Extra Technical Obstacles for Facebook Quitters - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/some-facebook-quitters-face-technical-obstacles-1522947553 <comment><USER2> I deleted my Facebook to the best of my ability about a week ago.

Fun facts:

* They switch around button colors to trick you into undoing your actions

* They are very eager to log you back in if you, for example, try to access help. This reactivates your account.

* You cannot delete your account on Messenger. They removed the option. Deleting your Facebook profile does not delete your messenger account

* Their doc for deleting your messenger account lies/is out of date.

* There is no shortage of dark patterns in their account delete process.

I ended up manually deleting all my content, unliking everything, and deleting all my posts.

More fun facts: they don't show you all of your content. If you go back and try to clean up your account, do it multiple times. Keep doing it until Facebook can't find anything more to show you. I assume this is a technical optimization, but it means that there is no reliable to see everything you've posted (from the web UI).

<comment><USER3> I'm surprised there wasn't a step that involved a locked file cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard."

<comment><USER4> Instead of deactivation confirmation message, dialog box contained bobcat. One star.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cox, a major cable operator, allows you to sign up and add any services you want online. However, partially removing or cancelling services online is expressly forbidden. For example, if you wish to keep Internet service but cancel cable TV, a call is required.

I know it's a different process, but wanted to reilluminate the some of the measures taken against disconnecting a service in general.

Once you do call, which I had to do for some older relatives recently, they invoke a high pressure sales pitch in the form of a question decision tree script.

The script requires the reps to start down the decision tree asking questions like, "Why are you disconnecting your service today?", and then using that answer and others to slowly incent/coerce you into a corner intended to make you feel it would be an absurd decision to downgrade service.

I recorded the call (legal because they are recording it as well) to avoid misunderstandings about the precise details of what was being politely requested.

In response to every script question, I gave one simple answer. "Sir, why are you downgrading your service today?". I reply, _"It's a secret"_.

After a few seconds of hesitation, another question follows. "Is there anything you are not happy about with our service?", "If we could save you more money than any other service would you be interested in hearing about it?". Sorry, that's also a secret.

Surprisingly, it short circuited the script pretty quickly without any social discomfort or feeling a need to justify myself. They allowed the changes to proceed, fully documented.

<comment><USER6> Blue Apron is the same way (easy sign-up online, cancellation on the website tells you to call this phone number).

So for the last year, I've been typing in "Blue Apron" to google every couple of weeks, clicking on their _paid_ ad, and skipping the next 5 weeks of deliveries. :)

<comment><USER7> The New York Times uses this cancellation process as well. I don't feel bad about violating their paywall now after being forced to actually talk to a person to do something that should be enabled with a single click.

<comment><USER8> The NYT now has an option to cancel using a chat window -- and I'm pretty sure the operator that you're chatting with is a bot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Probably (maybe?) not intentional, but suspiciously timed. Presumably off- boarding from Facebook looks a bit like a funnel, where every additional hurdle means more people will bail on their original intended action.

I nuked my facebook account a couple years back and I remember eye rolling at the number of steps. And then there was the waiting period where they'd keep my account around for some number of days or weeks just in case I decided to come back. Easier to buy a gun at a gun show than do something truly grave like get rid of a social media account.

<comment><USER10> Hey, question for you, admittedly slightly tangential.

I've been a dev for a few user facing products that stored customer created content and offered account deletion. These sites weren't specifically social, and I always thought offering a "we don't hard delete for N days" (with reasonably short N) was a user friendly option, in case of accidental deletion or realizing recovery of certain assets was needed. Would you have an issue with this if the rest of the process wasn't dark-patterened? (e.g. if it was a clear single button "Delete account, type account name to confirm, OK, your stuff is going to be hard gone in a week")

I'm curious as to where that line would be for you, since I usually consider well towards the "make options blatantly transparent and easy to use" and to the "allow users control of their account" side of things.

<comment><USER9> I feel like Github's Danger Zone strikes a nice middle ground between "total footgun" and Facebook's belligerent refusal to let someone immediately sever their relationship.

Actually, when compared to a breakup, the Facebook model seems even more silly:

"I just think this relationship isn't working, and that we should move on, and find someone who we'll be happy with."

"I'm really sorry you feel that way. I'll just continue being your boyfriend for the next week or two. If I hear from you at all during that time, I'll assume we're back together."

And specifically keeping a backup of my data prior to hard delete? On a continuum from worst to best:

Worst: Company as a matter of policy keeps my data around intentionally past the point of severing the relationship.

Forgivable: Technical architectural constraints mean that there might be some lag time before an "erase the tapes" process fully purges my data, with this limitation noted in the docs.

Best: Once I've terminated my relationship with the company, the company purges all my personal data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you're in Europe and want to delete your fb account, wouldn't it be better to wait until GDPR activates, so your data actually gets erased instead of hidden?

I'm going to erase quite a few accounts I'm no longer using on various services, I really hope they won't cheat.

<comment><USER12> According to Wikipedia, GDPR arrives on the 25th of May. Do you know it services are truly forced to comply from that day onwards or should we wait even longer?

<comment><USER13> If we log on from the UK or another European company after the 25th and delete the account from there, will they apply the GDPR based deletion, where they actually delete the data?

<comment><USER14> Strictly it only applies to residents of the EU, how much attention companies will pay to that, is another matter. But given the risks associated with not deleting data, I suspect most companies will err on the side of safety.

<comment><USER15> Change your location to somewhere in the EU, then delete.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> While not exactly the same, reminds me of the "Roach Motel" Dark Pattern [1] which intentionally increases friction to completing an action by users that would be detrimental to the business (such as deleting one's account). Amazon is another example of making it nearly impossible to figure out how to delete your account unless you search for the steps or go through a lot of trial and error. [2]

[1] [https://darkpatterns.org/types-of-dark-pattern/roach- motel](https://darkpatterns.org/types-of-dark-pattern/roach-motel) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxkrdLI6e6M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxkrdLI6e6M)

</comment><comment><USER17> The quickest way to get an idea of the ethics of a company you are about to sign up with is to see how easy it is to delete your account. If that's not automatic and with only one confirmation whether or not you are sure and that you can't undo your deletion then you are best off not to give them your data in the first place.

For all those FB users this is of course way too late, but maybe it will help some of you in the future with other services.

<comment><USER18> Second this. I have a junk address I use to sign up first, and if there's no flow to self-terminate I won't signup.

I've had some services where I've wound up in a standoff in an intercom session, with the requirement that I justify the deletion or go through troubleshooting and customer support before being blessed with the right to remove my own account.

ExpressVPN stands out particularly, the rep resorted to insulting me over my knowledge of data security when I justified the deletion based on the fact they could one day leak or be sold, so I'd prefer to terminate unused credentials.

Particularly strong pattern with VPN providers, Crypto exchanges, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I clicked the delete button on my account on Monday. I've had several people come to me and ask why I unfriended them, as if they had thought they'd offended me in some way. I started to wonder if Facebook had told them that I'd unfriended them. No, some of them had browser plugins that would search their friends list for changes.

... which is cool, I guess.

<comment><USER20> you can tell them you unfriended them because they are still using Facebook :>

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I deleted my account a few days ago. It was surprisingly less trouble than expected. I had very little linked to my account, only my PlayStation account had access for posting media from my PS4 which I only did once or twice.

I downloaded my data, which took about 20 minutes to accumulate, hit the delete button and had to confirm a second time with my password. Supposedly my account will be removed after 14 days of being deactivated. I had to be careful to remove all bookmarks etc to prevent any accidental logins resulting in the process being reversed.

Glad it's gone, I don't miss it. Hopefully this is the beginning of the end for this type of thing on the internet.

</comment><comment><USER22> Obligatory non-Paywall link [http://archive.is/FVdrM](http://archive.is/FVdrM)

<comment><USER23> I guess fullwsj.com got shutdown because of recent facebook limitations. Does the twitter referrer still work for wsj.com?

<comment><USER24> Domain expired. Probably the owner felt it wasn't worth the annual registration fee to continue maintaining the service?

<comment><USER25> Didn't realize people were actually using it. Renewed now, sorry for the downtime. I welcome feedback if anyone has any recommendations on how to improve the service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've been using this Chrome extension [0] for many years which simply hides the news feed. After installing it, I never looked back. I haven't disabled it once. If everyone stopped using the news feed, Facebook would be dead. It's the heart of the addiction machine.

[0] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kill-news- feed/hjo...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kill-news- feed/hjobfcedfgohjkaieocljfcppjbkglfd?hl=en)

<comment><USER27> This is sort of bizarre to me. I say this because I use uBlock to remove everything _but_ the newsfeed. The screen shots shown on that extension page is basically the inverse of what I have...

How do you engage with Facebook at all?

<comment><USER28> My guess is they engage with other Facebook users in a more direct and deliberate manner.

I'd wager that's a far less addictive way to use Facebook overall.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Quick question (I can't test as I'm not on Facebook):

If someone logs into a separate service using their 'Facebook Login' will that reactivate their account if disabled/deleted (within 14 days)?

Has this been tested?

