Airtel, one of the biggest Indian ISPs, is intercepting HTTP requests to display ads - <AUTHOR> http://blog.uncool.in/2009/02/26/airfail/

<comment><USER2> This is not surprising. The concept of customer service in India is very different from what we accept as the norm in the States. Indian businesses have always treated consumers like crap. The socio-economic reasons for this are beyond the scope of this post, but I do want to point out some examples to illustrate the general attitude, and help align the frame of reference better.

My mother lives in New Delhi and often visits me in the States. She still can't get over how easy it is to return stuff to stores here. In India, once you've purchased something, it's yours for life. You can't get a refund if you are not 'completely satisfied with your purchase'. Keep or trash; there is no 'like'. This applies even if the product is defective. If you are lucky, or willing to yell at the store manager, you might get store credit.

You don't like the movie selection on Delta? I once flew a 'discount carrier' from Bangalore to Delhi and had to stare at a 6" display ad for a refrigerator three hours straight, because it was pasted on the back of the headrest in front of me, and the seat next to me, and every other seat on the plane.

If your server in a San Francisco restaurant isn't friendly, you give the restaurant two stars on Yelp. In India, if my server is friendly, I have reason to be suspicious. Surprisingly, I have seen this attitude towards customer service even in Indian stores and restaurants in the Bay Area. Note: if you're white, your Indian server in an Indian restaurant is more likely to be friendly and hospitable. Not so much if you're Indian, perhaps because they know you know, or perhaps because awe of the 'white-skinned colonizing foreigner' is still deeply entrenched in our culture.

Airtel, and pretty much all wireless carriers in India often send you 'free' text messages advertising their newest ring tones, pricing schemes and partner offers. "AT&T does that too!" you say, but not twenty-five times a day. I don't know if people even understand the concept of opting out.

Let's talk about less superficial issues - landlines stop working arbitrarily. There are times when I can't reach my mother because her phone (and hence DSL) service has been knocked out by rain or wind or the latest 'big dig'. Even when the phone lines work, DSL doesn't work well and VoIP is spotty. Hour-long power outages are common. Four hour outages are even more common (and I'm talking big cities here). Running water around the clock? Only for the tiny new economic class that gets written about in the New York Times. I think it was the mid-nineties, when I heard about a week-long power outage in a Delhi neighborhood and the consequent lynching of local power grid officials by an irate mob.

Having grown up in the Indian middle-class, I am used to bad customer service, though I must admit the States is softening me. So when I see complaints about Airtel intercepting client HTTP requests, I can empathize, but it makes me wonder about much bigger customer service issues that never make it to the front page of HN.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was the one who submitted the original story (<shameless>that's my own blog</shameless>), so I have reasons to be very angry right now, but I don't quite agree with what you said there.

I have lived in New Delhi all my life, and I've seen this city grow. I remember the regular power outages, but that was some 5 or 6 years ago. The power still goes out, but it's a very rare incident. In fact, people of my age are rather surprised when that happens. My parents are, of course, unfazed because they've lived in times when it was considered disturbing when the power _didn't_ go out after every few hours.

I've been with Airtel for about two years now, and so far I've experienced just two problems with my connection, both of which were fixed within hours. I remember the roads being flooded with water and school being cancelled when I was a kid, but that doesn't happen anymore (no matter how hard I wish ;)). MTNLs landlines are the only constant many Indians know in life. Come whatever may, your trusty old MTNL will _always_ work. (MTNL's customer service, OTOH, treats you like shit.)

I wonder how my experiences will compare with those of other Indians. I live in a great neighbourhood in one of the better areas of New Delhi.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> ISPs in China have done this for years (3 years, as I can recall). Now, they found a more efficient way: intercepting http requests and injecting Google Adsense click in any web pages.

<comment><USER4> "google adsense click" as in they force send users to the advertisement link? That's huge!

<comment><USER5> I don't think that's what he meant. Google would lock that shit down quick if it was true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Funny, I have an Airtel broadband connection but have not seen that. However I suspect the reduction of bandwidth on unlimited schemes is correct.

<comment><USER7> Even I have not seen this yet but I have heard about the reduction of bandwidth even on the so called "unlimited" offers. I thought Airtel was the only decent ISP left in India, but they also seem to be messing things up.

And btw these ads are not gonna help them sell their insanely expensive DTH services. Also the lack of understanding of the technology among their customer care executives is shocking!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> How much do you guys pay for your internet connection per month? What is the speed that you get and where do you live?

Me? Rs.750 (around $15), 256kbps (Airtel), India (Bangalore).

</comment><comment><USER9> Rogers, the largest Canadian ISP, will redirect you to a page filled with their ads if you try to access a domain name that doesn't exist.

</comment><comment><USER4> Sify has been doing something similar from years. There, for every GB or so of bandwidth one day of the package is reduced.

</comment><comment><USER10> American ISPs have been doing this with failed DNS lookups for years.</comment>


RMS Feels There's "A Systematic Effort to Attack GNU Packages" - <AUTHOR> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=RMS-Emacs-Gud-LLVM <comment><USER2> After reading HN for a while, I have to agree with him. GPL'd software is being "phased-out" in favor of software that can be more easilly-exploited by corporations. LLVM is currently the best option of this.

Sadly, gcc is less modern than llvm, which means it's failing on it's quality rather than it's license. And the market is beginning to reflect that.

<comment><USER3> It's being phased out in favor of software that's _better_.

<comment><USER4> Not always, look at samba vs smbx.

<comment><USER5> Well, RMS shot his own foot with the GPLv3. While the GPLv2 is making its way in corporations, the GPLv3 is generally a show-stopper in itself, even if the licensed software is the best.

<comment><USER2> GNU was doing just fine without corporations for a long time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Stallman here wrote:

      If GNU packages do not support each other, it will be easier
      for many of them to fail.

This reminds me of a recent article describing his objections to work towards exporting the AST from GCC for use in Emacs: [http://lwn.net/Articles/629259/](http://lwn.net/Articles/629259/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Yet another RMS power-trip, I guess...</comment>


First number not in Google? (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://godplaysdice.blogspot.com/2008/09/first-number-not-in-google.html

<comment><USER2> I remember having what I thought was a brilliant idea of the time of squatting iPhone domains a decade in advance - clearly there was no way I was getting in on the next, but maybe iphone6 wasn't taken... (this was when the current was four).

Anyway, at the time the lowest one available was iphone36.com. I didn't register it. It's taken now, no idea how high you'd have to go now.

<comment><USER3> It's harder if you count like Microsoft:

1, 360, 1

<comment><USER4> I thought the canonical Microsoft list was Windows:

1, 2, 3, 3.1, 3.1.1(for workgroups), 95, 98, 98SE, ME, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10

<comment><USER5> Most people using NT knew it as version 4. Some folks knew that Windows 2000 was version 5. After that, things got weird: Vista is 6 but Windows 7 is 6.1 and Windows 8 is 6.2: [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/ms72...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/ms724832%28v=vs.85%29.aspx)

Windows 10 will finally (but perhaps temporarily) undo this weirdness, and report itself as version 10, but only to some applications! [http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/11/why- wi...](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/11/why- windows-10-isnt-version-6-any-more-and-why-it-will-probably-work/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I dink around in SEO a lot because I find it fascinating, fun and occasionally profitable. As a fun anecdote, at one point I wrote a ridiculously sarcastic post about "how to rank #1 on Google" and held the number one position for that query for at least a year. [1]

A long time ago, one of my friends came to me saying "When I googled for a picture of a bird wearing a tucked in shirt, I couldn't find anything!"

Clearly this tragedy needed a remedy, so I MSPainted a shirt onto a bird, tucked neatly into its little belly and plopped it onto my blog [2] with most of the SEO best practices check boxes filled in. Since it was of so little value and competition it took about three days for it to rank number one for "bird wearing a tucked in shirt" \- My friend thought I was a wizard, telling her coworkers of my mystical powers and ability to manipulate the internet. "You have very powerful friends" her boss would proclaim.

Point of this story? Well, there isn't really one.

Unfortunately, I broke my blog a few months ago in a host migration resulting in a crash for all my useless rankings. The image was lost in that migration as well... Perhaps someone else can provide the world with an image of a bird wearing a tucked in shirt it so desperately needs.

[1] Here's the now broken post for anyone curious - [http://stentontoledo.com/blog/how-to-rank-1-on-google- guaran...](http://stentontoledo.com/blog/how-to-rank-1-on-google-guaranteed/)

[2] [http://stentontoledo.com/blog/a-bird-wearing-a-tucked-in- shi...](http://stentontoledo.com/blog/a-bird-wearing-a-tucked-in-shirt/)

<comment><USER7> I was once tasked with reviewing our company website,and my first recommendation was adding a list of happy clients (with links to their sites), for a variety of reasons.

The next week I was able to announce to the team that we now ranked #1 on Google (cue applause) ... for some random phrase I compiled by using words in client names. I figured it was a good lesson for them that "#1 on Google" is not a goal in and of itself; you need to rank for something that matters.

Your bird with a tucked in shirt is a brilliant example, so thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> In the artwork "The Secret Lives of Numbers"[1] by Golan Levin, et al. from 2002, scraping AltaVista with Perl for the numbers 0 to 1,000,000 returned results for every number (otherwise I'm sure this would be mentioned in the report[2]). So at least 7 figures have been omnipresent on the web for the last 12+ years.

[1] [http://flong.com/projects/slon/](http://flong.com/projects/slon/) [2] [http://flong.com/storage/pdf/reports/webnums_report.pdf](http://flong.com/storage/pdf/reports/webnums_report.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER9> There's a similar game in which you ask "what is the smallest positive integer that doesn't have a dedicated Wikipedia page?"

