Plea Bargaining and Torture in light of the Aaron Swartz case - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2013/01/15/plea-bargaining-and-torture-in-light-of-the-aaron-swartz-case/ <comment><USER2> In 1984, a commission found that federal sentencing was too arbitrary (making us a "nation of men" rather than a "nation of laws") and so mandatory federal sentencing guidelines were enacted by Congress (the supreme court later made them not-quite-mandatory, but the restriction on judges is still pretty great).

However, judicial discretion was an important check against prosecutorial zeal, and the unintended consequence of reducing arbitrariness at the judicial level has been an increase in control at the prosecutorial level. Systemically, prosecutors are incentivized to put people away, as their careers aren't shielded like those of judges. We may be more a "nation of laws" than before 1984, but combined with punishments most people would consider unjust we've drifted toward being a police state.

In my opinion, if there's one thing to take away from this terrible tragedy, it's that we need a commission to study this systemic effect and recommend ways to make the justice system more just. I can't make myself blame the prosecutors involved when most federal prosecutors are similarly heavy-handed (and, quite possibly, were acting within a reasonable interpretation of the the law).

<comment><USER3> > I can't make myself blame the prosecutors involved when most federal > prosecutors are similarly heavy-handed

I can. Just because there are 1000 bullies doesn't make each one of them less of a bully. The system has its constraints but it is still up some human to pick cases from the pile and decide if and how many charges to press.

Now it seems the country is a in a pretty good state if there are no harsher and more terrible criminals left to prosecute than a 25 year old downloading scientific articles, which even the original victim claims have been retrieved and there is no need to do anything.

Whoever authorized the prosecution of that case and spent tax money on it, and everyone else in between who _didn't_ say "Wait a minute, this is crazy, surely there are some cases to spend the money on" is responsible.

<comment><USER4> The trouble is, many, possibly most, people are prone to be bullies under the wrong circumstances. See the Stanford prison experiment, and Stanley Milgram's torture experiment.

When the entire system of incentives for prosecutors rewards bullying, extortion, and intimidation, and punishes leniency or compassion, we shouldn't be surprised by the results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Even six months in prison is no walk in the park.

The article has is completely right. If the nominal penalty is 100 years and somebody gets 12 years after a plea bargain, that person is still locked away for a long time and the prosecutor can say "See, we're not so bad, we granted an 78% reduction of the sentence".

Pathetic.

As I said before, in most other civilized countries the maximum penalty is between 10 and 20 years prison (and that is for 1st degree murder).

<comment><USER6> While I agree many of our punishments are too harsh, it seems absurd to me that Anders Breivik, who murdered _77 people_ in Norway, only received a sentence of 21 years in prison.

Maybe because I'm American. Are Norwegians ok with this?

<comment><USER7> 20 years for 77 murders, equals 3 months for each life. That also excludes all the other crimes he committed. If he knew he would get 20 years per person would he have murdered anywhere near 77 people? Plus how do the families of victims feel if their lives are only worth 3 month each?

<comment><USER8> I'm sorry you got downvoted, but you are in a nutshell describing the vast difference in the purpose of the justice system between Northern Europe and the US.

You frame it as a question of headcount and worth and vengeance. And from that standpoint you conclude that the _vengeance_ exacted on Breivik was not enough, given his crimes.

But over here, the purpose of punishments in the justice system is ultimately about protecting society and rehabilitating criminals. Vengeance plays no part. And if he can be a productive member of society again after rehabilitation in prison, that's better than him taking up resources as a prisoner.

<comment><USER7> If its just about protecting society and rehabilitating why is the recommended sentence longer for murder than for say rape? The simple answer is that murder is seen as a worst crime, so you serve more time. So how can killing 77 not be worst than killing one person? There is more to the justice system than just protecting society and rehabilitation. If breivik was fully rehabilitated and no longer a threat after one year why not let him out?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The study referenced is very worthwhile reading:

 _The dominant version of American plea bargaining makes simi lar demands [to the Inquisition]: it requires the prosecutor to usurp the determinative and sentencing functions, hence to make himself judge in his own cause. I cannot emphasize too strongly how dangerous this concentration of prosecutorial power can be. The modern public prosecutor commands the vast resources of the state for gathering and generating accusing evidence. We allowed him this power in large part because the criminal trial interposed the safeguard of adjudication against the danger that he might bring those resources to bear against an innocent citizen-whether on account of honest error, arbitrariness, or worse. But the plea bargaining system has largely dissolved that safeguard._

Direct link:

[http://www.judicialstudies.unr.edu/JS_Summer09/JSP_Week_4/JS...](http://www.judicialstudies.unr.edu/JS_Summer09/JSP_Week_4/JS710Wk4.LangbeinTorandPleaBargtxt.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't understand why the system works this way. Shouldn't the goal be to achieve justice? I.e. if someone committed a crime that actually deserves 20 years in prison, why should the government settle for only 2 years? And if the person is innocent of any real crime, why should he do any time?

Instead it's based around some kind of competition of prosecution vs. defense, so they can compromise on smaller prison terms. It probably save everyone lots of money, but I don't see the where the justice is. Maybe if they had a simpler and less money-dominated legal system (with less lawyers), they could try to achieve real justice.

<comment><USER11> My guess as to the logical basis for plea bargaining is the notion that there's two types of criminals.

Type A criminals see nothing wrong with hurting others through criminal actions, and will not hesitate to do so if they believe it will get them material benefits and/or thrills (and think they can get away with it). They have no conscience or restraint. They are a danger to society and should go away as long as possible. Think of someone who kills a family member to collect life insurance money.

Type B criminals are basically ordinary people who are careless, make a bad decision, aren't aware that a certain action is illegal, or perhaps are consumed by emotional passion. They genuinely regret their actions and the consequences thereof. Think of a drunk driver who accidentally kills a pedestrian.

The theory behind the guilty/not-guilty plea is that Type A criminals will never confess, since they have no conscience or remorse. But Type B criminals will want to try to become a good person again, and the first step to this is admitting their past mistakes.

That's the theory. It doesn't always match reality. For example, the Type B criminal may be so troubled about what he's wrought that he blurts out a confession before getting a plea agreement in writing, in which case the state can still throw the book at him. Or an innocent person might confess as purely a risk mitigation measure: If you were some alternate universe's Aaron Swartz, you decided not to commit suicide, and you had a choice between pleading and getting guaranteed 6 months, or having a trial and a 50% chance of a not- guilty verdict but a 50% chance of 35 years in prison, you might be very tempted to choose the former.

Interesting mental exercise: I arbitrarily set the odds of winning a trial at 50-50. What do your odds of winning have to be before you choose to roll the dice?

<comment><USER12> To the degree that your contention is true, we can call a prosecutor "bad" who turns B's into A's through careerism or other motivation to intransigence. That some prosecutors will seek to decide for themselves who is an A and who is a B is an occupational hazard for them, and politically I would call it a form of mental illness.