A lot of people have saved logins etc so might not realise if this does actually reactivate them...

<comment><USER30> Yes. Without a doubt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> On a related note, I'm seeing lots of ads in meat-space here in Chicago about how much better Facebook is going to become at filtering fake news and fake accounts from you. It's a sign to me they're finally worried.

<comment><USER32> Yeah, all those ads about how they're going to fix fake ads, and clickbait ads, and so on, all over the L stops...

They're buying ads that try to influence public opinion, about how they mishandled orgs buying ads that try to influence public opinion. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> How commonly accepted of a best practice is it to only shadow delete items in a DB. Will GDPR in Europe stop this? As a US user, I always fear that the internet is 100% written in ink. Either because of some caching mechanism, archiving protocol, or general reluctance to delete.

<comment><USER17> Extremely common but definitely _not_ best practice. Many companies don't even have life cycle management.

Hopefully GDPR will stop this.

Your fears are well founded, especially for anything that was public at some point in time. Also include email in that view.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I would join all of the people in this Facebook exodus but I haven't used it in five years or so.

Catch up with old friends over lunch sometime or write them an actual letter. You'll feel more connected having that kind of personal interaction than seeing snippets in a timeline.

As for events, if the people close to you don't think to invite you to things... Reevaluate your social life because something seems broken and it's not the lack of FB. People had perfectly healthy social lives before FB inserted itself.

PS: I didn't have to "delete" my account. I just never installed the app and don't ever log in. I flagged the updates as spam in my email and all is well.

</comment><comment><USER35> If you want to avoid logging in accidentally, you can just make a garbage (that is, no-garbage?) account that you use only for family or something and then log into that instead.

Rename your old account to John Smith or something, change the password to sign everything out, delete it and then only re-sign into your new account (which you intend to barely/not use).

Nowadays I only use Facebook to reach family that don't use Instagram and I keep my Instagram network private-only and small (<80). There is automatic cross-posting so it doesn't cost me any effort in this regard.

<comment><USER36> Don't worry, Facebook keeps track of devices, so they'll still know it's really you.

<comment><USER35> Yes, they ask you to re-add all your old friends but I'm assuming that will disappear eventually when my other account goes poof [1].

1: in reality, it probably doesn't ever go poof.

<comment><USER36> I don't think that's a valid assumption :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> [https://m.facebook.com/account/delete](https://m.facebook.com/account/delete)

Use this link to delete hassle-free.

</comment><comment><USER38> [https://outline.com/Vg4R7C](https://outline.com/Vg4R7C)

For non subscribers

</comment><comment><USER39> This happened to me last week; I assumed it was intentional, a super-form of the "your friends will miss you!". You can reset your password and continue.

</comment><comment><USER40> why would i have to delete my account anyhow. I just stopped using facebook quite awhile ago but still have my account there. From time to time people which would have otherwise trouble to find me online write me there and thanks to the mail notifications i can tell them how to contact me properly.

<comment><USER41> They still collect information on you from all sites with a Like button. If you don't mind that there's no need to delete anything.

<comment><USER42> Just install ublock origin and activate all social filters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Paywall. Summary?

</comment><comment><USER44> "Facebook has asked several major U.S. hospitals to share anonymized data about their patients, such as illnesses and prescription info, for a proposed _research project_.

Facebook was intending to match it up with user data it had _collected_ , and help the hospitals figure out which patients might need special care or treatment."

Source:

[https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/05/facebook- building-8-explored...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/05/facebook- building-8-explored-data-sharing-agreement-with-hospitals.html)

<comment><USER36> Please share anonymous data with us that we can cross reference with our own data to de-anonymize!

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> The chief investment officer of the California State Teachers' Retirement System (CalSTRS) deleted his Facebook account yesterday because of FB's management re: privacy.

CalSTRS owned $650.4 million in FB shares at end of year 2017. I wonder if he experienced any of these technical problems when deleting his account.

Source: [https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/05/calstrs-cio-deletes- facebook...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/05/calstrs-cio-deletes-facebook- account-citing-offensive-management.html)

</comment><comment><USER45> I didn't delete my facebook. I unfriended everyone I knew. Took screenshots of the first pictures I saw when you googled my name as my pictures, then added random friends in other states I didn't know (not before re-filling all my data with fake data). Screw you facebook!

</comment><comment><USER44> "We've seen a few advertisers pause with us and _they 're asking the same questions that other people are asking_," Sandberg said Thursday in an interview at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California. "They want to make sure _they can use data_ and use it safely."

Sandberg said she is having " _reassuring conversations with advertisers, just as we are with people_ ," about how Facebook has _built privacy into its system_.

[ This is very reassuring. ]

The company makes almost all its revenue and profit from advertising.

[ This too. ]

...

In a wide-ranging interview, Sandberg discussed the company's _shifting responsibilities_ as _it thinks about what can go wrong_ with its network, following the Cambridge Analytica revelations.

[ "Shifting responsibilities". Hmmm. ]

...

The company will also apply new European user-privacy rules globally, Sandberg said.

While the service may look different depending on the country, "the fundamental core principles of those settings and controls we are going to apply all over the world," she said. "Whether or not laws are passed."

[ Why does it need to "look different"? Less confusing that way I guess. ]

Separately, in an interview with Emily Chang of Bloomberg Television, Sandberg _took the blame_ for not ensuring that Facebook's operations were staffed at the right level to protect users' privacy and for failing to look at security issues in total rather than dealing with specific problems as they arose.

"We also didn't build our operations fast enough, and that's on me," Sandberg said, explaining that the company will have 20,000 people working on security by year's end.

[ How brave to take the blame, considering the repercussions for this sort of negligence or carelessness with respect to privacy in the US are... nonexistent. ]

Source:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-05/facebook-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-05/facebook- s-sandberg-says-a-few-advertisers-paused-spending)

</comment><comment><USER44> "I feel deeply personally responsible, because _a lot of mistakes were made_ ," Sandberg said in an interview with Bloomberg.

[ Dont feel bad. You are doing a fantastic job! ]

"What _we didn 't do until recently_ and what we are doing now is just _take a broader view_ looking to be more restrictive in ways data could be misused. We also _didn 't build our operations fast enough_ \-- and that's on me," she added.

...

Sandberg addressed that comment as well, emphasizing that " _all of that was public information_."

...

"This is a _forever_ process, because security is always an arms race," Sandberg said during an interview with Bloomberg.

[ No worries! Take as much time as you need. ]

Source:

[https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/05/facebook-coo-feels-deeply- pe...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/05/facebook-coo-feels-deeply-personally- responsible-for-data-leak.html)

<comment><USER46> It looks like you've been posting dozens of these. Would you please stop? HN threads are for conversation, not copy-pasting.

<comment><USER44> And these two about Sandberg are the first ones that got downvoted. (But one of them just got upvoted, so... Touche Sandberg PR team. :)

The bracketed comments (so-called "commentary") are what drew the demerits I suspect, _not_ the copy-paste. I apologise to anyone who was offended. No more sarcasm from me, and no more copy-paste, I promise.

Almost all other posts have gotten generous amounts of upvotes. None got downvotes.

HN has some ethical readers who are bolstering the faith I have in the future of the internet!

One post (the one about the story comparing FB to an engorged tick) got _98 upvotes_.

<comment><USER46> Thanks, I appreciate the change.

Upvotes are an important variable on HN but they aren't sufficient to keep the site on track with its mandate. If they were, it wouldn't need moderation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> An account created 40 minutes ago can post something that appears on the front page?

<comment><USER48> Fot a more zen perspective, consider the upside down: It's not the poster that got it to the front page, but the people who upvoted it.

If those were all fresh accounts, it would have been detected as a voting ring.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Newswebsite for Reddit, HN .. With Curl-Option? - <AUTHOR> There is a news website out there where you can access news from Reddit, Hackernews and so on on one page. Also there was an option with curl or wget to read the news? This was standing beside the title.<p>What site is this? <comment><AUTHOR> Bump!</comment>


Request for Public Comment on Activities Under Executive Order 12333 - <AUTHOR> https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2015/03/23/2015-06537/request-for-public-comment-on-activities-under-executive-order-12333

<comment><AUTHOR> More info:

* "The NSA relies upon that obscure document [E.O. 12333] for, among other things, its surreptitious collection of unencrypted information transiting from Google and Yahoo data centers"[1]

* Here is Executive Order 12333 order itself, though it's a bit long. Can anyone point to the highlights?: [http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification/execut...](http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification/executive-order/12333.html)

[1] [http://http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/02/nsa- surv...](http://http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/02/nsa-surveillance- government-privacy-board-report)</comment>


How Big Banks Became Our Masters - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/27/opinion/how-big-banks-became-our-masters.html <comment><USER2> This doesn't really speak much to the "master" thing, but over the last few generations we have "financialized" (like securitised, but bigger) huge parts of the economy, and a lot of stuff that wasn't really part of the economy in the past.

For example, health services are largely financialized via insurance. IE, you don't directly buy health services, you buy insurance which buys health services. You don't buy a house, you get a mortgage. You don't support your parents (or colleagues) in their old age, you pay into pension or superannuation schemes. Education via student loans. Monthly expenses via credit card debt. Large ticket items via dealer finance. Public services via national debt…….Companies via private equity. Everything has a financial layer between payment and consumption.