And then you can ask what happens when _that_ number gets its own Wikipedia page...

<comment><USER10> N is the smallest number without a wikipedia page. A page is created to document this fact. N+1 is now the smallest number without a wikipedia page.

But if you created the page for N, that was its only feature of notability. If you create a page for N+1, N is now no longer notable. But that means also means that N+1's page is both inaccurate and not notable, and so it must be deleted. N is now once again the smallest number without a wikipedia page.

So rather than creating an infinitely increasing set of pages, I think you end up toggling forever between N and N+1

<comment><USER11> This is how you lose editing privileges.

<comment><USER11> (...either 2551 or 7563, depending on if you allow things like "7562 Kagiroino-Oka")

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> While there is no proof that this is the smallest number, you can find an rough upper bound by shedding digits

After a couple minutes of playing I worked it down to 210000041821 before getting bored.

A tenth of this and you are in telephone number space. Numbers a bit smaller than this and you are in valid parcel tracking numbers. Either Google indexing this page or more packages being sent will eventually invalidate this post.

</comment><comment><USER13> This makes me wonder if finding short strings with no/few search results and getting ranked for them all could lead to some free traffic from Google. Shotgun SEO?

</comment><comment><USER14> This site doesn't help: [http://www.integernumber.com/](http://www.integernumber.com/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Well, let's find out. I came up with 35949340184</comment>


No, I Won't Link to Your Spammy Article - <AUTHOR> https://www.troyhunt.com/no-i-wont-link-to-your-spammy-article/ <comment><USER2> I understand where Troy is coming from, and I agree with his point of view, but how is it that the community aspect of the web has atrophied away to dust?

Many years ago sending links to site owners and asking for a "linkback" was part and parcel of how you grew your website on the internet. When I got random emails they tended to be a bit less obvious than the brash "I think this would be good for your blog" and more "If you like this _please_ link back.", but the fact that commercial SEO has ruined the process entirely is just so depressing.

<comment><USER3> > Many years ago sending links to site owners and asking for a "linkback" was > part and parcel of how you grew your website on the internet.

Man, that was really a long time ago.

<comment><USER4> I doubt he would mind linking to an actual, good article that was part and parcel of how you grew your website on the internet.

Based on the list of titles, they are all literal blog spam - worthless, useless trash that contributes nothing other than absolute rubbish on the internet, largely affiliate links, fraudulent VPN reviews for whoever is the highest bidder, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The concept is interesting, that he thinks he can penalize spammers by A) having a popular blog and B) shaming them.

In general I agree that hiring a bunch of digital marketers who go out and ask hundreds or thousands of sites to link to a blog post is not really a productive sector of the economy. I think most marketing is an unproductive sector of the economy. But it is necessary because of the way the economy works and in a lot of ways the business which shouts its vaguely targeted message into the void the loudest tends to win.

Maybe there is something to Troy's idea of "if you shout too many times and too loudly I will shame you." Wouldn't it be a better world if most business growth happened through organic customer referrals, as opposed to paid marketing?

<comment><USER6> > _But it is necessary because of the way the economy works and in a lot of > ways the business which shouts its vaguely targeted message into the void > the loudest tends to win._

That isn't really necessary, it's just a zero-sum game the economy is stuck in. A world of good could be done by enlightened regulators, if they would start curtailing the worst aspects of marketing and advertising space.

In today's world, you need a megaphone to have even a tiny chance of being heard in a space where everyone else is already shouting through megaphones of their own. If someone could step in and take everyone's megaphones away, maybe then we'd have a chance at having a conversation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wouldn't classify those emails as spam, as spam is unsolicited bulk email, ie untargeted emails going out to a large amount of people.

Personalised unsolicited email or any other type of contact can be an important way to make new connections, at least in my opinion.

<comment><USER8> For many of us, the fact that it is "unsolicited" means it is spam. I really don't care if it was an e-mail sent out to 1000 random people or it was "targeted" to 20 people just like me.

If it's commercial and unsolicited, it's spam and I will treat it as such.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Totally get it. I wonder if diluting his page with irrelevant titles is going to have a negative effect on his own ranking.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've heard about it. It's actually a SEO "strategy" called link building. You just spam sites with articles related to you, asking for a link to your page, which in return raises your credibility in search results and yields better position... in theory.

<comment><USER11> Yup, and they have to do it like that because spamming links in comments no longer works because most commenting systems add a meta tag to the links so that search engines won't follow / consider them for ranking.

<comment><USER6> Also, blog comment systems these days often feature automated spam filters.

(Or petty bored admins like me; back in the days I had a wordpress blog, I once looked at the spam links I was bombarded with, identified the SEO company responsible, then went around them and mailed a customer of theirs, informing them of how their business is being promoted. It ended up with that customer dumping their SEO provider, which I found immensely satisfying.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wow, I hope I have self-esteem like him to react to a simple mass-produced spam like this.

<comment><USER13> He's not really writing it for the bots emailing him, he's saying "this SEO growth tactic sucks, marketers should stop it!" in a creative way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Someone has upset troy today.

</comment><comment><USER15> Then why is this spam here?

<comment><USER16> One of us solicited it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> No, I won't read this low effort blog post.

</comment><comment><USER18> A guy from a company with probably the worst history of unethical or even illegal behavior in the industry, got all worked up about guys doing link building outreach.

<comment><USER19> He is unethical?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm an SEO. I build links all the time.

SEOs like me don't give a rat's patoot if some guy throws a hissyfit about other SEOs contacting him for backlinks.

Whenever I do outreach, people reply with a quote on how much it costs. This is business, and I'm willing to pay.

I agree with him that those wanting a backlink for free are parasite moochers.

But the reality of the situation is that you can build great content and nobody will ever visit it if you don't build at least a few backlinks to yourself.

Build it and they will come?

Show me where, because it's certainly not in SEO.

I still gotta eat. So paid backlinks it is.

Troy can execute his evil plan. It'll fail. You think you're gonna get rankings & traffic from just including a few terms on an otherwise unrelated blogpost?

It isn't 2005 in SEO anymore.

If only it were!

</comment><comment><USER21> He just comes across as an arsehole, this sort of nonsense has stopped me listening to whatever else he has to say.

What we all do with spam is ignore it.

<comment><USER22> No, he doesn't, he comes across as someone who is helping by trying to react to a serious problem in a way that, if we all did it, might go some way to solving it. I wish everyone would/could do something like this.

If you send me an unsolicited email you/your company goes on an avoid list and it would take a very strong, very personal recommendation for me to work with you after that.

Unsolicited email is targeted (or in some cases, pretty untargeted) advertising. It's unprofessional, unpleasant and a hassle, and should be called out and heavily penalised whenever possible.

<comment><USER23> And how would I go about contacting you in a professional, pleasant and unhassling way if I genuinely have good reason to reach out _and_ we have no prior connection?

What I hear from your conclusion is "screw anyone who isn't already in my network", and that sounds... sad?

<comment><USER22> If only people with a genuinely good reason made contact it'd be a lot easier. If someone has a such a reason then they ought to be able to explain it well enough in an email, and given that the process of avoidance isn't automated, it's more than likely going to get seen.

Collaborations and discussions are always welcome and it's not hard to get in touch with me, it's generally very easy to separate this from the spam. Twitter is a better place than email to kick off a non-spammy relationship with someone you don't know.

That said, half of the people who send this spam _think_ they have a genuinely good reason and I have no doubt some of them even believe it. 99% of the time there isn't a good reason, they are after something. "I saw you do after X and we provide Y which is necessary for X" is not a good reason. For instance, even if I'm hiring, unsolicited contact from recruiters who think they can fill that role is entirely unwelcome, etc.

I can count on one hand the number of fruitful outcomes from completely cold contact that I've experienced in >15 years.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Reinventing a Free Trial offer  - <AUTHOR>

It's always nice when a company offers a free trial period - users love it, they can try company's services without a risk and earn experience that these services are really useful for them or their business.
It is good for companies too, because they can aquire clients which are doubting whether they need their services or should they choose this particular service provider. A part of trial users will convert to paying customers and company can communicate with trial users during the free trial period and after it to improve conversion rate.
But from my own customer experience I've spotted some things I want to share with you. I think my experience is not unique and the same customer journey have many of your potential customers.
Recently I've googled case studies about a/b- and multivariant testing. Via one of blog posts I've found an interesting service provider. Like many competing services he offers a 30 Day Free Trial.
After reading descriptions of features of this service on the company's website I've realized that I'd like (probably like many of you) to explore interfaces of all features in customer's area and try it in the feature for my startup.
But here comes the problem. My startup will launch only in July 2012, so before this date I will not able to try this product "in battle". But I wished to explore the interface of this service at the end of April to be sure whether it is as good as I imagine after reading descriptions of its features.
So, if I sign up for free trial right now, I will be able to explore interfaces of all features, but will not able to try service in battle. But if I will not sign up for free trial until my startup launch, it is a great possibility that in July I will not remember URL of this service (or will not remember that I've bookmarked it) and, as a result, will make a new search and choose another service provider. This company almost converted me from website visitor to free trial user, but may be lost me as potential paying customer forever because doesn't studied customer journey and doesn't understand that between customer's site's visit and customer's need of service can be relative large period of time.
Thus it can be smart to offer your customers a free trial period, but ask them whether they want to try your services right now or they want to look at your features right now but try its later (you can ask when, if you like). So you will not loose your potential clients, will have the possibility to communicate with them via e-mail and your clients will be able to try your services "in battle", see it is useful for them or their business and will more likely to convert to paying customers.
What do you think about it? <comment><USER2> It might be too confusing to ask users if they want to pause their trial. But A/B testing would be good for sure.

