Stigler diet - an early rigorous approach to nutrition - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler_diet <comment><AUTHOR> There's been a huge amount of discussion here about "Soylent", be that a company, a project, or whatever.

[https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=title%3Aso...](https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=title%3Asoylent&sortby=create_ts+desc&start=0)

What I'm a little confused about is why people aren't doing this "properly", in the sense that the problem was formulated by Stigler over half a century ago, and George Dantzig produced the algorithm to solve a large, complex version of it over 30 years ago.

If you're really interested in producing an adequate diet for minimal price, why not actually use the work done decades ago?</comment>


Florian Leibert(Mesosphere) and Luca Olivari as Advisory Council of ArangoDB - <AUTHOR> https://www.arangodb.com/2017/02/florian-leibert-ceo-mesosphere-luca-olivari-oracle-mongodb-joining-advisory-council-arangodb/ <comment><USER2> (Discmlaimer: I'm the CEO of ArangoDB) Glad to announce Florian Leibert (CEO of Mesosphere) and Luca Olivari (former Executive at Oracle and MongoDB) as part of our ArangoDB family. Warm welcome! Together with their advise and expertise we will further sharpen our focus and accelerate our growth.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great news! Welcome to the team!</comment>


The strange case of the Venus in a box - <AUTHOR> http://bat-bean-beam.blogspot.com/2016/04/the-strange-case-of-venus-in-box.html <comment><USER3> You can not understand this sort of thing if you model humans as idealized Vulcans. You have to understand that sex and nudity and such are all tied up not just with our forebrain, but with our irrational hindbrains, and we don't get to choose what "programs" those are running. I'm not saying I have a really easy answer, just that being mystified by these sorts of things is an indication that you're running on the wrong model of human minds. These issues are real, and the nudity is merely a player on a complicated game board of deep human currents of sex, power, hierarchy, and public morality, its need to be enforced, and it's need to be _seen_ being enforced (important not to model those as the same thing!), playing out in a complicated iterated group social game.

Further, it's worth pointing out that the people painting the nudity were not Vulcans neutrally painting "just what reality is" either. The painters set out to push certain buttons with those paintings, and the fact that people react is a measure of the fact they succeed. It should hardly be a mystery that people have further responses to the fact certain buttons are being pushed; indeed, it would be a mystery if they did just consider it no different than a painting of a bowl of fruit.

<comment><USER4> We're talking about pieces of art that have been around for centuries - <USER2> about people of power who are in the same positions as those that commissionned this pieces before them.

Who has the most thoughtful, the "right" "model of human minds" between those who commissionned these works, those who produced them and those who veiled them today?

<comment><USER5> People in that same position of power also killed rather a lot of middle easterners in the Crusades. I don't think we should use all their choices as a model for modern ones.

<comment><USER4> And? because people of power today do not?

Besides, the same type of nude art works, were produced long before (even in prehistoric times), east, south, north, and west of the Mediterranean sea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> By all means, let us ignore the herd of elephants stomping through the room.

This is all about the strange and disastrous new European fear of offending Those Who Must Not Be Offended. In this case a visiting Iranian head of state, but we see this stuff played out all over Europe every day, from this level and all the way down to minor, personal encounters.

But please, let us pretend we don't.

<comment><USER7> _> This is all about the strange and disastrous new European fear of offending Those Who Must Not Be Offended_

No it's not: The article describes several examples of such censorship, none of which had to do with Muslims (which I guess you're alluding to).

<comment><USER8> It's just as much the puritanical Christians and the feelings of Progressives that are demanding these coverups. It is not muslims, it is the blowback against freedom of speech by a number of groups who feel that they have a right not to be offended, and that their dogmatism is the one true way.

It's not a surprise, these things are cyclical, and global culture went through nearly 50 years of expanding tolerance - The drug use of the 60s and 70s, glorification of teenage rebellion in 80s and 90s, and the tech disruption of the aughts. We're seeing a resurgence of spirituality, in much the same way we've seen it before[1]. Not all of it is explicitly religious, some of it is just indistinguishable in it's goals.

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

<comment><USER9> I don't think it has anything to do with spirituality or even with religion.

There seems to be a certain alpha male - or at least alpha authoritarian - model of power which is rooted in a pretence of stern, serious, and disciplined public morality combined with private self-indulgence.

When you have naked boobies on display in public buildings, that model of pretended integrity starts to break down. Boobies and naked bodies - especially female bodies - are fundamentally antithetical to the immensely serious business of public alpha moral posturing. They're strictly for private off-the-record consumption only.