Underlying a lot of this is a relatively simple fact that if debt is available, consumers (from 18 year olds to Finance Ministers) will take it. If loans are available for certain products, more of those products will be consumed.

Another (possibly evil) driver is that governments have chosen financialization as instruments for promoting stuff they want to promote. Need more corn? Crop insurance subsidies. Educate the masses? Subsidise student loans. Promote home ownership? Implicitly guarantee retail banks' losses. Medical care for all? Tax free(subsidy) insurance. Flood problems? Flood insurance. Poverty? Microfinance.

So, banks got big. This has all sorts of weird effects.

One of the biggest problems in my opinion is the inflationary effect of this process. Real estate prices in many places are simply the amount that a bank is willing to lend buyers. If banks increase the amount a buyer can loan, house prices increase proportionally. IMO, the American healthcare saga is not really about ideology or competence or any of the stuff they talk about. The problem is that after 2-3 generations of wide scale subsidised financialization, prices & costs are so high.

My final thought is that part of the problem is the prominence of finance people in pubic decision making. They know finance. They believe in it. They use it to solve problems. They don't see baks getting bigger as a problem. It's kind of like the lawyer problem, who also have a lot of presence in politics. That means the legal field gets bigger all the time.

<comment><USER3> Wow this is really well written.

Sometimes I feel like this "extra layer"/middleman-adding is not only just to enable government interventions but is just fluff added so we could create jobs for those whose skills don't go beyond the typical white-collar worker. I might be wrong, but the image of extraneous University administrators and "not-enough" skilled labor kinda paints this picture.

<comment><USER2> Thanks. Always surprising how nice a friendly word is.

That's (in a somewhat roundabout way) is similar to one of David Graeber's arguments, you might like his book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article doesn't even answer its own question of "how".

For those interested in the topic, I highly recommend Connie Bruick's Predators' Ball and Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis.

> Adam Smith, the father of modern capitalism

I hope we can stop conflating free markets for capitalism. Capitalism is to free markets what communism is to socialism. Adam Smith was very much focused on free markets, not capitalism. The author of the article, makes it clear later with

> Adam Smith, who believed that for markets to work, all players must have > equal access to information, transparent prices and a shared moral framework

<comment><USER5> For a really insightful approach to how we got here, read Prof David Graeber's book Debt: the First 5000 Years

<comment><USER6> I wonder how long the modern idea of debt has existed? Mainly, that idea of owing someone something, (often) at a later date?

The concept of zero isn't even 5000 years old. Negative numbers were still being debated in the 1700s, though I think the first known use was in China's number rod system in 200 BCE. Conceptually, less than nothing is a funny thing and not really well grounded in the physical world.

It does make me curious. I'll have to look for the book. I find the history of mathematics to be fascinating, though debt may have originally been more culture and less math.

<comment><USER7> A TL;DR of the book (still read it!) is that debt was (at least typically, and as best we can tell) around before money, and that early communities operated on debt internally and mostly used barter or money-like things when dealing with dangerous, untrustworthy "others", which turns the usual "first we bartered, that sucked so we invented money, then debt" narrative around. Something _really_ resembling money, it claims, didn't come around until rulers invented it to better fund their armies ("OK, soldiers who will be operating in areas where you don't have social ties, here are five coins. All you civilians, including the ones we just conquered? You're each gonna need one of those coins to pay your taxes next year, or I'll take all your shit. Boom, now the coins have value.") The book advances the idea that barter is most common as a temporary measure among people who are used to using money but, for a time, cannot (during prolonged disasters, in prisons), _not_ as a major feature of the economies of early or primitive societies. It also ties the collision of debt-and-money with social-debt societies to the development of slavery, and covers a bunch of other interesting territory. Again, do read it.

As for negative numbers, you can express "owes" without them so I doubt it was a problem. After all, you don't "owe" someone negative one thousand dollars—you just owe them positive one thousand dollars. You hand them a negative-one-thousand dollar bill, they're not gonna be happy. Being able to write negative balances or work formally with negative numbers isn't strictly necessary to work with debt.

<comment><USER8> This seems repeating Ibn Khaldun's theories from XIV century.

In subsistence economies surplus is used primarily for fostering social relations and creating social obligations which one can call upon when times get though. And in subsistence economy sooner or later they will.

As more added value is created socioeconomic relations get more complicated and they become based on money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I can't help but wonder how much of this would have been fixed by letting them fail. This is way out of my ballpark, but it still bothers me a lot that they don't face the same consequences I do for making mistakes.

<comment><USER10> Iceland let its banks fail and protected the taxpayers, and a few years later the economy recovered just fine. It's at a much smaller scale than the US or EU economy though, but still.

<comment><USER11> It's entirely unfair to use 'but still' as any sort of argument here. Iceland is not a large chunk of the world economy, nor does it have a premier position as the world's economic nexus to protect. It's well documented that cause/effect differs as your economy scales (just look at how behavior changes between a small startup vs a unicorn). While there might be some valid arguments for letting the banks fall, 'someone else did it and it worked' is not one of them.

<comment><USER12> It's unfair to compare the differing results of different national policies? What other option do we have? Should we just swallow the whole bill of goods that Hank Paulson drops on our desk, the same way that Bush the Lesser did?

You probably don't think we should look to e.g. Portugal to see alternatives to the drug war, either. It's a funny sort of exceptionalism, to imagine that we can only learn from similar-sized nations. Would that be Brazil and Indonesia?

<comment><USER13> Of course scale should be taken into account; it's a sad state that this would count as exceptionalism.

Iceland and Portugal should be lessons for entities or similar size, like individual states of cities in the US.

<comment><USER14> Scale should certainly be taken into account. Still, differences in scale are no excuse to completely invalidate the data points without a good reason why it should matter this much.

The examples we have of countries letting their banks fail recovered¹. The onus is on anybody disagreeing to show how the US differences are relevant. Just pointing at them and screaming does not make it.

1 - AFAIK, all of them. What is interesting because it includes Brazil at the late 90's (the one single time Brazil grew in recent history).

<comment><USER13> Differences in scale are a great reason to throw data out.

Past experience gives us lessons for similar cases. The onus is on anybody using a model to ensure the use case is similar to the training data.

The US and Iceland are _nations_ but it's unreasonable to get hung up on that similarity of category. The _nation_ is not a label for grouping economies that are comparable.

I don't like bailouts either, for the record. My gripe is only with the scale question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The sad thing about this is that it seems like we haven't learned from the past. One of the hottest things in my local community right now is flipping houses. You have people levereged to the hilt with hard money loans, flippers teaching classes (and providing hard money loans), and home prices at or exceeding 2008 levels.

<comment><USER16> No no no, you aren't understanding, let me aid you in doing so.

The people in 2008 just timed the market poorly. This time around, we'll see all the tell-tale signs of a housing crash and get out right before it does so, all cash. Then, when all the stocks (Because, of course, banks will lose out on the highly leveraged positions of our non-fortuitous peers) have tanked, we'll simply buy them at rock bottom prices, riding a wave of financial security into the nursing home.

<comment><USER17> I hope, I just missed the irony-tags.

<comment><USER18> I hate those. If anything they just dilute the message.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Banks were supposed to be stable and boring. The quest for 'financial innovation' in the heady 80s accompanied by rocketing bonuses and compensation has led to highly unstable economies with risk and reward mixed up with government intervention, too big to fail, regulatory capture and lobbying and now basically stand isolated.

During the asian financial crisis the IMF and WB were gung ho about free markets, austerity and enforcing failure without exception but as soon as it hit western economies the whole field of economics changed with words like 'too big to fail' and 'systemic risk' entering the economic vocabulary.

How does one explain oil being at $40 and $140 with supply and demand and free markets. There is a lot more going on that is often hidden behind jargon that obfuscates than informs.

<comment><USER20> Isn't oil a commodity with a variable supply but relatively fixed demand? Big price swings are what you would expect in a situation like that.

One can argue that some suppliers act "irrationally" when they artificially restrict their output to drive up prices (OPEC), but this is what you would expect to see in that situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm not sure how the author can assert with a straight face that Dodd-Frank is essentially sacred, a lack of community banks is hurting the economy, and that it's all the big banks' fault.

A loan to your your local mom-and-pop shop is a much riskier investment than a bond to a large corporation. DFA discourages risk-taking with the new capital requirement rules. Thus, community banks are fighting over a small pool of profitable loan opportunities and their numbers shrink. On the other side, small businesses have a harder time getting loans.

Regulatory compliance overhead from DFA hits community banks harder than big banks as well, so they're consolidating and leaving fewer true community banks.

None of this is has much to do with the actions of big banks. It's the natural consequence of DFA. If you don't like the status quo, you need to change DFA. Not necessarily to pre-2007 rules, but some small changes could provide a big boost to community banks.