I like it when companies offer a test account that has full access to all the features that you can play around with.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting idea, be useful to be able to test a service and pause the trial, meaning you get a prompt for a time you've set in the future, or 'in battle' as you describe it ;-)

</comment><comment><USER4> Just signup with multiple accounts.</comment>


IOS app for Cheap Drivers - <AUTHOR> http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fuelzee/id660938854?mt=8

<comment><AUTHOR> We would love it if you could take a chance and review our app.Fuelzee is like foursquare for gas stations with real life rewards. We help you find cheap gas and reward you at the same time.

Are you a cheap driver, then we are your app!</comment>


Twitter's CEO downplays chatter about possible acquisition - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-m-a/twitters-ceo-downplays-chatter-about-possible-acquisition-idUSKCN1FX2VD?feedType=RSS&feedName=technologyNews <comment><USER2> Not a surprise, they finally showed they can make money.</comment>


How the NYT paywall is working - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/08/12/how-the-nyt-paywall-is-working/

<comment><USER2> Newspapers have historically earned about 80% of their revenue from advertisers and about 20% from subscriptions. However, newspapers typically lose money on these subscriptions since the cost of producing and delivering paper outstrips the revenue. It is advertising that subsidizes most of what people think content and delivery costs.

\- The true unburdened cost of a yearly New York Times subscription in paper is north of $1000. Advertisers cover 70-80% of this cost.

\- Uniques to nytimes.com are down approximately 20% since paywall implementation. This wasn't supposed to be the case. A porous paywall should lower pageviews but not uniques. This suggests that users are being trained to assume that they cannot access the Times even when they can. This is certainly a harbinger of a decline in influence.

\- Pageviews are down significantly as well.

\- Most of the nytimes digital subscribers are print subscriber dollars that they've allocated to the digital product.

The problem is that newspapers with paywalls are now optimizing their business to run on the 20% of revenue they never actually used to have instead of advertising which has historically paid the bills.

While some may believe this is necessary, I think there are better solutions (especially on the local newspaper level).

<comment><USER3> I've worked with NYT.com on some of their pre-paywall strategies and have several friends who work there currently.

All these points aside, the only significant issue is that Newspapers we're propped up on an ad-based bubble that was based on keeping ad-buyers in the dark.

Real-time analytics proved that advertising was not as effective as it was sold to be, ad-buyers only had (relative to todays) made up metrics that inflated the value.

Now when ad-buyers can see the true value of advertising through real metrics, they are far less willing to pay top dollar for it. Rupert Murdock foresaw this very clearly when he told the founders of Google "... you're going to ruin this for everyone" in reference to allowing ad-buyers to see metrics and bid on performance.

To make a very broad conclusion, marketing divisions were allowed larger budgets when they could tell executives they 'took out full page add in the New York Times' vs far less dramatic and less visible campaigns with targeted online markets, conversions, and engagement ratios.

The market become less useful when the total audience of an ad turned out to be far less than 100% of the distribution.

<comment><USER4> That's a very grave statement. You're essentially saying that the entire newspaper industry has been propped up on the basis of misinformation regarding the effectiveness of advertising. While this was a lucky flaw that allowed the Fourth Estate to remain afloat, it doesn't look like it'll last much longer. We're really going to be fucked as a society if the journalism industry falls apart.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps it's more of a transition.

In the old world we had centralized media -- paper is expensive, printing presses are more expensive, typeset articles more expensive still, then there's distribution, etc. -- so we need to optimizes the quality of the material that gets printed and distributed.

Today you can set up a wordpress or blogspot account for free. So the question is how do we get from a world of edited news written by professional journalists to a new world where a lot of the content is provided more-or-less for free, but we still need reliable places to go for news?

We have parasitic sites like Huffpost and Business Insider which essentially SEO content created by professional news organizations -- what we need is something that assembles equivalent stuff from citizen journalists, bloggers, and so on.

<comment><USER4> > a new world where a lot of the content is provided more-or-less for free, > but we still need reliable places to go for news

That's a wonderful sentiment, one that I'd love to see come true. But until someone can make it happen, we must consider the possibility that it cannot happen.

I mean, just take a look at _The Verge_. They have an enormous amount of accurate and in-depth tech coverage, both text- and video-based. They are far and away better than just random bloggers posting gadget reviews - they have actual lawyers explaining the Samsung v. Apple trial, and they create wonderful video features[0] on niche communities that we'd never know about otherwise. Even though their articles and videos are plastered with ads, I just don't understand how they can become profitable, even in the long run. In any case, they had to hire the best of the best in the online tech journalism industry to build the site they have today.

0: [http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/8/3177438/cyborg-america- bioh...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/8/3177438/cyborg-america-biohackers- grinders-body-hackers)

<comment><USER5> I think that we're heading in that direction whether we like it or not. The classic newspaper is in essence a "middleman" between writers and readers who makes money by picking writers who will be popular and selling ad space. Whether or not there are publishers or an audience, there will always be writers -- it's the middleman who is being rendered unnecessary.

We're seeing the same phenomena in the music industry and television, and it happened in radio long ago (which is why most radio content is completely disposable, public radio being the exception).

What does the end-game look like? Probably something like Google News or the App Store.

It's possible that entities such as the New Yorker or the NY Times or The Economist can survive if they figure out how to switch from their middleman model to a "make good stuff and sell it to people" model, but it's problematic -- switching business models is very hard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That article is a year old.

</comment><comment><USER7> Some people will try to steal anything, even if it's nailed down.

And some people will respect the sign that says "limit 1 free, otherwise please drop $5 in this slot."

Sometimes you have to help the second group by not making them feel like suckers, but they are a much easier group to rely on to pay your rent.

</comment><comment><USER8> Has there ever been an industry-wide study of this? i.e. which/how many startups saw increases in revenue/signups after putting more content behind a paywall?

</comment><comment><USER9> I pay for it and I think it's worth it for the quality of reporting.

</comment><comment><USER10> If you delete the entirety of the URL past the ".html" on a blocked NYT article you can bypass the paywall.

<comment><USER11> Yep. I wonder if they track stats on how many people do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> WSJ and FT caster to a more exclusive and professional audience who generally have to read their articles in order to stay current, therefore they can easily have a subscription only business model.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think the explanation is much more simple: it's working because most people aren't tech-savvy enough to figure out the loopholes and feel comfortable using them on a regular basis.

Kind of an interesting form of freemium business model, actually...

<comment><USER14> I'm tech savvy enough to dodge the paywall, but I'm also a paying NYT subscriber. I do it because traditional journalism has nearly completely collapsed, and I don't want to see a world that's solely dominated by TechCrunch, Engadget, Gizmodo-style, he-said-she-said bloggery.

In the last year I've made a concerted effort to subscribe to media sources that have quality reporting and/or writing.

<comment><USER13> That's wonderful, truly noble -- seriously -- but you, OP, and people like you are probably a very small group, at least compared to the masses of people who are paying simply because they don't know how to jump the paywall (or find it unpleasant to). If the paywall is "working", aka "making money for the NYT," it's mainly because of the techno-illiterates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> One site, I think the LA Times, would show your the entire article but then redirect you to their pay page after a few seconds. I just turned off javascript and it solved that issue...</comment>


Ask HN: Bioinformatics - the search for the hacker chemist - <AUTHOR>

I was chatting with my chemist friend and he mentioned the great need for people in the bioinformatics field that can not only do the programming but can also back-up their understanding of the data they are processing with bench work. I was like "huh - i would need some bio chem" and he was like "huh - i would need some software engineering"...and then we were both like "huh - if we combine our minds there would be no reason why we couldn't get a job in the field today"
Is there anyone that has done something like this, specifically in the bioinformatics field with a partner? I have not heard a lot about this and think it would happen more if chemists and hackers started hanging out more.
Also, where would you find contracting opportunities to try this out? <comment><USER2> I've worked in molecular modeling, bioinformatics, cheminformatics, and related fields. My observation has been that a large percentage of the people in those fields start from the sciences and learn the software development. This likely reflects the length of time it takes to become productive in each field.

I don't do much with bioinformatics these days so can't give you much specifics, but Dan Gusfield at UC Davis is an example of someone who started from algorithms development and (I believe) with collaboration entered bioinformatics. Jim Kent, now at UCSC, was a professional programmer who developed GigAssembler to assemble the data for the public Human Genome Project. But he entered grad school and was working on a PhD in biology before doing that.

But in general there are a number of groups which have people with science and people with programming backgrounds working together, both in industry and academia. The research group I was in in grad school had PIs and students from the physics, chemistry, CS, and math departments. I've worked with a number of companies which have research groups with either direct IT support or they've hired their own software developers.

If you specifically want a company hire the two of you, which means paying two salaries, and there's no history of how well the two of you work together, then I think it's going to be hard to convince them. What's the advantage for them to hire a pair than to hire two people out of the general population, with equivalent backgrounds?

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh, hacker chemists? that sound interesting. Am personally not one, but have you looked at the links available from

<http://www.bioinformatics.fr/jobs.php>

I hope it helps.</comment>


Show HN: Simple IRC Services System - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/toc-irc/jservices <comment><AUTHOR> SS: This does not have a services bot.

If you /quit, a clone will be created with your nickname.

When you reconnect, you can /msg oldnick RELEASE and you will regain your nickname as long as your user/host/real name match.