<comment><USER11> I recall reading a critique of the US prison system which said it has a tendency to turn B's into A's. I'm not sure how true this is, and I can't quite recall the exact mechanism which was outlined -- I think it was something along the lines of giving B's months or years of 24/7 exposure to an environment where being an A is common and socially acceptable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What Attorney Stephen Heymann did to James and Schwartz is a very old story. I can't believe nobody has brought up the parallel yet, but this story is very much like Les Miserables. In "Les Mis," an ex-convict who decides to lead an upstanding life is dogged by an law enforcement officer who sees the ex-con's bending of the rules to help others as criminal.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Mis%C3%A9rables_%28musical%...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Mis%C3%A9rables_%28musical%29)

<comment><USER14> Surely, linking to the original content (i.e. the book) would be better, don't you think?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Mis%C3%A9rables>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Thats 6 months plus a felony on his record right? For downloading a few files. Its disgusting.

<comment><USER16> That's a rather gross mischaracterization of what he was accused of. There's a good description here: <http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz- charges/>

<comment><USER17> Doesn't look like it is to me. The charges are absurd. What is wrong with you people?

<comment><USER16> Got any actual reasoning to offer? All you've done so far is make an unsupported assertion.

<comment><USER18> The expert witness that was working with the defense states that JSTOR did not require passwords from computers on MITs network:

[http://unhandled.com/2013/01/12/the-truth-about-aaron- swartz...](http://unhandled.com/2013/01/12/the-truth-about-aaron-swartzs- crime/)

Attaching serious criminal charges to the act of feeding an automated system input that the automated system does nothing to verify is crazy (that is, it isn't wire fraud to use a variety of email addresses on a system that does nothing other than note the address that was input).

The indictment uses language like "Although a MAC address is intended to be a permanent and globally unique identification". And yet nobody serious about security has any expectation that a MAC address is permanent or globally unique (it is well understood that they aren't particularly useful for authentication).

If the government wants to attach serious charges to accessing computer systems, there should at least be some sort of notification that the provider of the system considers the system to be protected under federal law, not this running backwards to say that accepting an email address or having the capability to block a MAC address somehow makes a network 'protected'.

To be perfectly clear, I'd be entirely fine with a broadly applicable lesser charge that applied more generally to computer tampering, for cases where the prosecutor wanted to argue that a user exceeded intended access and such.

<comment><USER19> > The expert witness that was working with the defense states that JSTOR did > not require passwords from computers on MITs network

The problem with this logic is that it assumes the content hoster has the _responsibility_ to actively keep attackers away. Sure, it's a great idea, but is it really their duty to stop from being victimized?

If a bank left their assets in the middle of the lobby they'd be stupid, but it would still be theft on the part of the robber when it inevitably gets stolen.

<comment><USER18> A better analogy might be that having stolen some magazines from a bookstore (a surprisingly large number of magazines...), the thief was charged with breaking and entering and safe cracking, rather than shoplifting.

And people that attach computers to the public internet absolutely do need to be treated as responsible for the information that those computers transmit. If they want to claim that they intend to limit access to the information, they need to take meaningful steps to actually put limits in place.

I don't mean to say that there should be no recourse in situations where intended access is exceeded, I mean that the bar for a 30 year felony needs to be a little higher than "we didn't intend for our system to be accessed in that manner".

<comment><USER19> > And people that attach computers to the public internet absolutely do need > to be treated as responsible for the information that those computers > transmit. If they want to claim that they intend to limit access to the > information, they need to take meaningful steps to actually put limits in > place.

That goes entirely against the principles on which activists claim the Web is based on. Instead of a democratic network where anyone with an IP address can fire up an httpd and be (in theory) just as equal as any other DNS entry, you're saying there needs to be technical measures put in place to enforce an "honor code". What's next, DRM on mp3 files?

But either way, they and MIT both took _many_ "meaningful steps" against aaronsw, and he sidestepped every one.

> I don't mean to say that there should be no recourse in situations where > intended access is exceeded, I mean that the bar for a 30 year felony needs > to be a little higher than "we didn't intend for our system to be accessed > in that manner".

Luckily, 30 years wasn't the sentence in question, even with the heavy-handed prosecution in place, and what transpired was more than "our system was accessed once in an unintended fashion". So the bar probably does need to be moved, but it's not as if he simply wandered near the wrong Wifi hotspot and accidentally mirrored a website...

<comment><USER18> I'm saying if you choose to configure your server to answer a request, you had better not come back later saying you didn't mean to answer that particular request. It's exactly in the spirit of the web, publishing something at a url is a grant of access to whatever was published.

So what was the sentence in question?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "The Catholic Church decided in the Middle Ages that too many people were getting convicted of crimes that they hadn't committed. They instituted a rule that said nobody could be convicted without either two eyewitnesses or a confession. Convictions became difficult to obtain. Since it was not possible to obtain extra witnesses, the Church decided to torture defendants until they confessed."

That's unfortunatelly typical anti-church misconception that does not have any support neither in fact nor in common sense.

Why Catholic church introduced demand for two wittnes, if they can do away without that condition??? Why they created obstacle for themselves???

As a matter of fact Catholic church introduced that condition to stop feudal unjustice and cruelty. That partly failed, since "civil power" started to use tortures.

Catholic church created then Inquisition, so, at least, stupid monarch and feudal masters could not kill or burn people they did not like for heresy (Jews, for instance) and witchcraft.

Note, that most anty-witches trials were in Protestant coutries. In Catholic countries (Poland, for instance), there was no "anty witches campaigns" and Jews from all over the Europe were moving to Poland in large numbers (or, to be more precise to Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth).

</comment><comment><USER21> Perhaps someone here who actually is a lawyer can answer this or correct my understanding... Under current rules, any plea bargain offers by a prosecutor can't be introduced into the trial. What if that were changed? What if, at the same time a jury is told that the maximum sentence is 47 years imprisonment they were also told the details of any plea-bargain negotiations, such as that the prosecution had been willing to accept 3 months? Might this help to mitigate the perverse effects of the plea bargain system we have now?

<comment><USER22> Well, it's usually the judge that makes the sentencing determination. A jury is just there to determine guilt or innocence. If a jury knew that the prosecutor was willing to take a 90% reduced sentence, but they still feel that the defendant is guilty, that wouldn't change anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Where is the interview with the defense attorney referenced in this article?

</comment><comment><USER24> <http://nevertakeaplea.org/>

I have been a proponent of this since before the Aaron Swartz case. Plea bargains are used because the system would completely grind to a halt otherwise. And it should. The machine eats people's lives.

Never take a plea.

<comment><USER25> >(EDITOR'S NOTE: This post is about government employees stealing money the government itself has stolen, and since it's about theft, it is a crime with a victim, namely those who put money into the parking meters.)

So this is a radical libertarian (or thereabouts) thing.

Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that. But it's worth noting that it isn't apolitical.

<comment><USER26> Saying that the criminal justice system should grind to a halt goes well beyond the radical side of libertarianism.

