertical play.

In short, as you navigate next steps for this product, I'd advise you to keep an eye on where your customers will really get value from you. Streamlining identity management or checkout might not have as much of a conversion lift for SaaS as it would for other industries where purchase intent is lower. Look first for those, and see how you can best help them. Don't get discouraged by the comments here, though. Often times tiny tweaks make all the difference between success and failure.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much for this thoughtful comment! I really appreciate your feedback, and the encouragement :)

I totally agree with you that it feels like this product currently sits in a weird mushy middle – not a great fit for coders on HN, and not differentiated enough in the crowded no-code-storefront space.

I'll keep iterating!

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I would just run Keycloak.

</comment><comment><USER52> Is logging in that hard?

</comment><comment><USER53> No.

Devise is pretty simple to set up.

</comment><comment><USER54> absolutely not, never. it's one of the worst ideas ever.

why would i give you the email address of all my accounts, and the ability to spoof them, for something that is trivial to build myself?

</comment><comment><USER55> This is cool

</comment><comment><USER56> so this is similar to fast.co?

</comment><comment><USER57> will you be there in 10 years?

<comment><USER58> He does not have to be there in 10 years. If his service where to go away you just change the login system to something else, there are open source alternatives. The id is the email, so there is no lock-in. That's for the login-part at least, adding stripe manually on top would be a bit more complicated, but doable.

<comment><USER57> > He does not have to be there in 10 years.

no point or use of this service then, might as well build our own / use oss.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Yes

</comment><comment><USER60> yes very nice !

</comment><comment><USER61> Why would anyone use this? Just write your own login, it's not hard, and you don't have the dependency on a 3rd party site that can go down at any point in time.

<comment><USER62> I agree that writing your own login routines is not hard, except I wouldn't want anyone to have the impression that it's trivial.

It's not trivial. It requires some knowledge to do it well. Off the top of my head—choice of unique identifier, password complexity rules, hashing best practices, registration flows, recovery flows, abuse detection, markup hinting for password managers... I could go on.</comment></comment>


Zenefits cuts nearly 50% of workforce - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/zenefits-layoffs-cut-nearly-500-employees-full-email-2017-2 <comment><USER4> I first heard of Zenefits when the CEO withdrew a job offer for someone who asked (anonymously) on Quora if they should accept an offer from Uber or Zenefits. The CEO didn't want anyone who wasn't all in for Zenefits "world changing" product.

Since then: that CEO got busted for writing a chrome plug-in to help people get around California's webinar requirement to get a license to sell insurance.

And the new CEO—the old COO—sent out a memo that sex in the staircases and alcohol in the office are not OK.

And he had to give away a huge portion of equity to early investors who accused the old CEO of turning Zenefits into a criminal enterprise for using unlicensed brokers to sell insurance.

This news does not surprise me.

<comment><USER5> Usually right before a major market correction, at the peak of a bubble, unsavory, downright illegal and deceptive elements are introduced because of the monetary incentive.

I'm looking at the headlines and thinking whether the clock has begun ticking.

<comment><USER6> I reminds me before the 2001 crash I remember at the height reading a 3 inch long story in the WSJ mentioning that a business school professor did background checks on a 100 tech startups. Found 1/3 of them had CEO/COO/CFO's or board members that had been prosecuted previously for securities fraud.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps it's the same guys from 2001 pumping and dumping but have found a clever way to avoid the SEC by keeping a private equity market that only VC's have access to so they can play hot potatoes until a unicorn IPOs

<comment><USER6> Oh that's a really good suspicion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sachs is right that the SMB market is _very_ cost sensitive.