Any messages you received while offline will be displayed at this time as well.</comment>


AirEnergy 3D – A 3D printed, opensource, mobile wind turbine - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/43717383/airenergy-3d-a-3d-printed-opensource-mobile-wind-t

<comment><USER2> Sure. But why 3-d print it? Go ahead and prototype it in 3-d printer, but then make a plastic mold and save money and printing time.

Also: Plastic gears between the generator and rotor? Nope.</comment>


Steps to beat failure – an inside job - windy-topology https://medium.com/@LifeTechPsych/7-steps-to-beat-failure-an-inside-job-1f0da447fbbe <comment> windy-topology "Failure is an inside job. So is success. If you want to achieve you have to win the war in your thinking first." \- Brian Tracy</comment>


Startcom CA applies for inclusion in Mozilla - <AUTHOR> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1311832#c12 <comment><USER2> > a.- StartCom is now a 100% Qihoo360 owned subordinate Company. Management > has also changed.

> b.- There´re no StartCom employees working at any Wosign premises. StartCom > has subcontracted Qihoo 360 for all PKI and development management.

This made me laugh, LoL.

For those don't know much about Qihoo 360, it's an infamously unethical company. Its flagship antivirus software behaved like a virus, which is very difficult for non-pro computer users to remove. It sneakily "deployed" its so called security guard software to many innocent users' computers meanwhile actually behaving like a backdoor, leaking user data not like a sieve, but a pipe. It's not uncommon to see a tip upon Windows startup telling things like "Your computer boots faster than 90% users in the country", tricking the users to take some "proudness" from it.

Don't just believe me, go check the Controversies section of its Wikipedia page [0], and do yourself some research. Say the previous StartCom owner China Unicom is an amateur hacker, then Qihoo 360 is a pro, but a much more evil one.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qihoo_360#Controversies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qihoo_360#Controversies)

</comment><comment><USER3> > a.- StartCom is now a 100% Qihoo360 owned subordinate Company. Management > has also changed.

> b.- There´re no StartCom employees working at any Wosign premises. StartCom > has subcontracted Qihoo 360 for all PKI and development management.

> c.- StartCom acquired EJBCA PKI software from Primekey (CA, VA and TSA). > There´s no in-house development for PKI

> d.- All StartCom servers are under Qihoo 360 premises in different > locations, in China and US.

> e.- StartCom has developed a new CMS system and website, using a new > language, PHP, from scratch.

They go to great lengths to make sure everything has changed and nothing is like it was before. Why not just take the final step and drop the (quite tainted) name "StartCom" and apply as Qihoo360 CA or whatever?

<comment><USER4> Qihoo360 isn't a reputable name either. Might be trying to avoid anybody who might recognise the name, and going for the "phoenix rises from the ashes" to reinvigorate StartCOM, whilst avoiding Qihoo360 from further tainting it in future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those of us who didn't know. Context [0] [1]

Personally, not sure how I feel about this, I'll continue to remove startcom from FF if it's still included.

[0] [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=994478](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=994478) [1] [https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2016/10/24/distrusting- new...](https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2016/10/24/distrusting-new-wosign- and-startcom-certificates/)

<comment><USER6> > I'll continue to remove startcom from FF if it's still included

That's also my first reaction to startcom. Reading it however it seems they've come a long way since the removal.

I'm not sure if I will again trust this CA again - time will learn if they're still using sneaky practices. But they seem to be doing better now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is there an extension like Noscript, but for CA certificates? In the same way which Noscript blocks JavaScript by default, but allows me to gradually build a whitelist of domains which I agree to run JavaScript from, is there an extension which doesn't trust any of the included CAs by default, and allows me to gradually enable CA certificates over time, so that my trust store is composed mainly of easy-to-trust CAs like Let's Encrypt and doesn't include dodgy CAs operating out of China?

<comment><USER8> Not sure about an extension, but you could always just remove all root certs from your trust store and then add them back one-by-one manually.

<comment><USER9> Keeping in mind it has all sorts of side effects (signed drivers, etc).

<comment><USER10> Not if you remove certs from your browser trust store. If I understand correctly a browser has no obligation to follow your OS trust store. If someone here knows, what browser actually trust OS certificates in addition to its own trust store?

<comment><USER9> Chrome and IE on windows I believe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Off topic, but because this is becoming a hobbyhorse of mine, from the Cure53 report:

 _In conclusion, it is evident that the time between the two rounds of testing and since the assessment concluded was well-spent by the StartCom maintainers. The overall leap in the state of security is considerable and very much praiseworthy. At present, the ultimate improvement stems from solid dedication to fixing the reported problems appropriately and in a manner that prevents recurrence. As two most important arguments, it can be noted that the numbers of bugs decrease significantly and that the vast majority of the previously spotted issues has been addressed correctly. The current tendency towards improvement can be read as a good sign. With each passing month, dedication to security appears to grow and positively affect the StartSSL compound._

This kind of language drives me crazy. I don't want to single out Cure53 here because I think a lot of firms deliver this kind of stuff. I know iSEC and Matasano did. But not only do I not believe that software security firms are really qualified, after spending a few weeks looking at a project, to evaluate the true quality standards of a dev team, but I also think it's an enormous conflict of interest.

It's not the assessor's job to determine whether StartCom is "praiseworthy" or whether their time was "well-spent" or even to provide a trend line. Their job is to find bugs, recommend fixes, and verify those fixes.

I'll go even further and say, I don't think software security firms should be writing these kinds of reports at all. Rather, they should authorize their clients to publish their technical reports, which should keep the editorializing dialed way down.

I did this kind of consulting work for over 10 years and I can confidently report that no matter what your standards and principles are, as an assessor you have _a lot_ of wiggle room to report findings positively or negatively (or not at all). When the only audience for your report is your client, that doesn't matter so much, as long as you (1) found bugs and (2) they got fixed. But when the audience is the broader public, I think it matters a great deal how things are reported, and the safest way to do that is denuded of all subjectivity.

</comment><comment><USER12> What's the benefit for Firefox users of including StartCom?

The way I feel about "trusted" certificate authorities that fell _way_ short of the required standard: You had one job.

<comment><USER8> > What's the benefit for Firefox users of including StartCom?

I think there is some benefit to maintaining a healthy ecosystem of multiple competing, independently operated CAs. The benefits of including StartCom are no different from that of any other CA in that regard.

Aside from that though, not much. Although... wasn't StartCom pretty much the only CA offering free DV certs prior to Let's Encrypt? If they're planning to resume offering that or a similar service, that would certainly be a significant benefit to overall security of the web.

<comment><USER13> Yes, they were the first I was aware of. Though, not sure if I could/would trust them again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > StartCom hired PwC for doing a full webtrust audit.

Is PwC any good for real security audits?

> StartCom hired Cure53 as suggested by Mozilla

Does that mean the report will be public? That's what Cure53 tend to do.

> c.- StartCom acquired EJBCA PKI software from Primekey (CA, VA and TSA). > There´s no in-house development for PKI

After acquisition it is now in-house...

> e.- StartCom has developed a new CMS system and website, using a new > language, PHP, from scratch.

This sounds like they're in need of a real webapp audit

Another question: are there any real reasons why we don't have critical name constraints to countries' TLDs?

<comment><USER14>
      are there any real reasons why we don't have critical
      name constraints to countries' TLDs?

The reasoning I've heard is that .cn users' security requirements aren't any lower than .com users' security requirements. i.e. if startcom/Qihoo360 aren't good enough to issue .com, they're not good enough to issue .cn

<comment><USER15> Yeah, but reducing the number of CAs that are trusted for any given domain is likely positive.

I'm also curious as to how the Chinese government plays into all this. Do they have a track record of making trusted CAs misissue certificates?

<comment><USER8> > Do they have a track record of making trusted CAs misissue certificates?

Probably not. Any CA missisuing certs intentionally (whether by government coercion or not) probably wouldn't remain trusted for long. So if the Chinese government is doing something like that, the public is certainly not aware of it, else there wouldn't be any Chinese CAs left that are still trusted.

<comment><USER10> That's the beauty of the trust store. The PKI might be a fucked up solution to our trust problem on the internet, but it puts enough pressure against governments to throw them away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If I understand certificate transparency correctly, StartCom's actions will be fully and publicly auditable, in real time.

This means one vector of attack : Chinese government requesting google.com certificate from them, and MITMing it's citizen would not be possible. To any CT experts: is my assessment correct?

<comment><USER17> One, it's notice of attack, not prevention of attack. StartCom (or an attacker in possession of their private key) can issue a perfectly valid google.com certificate, it's just going to be visible to the world that that's what happened.

Two, while Google is presumably watching CT logs for google.com certificate issuances, I'm certainly not watching my personal website. I suspect most people aren't, so they could probably get away with issuing e.g. a shadowsocks.org certificate and have a few days of successful attack before anyone notices. This is probably not what you want for dragnet surveillance, but it's great for an attack against an individual (whether conducted by a government or just some private party).

So yes, the state of the world is quite a bit better than it was before CT, but adding CAs remains a risk. They're only worth adding if there's a reason to do it. (StartCom's free certificates used to be a really good reason.)

<comment><USER15> There are various free services that will email you whenever a cert for one of your domains shows up in the CT logs. It's a good idea to sign up for one. (It would be an even better idea for domain registrars to automatically sign you up for one.) Here's one that Facebook operates: [https://developers.facebook.com/tools/ct/](https://developers.facebook.com/tools/ct/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Startcom was a previously-independent and reputable company until it was acquired by WoSign, so I might be willing to give them another shot, assuming they can scrub themselves of any lingering effect of WoSign's scummy practices.