<comment><USER22> Embracing technology could be a better solution. Government should fund open technology development as necessary to ease the burden of financial regulatory compliance. Technology could and should make it possible for smaller banks to comply with federal regulations with the same efficiency as big banks -- at the same time, federal regulations should be allowed to become as complex as necessary to surface and discourage fraud and systemically risky behavior.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Free markets are all good until the government fail to regulate them. Decentralization from state and political influence is good, until nobody is in control anymore. Then it's chaos.

To be frank I think that US banks might be influenced by foreign powers just like it happened for the last election.

I think that finance will damage sovereignty in the long run. It really looks like common citizens don't really have a say on how finance work in terms of politics.

</comment><comment><USER17> The problem is, that we let banks become so big and important for our economies, that they can make the rules, if we want it or not.

The rules that Obama made, where hardly enough to prevent the biggest problems, of the system. But even those are abolished by the new president, since they might limit the possible profits, rich people can make.

And so we live on in the land of unlimited profits for the 0,1% and the unlimited losses for society.

</comment><comment><USER24> 1\. The problem with financial services is customers are greedy - not banks 2\. The challenge in building any business - is that they always start by trying to solve a problem - but power always corrupts 1\. If google's aim was to truly organise the worlds information or xxx would it behave like thsi 2\. We say capitalism is good as through the pursuit of capital appreciation - these kinds of problems aggressively get solved but we reward financially - the creation of monopolies 3\. This then leads to all kinds of things: styling of innovation; but also pronounces the accumulation of capital 4\. The solution is whether you can construct a company in another way 5\. I think its now clear that you strive to be too greedy - that power / money will eventually corrupt 1\. Google search results 2\. Uber vs lyft 3\. Microsoft 6\. But this process takes years

Building financial services in a way that doesn't corrupt is as hard / harder than building a serach engine / browser / car sharing company that will last for 1000s of years rather than decards

</comment><comment><USER25> A timely, relevant (and unusually accessible) suggestion on how to save the local banks being killed by 20,000+ pages of Dodd-Frank regulations:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUXd3LJZ3hg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUXd3LJZ3hg)

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm seeing a lot of percentages and no source data here.

</comment><comment><USER27> A great book on this subject is The Bankers New Clothes.

It explains the history of banking, why banks are useful and also why many banks today are dysfunctional and harmful.

</comment><comment><USER28> Enter Bitcoin.

They will not be our masters much longer now that they will lose their monopoly on trust.

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm not even sure what this means - in what ways are they our masters?

<comment> wu-ikkyu Master: a man who has people working for him, especially servants or slaves.

If you work for money, then by extension you work for the bank, because that is where money is apparated.

The bank is the one who decides how much money is to be created, and who gets it first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> It amazes me that NY Times gets away with this sort of patronizing articles with their presumed (educated) readership.

"Mainstreet vs Wallstreet". <expletive deleted></comment>


Ask HN: "Badges" anyone else a little unenthused?  - <AUTHOR>

Seems every new site is offering me the chance to gain a badge of one form or another.
This trend doesn't grab me so much - I don't want 'badges' for anything.  Is that because I'm an old grump?  Are all the young hipsters super enthused about sporting all sorts of digital badges?
I like the concept of gamification but shouldn't it be more smooth and less jarring than offering 'badges'?
Are there any good websites out there parodying badges?  Maybe the Hipster Hacker http://twitter.com/hipsterhacker is working on a badge heavy new social site with node.js and mongodb?
Perhaps there is a commercial opportunity for a website that converts all your digital web 2.0 badges into real world embroidered badges so your mum can sew them onto your flannel shirt sleeves. <comment><USER2> Here's a good article on the psychology of badges: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2328684> . And here's one about achievement design: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2356944> .

Badges motivate users to set goals. Badges are also symbols of status and reputation.

<comment><AUTHOR> They look like good articles - will read them over the weekend. Maybe the badge concept is a bit less appealing if its overexposed/overused.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Badges do absolutely nothing for me in the web/app context. Twice in the last week or so I have clicked a link from HN and been taken to a site which awards me with a "Just Arrived" badge simply for visiting the site. I can see what they are trying to achieve as the site tells me I need to sign in with FB in order to keep the badge, but that implementation was nothing but an annoyance.

<comment><AUTHOR> This example really illustrates the point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's a startup idea: a marketplace for badges. if that ever happens, i will give up my tech profession and take up some other career

<comment><USER2> Only because you mentioned it... badges are "virtual goods", which is to say that badges are digital artifacts with a visual representation. A marketplace for badges is basically Zynga's entire business model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I moved passed gold stars on my papers a long time ago, but gamefication will be a huge driver of behavior. Skinner would be proud.

<comment><USER2> <http://star.me> for all your gold star needs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some badges/achievements work for me and some don't. For instance, I'm addicted to Team Fortress 2 achievements, but I couldn't care less for them on Foursquare or Stack Overflow.

I think context is important. It makes sense to me in a real game, but not so much for a website like Stack Overflow.

</comment><comment><USER7> For a second I parsed this as indicating that HN had instituted a system of badges, about which you were unenthused... phew!

<comment><AUTHOR> Given the industry trend for badges I wouldn't be surprised. Do I get an HN badge for having karma over 400?

<comment><USER7> Over 500 (or somesuch -- it's a moving target) gets you the ability to downvote.

Which raises an interesting point -- badges do nothing for me, but feature unlocking is compelling, as much as I wish it weren't. I don't _actually_ care, but if I stop paying attention I often find myself behaving as if I did.</comment></comment></comment>


One Bold Move Apple Has Not Yet Made (domestic manufacturing) - <AUTHOR> http://charmcitycurrent.com/gentlemanlymeanspursued/2010/07/12/the-one-bold-move-apple-hasnt-yet-made/

<comment><USER2> This proposal is operationally stupid and morally dubious.

From an operational/supply-chain standpoint:

Manufacturing happens in the Pearl River Delta in China for two reasons: speed and cost. The cost is not so much a function of the cheap labour as the proximity to component suppliers and abundance of manufacturing expertise. It's easy to build electronics around Shenzhen for the same reason that it's easy to build a tech start-up in the Valley. Everything you need is around the corner.

For Apple, one must remember that everything they build is composed of components sourced in south-east China. As a result, US-based manufacturing would be ludicrously inefficient. Hugely increased costs, greater inventory stockpiles, completely needless carbon emissions, and lost flexibility. It's like proposing RAM on a USB stick. It's so inefficient as to be nonsensical.

Even if that were not the case, Apple specialize in what they're good at: implementing great software, and designing wonderful hardware to accompany it. It would be go entirely against the grain of Apple's culture of doing a small number of things well to start a huge manufacturing arm. If they wanted to increase the good they do for the US, there are vastly better ways they could go about it.

Next, even _if_ Apple actually thought it was a good idea, they would be unable to pull it off without a lot of trial, error, and screw-ups. Foxconn is the Apple of manufacturing, and they're used by every major consumer electronics company for good reason. Apple are great at what they do after twenty years of experience, and appreciate the importance of _truly_ knowing a problem-space. Manufacturing expertise is neither simple nor free.

Lastly, stepping aside from these operational concerns, the moral case is weak. Why do the inhabitants of Detroit deserve jobs more than those of the cities around Shenzhen? I've been to the Chinese factories that Apple uses. People like their jobs. The conditions are good. I've also seen the conditions that people who don't have jobs at Apple factories live in.

China is taking people out of poverty faster than any civilization ever has before. Is funding innovation centers in Detroit really a better moral cause? I don't want to turn this into a political discussion, but I believe that the goal of bringing manufacturing jobs to the US is at least not an obviously great one.

<comment><USER3> _Why do the inhabitants of Detroit deserve jobs more than those of the cities around Shenzhen?_

Because they pay taxes on wages they earn in my country, if not they are supported by social programs in my country that are paid for by my tax dollars. Change that and I am all for it, until then I prefer job creation in my country.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the author argues from a position of near-total ignorance.

America is a laughably bad place to base a manufacturing operation. Labor laws and regulations are ridiculously strict. Laborers are paid more and work less than anywhere else in the world. The science of managing global supply chains would not exist if the collocation of development and manufacturing were so economically opposed to each other.

He argues that Apple "could then easily — and justifiably — charge a premium for American-made iPods or iPhones or products we haven't even seen yet." I don't believe I have ever read anything so fatuous. Price is dictated by what the consumer wants to pay, not the need to make a profit as the trade with China so persuasively demonstrates.

The future of manufacturing is Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia. It will not be Detroit. It is hard to find anything other than wishful thinking in this article.

<comment><USER5> I agree wholeheartedly. Apple charges what people will pay already. They aren't going to pay an extra 20% to have it made in Detroit.

The basis for the article is charity not profit. How does manufacturing their device in Detroit provide any competitive advantages. Apple does not have the margin or expertise to build semi-conductor fabs in Detroit, nor does the expertise exist to run such a plant in Detroit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The cost to manufacture the iPhone is around $190 and final assembly is only 5-7% of that. Apple gets $600 for them. Apple's genius designers and engineers are creating the lion's share of economic value, not factory workers.