<comment><USER27> Well, I took it to mean that the system should grind to a halt with as much bullshit as there is clogging it up, thereby forcing us (as a society) to choose what is really important to prosecute.

E.g., not a guy with a little baggie of weed, or a guy downloading some academic papers he isn't allowed to.

<comment><USER24> This is exactly what I was trying to say. Millions of dollars shouldn't be spent prosecuting people like Aaron. It is a waste to society in several ways.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Need Help - Market Share for Electronic Dance Music  - <AUTHOR>

So Justin and I have been at it for the past week and half looking for number in regards to market share for electronic music. We have focused our search just on the US market but are unable to come up with any good numbers.
According to RIAA total Digial sales in 2008 was $1.6bn http://188.8.131.52/D5664E44-B9F7-69E0-5ABD-B605F2EB6EF2.pdf
IFPI says there are 700 electronic music based bands in the US.
The interesting thing about EDM is that its hard to figure out market share just based on sales. Its more a of a live event business and promotional based genre. People rarely buy dance music, since a lot of it is available for free through podcasts and sets. Artists make bulk of their money from doing live shows at big events or clubs on a regular basis.
If you guys have any pointers let us know.
Cheers <comment><USER2> BeatPort dominates the market for non-vinyl sales of electronic dance music.</comment>


'The Floppy Did Me In' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/the-floppy-did-me-in/283132/ <comment><USER2> The article is short on details, but it sounds to me as if it was (most likely) MS Word Document metadata, rather than the floppy itself, which provided vital clues, though file deletion was another culprit:

[http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/how_the_cops_caug...](http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/how_the_cops_caught_btk/) (relevant details near end of article).

<comment><USER3> That's what Wikipedia has, and the implication from this Times story [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/05/technology/techspecial4/05...](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/05/technology/techspecial4/05forensic.html) that it draws from.

<comment><USER2> Thanks, good info.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This case is really interesting.

Here's a guy who had committed numerous murders, and gotten away with it to boot. But he had to have the recognition. Criminal psychology is fascinating stuff.</comment>


What I Learned Coding X-Wing vs TIE Fighter (1999) - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131781/the_internet_sucks_or_what_i_.php?print=1 <comment><USER3> Man, brings me back to my childhood. It's still disappointing to me that there hasn't been a game in the x wing/tie fighter mold - for me it would be a killer app for vr.

<comment><USER4> How about FS2Open? Fantastic series of games, even more fantastic engine. Someone should get on VR support, would be a good Elite:Dangerous competitor.

<comment><USER5> FS2Open "Getting Started": [http://www.hard- light.net/wiki/index.php/Getting_started](http://www.hard- light.net/wiki/index.php/Getting_started)

Demo of the associated kickstarted game "Overload": [http://playoverload.com/playable-teaser/](http://playoverload.com/playable- teaser/) Copied from that link: _The teaser includes VR support for the Oculus Rift only. The final launch of Overload will support other VR devices._

Apparently newer Overload demos include eye tracking support: [https://youtu.be/jcXWpL9CMps](https://youtu.be/jcXWpL9CMps)

Descent: Underground Early Access claims VR support and is $15 (50% off) on Steam right now: [http://store.steampowered.com/app/360950](http://store.steampowered.com/app/360950) Reviews say there's not much there yet though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting link but definitely needs a [1999] qualifier in the title.

</comment><comment><USER7> The obligatory [http://fabiensanglard.net/quake3/network.php](http://fabiensanglard.net/quake3/network.php)

<comment><USER8> Thanks for posting that - it's basically a case study on how to do a good job of implementing the communication for a networked multiplayer game. Extremely handy.

The only bugger of it is that there's still no across the board UDP support in browsers(1) which means if you're building games with HTML5 and JavaScript, whatever you do, you're still using TCP, which is a PITA. It's actually even worse: WebSockets obviously a bunch of HTTP guff on top so it's not even like you're using vanilla TCP. At present I don't think there's any way to use raw TCP from JavaScript.

This obviously isn't a big problem for slower paced or turn-based games but it's a total pain in the neck for anything that has real time dynamics (FPS, many types of 2D arcade game, etc.).

 _(1) There is WebRTC, which is apparently UDP-based, but it 's not yet supported across all browsers: [http://caniuse.com/#feat=rtcpeerconnection](http://caniuse.com/#feat=rtcpeerconnection). It's also meant for peer to peer so may or may not be a good fit for the kind of client/server/master game state comms you'd need for a multiplayer game. (I suppose you could utilise one of the clients for the master state but this is obviously open to abuse given that JS runs in a completely insecure execution environment - anything can get injected in there.)_

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So would it have worked better to send the entire game state every frame/every N frames/etc so that a dropped UDP packet would not totally trash the game? I don't know what the maximum frame size is for UDP.

<comment> TD-Linux You can only assume a MTU of about 1500 bytes, unfortunately. However, instead of sending each packet effectively twice as in the original article, you can use FEC to require only 2 of 3 packets to be received for example [1].

But yeah, WebRTC for example also effectively implements resending the whole state - if you get too far behind, the receiver can request a video keyframe from the sender.

[1] [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5109](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5109)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The whole bit about TCP being evil and hopelessly broken made me laugh - <USER2> funny to imagine these guys as complete network beginners :)

Its also ironic that people building networked games today are making the same mistakes - and it all starts from a huge misconception of how the internet and its protocols really work.

For as much as we like to think of ourselves "clever", networking is one area where intuition usually leads to terrible implementations :)

</comment><comment><USER10> I made a tribute to these games: [http://aeonalpha.com](http://aeonalpha.com), it uses TCP/HTTP and the backend is open source: [http://fuse.rupy.se/fuse.html](http://fuse.rupy.se/fuse.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> "[TCP is] why we would see latencies in the 5-second range." So much has changed. :)

<comment><USER12> Well, the writer's bio lists his game making achievements, but the take on networking reminds me of the phrase "Let the cobbler stick to his last" ( [http://proverbhunter.com/proverb/let-the-cobbler-stick-to- hi...](http://proverbhunter.com/proverb/let-the-cobbler-stick-to-his-last/) )

<comment><USER13> Are you saying that he didn't know what he was talking about? Because in 1999, the internet was terrible for games. Most people were still on dialup!

<comment><USER14> It is interesting to compare this to congested public wifi (congested internet connection behind the wifi). Or Comcast in some (many?) cases for that matter... Congestion is worse these days but when things go well bandwidth and latency are much better. UDP is also a "if there is any congestion drop this first" flag (first attempt retry via a tcp connection that is kept open but normally not used might be an interesting tactic to try these days).

With bittorent and browsers opening a zillion connections at once, a single connection can be easily swamped. For those of us using a VPN past the ISP, that means everything, but a game with a single connection is likely just as vulnerable. These days (if not using a server) having clients each send their data and what they received from everyone else to all other clients might be more likely to work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "TCP is evil. Don't use TCP for a game. You would rather spend the rest of your life watching Titanic over and over in a theater full of 13 year old girls."