<comment><USER19> As if WoSign were any better: [https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA:WoSign_Issues](https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA:WoSign_Issues)

<comment><USER18> You misunderstand me. I know that WoSign is crap. I would not ever trust WoSign again.

My point is that Startcom seemed decent _until_ they were acquired by WoSign and started adopting their shady practices. If they are completely disentangled from WoSign, I might be willing to trust them again.

<comment><USER20> To be fair to the parent comment, your original comment as it is written says the exact opposite; that you'd be willing to trust them _due to_ the acquisition.

<comment><USER21> Made sense to me if you know that WoSign is crap and read the article indicating they are no longer under WoSign control.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> StartSSL also provides free S/MIME certificates. Any suggestion on what to use instead?

<comment><USER23> Comodo also gives free email certificates: [https://www.instantssl.com/ssl- certificate-products/free-ema...](https://www.instantssl.com/ssl-certificate- products/free-email-certificate.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Ummm, just simple and emphatically...no.</comment>


Meet Dropwizard - <AUTHOR> http://dropwizard.codahale.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> @kls: Looks like the solution you've been proposing, now packed up.</comment>


UK questioned on online ad system - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7542810.stm

<comment><AUTHOR> Quote: "It [EU Information Commission] said anyone using Phorm must ask for the consent of users before going ahead with any further trials." Slightly worrying that such a comment needs to even be made.</comment>


Tiny Terminal: Maker Builds a Working Raspberry Pi Laptop - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/design/2012/12/raspberry-pi-laptop/?pid=1642&viewall=true

<comment><USER2> BTW, this was already submitted: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4956663></comment>


A Fascinating Overview of the Rezoning and Preservation of Charleston,SC (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWHTA2O9T2A <comment><AUTHOR> Andres Duany is the architect/city planner giving this presentation. If you're interested in systems design, especially through the lens of city planning and architecture, he's an interesting character to follow.

Also, he and his firm wrote a book called "Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream", a good read!</comment>


Langton's ant - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langtons_ant

<comment><USER2> I've been interested in Langton ants for a good 8 years now, and have been playing with variants on them for a long time. Here's one of my favorites: <http://pyvascript.appspot.com/Langton45>

Rather than working on 90 degree turns, this does 45 degree angles, and it has a bit more complexity in the command set.

The rules are: + and - turn right and left 45 degrees, * and / turn right and left 90 degrees, ! reverses direction, . does nothing.

You can come up with some really interesting patterns, e.g. <http://pyvascript.appspot.com/Langton45?command=*.%2B>

Edit: Huh, I guess I never released any of that. I should port it to a modern Pyvascript and throw it up somewhere, as the version this is built against is probably going on 3 years old.

<comment><USER3> That's really cool. At times it looks like a spider spinning a web. Does it ever reach a state where the behavior becomes constant?

<comment><USER2> Not really, although you can make stable ants. Doing anything complex and stable, though, is really difficult. After I built that, I spent a couple weeks doing little but trying to create something simple (in terms of commands) and beautiful, that would run indefinitely; I was never really very successful. That said, I may well be the only person that's ever played with 45-degree ants, so there's a good potential for someone else to succeed where I failed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Also see Conway's Game of Life for an interactive system of complex emergent behaviors from very simple rules:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life>

<http://www.bitstorm.org/gameoflife/>

</comment><comment><USER5> For more fun along these lines, wolfram provides as always:

<http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/CellularAutomatonExplorer/>

(Cellular Automata is the name for these constructs, langon's ant, the game of life, and so on.)

<comment><USER6> Wolfram's book "A New Kind of Science" is an interesting take on cellular automata as well, although readers should be warned that it borders on crank science, has tons of hyperbole in it's treatment of CA's potential impact on science, and waters down the contributions of others in the field.

<comment><USER7> Ray Kurzweil's review:

[http://www.kurzweilai.net/reflections-on-stephen-wolfram- s-a...](http://www.kurzweilai.net/reflections-on-stephen-wolfram-s-a-new-kind- of-science)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It is interesting, but, pardon my ignorance, is it appropriate to call this "a behaviour" (in the traditional meaning of this word)? It looks to me like "just" playing with numbers, i.e. normal phenomenon ultimately describable with some math theory. It looks far-fetched to me to describe it with the terms like "simple rules can result to complex emergent behaviour," etc...

I remember there are some number sequences generated by some rules, which seems random at first and then some sub-sequence repeates. Now this looks similar to me, except it seems to more mysterious because someone described it as "ant doing something". ;-)

<comment><USER3> If you want to remove some of your self-described "ignorance" I highly recommend "Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos". It's a great primer on the origins of study of emergent behavior in chaotic systems, particularly highlighting the work of Chris Langton, Stuart Kaufman, the Santa Fe Institute and several others. GREAT read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Where can one find chaotic toy algorithms that don't involve Turing machines or cellular automata? (I need one for a project, and I keep running into image processing and biology applications. I actually need a toy one.)

EDIT: Found it: (pseudocode, not Python)

        while x > 1
             case ((x mod 2) == 0):
                 x = x / 2
             case ((x mod 3) == 0):
                 x = x + 1
             default:
                 x = x * 3

The number of iterations it takes to leave the loop is chaotic.

<comment><USER10> See also, hailstorm numbers - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collatz_conjecture#Statement_of...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collatz_conjecture#Statement_of_the_problem)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have a free android live wallpaper, based on them: [https://market.android.com/details?id=info.jaisharma.antsliv...](https://market.android.com/details?id=info.jaisharma.antslive.free) . You can create/delete ants, the patterns they draw is always interesting specially since multiple ants affect each other's state and since a human draws ants at random location and time.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> See also:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langtons_loops>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireworld>

</comment><comment><USER12> Complex patterns produced by simple set of rules? DNA->proteins->cells->organisms->societies? The only difference in my view is that DNA happens in 3-dimensional space and uses 4 "colors" instead of 2.

</comment><comment><USER13> Interned with Langton at SFI in summer of 1997. Great experience.</comment>


AmericanExpress This is an epic fail.  - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/morrisonbrett/status/445291810068250624 <comment><USER2> Looks like this was a last pass bug, not an issue with AMEX: [https://twitter.com/morrisonbrett/status/445335047281709056](https://twitter.com/morrisonbrett/status/445335047281709056)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, that makes more sense then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Has anyone else seen this? There's no way this passed review.

<comment><USER4> Upon reading the replies on Twitter, it looks to be an issue with LastPass

<comment><USER5> Would love to see some steps to re-produce rather than a baity tweet. I use LastPass and have not seen this happen before but I agree its probably more likely from a password manager than a vulnerability with American Express.</comment></comment></comment>


Uber and Lyft drivers strike today ahead of much-anticipated IPO - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-uber-driver-strike-ipo-20190508-story.html <comment><USER2> I guess Michigan is unaffected.

There's not even surge pricing right now.</comment>


Bitcoin hedge fund - <AUTHOR> http://bitcoinfund.eu/joinus <comment><USER3> It's not clear to me what being a hedge fund gets you if all you're doing is holding Bitcoins. Sure, there are some regulated entities that can't invest in Bitcoins otherwise (i.e., pension funds), but they probably aren't going to start here. Otherwise, how is this in any way better than just buying Bitcoins on your own and not paying the fees?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the only advantage is for the regulated entities that you mention.

<comment><USER4> Is that even true? There are restrictions on the types of portfolio companies that VC's can invest in because of the limited partners. That's why startups are corporations and not LLC's, for example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This may seem like a really dumb question, but how is this different than just buying bitcoins as an investment? I don't understand what a hedge fund is. If I choose to invest in bitcoin, why would I want to be forced to buy $100,000 and then $10,000 per year?

<comment><USER4> A "hedge fund" is nothing more than a legal structure for private investment, usually with the familiar 2/20 fee structure we see with VC's (or something similar).

That is all it is. A way to pool the money of limited partners under the control of investment manager(s). A smart guy once told me "a hedge fund isn't an asset class, it's a fee structure".

That said, I have no idea what these guys are up to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's neat, but where is the hedge _against_ bitcoins? This is a long hedge, you'll need short hedges too, no?

<comment><USER7> AFAIK short selling originated as a flaw in manually settled stock exchanges. ( You only needed to have the stocks when the accounts were settled, so you could sell first and then buy later.) But you can get the same effect by borrowing bitcoins and selling them. Then you need to buy them back later.

<comment><USER8> That's exactly what short selling stock is: you borrow it from someone and sell it, and return it to them later by buying it for (hopefully) cheaper. To sell short without borrowing is called 'naked' short selling, and it's not allowed on US equity exchanges.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Critics have claimed it is a Ponzi scheme due to its strictly-limited inflation program, which is set to run until 2140."

Anyone who could shed light on this? Why would inflation be a Ponzi scheme?

<comment><USER10> It's talked about as a Ponzi scheme because the assumption is -

\- Early adopters hold a lot of coin because it was easy and dirt cheap to do so early on.

\- The market is based entirely on speculation.

\- Early adopters make money by pumping the price up and encouraging new people in to the market, then cashing out and absconding.

\- The value will collapse at some point leaving the early adopters dollar- rich and everyone else screwed

This isn't the classic definition of a Ponzi but has some of the hallmarks. I guess the limited inflation part plays into this - as the amount of BTC is limited, if it becomes more widely held and used it has to increase in value, directly enriching those that come in early at the expense of later adopters.

I'll admit that's a big part of why I'll never touch it. That and the limited amount means the built in deflation is just (economically speaking) _bad_ anyway.