Non-authoritarians don't care about keeping up appearances in this way. But authoritarians and narcissists most certainly do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There was a rather good cartoon in Private Eye this month (unforately not online as far as I can google) where Adam and Eve (from the last judgement mentioned in the OP) are captioned saying "It's worse that we thought - we're being slammed on Twitter"

</comment><comment><USER11> A vaguely simlar case in the US, a few years ago: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_of_Justice#Spirit_of_Ju...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_of_Justice#Spirit_of_Justice_and_the_Attorneys_General)

</comment><comment><USER12> Thanks for this. A really perceptive brief meditation on something we'd often just chuckle at and move on.

</comment><comment><USER13> What I wonder about most is why they didn't just use a piece of cloth instead.

<comment><USER14> They're probably trying to minimize contact with the art - the same way that they don't allow flash photography of paintings.

<comment><USER13> Ok good point. But you could suspend it from the ceiling. Placing a box would, I suppose, create a much higher risk of damage.</comment></comment></comment>


Playlist converter not so new web app - <AUTHOR> http://www.playlist-converter.net <comment><AUTHOR> Conversion of playlist from one music streaming service to another is more and more needed by users. This is a long term project. years after years user are geekier and we leave mp3s collection for youtube, spotify, deezer and co. Love to get your feedback. There a simple text api and the conversion from freetext is very handy if data come fron another service export :)</comment>


Open source email client for minimalists - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/apancik/plain-email <comment><USER2> Surely mutt is the open-source email client for minimalists? This is written in javascript, which does not bespeak minimalism.</comment>


Founder Stories: The Ups and Downs of Startup Life at WeddingLovely - <AUTHOR> http://weddinglovely.com/blog/founder-stories-the-ups-and-downs-of-startup-life/ <comment><USER2> Tracy previously posted about her former failed cofounder[0] experience (before Julia came aboard), this one is about a failed hire, but she has a lot more stories about failed acquisitions, fundraising, and products. I've experienced some of these things with my own startup too but it never ceases to amaze me how diverse and different, yet universal, the "hard parts" of startups are.

I wish more people were brave enough to talk about that side.

[0] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3776972>

<comment><USER3> Thanks. :) A lot of people at Startup School were more than happy to talk about the troubles they went through, but only after the fact — it was really hard for me to press submit to talk about _current_ troubles. So much pressure for startup bullshit out there!

<comment><USER4> Reminds me of this: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2545823>

<comment><USER3> That's awesome, haven't seen that before. Funny because I was just at Brooklyn Beta and Ben spoke at length about how he didn't know what he was doing and attributed some of Svpply's "failure" to his run as CEO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm interested to hear how you came up with your pricing. Likely you spent a lot of time coming up with the packages, but it seems like your market is really a tough market to price properly.

There is so much complexity in this industry that I would assume that the right pricing strategy would make a huge difference in your business.

At first glance I would assume things like... you must be low enough to not compete with wedding planners, so that would imply a max price of $2K to $3K. But then your pricing is only $79 which is far below (what I think is the average cost of a wedding planner). I'd be interested to find out what makes up that difference.

Are there ways to close the gap?

I'm sure there are a lot of considerations in the pricing that I cannot even think about properly, but it seems like there should be a lot of opportunity here.

<comment><USER3> HA good question. Succinctly, our pricing is not set in stone is likely to change.

Keep in mind that the vast majority of weddings these days do not have full planners, and if they work with a planner, generally it's a month-of or day-of planner, so that lowers the tiers of people we would be "competing" against.

WeddingLovely is also very new, so starting out at $14.99/month seemed ideal to test out. $19.99 is actually an experiment in price anchoring. $119 is because people usually work with us way before their wedding so we wanted to have a tier that rewards people who start with us early.

Basically, _these are all guesses that we're testing_ , and will update and improve both our pricing as well as our features as we work more with engaged couples as well as gain more experience running an online wedding planning app.

<comment><USER6> I got married a year ago, the organisation was so painful that I considered (and quickly dismissed) and idea to go into this space myself..

If I had to do it again, I'd want (and pay good money for):

* RSVP: via web/email, Facebook and post. Charge for post.

* Wedding Website (incl gallery!)

* Gift management (use a partner)

Then you can add:

* Make deals with Photographers, possibly vet them. Maybe get them to fill your galleries? It could be a hard sell, especially if you try and compete with them (i.e. by offering prints). Actually, why not partner with them: give them the ability to sell their prints more easily, not just to the Bride & Groom, but to the guests!

Actually, building a wedding business around the problem-domain of Wedding Photographers seems like an excellent strategy. If you increase their profits then they'll evangelise your site.

* Wedding plans / inspiration. Nice because you can sell stuff there (via partners).

* Directory for Wedding locations: it was hard finding good pictures and prices of wedding locations.