OK, I giggled at this! :D

<comment><USER16> I'd add a condition to that to say don't use TCP for a realtime game. For turn-based games, it works great and the inherent benefits of TCP (retrans, in order, etc) can be used to simplify the netcode.

On a related-but-not note, I wonder if 13 year old girls react the same to Titanic now as they did when it was in theaters? I'll find out in about 11 years myself but curious if anyone has anecdotal evidence.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What to do with 3K visitors a month? - <AUTHOR> I created a chat site with an open chat. Very basic. Additionally I added a profile system. Also very basic. Now I have about 3K visitors a month, make about $30 dollar a month through adsense, but I dont have any clue on how to make it more profitable. <comment><USER3> What to do with them ? Do right by them. Try to figure out why they are using your site instead of some other one (slack comes to mind), figure out who your audience is, talk to them to try to find out who they are (not necessarily "what they want", because people will tell you all kinds of things), and give them what they need.

If, at the end of all this, you don't have a clearer idea about how to help these people to happily give you their time / money / eyeballs, then maybe just leave it be and enjoy $30 worth of beer each month or something.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> $30/month is pretty good for 3k in visitors i think. I get about 10k visitors and only make $25 off adsense. What's your website address? I'd love to see where your ad placement is at. Maybe it has to do with the amount of time the users are on the site.

In terms of getting more $, affiliate income makes lots of money. In the old days when we used to run sites with adsense and affiliates, the affiliate income accounted for about 70% of the revenue. If you had a good place on your site for it, I'd start by looking in to the amazon associates program. FYI. The amazon affiliate pays out from 4% - 10% of the sale of the product.

<comment><AUTHOR> To bad, I have no idea what ads to target. Could be just anything. But I guess adult content would do pretty well. Most of the people really talk some nasty stuff.

<comment><USER5> Do they know you're in on their conversations?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes ofcourse. It is am open chat, no private conversations are possible for the chat. But when user register, they can send private messages to each other. These i can not read.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Dont.

We haven't monetized hackernoon.com at all and have instead focused on good content and we are now well into the millions of monthly uniques. Its not worth the time to monitize 3k visitors

<comment><USER7> I'm half with you. I think monetising 3k people on a generic chat site is going to be hard/impossible (what interests one may not interest the other). That said, monetising 3k people in a micro niche could potentially be absolutely worth it. For instance, if the 3k are chatting about poker - <USER2> may only need to convert a handful a month with the right offer to make it a nice bit of extra (semi) passive income.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Very nice, thanks for the feedback. To give it a bit more context.

The reason I'm not sharing the url is because the code is somewhat outdated and may be insecure. In my spare time I'm working on a new version which matches some of the recent security 'standards'. The website started as a project just for learning how to develop a basic website with interaction between users. So about seven years ago I tried becoming new instance of \Zuckerberg. I started chatting the website all over de chat-places. I added a twitter account, following (by hand :)) all those singles and lonely people out there hoping they follow back. Greeting them every day and helping other twitter addicts keeping their following list clean with new tools also presented within a backoffice on the same website.

My situation only allows me to work just a couple of hours a week on a side project. The reason I'm looking for some new ideas to monetize the project a bit more is because I want to buy a new house, like within a year or so. Just need a 100K in euros additionally to buy a nice place to give my son the full experience of life as much as possible in the way me and my wife dream about it. I can't just switch jobs, because the company I work for did alot for me. And I am a v ery loyal person when it comes to people/businesses helping me out with stuff.

Now, for the chat service, its more like a lonely-chat-service. About 100 visitors a day, saying "Hi, is there anyone around here?" or something like that. Then, the silence is killing them at which point they probably start clicking thos e ads :) So as I removed the usefull stuff from the website, people started clicking more on ads, to just get away.

When I read the feedback, I think I should just add some sort of feedback button or create a popup with a textarea in which they can add their dream they expected to get in by entering the website. And then start building them those dream s, for just a penny a day.

<comment><USER8> As vblord and others have said: you need to work on the product if ultimately you want it to grow.

But here's another way you can make some money with 3k users: sell something to them. As some have said, things like custom emojis, digital roses, etc, might work. But think outside of the tech box and offer to sell actual physical things e.g. a user could buy flowers for another user and you take care of the service and take a cut out of it.

There's actually a show right now on tv called "Halt and Catch Fire" ([http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543312/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543312/) best show ever about tech imho) and they're trying to grow a startup who's service is a chat service!

<comment><USER4> ttam, i hear Silicon Valley is supposed to be a really great show about that too. [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2575988/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2575988/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why would you want to make it more profitable? The alternative is giving your users a better, ad-free experience. What makes you happier: 1) Getting $100/month in revenue 2) Having a fast growing group of users who love your web-app?

<comment><USER10> I don't think that's really a fair comment. There's lots of reasons to want to monetize a project, including to pay for servers, fund future development, and fund future projects. All it takes is a few small sites/services that are making >= $500/m via ads or paid customers to be able to quit your job and focus your time on said projects.

<comment><USER11> The parent worded it poorly IMO. But the notion is real.

The parent made it seem like you had to choose between making money or a good app, which is obviously nonsense.

But I do identify with getting more gratification from solving a problem well and offering to others for free than potentially making money off of it. I might be weird, but money is a drug, and I'll take just what I need (or what my wife says we need).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> You need to provide more information about the services you provide.

How specialized are you, maybe if you're incredibly specialized and have the right crowd, you can start having premium accounts, in exchange for special features.

3k is pretty low, for a chat service (in general, maybe for extremely specialized services it isn't).

If possible, try to expand your userbase, advertising? Social sharing? Affiliate programs?

The possibilities are endless and you live and die by the specifics of your niche.

Decide if you want to aim for massive, or niche, ads, premium features, freemium?

If you want more specifics, I think you need to be more specific in your question, but then I'll gladly expand.

</comment><comment><USER13> > _"...but I dont have any clue on how to make it more profitable."_

You probably won't fix that in this thread if you don't share the URL or even enough information about your chat site for people to give educated feedback.

What kind of users are they? Do they chat about everything or is there a theme or geographical niche? What kinds of ads are displaying through adsense? How long did it take you to get to 3k users? Do you feel like it will be hard to get more? Why did you throw up adsense at such low traffic?

<comment><AUTHOR> What kind of users are they? > mostly people that search chat sites like "free chat sites without registration" and those that click links on chat link pages.

Do they chat about everything or is there a theme or geographical niche? > Dutch visitors, 99%. No theme, just a single chatbox, and another one for registered users. Mostly chatting about adult related stuff or searching for men/woman.

What kinds of ads are displaying through adsense? > anything, I took the advice that popped up in google adsense.

How long did it take you to get to 3k users? > took me a few years, but i spent just a few hours a week like half a year to get those monthly 3K.

Do you feel like it will be hard to get more? >Just figuring that out now.