And having been to many OEM factories in southern China and Taiwan, you have to put their labor in context - workers pour in to work and are making several times more money than their parents did - the generational difference is massive. Imagine making 10x more than your parents. They have job fairs with hundreds of thousands of people wanting to work, its not forced. There is a wide spread air of excitement and opportunity all over south east Asia.

Apple tapping these eager to work people gives them more capital to reinvest in the 1000x more valuable jobs in Cupertino, this in turn employs a lot more people and business in America.

</comment><comment><USER7> Jobs already did this with NeXT. It would be interesting to see Apple do this as well.

They have plenty of cash with which to do so though such a project is perhaps not the best diversion of resources for shareholders...

[http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1990/...](http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1990/02/26/73121/index.htm)

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't think americans (being one myself), care as much as the author thinks about stuff being made in america. Maybe in 1986 we did, not in 2010.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've never quite understood why Chinese people are somehow less worthy than Americans of having jobs.

That aside, labour costs are not actually a large proportion of the cost of manufacturing electronics. The main reason goods like this are manufactured in the far east is that all of the components are manufactured there, so it makes sense to assemble them nearby. Detroit is pretty much the worst place you could imagine for that - think of the lead times.

</comment><comment><USER10> There are a few systemic issues preventing this from happening, but otherwise it would be a great idea for apple.

1) The Chinese people are impoverished by the Chinese government and kept that way by the dollar peg.

2) People in China would kill to be paid what we call minimum wage here in the USA... that is, if they were allowed to have guns.

3) The main expense in a modern manufacturing operation is not manpower but rather the automation in the manufacturing facility itself.

4) Most of the know-how to build these factories and the companies that manufacture automation equipment are located in China.

5) Making iphones in the USA would probably cost 5x as much as making them in China, and at most Americans would pay 20% more to have a "Made in USA" stamped on the iphone.

</comment><comment><USER11> 1) they probavly considered multiple manufacturing locations already (and probably reevaluate periodically)

2) customer base is world wide, so there isn't a geographic reason necessarily to base manufacturing in America. Whenever I buy an Apple product (not from their brick & mortar store), it ships directly from Shenzhen to my door here in Manhattan (I couldn't care less if it shipped from Texas)

</comment><comment><USER12> Even though I'm European, I would feel a lot better purchasing goods manufactured in the States, or really anywhere in the Western World. I would be prepared to fork out a bit more money (within reasonable limits) for such products.

<comment><USER9> Dude, if you're going to make racist comments like that you're supposed to disguise them with some sort of parochial appeal for the good of the local economy, not just "anywhere in the Western World". Know the game.

<comment><USER13> Perhaps this is based on labor policies, and not race. From the comment, there's not enough to distinguish one motivation from the other. Jump to conclusions much?

<comment><USER9> Yes.

Do you know something about labour policies in, say, Taiwan, Japan or South Korea that I don't?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would like this too, but I'm not sure I can justify this desire in any rational way. The reasons I hear against manufacturing in China are that the workers are slaves that make no money, and that the quality is inferior.

But big companies seem to have the QC down; I have lots of well-made stuff from China. I cringe at the thought that all my IKEA furniture is made in China, but it was all perfectly manufactured and has held up wonderfully for many years. Good design + good QA means you can get good product out of China. (There is lots of poorly-made stuff from China, but it's poorly-made because it's rock-bottom cheap, not merely cheap. Rock-bottom cheap stuff made anywhere is crap.)

The next issue is the labor one. I ask myself, how would pulling all manufacturing out of China help the Chinese people? $1/day buys more food than $0/day, right? So would manufacturing stuff outside of China help the overall human condition? Would it help _me_? What's the advantage here?

Just a small data point: the $4 made-in-China shirts I buy at Target seem to be better stitched than the average $20 made-in-America shirts I buy from American Apparel. I have had a lot of the AA shirts just completely unravel in the first wash. I always get an apology and a replacement, but I've never had a cheap Target T-shirt do this. So China is not automatically worse, although I do prefer the American-made product for other reasons.

</comment><comment><USER15> Putting aside the other issues I have with this story, Detroit seems like a pretty bad choice for locating manufacturing. The workers that the article alludes to being there are long used to being in a union that guarantees them ludicrously high wages and and untold benefits. The only way I can see new manufacturing in the US being viable is if it's unencumbered by unions (as implemented by the UAW, etc)

</comment><comment><USER16> Thanks for all the comments and feedback. I'd like to add a couple of things to help clarify:

1\. I'm not arguing for Apple moving their entire manufacturing base to the US. What I'm suggesting is a US facility to (as noted in the piece) produce limited run goods. Indeed, I explicitly suggest that it be a "technology incubator."

2\. I don't mention China once in the piece, and there's a reason for that. This isn't about arguing against one place, just arguing for Apple (or another, similar manufacturer) giving a piece of the game to a US facility.

Maybe it's feasible, maybe it's not. My argument is only that it would be a win for Apple in terms of PR and brand image, and it would be a win for wherever they did it. I'm admittedly not coming at this from a pure tech/logistics angle.

As for the "wishful thinking" comment, I'll cop to that.

But like I said, thanks for the feedback. Good thoughts.

Neal

</comment><comment><USER17> This really isn't possible since the product assembly is only a small portion of the "made in the USA" part. There's hard drives, flash chips, LCD screens, and other components that are made overseas as well. Some components (like hard drives) are 100% outsourced and Apple just puts in an off-the-shelf (though relabeled) unit.

</comment><comment><USER18> "They could then easily and justifiably charge a premium for American-made iPods or iPhones or products we haven't even seen yet"

I really don't see this working out. Maybe I'm underestimating the purchasing patriotism of the wheat belt though.

<comment><USER19> The cases for these American-made products could be painted to look like an American flag. Think of the possibilities to market that to the wheat belt:)

<comment><USER20> That is not something that Apple would ever do (while Jobs is alive, at least).

<comment><USER19> I was being sarcastic:)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think the split between asia making the hardware and america the software is working very well for both sides. The world is round after all. Of course it's cheaper for us this way, but there's also quite a bit of know-how accumulation in asia, that we might find hard to emulate. Like pumping out millions of high DPI Displays in just a few month - don't underestimate that.

I would be really more concerned that asia starts making it's own software and are some-what surprised that they are struggling so much to come up with anything useful.

<comment><USER22> Of course, that feat of producting millions of a product in a short period of time is also because of how much harder laborers for lower pay over there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Apple's done an extraordinary job managing their operating expenses, and I don't think a move to domestic manufacturing would generate the needed premium sales volume to justify the expense. It'd hurt their bottom line.

[http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/07/12/how-apple- maintains-e...](http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/07/12/how-apple-maintains- explosive-earnings-growth/)

</comment><comment><USER24> They did open a large datacenter in North Carolina recently for mobileme and iTunes hosting. Albeit for a 10 year tax break, but they would have received that from any state.

<comment><USER25> Data centers usually don't have very many on-site employees, though. I think the idea here is to move the labor to the US.

<comment><USER24> I agree. This says only 50-100 direct employees, once operational: [http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/07/maiden-nc-now- home...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/07/maiden-nc-now-home- to-1-billion-apple-data-center.ars)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> "To that end, consider the following scenario.

Apple announces tomorrow that they've purchased a dormant facility in Detroit with plans to turn it into a high-end technology incubator. They'll produce both internal prototypes and limited-run consumer goods. They'll hire 500 workers and offer them comprehensive training and full benefits.

Who wouldn't be excited by that?"

Apple?

</comment><comment><USER22> I always cringe when I see this on a new Apple product after I purchase it: "Designed by Apple in California. Manufactured in China."

How powerful would it be if they were able to say "Designed and manufactured by Apple in California"...

<comment><USER27> It's actually manufactured in Mainland China(Not Taiwan), but it seems to be getting expensive there, so it is making more and more sense to move some production back to the US.

[http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/2429f498-82fd-11df-8b15-00144feabd...](http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/2429f498-82fd-11df-8b15-00144feabdc0.html)

<comment><USER22> Just updated my post after I realized that, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Apple has been there and done that: <http://www.applefritter.com/node/4963>

</comment><comment><USER29> I would have sworn that the fancy new unibody cases were manufactured domestically.

<comment><USER30> Apple has a video on their website showcasing the unibody. The milling machine that the unibodies are being made in is covered in Chinese characters and the factory workers all appear to be asian.

So probably not.

<comment><USER29> Huh. I just remember the media event where it was introduced them talking about the almost fully-automated factory and how that meant it could be domestic. But if the rest is still made in China I suppose that doesn't make any sense. Must have been a rumor I misremembered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Every time I read "Designed in California. Made in China." I die a little inside.</comment>


I'm Stopping the Fan-Supported Podcast Experiment - <AUTHOR> https://tim.blog/2019/07/11/why-im-stopping-the-fan-supported-podcast-experiment/ <comment><USER2> Of course, podcast ads are also the opposite of almost all the other ads on the Internet: They don't send your personal data and web browsing history to hundreds of shady companies, they don't slow down your webbrowsing, they aren't a vector to install malware on your system.

Thus, I have absolutely no problem with podcast ads, and if they allow a great podcast I like to be produced sustainably, that's awesome! The same way I also don't have a problem with ads in printed magazines or on billboards (yet; some of them already do track you, of course).