<comment><USER11> thanks for the info, in Brazil you don't hear a lot about bitcoins so I didn't know about this "Limited amount" thing and that is a REALLY important info.

<comment><USER10> Yeah it is a fundamental part of the model. The limit is something like 21 million BTC _ever_. The reward from mining diminishes over time, halving every so often so that it will take quite a while to get to the 21 million.

To BTC enthusiasts, this fixed supply is a major positive point as 'nobody can dilute my money!', but to others (like me) the idea of a currency with a fixed supply seems wrong. The more of the global economy BTC comes to represent the higher the value of each BTC, assuring that so long as it is used it will rise in value. This creates a big disincentive to spend and pretty much kills any idea of lending. What's more it concentrates wealth in the hands of people who put in a comparatively small effort a long time ago and now hold BTC, compared to those producing economic output now, meaning that _if_ it became common currency we'd end up with even more extreme division of wealth than we see now.

Note that I don't necessarily agree with the 'assumption' that BTC will collapse, that some people use to justify calling it a Ponzi or Pump'n'Dump scheme, but I do think it would be a terrible choice of primary currency for the reasons I've given.

<comment><USER12> _if it became common currency we'd end up with even more extreme division of wealth than we see now_

I disagree. Unless BTC becomes the _only_ common currency, you'd end up with more distributed wealth, since the holders of BTC aren't exactly the biggest holders of USD or EUR.

By the way, how does the drop in prices relative to BTC kill lending?

And tech devices are cheaper every year, from that argument, shouldn't it mean there's a great incentive not to buy them? By that logic, we should see a terrible market, with very few buyers.

[http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/01/boudreaux_on_mo.htm...](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/01/boudreaux_on_mo.html)

<comment><USER10> _"I disagree. Unless BTC becomes the only common currency, you'd end up with more distributed wealth, since the holders of BTC aren't exactly the biggest holders of USD or EUR."_

This is why I said if it became common currency. --edit-- as A lot of bitcoin folks seem to think would be a good idea! If it stays a minority interest like gold then the particular problem of widening wealth disparity is not really an issue. But that doesn't seem to be the aim of many in the BTC community - <USER2> want society to adopt BTC or something very close to BTC as a main currency, because they think the limited supply model would be a good thing in this situation, which I think it would not.

 _"By the way, how does the drop in prices relative to BTC kill lending?"_

Err, because if BTC are always going up in value, why would I bother lending them?

As a borrower of currency with small, controlled inflation I pay a percentage in interest. This is eased by tomorrow's money being worth slightly less than today's.

As a lender I need to lend or otherwise invest to maintain value, and lending with an interest rate a little above inflation (and a little more to account for risk) is a good way to do this.

With a deflationary currency the burden on the borrower increases massively as tomorrow's currency is worth more and you'll have to do more to repay it.

As a lender I'm not going to lend at a flat or negative interest rate because it's easier and lower risk just to hang on to the coins.

 _"tech devices are cheaper every year, from that argument, shouldn't it mean there's a great incentive not to buy them?"_

Because they're useful and they're not the same every year? Also there _is_ a small disincentive to buying computers when you can get more for your money if you hang on a bit.

<comment><USER12> _because if BTC are always going up in value, why would I bother lending them?_

Because you'd get more of them (just like now)? The only difference is that instead of having to cover inflation, any positive rate would give you profit over just holding them.

 _As a borrower of currency with small, controlled inflation I pay a percentage in interest. This is eased by tomorrows money being slightly less than todays._

But it's _not_ eased, because as you say in the next paragraph, the lender prices in the inflation in that percentage. How do you benefit from USD being 3% cheaper, if the interest is 3% higher because of it? Only _unexpected_ (not accounted for) inflation benefits the borrower.

As a lender, you wouldn't lend a little above inflation, but a little above 0% to get the same returns.

 _With a deflationary currency the burden of the borrower increases massively as tomorrows currency is worth more_

But the interest rates are dropped to account for that fact.

 _As a lender I'm not going to lend at a flat or negative interest rate_

Oh, with that I can agree: negative or zero interest lending would stop. But that's hardly _all_ lending, and it's not even clear if we want to encourage it.

<comment><USER10> _"Because you'd get more of them (just like now)? The only difference is that instead of having to cover inflation, any positive rate would give you profit over just holding them."_

But you _must_ charge a positive rate, which means the gap between deflation and rate charge may have to be huge. \--edit-- And the bigger the gap (the more deflation there is) the higher the rate of positive interest you would want to charge to represent the risk that the person can't pay back, and the relatively high income to be gained by doing nothing.

 _"But it's not eased, because as you say in the next paragraph, the lender prices in the inflation in that percentage. How do you benefit from USD being 3% cheaper, if the interest is 3% higher because of it? Only unexpected (not accounted for) inflation benefits the borrower."_

See above. A positive rate must be charged for it to be worthwhile, even if this is so far above deflation it's not funny.

 _"But the interest rates are dropped to account for that fact."_

Yes, but they have an absolute cutoff. \--edit-- Also what's my incentive, at the moment my stash of cash is losing value by holding it. It's (almost) 100% risk-free with an (almost) guarantee'd small loss in value. If you invent an implement (let's call it bitcoin) with the same risk profile as cash but an (almost) guarantee'd gain in value, many investors would just invest in cash. I know I would.

 _"Oh, with that I can agree: negative or zero interest lending would stop. But that's hardly all lending, and it's not even clear if we want to encourage it."_

I'm not sure negative or zero lending is a thing at the moment...

And I'm pretty sure we do want to encourage investment over hoarding, monetary velocity generally being considered to be _a good thing_ , sitting on piles of cash which give you an ever greater fortune/stake in the economy just by holding them... I don't think that can be healthy for an economy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am slightly confused by their description of their security model. [1] It is all about long term protection of their secret key. However, if they need this key ( is it actually just one?), it seems that they need to compromise a large part of their security. So does this mean, that they will simply never sell bitcoins?

[1] <http://bitcoinfund.eu/security>

</comment><comment><USER13> Posted earlier: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5344902>

As stated in that Forbes article, it seems the only advantage is for certain corporate entities with restrictions on what they can invest in. Other players like individuals could just buy Bitcoins on their own without exposure to an additional layer of fees.

</comment><comment><USER14> I have been doing a much smaller-scale version of this for some time now with a few friends. <http://bitgroin.com/>

EDIT: And "basket fund" is a joke about putting all the eggs in one basket instead of hedging.

<comment><USER15> Are you doing some arbitrage/HFT or just investing to bitcoins?

<comment><USER14> I've experimented with quite a few "high-frequency" (actually only re- evaluating every minute) trading strategies. (Un?)fortunately deflation is so rapid at the moment, I haven't found anything better than just buying bitcoins and holding them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/15/bitcoin_flaw/>

</comment><comment><USER17> man, i hope that's a joke.

<comment><AUTHOR> It isn't.

<http://www.finalternatives.com/node/23100>

<comment><USER17> Ah cheers for that, makes a little more sense now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> yay! bitcoins!</comment>


Ask HN: Do different programming languages make you think in different ways? - <AUTHOR>

At the terminal, do the different languages you code in make you think in certain ways? <comment><USER2> Without a doubt. It's all about values and priorities. Each language was designed by a guiding philosophy, some set of values that shaped the way it was designed and the way in which it should properly be used. As a result, one language is going to promote some values over some values. This in turn will start to constrain (in a positive way) how you think about a problem. You'll think in terms of the language's paradigm (values) and this will cause you to see what's good about one paradigm over another.

There's no silver bullet, just different priorities.

Trying new languages will help give you a well-rounded perspective and will have you porting ideas from other languages into your current language often with benefit.

</comment><comment><USER3> Absolutely! Programming in Haskell is a much different experience than programming in, say, Go or Javascript. However, when I'm switching between languages in the same paradigm (or close), my mindset tends to be the same.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yup. That was Ken Iverson's point of view when he created APL.

Different languages make you think in different ways. When working with Go, C and Python, I'm always keenly aware of the different and optimum data structures to use. Not so when writing code in JavaScript. I spend more time and effort looking out for the pitfalls in JS than anything.

When working in R and Matlab, my method of thinking is oriented towards matrices and linear algebra. The same problem will most definitely be solved in different manners in the different languages I am familiar with

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. I guess the question came from my waking thought this morning - thinking of how languages can strongly influence perception (ie, Australian Aborigines conception of time being drastically different to much of the rest of the world due to language structure). So I was wondering if that dove- tailed with programming languages. But I'm thinking maybe not, as you kind of know your outcome before you set out on coding something. Ie, coding isn't like spontaneous prose. You have a certain outcome in mind and the language is really a means to realize that.

<comment><USER4> My personal hypothesis is Whorf Sapir happens with programming languages as well.

A lisp developer is going to think about a problem in a very different way from a JS dev.</comment></comment></comment>


Tough Interview Questions and the Answers Managers Want - <AUTHOR> http://www.microsearchsf.com/intrvucw.htm

<comment><USER2> So they ask a predictable and stupid question, and you are supposed to deliver a predictable and boring answer...

Great way to land your next corporate IT job!</comment>


Ask HN: What I must read to be python savvy? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a ruby enthusiast, but I really need to learn python for a new job. What's the best material I can read/watch to quickly get the best of python + accesories frameworks (django, easy_install, etc). tks! <comment><USER2> I'd recommend reading the code in the Python standard library. If you're into web stuff in addition to Django I'd say the web.py[1] and Trac[2] sources are worth reading. If you're looking at a larger project, the Mercurial[3] sources are good. Also sign up at Google App Engine[4] and build a few trivial applications. You'll learn a lot.