* Directory for Reception locations: same problem as Wedding Locations. This is also a more general problem, the discoverability of these places is terrible.

* Diversify into cards. This'll be a massive win for men: never forget your wedding anniversary again. Heck, implement this as a simple reminder service. Make a fun "Groom" styled-skin to solve his problem (and double your market!). BTW this also works for anniversaries / birthdays etc. Men forget this stuff really quickly.

The post wouldn't be complete without some feedback:

I personally don't like the copy on your site. You sound like a Bridal magazine. Your focus is on "curated links we found on google", but it should be on how you actually solve the problem of organising a Wedding. I don't care about the pretty things you've found on Google*

Question: why on earth are you charging a monthly fee for a one-off occasion? Why not let people try your site out for a month, with a larger flat fee at the end? Then offer to host the wedding picture gallery for N months, with the option to buy N months extra hosting.

What is your conversion rate like?

I like what you're doing, there's certainly enough to support a small but healthy business.. it would be cool to see you succeeding, especially if it comes from advice from HN :)

* NOTE: I'm not your target market.

<comment><USER3> Hi, thanks so much for the feedback!!

This is great timing since I'm actually working on revamping ALL the marketing copy. I agree completely with your points — I got wrapped up in "this is what a wedding startup would say!" rather than what is actually awesome about us.

Why we're charging monthly for a one off occasion: We actually have a monthly charge and a one-off charge, and our conversions are roughly split between the two. People who are just a few months out from their wedding tend to pick the monthly option, and people who are far out tend to pick the charge-once option. That said, I'm not justifying this — we're still (and probably always will be) in the process of testing out new pricing!

Good points about what you pay for. We actually work with a little over 1,500 wedding vendors (and almost 500 wedding photographers), and we're almost done with our vendor integration into the planning app.

Thanks so much for poking at WeddingLovely and spending time writing your feedback!

<comment><USER5> By offering the option to do either by month or a 1 time fee, your customers are doing the following: 1) Calculating number of months to wedding day (since they likely know the date) 2) Deciding which is cheaper 3) Purchasing the cheaper option.

*You are probably also losing conversions to people who decide to wait to save money, then just forget to purchase.

I'm not suggesting you do this, but just think about what would happen if you priced it in the opposite way. 6 months before the wedding, $80, 5 months before the wedding $90, 4 months before the wedding $100 etc.

My guess is that you may end up making a bigger $/user, and may even increase your conversion rate.

Looks like a good site and like you are offering real value. Best of luck!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great Post Tracy. Great going for your startup and ATB. Thanks for being open in talking about your current troubles and not giving a rosy picture about ur startup.

</comment><comment><USER8> Great post! And how refreshing: founders that don't just squander investors' money, but actually live paltry lives while trying to grow.

<comment><USER3> Technically I've done both, since WeddingLovely was in the 500 Startups incubator a year ago. ;) Just haven't raised any more money since, which is another long and complex story that I should probably write about too!

<comment><USER8> Yes! You should! I, for one, would love to hear why.

<comment><USER3> Cliff notes: I don't feel comfortable raising money until the timing is absolutely right, and the timing was not right at 500's demo day since this online planning product hadn't launched yet, there was another weddings company in my batch doing something similar, and another two prominent wedding startups were fundraising at the same time too. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice post Tracy! :)

<comment><USER3> Thanks Azat! Had no idea this would get picked up by HN at all, it's quite the compliment.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Free OKRs and 1-on-1 solution - <AUTHOR> https://www.happierco.com/free/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN! We released this week a free version of our solution for small teams.

OKRs and 1-on-1s have become a very important part of a manager toolbox, but it can be difficult to justify the cost of paying for another productivity solution.

We think every manager should be able to communicate well with their team members and keep them engaged. And every employee deserves a great manager!

That's why we switched to a freemium model with full access to our OKRs and 1-on-1 features. We have additional features (analytics, reviews, surveys, etc.) under the paid plan.

If you're a manager and you wish it was easier to manage your OKRs and 1-on-1s, please try Happierco free plan and let us know your feedback. We hope you like it! :)</comment>


OpenH264 is a codec library which supports H.264 encoding and decoding - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/danielrh/losslessh264

<comment><USER2> The URL point to losslessh264 a fork of OpenH264

> "we built a recompression layer that can get additional win ontop of CAVLC > and other algorithms."</comment>


Ask HN: Is there radiation fallout risk in California? - <AUTHOR>

What would be the risk of unhealthy radiation fallout in California? Could the radiation clouds move over the Pacific?<p>Also these geiger counters, is it something civilians could buy and use? <comment><USER2> [http://www.theaustralian.com.au/radiation-fears-sweep-the- re...](http://www.theaustralian.com.au/radiation-fears-sweep-the-region/story- fn84naht-1226022828500)

Has an article on it. Basically you shouldn't worry, people were testing a whole bunch of atomic weapons during the cold war and everyone turned out alright.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not sure an atomic bomb is a good comparison, I have heard nuclear reactors possess many multiples of radioactive material than a bomb.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: $275k/year income, what should I do? - <AUTHOR> Throw away for privacy.
I make about $275K a year (that's cash, not stock). I own a home but have a mortgage. I have no other debt. I invest all of my extra income in low expense index funds.
What else can I do to grow passive income or increase my income? <comment><USER2> A few ideas depending on your definition of passive and your tolerance of risk.