<comment><USER3> I find podcast ads to be far worse than every other type of ad because it's the only one that forces you to engage in the ad at 1:1 speed. My podcast app allows me to skip forward 15s but that requires interaction and I'm often in a situation where my hands are not free enough to skip through ads.

I pay for ad free versions of every podcast I listen to that offers it. If you calculate the amount of time you spend listening to the ad, multiplied by a reasonable hourly rate, then paying to make the ad go away generally makes sense. Podcasts that don't offer an ad free version, I'm much more likely to leave it lowest on my priority queue of podcasts to listen to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A few tidbits:

18k respondents to his survey offered up $30k per month in donations .. but ads are better .. for a podcast.

He has 400M downloads from ~300 episodes.

One subscriber paid $1k per month.

Despite respondents to the survey saying they'd pay $5 or $10 he tested $9.95 and $19.95 payment levels as the minimum and 83% paid whatever the lowest was. So, prior to the subscription 24% said they'd pay $5, and only 4% that they'd pay $10 but he still managed to only lose 17% (off the subscription page) when the minimum was $19.95 .. that's kinda crazy.

#iveneverheardofhim #isheahypnotist

Edit: People listen, then go away and hunt down the products, enough that companies will pay him more than [ 30k/(1M/5) ] ~$6 per subscriber per month??

<comment><USER5> I'd never heard of him before today either.

He wrote a book called the 4 hour work week that claims he makes 40k/month by only working 4 hours a week. The amazon reviews are a mix of creepy 5 star reviews by pod people and 20% 1 & 2 star reviews mocking it. The comments on his podcast (on castbox 200k subscribers) are similar with lots of whining about the length of the adverts and how boring the show is.

After a bit more looking... absolutely fascinating. Obviously he's a complete con-artist and he works like a dog but his marketing ability is psychopathic genius.

<comment><USER6> He began his career by pushing a supplement (first for the brain, then pivoted it to performance) [https://hackinglife.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/razodglh#supplement...](https://hackinglife.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/razodglh#supplements- and-self-help)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not sure how well it's working for them, but for 3+ years i've been subscribed to a podcast that has two feeds, one for shorter abridged episodes with ads, and one for longer ad-free episodes for paid subscribers.

Clearly most people don't want to pay, but if your content lends itself to this kind of basic/premium situation, I think it makes a lot of sense.

</comment><comment><USER8> > That's why I have a closet full of Mizzen & Main shirts and drink Four > Sigmatic. Not sure I would have known about those without you.

Four Sigmatic?

> Four Sigmatic is a US company specialized in superfoods, functional > mushrooms and adaptogenic herbs.

Ok. To each their own, I guess.

</comment><comment><USER9> Subscription-based media (almost) only works for niche publications. NYT is an exception but it's only partially funded through subscriptions. The New Yorker took decades to turn a profit, and has ads as well.

Based on the fact that his user base is so large, it makes sense that advertising works best. Especially considering how many listeners he would lose if he only released it to subscribers. The user base may be more valuable to advertisers, than the podcast is to subscribers.

</comment><comment><USER10> A la carte is annoying when everyone starts doing it. Subscription fatigue is already setting in for music and video streaming services. No reason the podcast space would be different.

Still, kudos to Tim for trying.

<comment><USER11> A la carte works remarkably well with Patreon. Personally I support 11 different video, podcast, and writers.

Perhaps that's the real takeaway: make it easy to do a la carte, and people will.

<comment><USER12> It works well _for_ Patreon, but Patreon content creator earnings seem to follow the same power law that afflicts much of the economy. Almost nobody makes more than a couple bucks until they have network effects strong enough to fuel orders of magnitude higher earnings outside of Patreon with traditional (annoying) merch/advertising.

That's not to shit on Patreon. I think it's the right idea but still far from effective enough to consider creative funding a "solved problem" yet.

<comment> em-bee actually it doesn't work as well for patreon as they'd like because these small transactions still cost to much. banks charge you through the nose for them, so they take a share of the profit here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd hesitate to generalize this across the podcasting space. Tim's podcast is pretty unique in this regard. He _really_ does have unique and interesting advertisers, probably because his scale means he can pick basically whoever he wants.

Sam Harris did this same experiment recently and has stuck with the ad-free model. I listen to both podcasts with roughly equal frequency and interest and I immediately subscribed to Sam but not to Tim.

Not sure what the mechanics are going on here but bottom line is that both models seem to work well in different contexts.</comment>


From engineering to management - <AUTHOR> Is it common for a mid level  software engineer to be hired into  management at a new company? I moved to consulting and there's not much room for management within the firm,  and we don't offer management positions to clients.
I enjoy helping people learn,  and I'm a very  strong engineer (shown through the actions of employers,  not just words). I've been told I'm great at interviewing too.
To be honest,  I though management was a joke before. Not anymore.  After maturing I've  come to the realization one person can't do it all,  and nor should they.
I would do my best to care the team I'm apart of too.  Making sure everyone's work life balance is maintained would be a high priority for me. <comment><USER2> To be manager you have to be specific personality. You have to be able to treat with different personalities, solve non technical issues, be prepared for work in multitasking mode - lot of issues at same time, with different severities, from different sources and requirements.

Management problems are hard defined, so you can hardly Identify correct procedure, verify correctnes of your choice and the most of time it's running for the long haul.

Probably in most cases you will not see any results (like working code or system). Happy people just will not complain but they will not thank you for that, but on the other hand unhappy people will complain and swear. And you will see and hear it.

You are also inbetween two stones...upper management or customer and your team.

This is not for everyone. few years ago I had same intentions but after few discussions, observations and experiences i regreted my decision.

Own business is little bit different story. I am doing what i want...i wanna design something ...go for it, but still have business decision making rights.

</comment><comment><USER3> Managing and engineering are two different paths. I'm not saying one person can't do both (I do, 50/50), but they require different skills. I don't think one is "better" than the other, they are just different.

An engineer focuses on the product, on the code, on the technical solution to a business problem. A manager has to take care of the people, help them grow, make sure they are happy, challenged.

IMO a real manager is rarely involved in the product development. And if he is, it should be solely to help remove roadblocks that are slowing down the team. Forget about counting how many story points the team can do, or how many bugs they closed last week. Just make sure people are happy and learning new things.

</comment><comment><USER4> You want to shoot for a large company. In the startup world they just place all these hats on the same people, as an engineer you're also a product manager, a project manager, an interaction designer, basically every hat but sales.

</comment><comment><USER5> Plan to make a transitional stop as a team lead. It's a position that lets you develop "leadership" skills and practice interfacing with managers and other departments on behalf of a team. But it's still an engineering position and doesn't require previous management experience.

At a smaller company (most early stage startups) with a team of 10-20 engineers is where you're most likely to get the most management exposure as a team lead. Because the engineering team is big enough to need a leadership and planning layer below the CTO but too small to have developed a true management army yet.

In a small company (run well), you'll also have more exposure to how your decisions impact the business and what business information you need to make those decisions - crucial aspects of being a good manager.

However, a larger company is more likely to have good mentors for you to learn from. Like everything else, it's a trade off and a balancing act. You may want to try both routes.

If you find you like it and you're pretty good at it, it should be much easier to get hired into a management position from a team lead position than from a plain engineering position because you've positioned yourself as a leader of people and have some practice doing it.

Then you just need to be confident that you'll be content spending 95% of your time talking and planning and 5% or less working directly with the tech.

</comment><comment><USER6> No, it is not at all common. The expectation is you'll at least have a few years as a lead. You're going to have to move to a company with room for growth and get promoted.

If you want to stay technical, go with a non-enterprise software company. Anywhere from Google to a tech startup. If you want to get more managerial, pick anywhere else.

I wrote about this in much more depth here:

[http://www.madeupname.com/management-the-final- frontier/](http://www.madeupname.com/management-the-final-frontier/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I doubt you'll get _hired_ as a manager; you need to get promoted instead. So go get a job at a large company as an engineer and spend at least six months kicking ass. The ideal company is one with some disfunction and churn -- new hires and such. Then you need to go either out or up with a bang.

Find some major problems with the software development and complain about them strongly to upper management and offer a solution.

Learn to communicate with busy people. Use short emails. Lead with the most important point in verbal and written communication. Learn to tailor your communication to your audiance. Gain the trust and respect of everyone you can. People need to look at you and think, "this guy's/gal's got it." Some will like you and others will not. If you haven't been promoted after doing all this, then straight out ask to be a manager. If you don't get it, leave and do it over.

Also, read The Power Broker [1]

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Power-Broker-Robert-Moses- Fall/dp/039...](https://www.amazon.com/Power-Broker-Robert-Moses- Fall/dp/0394720245)

<comment><USER5> Not sure I agree about joining a dysfunctional company to that end - you're liable to either learn or be forced into terrible management habits.