1- <http://github.com/webpy/webpy/tree/master>

2- <http://trac.edgewall.org/browser/trunk/trac>

3- <http://mercurial.selenic.com/hg/hg/file>

4- <http://code.google.com/appengine/>

Oh if you're into Django check out <http://7days7apps.com> too.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://diveintopython.org/> is a great book, though it hasn't been updated since Python 2.2. There's a revision currently being written for Python 3.0: <http://diveintopython3.org/>

(I should note that since Python 3.0 made (necessary) backwards-incompatible changes to syntax, most large libraries and frameworks, such as Django, do not yet run on it.)

</comment><comment><USER4> I found working through the django tutorial to be a great start. You'll pick up the language naturally along the way.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd start with a problem you could solve in something you know, and write it in Python, researching as you go. I always find tutorials with non-practical problems much less effective than actually implementing something myself.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> thanks!</comment>


Ask HN: why Baidu cloud can offer me 2To when I register and not Dropbox? - <AUTHOR>

Since i live in china, I have started using more and more chinese app on my android. I have discovered Baidu Yun which has offered me 2To space when i have registered. I was quite septical by the functionalities that it could provide me but later, I have seen their (Android/iOS) app gives me even more functionalities than dropbox.
This offer didn't have any time limit and last week, Baidu Yun has given to me 3To more so now I have 5To. Baidu is not the only one who provides this offer, also Tencent QQ cloud gives me 30To.
Sure the only problem is that you have to be able to read chinese. However, the UI/UX of those App is very clear and you can do basic action very easily. <comment><USER2> The chinese are probably overselling like crazy (not to say Dropbox don't), if a a few million chinese start filling up on those TBs they will run into trouble very quickly... but they know this won't really happen, so they just use this for marketing purposes. /imho

<comment><AUTHOR> Baidu Yun allow you to download some files through bittorrent. You just have to upload your torrent file then it will be downloaded on their servers.

I don't have a great connection at home but i can upload 6Go files from my computer with 1.5Mo/s or 2Mo/s to my BaiduYun personal storage, and i reach 3Mo/s per downloads.

It's quite common in china to use BitTorrent, and most of my friends downloads more than 10Go per day.

I agree that it must be about a marketing campaign but it's still incredible. I have already reach 1.5To, and i didn't have any email from them or warning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> To oversimplify, either Dropbox is too greedy or they have grater costs per GB than the Chinese companies.

<comment><AUTHOR> Chinese companies maybe can have cheaper storage hardware but it couldn't be thousands times cheaper.</comment></comment>


The Mincome Experiment of 1974-79 - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-mincome-experiment-dauphin <comment><USER2> Where true basic income differs from this experiment by Canada is that true basic income should be for every adult, regardless of income, race, marital status, sexuality, etc. Not just for poor people, as with Mincome in this Canadian town.

A few arguments for:

1) It becomes a defacto emergency lifeline when a ostensibly middle class person loses their job or suffers an extremely expensive illness. In the US, it can take forever to get on disability. With true basic income, there's no need to worry about getting on disability, since you already have a basic income (and yes, this means that disability should be eliminated if this passes).

2) It becomes much less expensive to administer. No massive bureaucracy started up and growing larger just to weed out candidates for some shitty benefit. You're an adult person? Great, you're in!

3) When everyone gets it, it's much more politically feasible to start and maintain. No more questions of "them" doing this or "they" ripping off the hard working man.

4) It allows even healthy middle class people to take risks that might have a big payoff, such as starting up a new business, or embarking on a quest to invent some new technique. Or build an open source project!

<comment><USER3> I like this idea a lot, but what would stop goods/housing from rising in price to meet the influx of free money?

<comment><USER4> That was my initial response when I first heard this concept a few years ago, and the answer is somewhat surprising (Note: I'm not an economist, so please someone correct me if I get anything wrong here):

3 things can alter those prices: A change in supply, a change in demand, or general inflation/deflation.

The supply doesn't inherently change in this plan, nor does demand (*assuming everyone is getting these goods today.) And there's no inflation, as this is just redistribution, not printing new money.

<comment><USER5> If you think inflation's only source is 'printing money', you may not be qualified to speak on economic issues. Liquidity, the monetary supply, and the cost of exchange are quite a bit more complex than that, and far more prone to being manipulated and falling over, as both the Housing Crisis and Libor Scandal taught us.

<comment><USER6> I'm sorry but you are wrong. Inflation is nothing but the increase of money supply without an equivalent increase in production.

What you are doing is being a good Keynesian and trying to make people believe that this stuff is too complicated for them to even start having an opinion on it. That strategy is condescending and not productive, and encourages helplessness in people.

<comment><USER7> > Inflation is nothing but the increase of money supply without an equivalent > increase in production

Wouldn't that mean that inflation would also be caused by a decrease in production without an equivalent decrease in the money supply?

<comment><USER8> Yes. Google "stagflation".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Let's do some back of the envelope math here.

316 million Americans, at a $30k/year money sample works out to be $9 trillion dollars a year.

The budget that Obama just proposed is $4 trillion dollars (and that has no chance of getting implemented in full). Even if we say you can cut half of that out (Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, etc), let's call it $2 trillion dollars.

So we need $11 trillion dollars of tax money to fund this. The total net worth of US private people is $67 trillion or so[1]. The aggregate net worth of the top 400 people in the USA is $2.3 trillion[2]. You could take all of their money, and still not even come close to paying for the program for ONE YEAR.

At that point, you start having to come down hard on the upper middle class. The top 25% owns roughly 73% of the wealth in the country, or ~$48 trillion. If you tax their NET WORTH at 25%, you could fund the program for a year.

Pretty quickly you're going to run into a situation where you're cutting a check to everyone, then collecting the money (and more) back in taxes. And in this case, it's terribly inefficient.

On a small scale, a program like this probably works well. On a large scale, it would be a disaster.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_position_of_the_Unite...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_position_of_the_United_States) [2] [http://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/](http://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/)

<comment><USER10> $30,000 is a pretty big number.

If you made it $8,000, a family of 4 would still be above today's poverty line (which is still arbitrary, but it seems like a better "minimal income" than one that gives everybody approximately the current median personal income).

$9 trillion / (30/8) = $2.4 trillion.

<comment><USER9> According to [1], for a family of 4 the poverty line is just under $24k?

[1] [http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/14poverty.cfm](http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/14poverty.cfm)

<comment><USER10> Uh-huh. 4*8=32.

You used 316 million as one of your multipliers, that presumably includes children.

<comment><USER11> I think there would need to be some structure around children, what an incentive to make babies! $8k per baby per year, the Duggar family would be making $168k per year! I'd rather it be something as an adult. So the number of people 18 years or older is 242,470,820 [0]. Double the $8k to meet that poverty line as a couple. So at $16k per adult you come out to just under $3.9 trillion a year.

Edit: from the poverty data [1] you could say that only ~45 million people get the full $8k, the rest starts to taper off at the 50 cents to a dollar pace. That means this would cost considerably less. $360 billion is the minimum. The cost out would be $3.9 trillion, but those extra $8k checks would be collected at tax time. A one job two adult household, the job holder would have to pay back all the $8k, but the partner wouldn't if they didn't make any money.

[0] [http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html](http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html)

[1] [https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/about/overview/](https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/about/overview/)

<comment><USER10> Maybe. I think people mostly see children as a responsibility though, so I wonder if the problem would live up to the concern.

I wonder if you could try to measure the differences in birth rates for people receiving the EIC, comparing across numbers of children (at some income levels the first child provides ~2x the benefit as the third).

edit: Searching "EITC birth rates" shows that people have looked at it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Previous discussion of Mincome, prompted by a different article: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8792192](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8792192)

</comment><comment><USER13> I wonder if it would be feasible to pick a small town in the US and have private parties contribute enough to run such an experiment -- perhaps with better record keeping.

Say a town of 3000 adults and 1000 needed help to get to a 'living wage' level. Let's call living wage an average of $40K per year and, on average, the 1000 people needed about half that to get to that level.

$20m/year plus administrative costs, let's say $5m. $25m for the experiment. Say we run it for a guarantee of 5 years, so that is $125 million.

Too bad. A bit beyond a kickstarter level.

Maybe somebody could supplement it with a reality show.

<comment><USER14> There is was a negative income tax experiment in 70s in Seattle:

[http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/NegativeIncomeTax.html](http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/NegativeIncomeTax.html)

<comment><USER13> That article is very negative on the whole idea and is short on facts of the experiment and long on conclusions.

One point it made that had me thinking was that it would be impossible to cover enough of the population because the poverty line is so close to median income.

Well, what if we didn't cover everyone? What if we picked areas that are having a particularly rough time and used a negative income tax to prime the pump?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't understand the notion regarding feedback from participants in the experiment. Evelyn Forget said that opinions from respondents may skew positive because those with negative experiences would be less likely to reach out to her. I was under the impression that consumers with negative experiences provide feedback far more often than satisfied consumers. Has that been debunked or am I missing some factor?

</comment><comment><USER16> Can someone explain to me how basic income could work? I'm really interested, not trying to start a battle. The biggest question: Where does the money come from? Massive taxes on the wealthy? You can't just pull a salary for everyone out of thin air. In the case of this town in Canada, the project was probably funded by taxes from other parts of the country, and could not have worked universally.

<comment><USER17> It's not as expensive as you think, if you run the numbers. Most of the money comes from dismantling welfare, social security, food stamps, et cetera. Tax rates on the middle class are increased enough to cancel out the basic income benefit, so that washes out. As long as the poor isn't the majority of your population, it's not a large tax increase on the rich.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hope we start experimenting with this in the US also. Maybe at a state level.