We use both Zenefits and Gusto (mainly because of legacy issues - <USER2> offered both benefits + payroll when we started)

Zenefits manages our health insurance and onboarding, and Gusto does payroll. We don't pay Zenefits directly. With this layoff, there's about zero chance I would consider switching to their payroll service (even though it's about 20% cheaper than Gusto)

Gusto has a really solid UI. However, their problems are that unlike ADP, they require a long lead time (5 days I think?) for payroll. They also don't differentiate between part time and full time staff which makes this prohibitive if you use a lot of part time staff with few hours. Neither service provides a "full stop" HR solution - we have to use WhenIWork for timesheets and scheduling, and Workable for an ATS. I could justify their pricing if this was all rolled in.

Gusto recently doubled their prices so we are looking at OnPay which is about 1/3rd the price of either Gusto or Zenefits for payroll.

<comment><USER8> Shoot me an email -- I can see if we can get you on our 2-Day ACH program for running payroll

<comment><USER9> I'd be interested in this too. How do I contact you?

<comment><USER8> Contact info is in my profile. Thanks, looking forward to hearing from you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I worked at Zenefits for a year. Was employee ~600.

This move was much needed 1 year ago - just an awful place to work all around.

Most of the raelly good people I met there have left - the people I know that stayed either had golden hand cuffs or weren't the high achieving type, to put it nicely.

<comment><USER11> > golden hand cuffs

Those aren't really worth much anymore -- once you hit a bump in the road, employee options are the first things to be wiped out. If investors received a larger share as has been reported, it's in preferred shares, which probably wipes out the employee options.

<comment><USER12> can you explain a bit about how preferred shares wipe out employee options? thats only in the scenario the company exits for far fewer than its current valuation?

<comment><USER13> 1\. Usually debts are paid off first, then preferred shareholders get their money back, before regular shareholders get a chance to sell. I got a 1099 for $0.00 one year thanks to this!

2\. When new shares are issued, usually preferred shareholders get shares for free to maintain their percentage in the company. Other existing shareholders do not, of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The artificial need for ever increasing growth and valuations is so destructive in this town, need to start rethinking some of those attitudes. We just have to hit this weird fake number with no basis in reality, or people's lives get ruined. Why?

I get how capital and return on investment work, but maybe it's time for a different model.

<comment><USER15> > is so destructive in this town

Destructive to whom?

<comment><USER16> One answer: destructive to other businesses that can't compete with VC-backed price dumping. A good recent example was wash.io: they undercut and drove out a bunch of laundromats in San Francisco, and then, just to put the cherry on the stupidity cake, they went out of business themselves, so now there are a whole bunch of people in SF that can't do laundry. There was an extensive Twitter debate about this that I would link to, but it appears to have all been deleted.

<comment><USER17> Where did all the washing machines go? Did they destroy them? If all those places sold their washing machines when they went out of business then the capacity for doing laundry was conserved.

<comment><USER18> Come on. You can't just conjour up a laundrette like you spin up an AWS instance. You need to find real estate, employees, equipment. All of those will have been redistributed when the business shut down and any new proprietor will have to start all over from scratch.

<comment><USER19> I think the GPs point was that presumably the equipment and real estate still existed at some point after wash.io shut down. They _could_ have been sold off as businesses rather than simply being dumped through an auction house, but it sounds like that's not what happened.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Well, that might tell me a bit about why I wasn't getting calls - I actually wanted to work there! I've spent 12+ years in the insurance industry all with large market leaders, and I think it'd be fun to do something disruptive - <USER3> know, just not illegal.

</comment><comment><USER21> At some point, mass layoffs just _scream_ "management screw-ups" and there should be major legal consequences for doing so. Otherwise, layoffs become an easy crutch for money-grabbing executives to screw over innocent workers without really punishing poor decision-making.

For instance, if the total layoffs per year exceed some amount (say 25% of the workforce, which still seems absurd), the company should _automatically_ have to pay a fine, such as 5% of the total salaries that were "saved". In addition, they should be required by law to give a one-year severance per employee in that situation. Management screw-ups need to come at a _damned high price_ so that this becomes a rarity.

<comment><USER22> There are laws like this in places other than the US. They mostly make it so that companies hire full time employees at a much slower rate because they are afraid of the consequences of firing people. You end up with a two tier system of real employees and a sea of contractors.