That said, I couldn't agree more about communication. It's a crucial management skill and one that too few engineers develop properly (and I'm not even talking about socially awkward stereotypes). Communicating effectively with management is a very specific skill that's very different from general social communication; and communicating effectively with one's reports is yet another skillset.</comment></comment>


Petition to prevent DEA from designating Kratom plant as Schedule I - <AUTHOR> https://petitions.whitehouse.gov//petition/please-do-not-make-kratom-schedule-i-substance <comment><AUTHOR> This petition is unlike many other petitions you may have seen. Specifically, this petition could fulfill the third requirement under which the DEA's "Notice of Intent" emergency scheduling decision can be fought, which basically stipulates that if people collectively disagree with the decision, it can be fought. This petition is much more important than it seems on the surface.</comment>


The Long Hot Summer of Grammar - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/culture/comma-queen/the-long-hot-summer-of-grammar <comment><USER2> I am saddened by efforts to remove the capital I from "the Internet" (as opposed to "internet protocols") because it simply reflects ignorance.

I do make an exception from people willing to go full cummings.

</comment><comment><USER3> As an NLP developer, I did like the aside on hyphen purgatory - I think that can serve as the basis for a strategy on the news ingestor in development. The vocabulary is currently riddled with hyphenated words :-(</comment>


Disqus Commenting System Goes Down; Leaves All Blogs Comment-Less - <AUTHOR> http://digitizor.com/2012/01/22/disqus-comments-down/ <comment><USER2> If it only went down for about an hour during this whole time, then that's not really much of an argument for moving away from this type of service, because that is really excellent uptime.

But it doesn't seem ideal or really necessary for everyone to rely on one company for blog comments or for searches/advertising or anything.

<comment><USER3> IMO, Disqus is great for adding discussion to pages which don't have a built in commenting system; for example a single page which shows some demo of code.

But for my wordpress blog, I prefer native comments as it removes the dependency to a third party service

<comment> mkr-hn The Disqus plugin for WordPress can sync comments to your database. That way you still have your comments if Disqus goes down, or you decide not to use it. I still go with native because I prefer the way it looks. :)

<comment><USER3> Hmm. Is the Disqus plugin capable of automatically falling back to native Wordpress commenting in the case of Disqus down? If so, the authors need not panic even if Disqus down.

<comment><USER4> that seems like something you can easily implement on your end, not the disqus end.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While it's fun to point out downtime of hosted services, you have to balance it against downtime you'd have had if you hosted the service yourself. I've found non-critical services I administer and host myself always suffer worse downtime than those I outsource to a service.

</comment><comment><USER6> Bit of a link-bait title. I'd wager that the majority of blogs DON'T use Disqus, so saying it leaves 'All blogs comment-less' is a bit much.

<comment><USER7> I think it was pretty clear given the context that "All Blogs" meant "All Blogs using Disqus", and even an appropriate abbreviation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I thought the web was meant to be distributed so why everyone is using centralized service like disqus and megaupload ?

<comment><USER9> because centralisation centralises money too :)

<comment><USER10> And this is the only response in the thread worth discussing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Disqus is down?! Great - it's time to browse some blogs!

</comment><comment><USER12> I would like a real-time commenting system like what Google+ has. I actually think it leads to higher engagement. If Google decided to make it as a WP plugin, it would probably become more popular than Facebook's commenting system at least.

<comment><USER13> livefyre does that. If you go to TalkingPointsMemo.com and check out their comment section you can see it in action.

In my opinion it is a little messy only because when you load a page only the top few comments load, but as you scroll down to read more comments, comments that are replies to earlier comments start popping up, and it gets a bit overwhelming trying to follow a comment thread.

I like the idea, I jut think the execution need work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The interesting bit for me was the "everything ok" status page.

I wonder if any services run their own monitoring system live into their status page? (and uptime stats). If not, I guess the status page is less urgent than "fixing the problem", so is likely to never be updated?

</comment><comment><USER15> Blog comments gone?

"And nothing of value was lost."

<comment><USER16> I've seen comments far better than the original article they respond to.

<comment><USER17> I think it would be fair to say the lions share of comments are not as valuable as the original article. Youtube comments are a perfect example of this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Disqus creeps me out anyway. I don't like any site that tracks you where ever you go.

</comment><comment><USER3> It is back to online now.</comment>


Resume.io - Crazy-simple online resumes with impression tracking. - <AUTHOR> http://resume.io/ <comment><USER3> Fantastic idea and looks like it might be nice implementation, just not enough detail on the product for me to sign up and have a play.

No ToS, no privacy statement, nothing. Who are you?

Also:

1\. Can I mark my account as hidden until I want people to see it?

2\. What will you do with my data? Note, with LinkedIn it's pretty clear what they're going to do from the get-go just because of the nature of the service, with this there's nothing. Are you going to sell my details to recruiters? If so can I opt out? Do I have to pay rent if I do? Note some people won't care (perhaps a lot), this community is a bit of an outlier when it comes to privacy concerns.

3\. What domain will I have, can I use my own?

4\. Can I change the default style (as the example isn't really to my tastes)

Edit: One last thing, a full size example would be good too. You must have your own?

<comment><USER4> I signed up just to poke around. Here's a full page example:

<http://resume.io/dangrossman/xisuxools3>

There seems to be no style options and no domain/URL options. You just fill in boxes and it generates a random URL after your username as the resume. You can have more than one resume with different random URLs.

There's a LinkedIn import button to grab your list of employers and dates of employment, but it somehow gave me the wrong dates.

<comment><USER5> I think the random string is clever. My first instinct would be that you should be able to reach it at <http://resume.io/dangrossman>, but then if someone is familiar with the service they could circumvent the tracking URLs.

On the other hand, having a human friendly URL might be nice in the long run for easily finding people. Definitely a tradeoff.

<comment><USER6> I think resume.io/user/public would do fine, wouldn't it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think any move towards online resumes is great. It makes no sense that all recuitment is online yet all documents are off-line.

I don't keep a resume anymore, but on occasion someone asks me for one. I normally tell them I don't have one and point to my site, linkedin page, etc.

A couple of times recently I've been told that 'online resumes are not accepted'. Presumably because they can be changed after the fact. Ie - <USER2> fake job, submit resume, remove fake job. Or something.

Of course, I just use the linkedin export to PDF option and send it to the lazy person _shakes fist_

But you might want to either (a) have a pdf export for people and/or (b) have a 'guarantee locked version' or something so that people know the version they are looking at hasn't changed since they first saw it.

Yes, I know, it's weird to want to refuse updates to a resume, but apparently people want that. It's more about ass-covering by documentation, but I guess that's what many people are about.

<comment><USER8> What about versioning? I don't want all my versions exposed, but an ability to link to a specific version would be nice. Maybe a random url for each version. Your site could then guarantee that old versions can not be changed. Include the date of the version on the page, together with a link to the most recent version.

<comment><USER9> Different random url I suppose...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not bad, a nice simple hosted resume solution. I'm not a designer but it seems to me that the visual distinction achieved by the indentation on the left side of resume items could be improved a bit. It all seems kind of mashed together and somehow hard on the eyes.

As mentioned in another comment, <http://re.vu> is a totally different approach that attempts to enable slick display of a ton of information.

I still prefer what I currently use: Markdown + pandoc + github + bit.ly. That gives me the following:

1\. Version control, backup and hosting from Github.

2\. Plain text for posting in the occasional web form or whenever else I might need a plain text resume.

3\. One-command conversion to PDF using pandoc with a very simple LaTeX header (which I could automate with git hooks if I was lazy enough).

4\. One-command conversion to HTML using pandoc, with a CSS file. I can jazz up the CSS and then print to PDF from my browser if I ever want something prettier.

5\. Readable URLs using bit.ly that point to the latest version, for which I can easily view analytics by appending +, including country and referrer: <http://bit.ly/mwhiteresume> and <http://bit.ly/mwhiteresumepdf>

6\. The awesomeness that is Github's Markdown style.

<http://github.com/mwhite/resume>

<comment><USER11> What does a live version of your resume look like, if you don't mind me asking?

Would love to see the final version.

<comment><USER10> I usually send people the Github markdown one as my main version: <http://bit.ly/mwhiteresume>. Then there is the PDF: <http://bit.ly/mwhiteresumepdf>. I don't really use the HTML but here it is: <http://mwhite.info/resume/resume.html>. Looks better than I remembered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My resumes are typically tweaked to be job specific. Do I get to create just one generic apply-to-all copy?

How about tracking metrics other than just views? Following [http://paulbutler.org/archives/experiment-in-testing-my- resu...](http://paulbutler.org/archives/experiment-in-testing-my-resume/) there are: how far into resume one scrolls, clickthroughs on embedded links, inclusion/exclusion of sections (e.g. grades for recent grads).

<comment><AUTHOR> You can fork a resume to a new URL and customize it for each job.

Interesting! Will look into those.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Who is the target market for this, exactly?

I guess it seems like "make a business version of X" is always sensible, so maybe this is like the business version of <http://about.me/> ?

Personally, the resume process whenever I have applied anywhere has been: (1) make a beautiful resume in LaTeX, (2) export beautiful LaTeX resume to PDF, (3) get asked for an MS Word Doc or plain text so they can put it in their recruitment system.