Why did you throw up adsense at such low traffic? > Someone told me I could get $ for throwing adsense on my site and i was wondering how much that would be

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Aside from having ads on the site, your only real option is a paid plan. In that case, just start marketing the project as "beta" and add a pricing page that says the pricing is "coming soon". Continue building out features and once you get a good enough product to charge for add a paid plan and flip everybody else over to the default "Free Plan" that's limited in a way that users can still use the site, but have enough reasons to upgrade to the paid plan.

Whatever you do I'd try to listen to your users and see exactly what they want. 3,000 users really isn't very many and it would be really easy for them to disappear. Talk to your users, find out why they're using your site/service, keep that in mind when building out your feature set.

Edit: Keep in mind, building out the service and keeping it free is also an option, especially if you enjoy working on and running the site. If you listen to your users and keep improving the product, it's very possible to turn 3K monthly users into 300K. I run an API that has a front end site which gets around 175K monthly hits and brings in about $1300+ (CAD) a month from the ads. The site costs peanuts to run so I'm happy to serve the 35 million API calls for free and fund the project 100% via adsense. It just depends on how far you'd like to scale it and what your users are like.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! When I finished the rebuild, I will be able to create and maintain some new features based on what users want. Will keep de the paid plans in mind! Maybe just a very small amount, it does not cost me that much to run the service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's a great feeling knowing that you've built something which is used by thousands of people, but even better when it's generating revenue to cover the costs (your time, hosting, etc). However, to put things in perspective you're really only talking about 100 visitors per day and $1 in revenue. Factoring that, I suggest focusing more on improving the site, growing it's traffic and then when it passes 500 visitors per day start focusing on revenue. If you prefer the AdSense route, make sure you've optimized your ad placements and the type of ads you're serving.

This advice is coming from someone who has a site doing roughly $5k month from AdSense via 275k+ visitors / 1.3M+ pageviews and it makes up about 30% of the site's revenue. Rest is from paid plans & affiliate marketing.

<comment><USER15> Follow this advice! 3k users is awesome. It validates your product. Get more users to do more money.

It is a nice challenge and you'll learn a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> As a chat service, you may have some options for adding premium emoji, premium avatars, or other digital displays of wealth. Digital gifts can be another option. Ok Cupid is rumored to have made a lot on digital roses. Premium services like private rooms may have value as well.

</comment><comment><USER17> My question is do you have 3000 visitors or 3000 MAU? There is a big difference. With Adsense there are things to consider to increase your revenue, such as who your users are (location and demographic), the type of content on the site, and how long they stay on your site.

As others have pointed out, without knowing more about your site it's difficult to answer. But some suggestions. Try selling add-ons such as premium emojis or avatars. Look towards a premium account with added features as well.

</comment><comment><USER18> I suggest to add some premium content to profiles. Charge a very low price - 2-3 Euros/month - and have people pay at the end of each month. If they dont pay then close their account/profile. This way they only pay if they are satisfied and allways have the last 30 free days. You only need 10 paying customers/visitors - 0,3% of current visitor numbers to earn the same as with adsense

</comment><comment><USER19> Go to a startup meetup and hook up with someone you think will be great at marketing or knows something about the chat space that you don't.

Partner with them on making this more profitable.

</comment><comment><USER20> I work building tools for ad optimizers, next step they take is to get an account for DFP and Ad exchange(Google) which offers better revenue, there are also other ad networks you can configure on DFP to boost revenue like PubGalaxy the thing is you need to take time to test each one or get help for a pro ad optimizer and these days all big publishers are using Header bidding, you can reach me alejandro [at] ialex.org if want more details.

</comment><comment><USER21> Flattr is worth investigating: [https://flattr.com/](https://flattr.com/)

Also you can ask for Bitcoin / Litecoin donations depending on how technical your visitors are. I know you want normal currency, but you can convert BTC using Coinbase and other exchanges

</comment><comment><USER22> It's awesome that you made it this far, but to be honest 3k MAU just isn't enough. If you're making money through ads, you'll want more eyeballs on them so try getting more users! Depending on how far you want to take it, your username may unfortunately become very relevant.

</comment><comment><USER23> Where is it? If you had given us the URL you might have got a few cents more.

</comment><comment><USER24> Is it oriented toward businesses? Or is there an angle to create a more business-oriented version? Better ad payouts in my experience, and more likely to pay for a service.

</comment><comment><USER25> Does your community share some set of problems in common? If so, look for sponsorship by an organization that makes money solving those problems.

</comment><comment><USER26> You could probably sell ads on your own depending the audience. If its a bunch of CEOs on their you could probably sell ads for millions.

</comment><comment><USER27> Depends on what they're talking about. What's the name of your site?</comment>


The Intellectual Situation - <AUTHOR> http://nplusonemag.com/the-intellectual-situation-issue-15

<comment><USER2> The intellectual situation is that the link leads nowhere -- it's apparently a typo.</comment>


How China Unleashed Twitter Trolls to Discredit Hong Kong's Protesters - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/18/world/asia/hk-twitter.html <comment><USER2> What is stopping Twitter from releasing server logs for others to independently authenticate attribution? Facebook, Google have not declared. The ASPI analysis proceeds on assumption that Twitters attribution is correct. The startup Digital Intelligence concludes confidently "China has made its debut as a confirmed information operations actor" because the bots coordinated behavior "emulat[es] divisive disinformation tactics seen in other disinformation campaigns from Russia and Iran".

That said, the take away from both analysis is that 30 (DI) - 112 (ASPI) of the ~900 accounts have high likelihood of being an disinformation network... that operated for over 2 years, using many re-purposed spam/dating/escort/porn accounts that was never sanitized to preserve cover. Evaluate the scale and operational rigor of this network and it's hard to conclude this is state- level tradecraft than some independent agent/contractor with limited resources and basic scripting knowledge.

Leave it to NYT to sneak in balance at the end with inflammatory headline.

>Elise Thomas, one of the authors of the Australian report, said that the low level of professionalism suggested that the campaign was not the work of the People's Liberation Army or the Ministry of State Security, which have previously been linked to Chinese cyberespionage and information campaigns.

>"I would be surprised if the P.L.A. was responsible because I would expect they would be more competent than this," Ms. Thomas said.

Yeah. Look, China is bad at foreign influence campaigns, but this is insultingly bad. I'm completely willing to believe China has expanded propaganda efforts abroad, but this doesn't feel like it.

E: unsurprisingly people are already using the article to accusing others of being bots. Because humans writing and replying unique responses are equivalent to automated bots that copy and base tweets on a schedule.

<comment><USER3> > some independent agent/contractor with limited resources and basic scripting > knowledge.

Outsourcing seems likely. Last month an invitation for bids was posted for a contract to promote Chinese state media on Twitter for 1.2 million yuan, payable if the follower count increased by at least 580,000 at the end of the contract period. [1]

Some people have framed it as "China openly buys followers", but it seems clear that whoever came up with the contract intended for those followers to be real people, since a propaganda account is pretty useless if it's only read by bots. Of course the successful bidder would be likely to try and add some fake accounts if they couldn't hit the target otherwise. Someone seems to have realized that and pulled the announcement, which is why I had to use an archive.org link.