It's important to really think through what the actual results of a proposed policy will be. Unintended consequences abound.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Signed up for our company to see what it was all about, They wouldn't stop calling, now maybe they will stop.

/b

</comment><comment><USER24> Bummer, they were on a hiring rampage here in Vancouver last year.

<comment><USER25> Looks like they still are [1]. But the salary seems unbelievably high for the experience levels they're asking for.

[1] [https://ca.indeed.com/cmp/Zenefits- Development,-Inc./jobs/So...](https://ca.indeed.com/cmp/Zenefits- Development,-Inc./jobs/Software-Engineer-3efabcfeb10e24de?q=zenefits)

<comment><USER26> But I was under the impression that Vancover was incredibly expensive.

Your take home pay at the end of the year would be 88k - 116k (if those numbers are to be believed). After accounting for rent and other expenses, I feel like that's average at best.

<comment><USER27> It is, but Vancouver is also well known for not paying well. It's expensive because of a real estate bubble, not because it is overflowing with high paying jobs.

<comment><USER25> Exactly. Most developer jobs pay slightly over half the quoted amount.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Karma</comment>


Cigarettes, Space Invaders and the birth of the game watch - <AUTHOR> http://www.polygon.com/a/smartwatch-history-guide-evolution/watch-history <comment><USER2> I was expecting an explanation for why it's trendy right now to watch other people playing games.</comment>


The Kopp-Etchells Effect - <AUTHOR> http://www.michaelyon-online.com.php5-4.dfw1-1.websitetestlink.com/the-kopp-etchells-effect.htm

<comment><USER2> This really needs to be read and upvoted.</comment>


Love, Death, and Other Forgotten Traditions - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/54/the-unspoken/love-death-and-other-forgotten-traditions <comment><USER2> While I agree that we would do well to take some lessons from these people, one big difference between Shiuar and Western families is that Western families have switched from r-selection to k-selection - fewer babies treated as precious, fragile things. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory).

It was common in the past to have a LOT of children (and not only due to lack of anticonceptive methods), much like Shiuar, and not to name children younger than 2 years (to try and not become attached) and half of them dying before their 1st year.

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

</comment><comment><USER3> wealthy people become detached from each other and attached to objects. comfort and convenience are hard itches not to scratch; but the evolutionary mechanism which got us here swings the pendulum back towards the same type of group adaptation.

when information completely replaces food humans will be hunter gatherers again, that period won't last long (my personal hope, it could last millions of years!?) as great civilizations and empires will rise with the "new truth", expansion, border wars, dynasties, we've told this story already.

the animating force of human beings does not require a biological body (this is probably true for all living creatures), it requires a strategic approach, driven by flexibility and unreliable narration. should the process itself ever be completely understood, there is a high likelihood that a species would decide to terminate itself due to the inherent cruelty and stupidity of being alive, originally our emotional bias and presently our curiosity ensures we won't fall into that bottleneck.

in the short term, modern individualism will die the death of one thousand cuts. it's good in theory, in practice it makes people miserable. nobody aged 0-12 or 25-99 wants to be alone, wanderlust is a pollination mechanism, and that wind only has to blow you to the next tribe.</comment>


Using Git to manage a one.com website - <AUTHOR> https://www.digitalcomet.be/blog/ssh-and-git-on-one-dot-com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Usually it's a breeze to deploy a website using git. Until I had to do it for a one.com account.

5 different support reps said it couldn't be done, so I did it anyway, just to show them.</comment>


Don't use git [video] - <AUTHOR> http://vimeo.com/74377782

<comment><USER2> That was really infuriating to watch. All of his arguments were pretty trivial and some flat out didn't make any sense. Git is so fast that it forces us to be anti social because we can't go catch up with other people in the time that it would have taken SVN to checkout a branch. Wait what? Git's speed allows you to develop faster without having stop gaps. Something else that is a shocker: Git doesn't force you to stop talking to others. All in all, this guy is grasping at straws.