Does passively posting a resume work for people? Does it lead to actual good recruiter interactions, rather than noise? Or is this for freelancers?

<comment><USER14> I agree that your job search has to be active. Check out <http://workastic.com>. I wrote it so that people know exactly what to do when they are looking for a job (the secret: activate your network and get referrals to the companies you want to work at).

It has the same idea of tracking who sees your resume, and more importantly, who does what with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Yeah it's simple. But if you want simple and better, <http://re.vu/> is far superior.

<comment><USER16> Want a post up an example of a re.vu resume for comparison against this service?

<comment><USER15> Buried in their About page are the founders:

<http://re.vu/stephen> <http://re.vu/bart> <http://re.vu/mikeharding>

<comment><USER11> Hrmm...I like these, but just looking at the first two it doesn't give me much information. Or rather, not much information that a recruiter can use.

It's like it is talking, but not saying anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Tried it out, excellent execution. The Linkedin import is a killer.

But, what's the use case for a product like this? I mean, I had my CV on Linkedin for ages. Same goes for most of the professionals I know.

How does a product like this one - and the others mentioned in the comments - position itself in a space dominated by Linkedin and personal web sites (such as flavors.me)?

<comment><USER18> I'm curious of that too. What's the differentiator? If it's just that it's 'simple' then why not just create a simple facade over sites like LinkedIn (full disclosure I work there)? What incentive do users have in the long run to maintain yet another site with information about them. At some point after undergrad I went around tracking down all those about-me sites that accumulated around the net and had outdated or completely erroneous information. I get the feeling this would stale in the same way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I have mixed emotions about this post. It's both really frustrating & reassuring for me at the same time. I've been working (with a partner) on a very similar concept for the past couple of months.

Though I'd say that the features of ours are far more developed (we're implementing most of the ones I've seen suggested in this post); you're first to market. I guess the list of MVP features we've been working towards was just a little too long. Lesson learnt.

Sigh! I'll just have to get that signup page finished a little bit quicker.

</comment><comment><USER20> Nice, although I must admit that it just gave me the idea to put my resume on Google Docs and track it with Google Analytics: [http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/07/google-docs- stats.h...](http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/07/google-docs-stats.html)

Often employers want Word Documents anyway, which I suppose they could export from Google Docs.

Not sure if it is possible to share documents with non-GMail email addresses on GDocs, which would be a must.

<comment><USER21> > Not sure if it is possible to share documents with non-GMail email addresses > on GDocs, which would be a must.

This is possible. You can set a document to be visible to anyone with the link, so sign-in isn't requred. More info here:

[https://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...](https://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=180199&topic=1360909)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> indeed.com supports resume posting.

It can take a resume upload or a linkedin profile and give you your own personalized resume URL like:

<http://www.indeed.com/me/TreyHenninger>

The resume search is awesome for employers too. <http://www.indeed.com/resumes>

Disclaimer: I work at indeed, but not on the resume product.

</comment><comment><USER23> <http://jobspice.com/> is another one that gives more control over visual presentation.

</comment><comment><USER24> Resume.io looks very simple but too simple for me. I have been fiddling around with re.vu and am very impressed. I like the ease of creating interesting infographics and attaching my work. re.vu easily creates something that gives an employer an instant insight into who I am instead of just a name on a page of text.

</comment><comment><USER25> I was hoping it would act as a linkedin importer with impression tracking. The thing I like about linkedin is that I keep that information updated anyway and if anyone needs to pull a resume they can do so from my profile. This, while nice, is more work - which makes it not all that useful.

</comment><comment><USER26> Yes, quite good. It misses a few of the principles of a good resume though...

\- Switch to a better font

\- definitely lose the italics

\- I'd drop the breadcrumb at the top of the resume view page, that could easily confuse someone reading it

\- Certainly avoid usernames appearing on the public stuff

Good stuff :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nav bar only shows if you're viewing your own resumes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Nice, albeit a bit too simple.

Another question (not just for you, but all online resume sites): How do you do identity management? I mean if I really wanted it, I could fake someones name, address, phone, (even photo, if that option would be available) etc easily, insert some false facts about education and work history and then let people start to google for it. I mean, you could always file a removal request, if you might stumble upon such a (your) faked profile, but you would have to ensure somehow, that the requester is the right person this time.

Or am I missing some mechanism to prevent this sort of identity thefts?

</comment><comment><USER28> Hey everyone. I'm pretty new to Hacker News, but I had a friend refer me to this chat. I'd like to throw my own site into this conversation for feedback. I've recently launched resume site called Kareer.me. Its sort of in between resume.io and re.vu in terms of features. The main difference is that our site is more focused on the process of the job search, allowing job seekers to make individual resumes for each job application. Resumes are traceable and private.

Love to get any of your feedback! Check it at <http://www.Kareer.me>

</comment><comment><USER29> I created an online resume using re.vu and found it to be very easy. The thing I like the most is the fact that it can be updated and shared quickly. There are some limitations, but that is mostly on the analytics side (an email from the CEO informed me that deeper analytics are coming soon.

I think the move to infographics helps tell a more complete story. It took me about an hour to complete my re.vu profile. I've shared it with some colleagues and all would use this to learn more about a candidate. I think the devil is in the details.

Travis re.vu/TravisSheridan

</comment><comment><USER30> Looks good. I signed up to play around with it. One thing that confused me at first was the resume link appends a random string of letters after your account. So my resume is at <http://resume.io/gabe/staujevooc>.

I thought "Staujevooc" was a last name and my account got confused with someone else's.

Can the randomly generated string be numbers instead? I don't want to send out that link to someone and have them ask, "Who is Gabe Staujevooc?"

<comment><AUTHOR> heh, it uses a function that makes pronounceable (attractive) strings, but you're sort of right, it does sound like part of the name...

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Cool idea though I wonder if you apply to a job at say a large Co or firm, most likely the resume will be looked at printed/copied into word/outlook and mailed around - smart tracking system thwarted though this is more for targeted resume applications.

Other issues is that many sites/firms etc require word or pdf resumes and are skeptical (at least for most non techie positions) of anything that is neither.

</comment><comment><USER32> Clean and simple, just how I like it. Nice work on the LinkedIn importer.

Edit: Forgot to add, some more explicit privacy options would be cool. Also the "card" on the homepage (<http://resume.io/{username}>) seems to not be working correctly(?)

</comment><comment><USER33> Nice to see another resume app out in the wild. Mine is <http://www.cvstash.com>. I think yours have a more minimalism feel.

</comment><comment><USER34> <http://zerp.ly> is similar too. I like the clean style of resume.io though, I wish zerp.ly provided something as simple.

</comment><comment><USER35> A guy I know built this <http://my.ceevee.com/> . It might be interesting for you to compare and contrast.

</comment><comment><USER36> Other similar websites:

<http://re.vu/>

<http://www.vizualize.me/>

</comment><comment><USER37> as someone who hates linkedin and the type of behavior it promotes, i think this is great.

awesome work jacob. ^_^

</comment><comment><USER38> Simple and effective. This is awesome!

Was wondering if it is possible to change the URL of the resume page?

</comment><comment><USER6> Would it be possible to have a "Projects" field similar to Experience, Education, etc.?

</comment><comment><USER39> Love your work Jacob. Looks great, easy as hell to use and well executed. Respect. :-)

</comment><comment><USER40> Where is the import from Linkedin option?

<comment><USER32> Once you sign up, go to <http://resume.io/home> and click on the "Import LinkedIn profile" link on the lower right corner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> viewed impressions is not the most important number..

if you look at the typical hr or recruiter workflow its when they copy/paste the resume into an email impressions that matters..

that is why with my boilerplate framework I use tynt services to track that..

boilerplate framework should be up over this weekend at my github account..</comment>


Web Stories for WordPress by Google and open source - <AUTHOR> https://google.github.io/web-stories-wp/beta/ <comment><AUTHOR> Source: [https://github.com/google/web-stories- wp](https://github.com/google/web-stories-wp)</comment>


How Uber uses interaction design to manipulate its drivers - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/04/02/technology/uber-drivers-psychological-tricks.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> I'm quit tired of all the Uber bashing going on. "Psychological tricks" \- really? A company is trying to make sure there are drivers available during busy times and even helps them know where those areas are but this this article reads like yet another hit piece on Uber. Last I checked we can still vote with our actions. Don't like the way Uber is treating you as a driver? Don't drive for Uber. People who complain about Uber yet use it for income are the precise reason "unfair" practices can continue thriving. You can't really blame the CEO for wanting to make a profitable business, even if it means gamifying the platform to get more out of drivers. What's next, are we going to get angry at e-commerce shops for suggesting we spend 10.01 more to get free shipping? C'mon...</comment>


Facebook offers to pay users for their voice recordings - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/facebook-offers-to-pay-users-for-their-voice-recordings/ <comment><USER2> While years ago zukenberg's laptop spotted with tape covered microphon and camera means they already collected the data.

<comment><USER3> That was because Snowden's revelations.

[https://mashable.com/2014/06/05/edward-snowden- revelations/](https://mashable.com/2014/06/05/edward-snowden-revelations/)</comment></comment>