This spam campaign might have been similar; with a contract to spread propaganda messages that lacked the necessary safeguards to ensure subtlety.

[1] [https://web.archive.org/web/20190822113315/http://www.ccgp.g...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190822113315/http://www.ccgp.gov.cn/cggg/dfgg/zbgg/201908/t20190816_12699714.htm)

<comment><USER2> The question is, is this the kind of activity China would outsource to this quality? This recklessly on a sensitive topic like HK so close to 80th anniversary. Was it that time-sensitive / desperate to allow something this amateurish to roll out. They're paying millions buying advertisement in foreign newspapers, I'd expect an social median influence operation would get more funding than 100 poorly cultivated bot accounts.

Services for hitting western social media KPIs are dime a dozen, but a private industry for foreign influence campaigns not so much. Maybe those Estonian fake news kids. Would be interesting to see what that tender would look like though, at least they're paying more than 50c.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Am starting to feel this trolling is an industry (like troll farm) of its own - there are people or bots dedicated to trolling and reporting people who raise voice against the discrimination.. I recently had to report an unfair service by virgin atlantic staff after an emergency landing - I tweeted the pictures and video of the incident.. I was immediately trolled by twitter accounts about how i should be happy that I am alive - I was complaining about how the staff handled the issues after the emergency landing .. wish the social media companies could raise voice against companies or countries that use their platform to discredit real concern - guess people do not matter anymore

<comment><USER5> You may not believe it, the vast majority of Chinese actually love the CCP and the system, they only just hate that a few corrupt low-level officials who are the bad apples fucking up leaders' glorious visions.

These "bots" are mostly spontaneous people, they are not even government- sponsored Wumao, they genuinely love China and defend it, their reason being it may have some flaws but any other country has too and is worse than China, and them being either students or comfortable middle-class help.

<comment><USER6> I wouldn't say most Chinese love the system. They don't despise it though.

I think a lot see the HK thing as an attack on their country. There's a fair bit of history (the insult of losing territory to foreign powers) and also current tensions ('locusts' is a HK slur against mainland Chinese). A lot of HK people kinda dislike mainlanders coming to HK, but the city kinda relies on mainland money.

So there's already a bit of contention, then a large number of HK people are protesting against mainland China having any influence. It's then easy to conflate attacks on mainland China (the government) with attacks on mainland China (the people).

<comment><USER7> I feel like all the people who are involuntary organ-donors might disagree if they weren't dead. China has a way of disappearing people who don't like it. I wonder how many people would come out more vocally if you weren't disappeared for disagreeing or even being outspoken.

[https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/true- stories/the...](https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/true-stories/the- reality-of-human-organ-harvesting-in-china/news- story/14d3aa5751c39d6639a1cc5b39f223b7)

<comment><USER8> Give you some hint: According to Godel theorem, a system in higher order is necessary to judge the truth in current system. So self claim the story is true implied the story teller (i.e. the author of the news) is not quite intellegent and maybe very naive to mix fact and belief.

I totally respect your strong belief about the story. But don't enforce others accept your personal opion by imply your personal belief is truth. It's quite insulting.

<comment><USER9> > I totally respect your strong belief about the story. But don't enforce > others accept your personal opion by imply your personal belief is truth. > It's quite insulting.

Are you Chinese? You being offended by his post makes me feel like you are. He wasn't forcing his oppinion on you.

Also godel's theorem doesn't have anything to do with this, as godel's theorem is about mathematical systems.

<comment><USER8> Legally I'm not Chinese but it's not relevant in this context. You have a wrong assumption about the cause. Another wrong assumption is I'm offended which I'm not. Here's the subtle difference: A person's behaviour is insulting meanings he/she could offend some (not all) people who follow some rules, which might be: reasoning process should base on relative facts/axioms within the same axiomatic system.

Let me explain a little more about where the insulting comes from. During daily conversation people usually omit many relevant consensus details: context and premises. Otherwise communication would be extremely redundant.

One thing is important is: anything put into premise that other conclusions can drawn from, should be relative facts which all the parties agree. By providing personal belief as premise to draw other conclusion without explicitly stating that's just personal belief means the "evidence" provider cannot tell the difference , unintentionally and implicitly force others reasoning within "evidence" provider's own axioms system, without knowing there's totally different axioms system with other premises exist.

In short: There's no problem at all to express personal opinions. However put personal opinion into a premise to draw other conclusions during reasoning without explicit emphasise is not good.

About Godel theorem, strictly it's only about Math. You are right on that. I'm half joking but it' an analogy. In sports field there's a referee because if one team can act as authoritative way to claim they own truth implicitly gives the other team the same authority which will lead to chaos. There's a parallel relation here.

EDIT: typo and grammar fix

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's a good time to remember that the vast majority of people never use Twitter. The media has had a fixation with the platform for as long as I can remember, which has helped it gain an unearned reputation as being relevant.

It's not relevant. It's the trash heap of the internet. I can't understand why anyone would continue to spend time on it when it's become universally known that bots and trolls run the show.

<comment><USER11> > It's not relevant. It's the trash heap of the internet.

It's got heads of state, leaders of enterprise, and myriad celebrity on the platform. As much as I'd like to see Twitter, Facebook, et. al. nuked from orbit, they're very much relevant.

<comment><USER12> Agreed, it may still be a trash heap, but it's still very relevant culturally. It's also a lazy source for headlines and (occasionally) breaking news so it gets far more relevance media-wise than it warrants in terms of quality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A lot more data here, which was referenced in the article: [https://medium.com/digintel/welcome-to-the-party-a-data- anal...](https://medium.com/digintel/welcome-to-the-party-a-data-analysis-of- chinese-information-operations-6d48ee186939)

</comment><comment><USER14> China has been using armies of bots for many years to sway public opinion. Much scarier than Russia, because they have 10X the resources.

<comment><USER15> Well they've been doing a pretty bad job then, considering how often they are bashed on HN, Reddit, Imgur, etc.

<comment><USER16> It's incredibly funny to me how concerned western netizens seem to be about Chinese astroturfing... as if it's an actual problem they need to worry about.

99.9999% of comments you'll find online are highly critical of China. The most upvoted submissions on Reddit and HN are often those critical of China. Most Americans (60% last time I checked) already have a negative view of China and their knee-jerk reaction is to support anything or anyone who speaks out against the CCP.

Does anyone really think 17 bots on Twitter tweeting messages in Chinese is going to change this?

<comment><USER14> "Does anyone really think 17 bots on Twitter tweeting messages in Chinese is going to change this?"

Try 17 thousand or 17 million bots, Tweeting in English.

This is also only a small fraction of what they are actually doing. If you take a look at many new movies coming out in the US, many are financed by a Chinese company.

They have also started buying major stakes in media companies, like Reddit.

The strange thing about the Hong Kong protests is that I can't seem to find any balanced coverage of it and I almost saw no coverage of it here on major US television networks.