<comment><USER19> It would have to be in an extremely liberal area. Socialism is still a four letter word in the US, and this is the epitome of socialist initiatives.

<comment><USER20> It seems like reducing socialism to me. Instead of the gov't hand-picking (centrally planning) benefactors of tax dollars, e.g. defense contractors or oil/ag subsidies, it's being returned to the people (and _all_ the people - not just some according to their need or whatever).

<comment><USER9> It's probably an ever bigger problem than that. Regardless of liberal or conservative, if you want to raise taxes essentially across the board (which you'd have to do--even taking all of the wealth of "the 1%" would fund this project for maybe a year) you're going to have a really tough time convincing people that their taxes are going to be raised 500% or whatever it would end up being.

Just back-of-the envelope numbers, if 300 million Americans received $30k/yr, that's $9 trillion dollars per year that has to come from someplace. My guess would be that the majority of people would end up handing that $30k right back in the form of taxes. And at that point, it becomes an exercise in the government giving people money, then having to get it back via taxes, so then what is the point? Is it easier to give 10 people $10 or to give 100 people $10, then take $900 of it back?

<comment><USER21> _Is it easier to give 10 people $10 or to give 100 people $10, then take $900 of it back?_

If 100 people is the totality of the population, the cost of bureaucracy for monitoring which of those 10 people actually get the $10 (specifically ensuring a low fraud level) is near or greater than $100, and the social stigma of getting that $10 in the first place is reduced or eliminated, then yes, it could be "easier".

In other words, would it make sense to give everyone the same amount, and take it back from some in taxes, when weighing the cost of the current levels of enforcement and the possible social good done through reduced stigmatization of the poor.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Somewhere just a little better than HN? - <AUTHOR>

I'm not exactly trying to be snarky about this, but basically, there's a subset of content on HN that I actually care much about, what I'd describe as the hard facts and interesting invention components. I do want to read articles from totally disparate fields, but I don't give a damn about entrepreneurship and start-ups as a culture... usually. I want to read technical papers and reporting, I want blog posts on new frameworks and languages and robots, but I could happily dispense with the "My favorite language is better than your favorite language" posts. Simply put, the usual business of software is tiresome, but software and science are not. Is there an aggregator out there for me, momma? <comment><USER2> No one cares about _all_ of HN. We just all care about different subsets. If you want your perfect community, you need to find enough people who care about exactly the same subset of articles as you to support the community and convince them to become a part of it. Then you need to ruthlessly keep out anyone who has a slightly different subset, while making sure people don't leave the community or, for that matter, change their tastes.

Of course, your own tastes will change, so really you need to guide everyone else in the community to change their tastes right along with you so the community will continue to provide the aggregation you desire. Either that, or you'll have to convince or force old members to leave and new ones to come in that match your new interests.

In other words, you're asking for something which can't reasonably be expected to exist. The aggregator you want is _you_. Click on the articles that sound interesting. Ignore the ones that don't. You can't expect a community to perfectly support your personal, unique, and ever-changing tastes.

<comment><USER3> Hmm, perhaps I should add tags to hackerstream.com. I think you can solve this problem with UI. That's basically what subreddits are. In the backend reddit has just one pool of stories; subreddits allow us (kinda) to configure views into that pool.

\---

 _Tangent: HackerStream creation myth_

With HN I found that I tended to read a story's comments once and never return[1], so the odds of seeing a specific interesting comment relied mostly on whether it was posted before or after I encountered the thread. Now with hackerstream the odds rely on just whether I am reading when it was posted. A real-time UI may seem noisier, but if you care about comments it's just as noisy. And switching between traditional and real-time views is strictly better than either alone.

Anyway, it's a testbed for exploring a less noisy experience.

[1] Except when notified of responses to my comments - thanks notifo!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Maybe try using an RSS reader and over time build up the exact things you want to read. Eventually, you'll have a perfect feed of things that interest you (well, maybe not perfect, but close). Another option is Reddit, which has the ability to subscribe to specific groups that show up in your feed. It's community generated if you would prefer not to hassle with building an RSS feed library yourself. I find myself coming to HN for startup stuff and Reddit for more directed conversations about Python or Ubuntu since they are already filtered and show up when I'm logged in.

<comment><AUTHOR> hmm. might could. I am consuming HN exclusively through google reader, so maybe I need to see a little more what it can do for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The displayed links show a user-chosen title (which, to be sure, is often less informative than the original article title) and a base URL for the source (which also is often confusing, especially for blogs or newsgroups hosted on the Google domain). That's enough information to guide my skimming of links to choose the links to read. If the duplicate submission detector worked better, I'd be even happier, but I find HN useful for finding what I like to read.

</comment><comment><USER6> I browse through the titles of the news and read only those that are really of my interest. I cherrypick the news I read and I find a good think that not all the news are of my interest because I don't have enough time to read them all. Sometimes I find interesting articles on fields I wouldn't have researched on my own.

</comment><comment><USER3> I recently reread "hot-tubbing an online community", a classic from 1999 (<http://www.calebclark.org/?p=870>), which seems very relevant.

</comment><comment><USER7> A mixture of LtU and Kragen's mailing lists might suit you.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks! I do read LtU, and I'll check out this "Kragen's" of which you speak.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think what you want is what friend feed wanted to be, but still isn't. Too bad really, because I'm after the same thing.</comment>


Show HN: jqkungfu, a jq Playground Built with WebAssembly - <AUTHOR> http://jqkungfu.com <comment><AUTHOR> Author here.

I built this tool to quickly play around with JSON data and jq queries outside the command line.

It was built by compiling jq from C to WebAssembly, and by basically calling jq's main() function from JavaScript!

The main advantage of this over having a server run jq queries and return results to the browser is speed and security. But there's also convenience: jqkungfu is front-end only, and is hosted as a bunch of static files on cloud storage!</comment>


Big companies are not becoming data-driven fast enough - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/06/big-companies-are-not-becoming-data-driven-fast-enough/ <comment><USER2> I'd like to see a solid argument for a new style of management that uses statistics in new ways. For the most part, my experience with the phrase "data driven" has been a negative one. Most of the time, when I have a client that claims to be "data driven", they are using a style of argument to avoid direct, honest conversations. When I wrote "When companies make a fetish of being data driven they reward a passive aggressive style" I did my best to explain what I've seen:

" _As far as I know, there has never been a company that said "We want the worst informed people to make the decisions" so in a sense all companies have always valued data. But they didn't make a fetish out of it. They simply expected people to be well informed, and to make intelligent arguments, based on what they know. That would have been true at General Motors in 1950. That much has probably been true at most companies for centuries. When management says that the company is going to be "data driven" they are implicitly asking for a particular type of interaction to happen in meetings, an elaborate dance where people hide their emotions and quote statistics._ "

[http://www.smashcompany.com/business/when-companies-make- a-f...](http://www.smashcompany.com/business/when-companies-make-a-fetish-of- being-data-driven-they-are-often-rewarding-a-passive-aggressive-style)

<comment><USER3> How about the Oakland Athletics, the Boston Red Sox, the Chicago Cubs, or the Golden State Warriors? All of these teams bucked a very strong counter-current by applying data-driven management practices. Go back even further to General Electric under neutron Jack Welsh, who advocated six sigma practices with great success. More controversially, look at the practices of the financial industry. Decisions grounded by sound quantitative risk management practices helped to contribute to survival while others who didn't exercise such practice collapsed.

How about the organizations that failed to manage using data driven decisions and took huge risks: Merrill Lynch, Washington Mutual, AIG,....?

Trusting the algorithm gets flak but it sure has plenty of anecdotal evidence to support why it is superior to gut instinct and wisdom in many circumstances.

<comment><USER4> Well, I would argue that while being data driven often has a first mover advantage, eventually this is arbitraged away. The first few movers reap a lot of the benefits, and by the time everyone starts to replicate a similar methodology, it is either too hard to catchup, or there are too many dogs chasing the same car. A good example of this would be banks in 2008. The quants were looking at only the underlying statistics, and not conceptualizing that the historic data didn't account for housing bubble, low rates, zero down, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here I am thinking we went too far with data-driven product development. A/B testing and optimizing for bad metrics like "engagement" which creates products like facebook that look good from a metrics perspective.

<comment><USER6> So true. Ultimately, data only gives you insight into people's short term decision processes. It doesn't help you to give people what they actually need in the long term.

Also, data can always be presented in ways which serve the financial interests of those who control that data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think humanity has gone too far with companies being too data-driven. Companies have been data driven for a long time, but instead of using MAUs or "engagement" (which produces optimized garbage like facebook) we use revenue and income which, when becomes the primary driving metrics, produces another kind of garbage. Products are getting cheaper, more disposable, and less sustainable.

That last thought makes me upset when I think of people as the product.

</comment><comment><USER8> Headline is misleading. This is reporting on some research showing that adoption of the "data-driven" buzzword is fairly slow. The assertion is made that this is important, without evidence.

Not answered: fast enough for what?

<comment><USER9> You might say the article is lacking data to support its claims. I guess it was too difficult to gather.

<comment><USER10> I like what you did there!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> We can never be data driven. The important data is what customers will be willing to spend money on next year - we can only make guesses. Data can educate the guess somewhat, but it is still a guess. Will our competition come up with some not patent on a product that is so much better than us that we sell nothing - if so the right answer is for the CEO to lay me off now. Will our new product be enough better with expensive to develop feature X to be worth the price - we can do focus groups and the likes but it is still a guess in the end.</comment>