<comment><USER3> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlv6BrrxD_4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlv6BrrxD_4) ;)</comment></comment>


Cops used dead man's finger in attempt to access his phone - <AUTHOR> http://www.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/Cops-used-dead-man-s-finger-in-attempt-to-access-his-phone-It-s-legal-but-is-it-okay-_167262017 <comment><USER2> Concerning the dead man's privacy, it doesn't matter, he's dead. What matters is the appearance of decency and respect in death because it matters to the family. The article makes me wonder if the police walked up during the funeral and messed with the corpse, but I really doubt that was the case. There is no dignified death. Death ceremonies are performed for the living.

<comment><USER3> And yet desecrating the dead is almost universally panned, because of its effect on the living. Is using a dead person's finger to unlock their phone desecration? The deceased's family seems to think so.

<comment><USER4> How would this be different from using someone's fingerprints to identify them, if they had no ID on them or any other ID method? Is that desecration too?

<comment><USER5> My understanding is that, generally, the purpose of identification is to find living relatives. It's a matter of respect - identification allows for appropriate rites to be provided, while this is taking advantage of the fact that the dead have no rights to use the prints for their own purposes.

<comment><USER4> Ok, but respect of disrespect is not the same as desecration, which is what was being argued. Just because we don't like something does not mean we dress it up as something else.

<comment><USER5> True, desecration is too strong a word in my opinion. I'm not familiar enough with other cultures and religions to say whether that would be true for everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I feel the funeral home ought to have said "no" pretty quickly and plainly here. There was no warrant, the funeral home is private property and the cops were there explicitly to try to get evidence from a corpse.

I'm sure it is quite important for the police to do their job, but the funeral home is hired by the family and should, within reason, do only what the family says should be done with the body.

Let the police get a warrant if it's so important.

<comment><USER7> They stated early in the article that a warrant is not needed because "there's no expectation of privacy for the dead."

I strongly disagree with this, since it's not just the privacy of the owner locked away on a phone, but also the privacy of the people they have interacted with. It takes at least two to make a conversation, and suddenly if one dies then the other's messages are available for collection without a warrant?

<comment><USER8> The State's right to do whatever they want to a corpse certainly ends once they no longer have possession of the corpse.

More importantly, what the police did here was execute a search upon the funeral home. That their purpose was to temporarily seize a corpse shouldn't be any different than if they were looking for documents.

<comment><USER9> Society has long treated human bodies very differently than mere documents.

<comment><USER5> Which makes it all the more disconcerting that they would appear to have less legal protections, at least in this case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Important detail from the article: It didn't work.

<comment><USER11> I found this interesting too. Does anyone know a reason why it didn't work?

<comment><USER12> You can't unlock an iPhone with a fingerprint more than eight hours after the last unlock.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> of course they did. why is this news?</comment>


Microsoft holds 200 patents that are necessary to build an Android smartphone - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2014/04/08/chinese-ministry-of-commerce-approves-microsoft-nokia-deal.aspx

<comment><USER2> This is true, Most of the Android manufacturer are paying some patent fees to Microsoft for example Samsung is paying $ 10 to Microsoft on every Android powered smartphone, this amount was $ 15 trimmed down to $ 10 after Samsung agreed to bring our Windows Phone Powered smartphone market. Case is almost same with HTC, LG just they vary in amount they pay. In Q2 2013 Microsoft Corporation Earned $1.51 Billion From Android Smartphone Vendors [REPORT] Microsoft earned a total of $1.51 billion (approx) from 131 million Android devices that were shipped out by Android smartphone vendors. The total earning from Android royalties would surge up with the inclusion of royalties collect from Android powered Tablet sales. [http://www.dazeinfo.com/2013/09/13/microsoft-corporation- msf...](http://www.dazeinfo.com/2013/09/13/microsoft-corporation-msft- earned-1-51-billion-android-smartphone-vendors-q2-2013-report/)</comment>