<comment><USER17> _Try 17 thousand or 17 million bots, Tweeting in English_

And now they've got Reddit covered with /r/Sino but I'm unsure if that's new or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I really hate how inherently biased and subjective most reporting about "social bots" seems to be.

For these last years headlines about all kinds of "bot armies" are constantly making the rounds, getting blamed for pretty much everything from Trump's election to Brexit.

Often based on some research that defines the parameters for a user being a "social bot", that they have extremely high false-positive rates, but still end up only identifying hundreds, maybe thousands of accounts, on platforms that have total user numbers in the hundreds of millions or even over a billion.

That is already enough to cause widespread paranoia about Chinese/Russian/Iranian trolls supposedly being everywhere.

So anybody on Twitter, Facebook or Reddit who's opinions and views don't align with a certain Overton window, are quickly labeled as being "foreign influencers", regardless of any arguments or facts whatsoever, in a purely ideological reaction of "What, you do not agree that <insert country> is evil?! How dare you!".

Meanwhile, barely anybody talks about the reality that these kinds of games are played by pretty much everybody [0] [1], but I guess it would be weird for a US American platform to ban users for spreading pro-US propaganda. Tho, it's still scary how completely oblivious most people seem to be about that, while seeing the Chinese/Russian/Iranian version everywhere.

[0] [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy- op...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation- social-networks)

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/4ylml3/reddit...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/4ylml3/reddit_has_removed_their_blog_post_identifying/)

<comment><USER19> We've all already been successfully trolled.

The well has already been poisoned.

Paranoia has now been compounded.

Clarity regarding contemporary domestic political landscape has now been further muddled.

Effective astroturfing was always a secondary objective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> In a few years the Chinese economy will experience much slower growth rate (similar to the West) and people will get out of the this 30-year hypnotic state of fast-moving and dehumanizing economic development and quest for money (which the CCP has used to consolidate its grip) and with the growing corruption at increasingly higher levels of the government, the people will eventually demand what is theirs: The right to rule and appoint their rulers and then the CCP will be in trouble, and there won't be a blazingly fast economic growth to hide behind.

</comment><comment><USER21> twitter is just a cesspit now. I have watched this happen to my own country (the UK) with trolls and bots constantly pumping out anything which gets an emotional reaction of outrage.

</comment><comment><USER22> I stopped trusting any New York Times article since the report of Lanxiang[1], which became a popular meme on Chinese social networks.

1\. [https://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/22/technology/22cyber.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/22/technology/22cyber.html)

</comment><comment><USER23> I see this in YouTube comments a lot on Hong Kong-related videos. Also they flag videos. A Cantonese language YouTuber I follow posted one video with her opinions and got flagged and hit with a strike on her account.

</comment><comment><USER24> China should scrap the GFW and unleash them all, I guess the English-speaking world would have to build a GFW to fend off all Chinese netizens then.

<comment><USER12> They don't even need to. It's not like they are having any problems doing what they want currently and their power is so far from being threatened that it's not even worthing monitoring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> They go by the name 50 Cent party: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party)

This is purely something that's pushing a political agenda. In China, there's a single party, so disagreement is perceived as sabotage. While in other countries, its accepted as part of the system.

In US we have a house/senate minority leader: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority_leader](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority_leader)

In Westminster-based systems (Australia, Canada, UK), they call them opposition: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_opposition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_opposition)

So if China lacks this representation, what is there to counterbalance? Wouldn't it lead to viewpoint discrimination?

There are things that need a more direct form a democracy to fix. Rent control, tighter restrictions on who does business/runs for election there. For instance, should agents of Beijing be fit to represent the people of HK and craft laws?

If you'd like to see what happens when foreign governments sabotage legislature, Poland's first legislative councils were rampant with it: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Poland_in_the_Early...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Poland_in_the_Early_Modern_era_\(1569%E2%80%931795\))

What other outlet is there but giving control to HK citizens have total and complete sovereignty to handle their own localized issues?

</comment><comment><USER26> Anyone else a bit freaked out at how effective social influence is? What does that say about how we form opinions?

<comment><USER27> I think 95%+ of opinions are directly regurgitated from others, but we humans mistake our own novelty with the idea for the idea actually being original.

Thinking about my teenage years, I'd often see a documentary and then "come up" with concepts it covered a week or two later.

Similarly, I think one of the biggest issues with "bot influencers" is that the average human is not good at thinking for themselves and regurgitates whatever they agree with/protects the ego. The online activity of many technology-naive middle aged users gradually becomes indistinguishable from the bots they follow.

<comment><USER28> What do you think is the best approach to make sure one's opinion is independent without spending a massive amount of time on getting an expertise in the subject?

<comment><USER29> You can't. Independent opinion doesn't exist - you would have to validate every datum you're presented with starting from first principles, which is impossible.

Accept that most of your opinions will be informed by the opinions of others, likely directly, and your method for judging truth will instinctively be biased more towards emotion, social status and ego-preservation than than logic and fact, because humans are social animals and that's just how we're wired.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> For anyone paywalled: [http://archive.is/Blzuk](http://archive.is/Blzuk)

</comment><comment><USER31> We gotta stop blaming `China` -- The China brand has been tarnished unfairly in my view as we use it to be synonymous with the so-called `Communist Party of China`

<comment><USER31> As usual, with the downvotes, allow us to clarify:

At present there are still people just like us being saddled with some mandarin fever dream of the social credit system while we're treating the whole continent of China like a troll brigade pumping fake news on twitter and suppressing Hong Kong video clips on TikTok

We've gotta understand that fighting totalitarianism with prejudice and stereotypes plays right into the hands of the puppet masters and doubly victimizes the innocent people caught in the crossfire, who could very well be us in another life

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> most time, and most people always believe what they want to believe

</comment><comment><USER33> There needs to be some sort of internet sanction where the offending country's internet access to the world is cut off until they start acting like good global citizens.

<comment><USER34> We cannot even eradicate botnets operated by individual criminals.

<comment><USER35> We can't (won't) even stop robocalling (US)</comment></comment></comment>


How to read Haskell like Python - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ezyang.com/2011/11/how-to-read-haskell <comment><USER2> To be fair, monadic code does not necessarily have side effects. It's just a useful way of thinking about computational steps. `Maybe` is a monad that is completely pure and has no side effects: [http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base/s...](http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base/src/Data- Maybe.html#line-76)

I understand that this article is geared towards beginners, so this is probably just a simplification on the author's part. Other than that it's a great article.

<comment><USER3> The problem with the simplification is that you really need to understand which monad code is using to read the code. foo >>= bar >>= baz has very different behaviors in the IO monad (it's like a shell pipe foo | bar | baz) and the Maybe monad (it's like a short-circuiting foo && bar && baz).

<comment><USER4> Not really... you're perfectly capable of reading Python code:

      x = foo()
      y = bar(x)
      baz(y)

Knowing that any of these functions could throw an exception. How is it any different, from the reader's perspective? (Yes, it's /very/ different from an implementation perspective, but that's not what we're dealing with here...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've tried to learn Haskell a couple times, and I keep running into the basic problem of not being able to search for info on terms like ">>=". If you don't know what it means, how do you find out? I certainly never knew until reading in this article that they were called "fish" operators. I previously tried to work through 3 or 4 different Haskell tutorials, and still didn't know this.

This article seems very helpful for simply enabling someone with Python experience to learn Haskell.

<comment><USER6> They aren't actually called "fish" operators, as far as I know. ">>=" is pronounced "bind"; all the other ones are related. I didn't have this problem when learning Haskell because I just started by reading "Learn You a Haskell for Great Good"--which is a great book, coincidentally--and never had to google operators.

<comment><USER4> OK OK, "Bind and fish" operators. :-)

<comment><USER6> I actually rather like the name "fish operator". I just wanted to point out that Googling for that phrase wouldn't really work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A set of useful lies.

Some of my co-workers were interested in learning to read Haskell, not so much in writing it. Let's see whether they like it.

</comment><comment><USER8> For me, one of the biggest obstacles to understanding lots of Haskell code is opaque infix operators.

<comment><USER9> There aren't that many of them in the Prelude and common libraries.

Besides the standard arithmetic ones, only ones I can think of are the "fish" operators, composition dot, and a few arrows.

Did you try to learn what they mean, or did you give up earlier than that?

<comment><USER10> To be precise: cons (:), bind (>>=), 'constant bind' (>>), 'flipped bind' (=<<), compose (.), apply ($), strict apply ($!), append (++), and subscript (!!).

<comment><USER3> I had never seen $! before, of course it's obvious what it does if you know ! and $. There are patterns like this throughout the operators.

There are also the applicatives <$> <*> <$ etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _> But Haskell programmers are allergic to extra variables._

Point-free style, best style. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3233870>

</comment><comment><USER12> I think the "dabbling" phase of learning a language is important, and this is the best intro for Haskell dabblers I've ever seen. Nice work, author.

</comment><comment><USER13> Is it weird that I know haskell and not python? I think so.

</comment><comment><USER14> Whoa, as a python guy, this makes me not want to learn Haskell at all. The syntax seems as bad a Perl.

<comment><USER15> Nah, it's no biggie. What really is rough is the adherence to static types; it's very harsh and can really slow down a person hoping to build things.

And of course, if you're like me, then you don't want to go into a language where there's no Twisted equivalent.

<comment><USER4> I can't tell if you're trolling. GHC Haskell has first class pre-emptive concurrency support. You don't need Twisted because we give that all to you, out-of-the-box, without needing to do anything fancy.

<comment><USER16> I think he is complaining that he can write code in a natural form and then GHC's runtime makes the necessary calls to the event loop to make things happen as declared. This is annoying because all the hours you spent trying to work around Python turned out to be a big waste of time. Or something.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Generate a panorama - <AUTHOR> http://www.udeuschle.selfhost.pro/panoramas/makepanoramas_en.htm

<comment><USER2> Because it's running so slowly, can someone describe what it actually does and maybe mirror to an example? I think I can guess what it is but can't be sure because there is no explanation on the site.

<comment><USER3> <http://i.imgur.com/YkfpE.png?1>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The 'default' panorama was loaded relatively quickly. My hometown's panorama has been stuck at "21%" for the last 10 minutes...

</comment><comment><USER5> Unfortunately it's unusably slow, otherwise it would be really cool

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd pay for a faster version!

Especially it could be some kind of augmented reality app....</comment></comment>


Twitter should automatically and quickly delete your tweet if it is bad. - <AUTHOR>

The idea is to specify some criteria as to when twitter would automatically and quickly delete your tweet.
For example, if more than 2 people unsubscribe soon after your tweet is posted, then delete it automatically to avoid further reducing your audience.
You can even be more specific by only considering unsubscribers who pass some threshold in that count (e.g., those with at least 1000 followers).
Moreover, your criteria can take into account retweets and new subscribers.
CLARIFICATION: You -- not twitter -- would specify the criteria for automatic deletion of your tweets. If you don't like this feature, then don't use it. <comment><USER2> Welcome to real life. How about taking responsibility for what you write? Just think twice about what you're going to say. And if you say something people don't like, well too bad... just live with it. Everybody in the world does this everyday.

Being a douche is bad. Being a douche and try to hide it? Well, even worse. Now I really don't want to follow you.

<comment><AUTHOR> I find this response rather strange.

Why not also argue against stop loss orders in the stock market?

<comment><USER3> stop loss orders cost money.

<comment><USER4> And stop-loss orders _involve_ money. Twitter does (should?) not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't think this could ever actually work. If you've already lost 2 followers, then your tweet is already out there in the timelines of your followers. Those who are going to see it, probably already have. Those who aren't, probably weren't paying attention and never will anyway. There are already services that tell you what you said that made people unfollow you -- so you can delete tweet manually or modify your tweeting behavior (services like: <http://www.tweeteffect.com/> and <http://twitterless.com/> )

Twitter couldn't remove it from timelines until people refresh, and I'm not sure if third-party clients cache tweets, but if they do, then you'd never get your problem tweet deleted from those timelines either.

I guess this feature could somehow block people from retweeting your tweet? Maybe... I suppose. But, uh, most people don't retweet things that made them want to unfollow you. So that would be a silly feature.

What Twitter SHOULD do, instead, is fix their delete function, which leaves deleted tweets in Twitter search. Or provide a quick edit function (i.e., editing available for 90 seconds after tweeting) so people could fix typos.

</comment><comment><USER6> Take some personal responsibility instead of wanting Big Brother (Twitter) to do it for you. The more inappropriate things a person says, the fewer people will follow them... ... Anyway, WHO defines WHAT is a bad tweet? Just cos you don't like it and find it distasteful, doesn't mean that others will also. Many forms of satire would be deemed distasteful and yet others are simply deemed distasteful due to the reader having a poor sense of humour or lack of context.

<comment><AUTHOR> You -- not twitter -- would specify the criteria for automatic deletion of your tweets. If you don't like this feature, then don't use it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Maybe it's just me, but I would be incredibly annoyed by a feature that would allow people to arbitrarily make my posts get deleted. Most Twitter users don't really care about this sort of thing, and those that do already have better ways of dealing with it.

<comment><AUTHOR> You would specify the criteria for automatic deletion. If you don't like this feature, then don't activate it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Everyone is responsible for what he tweets; but the idea is good and can be a good Twitter App

</comment><comment><USER8> "If you're not pissing off at least 50% of the people you meet each day, you're not having a good day."

Arbitrarily deleting messages based on you reader's behaviour is a recipe for mediocrity.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why do you care so much about _amount_ of people following you?

</comment><comment><USER3> why should they implement this functionality? i don't really see any justification for why.

it makes twitter into a personal publicity tool out of the box, which i don't think is how it should be considered and a turn in the wrong direction.

</comment><comment><USER10> So much for accountability, eh?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not only would this limit your follower loss, but it would also give you feedback on the sorts of things you might want to avoid in the future when you tweet.</comment></comment>