1) If/when stock prices enter recession mode, buy up a strong blue chip (e.g ATAT or Verizon) and collect the 4% dividends as income.

2) High yield checking accounts. Mine pays 2% and that is genuinely riskless and passive.

3) Become a consultant and farm out any menial work you can't do yourself to a loyal and trusting associate (like me!)

4) Consider an annuity. Even though I personally feel like they're a horrific scam designed to make insurance brokers a lot of money, guaranteed income is a really powerful thing, especially if you are planning to live deep into your 90s and dont have any retirement accounts or pensions.

</comment><comment><USER3> Find some non-commercial small projects that you think are interesting and donate funds to them. It is likely that you will get a lot more social capital by being a patron of cool things than you will by making other people richer by letting them play with your excess money. Obviously you can probably afford to do both.</comment>


Show HN: Mosaic - use multiple iOS devices as one large display - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oomE3-XnxGM

<comment><USER2> Hi guys, one of three Mosaic devs here. If anyone has questions please ask; also check out the source on Github (<https://github.com/mosaicdisplay>) and our LaunchRock page (<http://mosaic.launchrock.com>). Feedback very much appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER3> Love this hack, brilliant to watch in person: [https://www.dropbox.com/s/t07rh0xdkkmxowc/2013-01-20%2011.42...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/t07rh0xdkkmxowc/2013-01-20%2011.42.45.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER4> Using some of this code, I think screen-stitching can finally be easily used by devs in mainstream apps.

We actually wrote unit tests during a hackathon. :)

</comment><comment><USER5> This was the best app created at #PenApps

</comment><comment><USER6> This was by far the coolest app I saw from the first round! Nice job.

</comment><comment><USER7> One of the best hacks I've seen at a hackathon... ever.

</comment><comment><USER8> this hack is fucking amazing....still completely lost as to how they pulled this off!?</comment>


The Crow Paradox - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106826971&ft=1&f=1001 <comment><USER2> Paradox seems a strong word for something that could have any number of legitimate reasons behind it.

There is no compelling, logical reason to expect that becasue crows can differentiate between humans, we should be able to differentiate between them.

You would expect crows to need to be able to identify predators pretty precisely, whereas humans have little reason to differentiate between different members of the crow species becasue our survival would never depend on it.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. He even puts forth that very explanation.

Hardly "a statement which contradicts itself."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> More like "the crow fascination". I thought this was going to be related to the parable of the crow at least (not really a paradox either) in which the crow wants to get water from the bottom of a barrel which her beak can not quite reach. Being an engineer she realizes that she can raise the level of the water by dropping stones in. By the time she has dropped enough stones in the water has actually just moved to fill the voids between them. She continues to drop stones on the now overflowing barrel of stones unwilling to admit she should have just broken the container open in the first place. She dies of thirst shortly there after. Hows that for a kids book?

</comment><comment><USER5> I was once chased by a crow for a good hundred yards, if not more. It cawed at me aggressively, and as I would get farther away, it fly to a new position so it could keep cawing at me. Several times it buzzed me from behind a few feet from my head. Finally I went around a corner where I was completely obscured from the crow and the place where it originally started harassing me (there was a 12 or 14 story building in the way). I thought I had finally escaped. Then the crow buzzed me one last time, flying past me from behind so close that it hit me on the shoulder.

<comment><USER6> In Australia, Magpies are known to peck people in the head and even made some people I know bleed when they were kids.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magpie></comment></comment>


Stanza: a new optionally-typed general-purpose programming language - <AUTHOR> http://lbstanza.org/ <comment><USER2> We moved most of the comments from this thread to the creator's Show HN, which was posted a few days ago and didn't get much attention: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11717561](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11717561).

We'll roll back the clock on that post so it gets to the same place on the front page that this one was.

</comment><comment><USER3> Post from the original author of the language-

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11717561](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11717561)

</comment><comment><USER4> I like what I'm seeing so far. The mix of ease of prototyping (e.g. not fighting the type system if you don't want to) and powerful constructs from functional programming land (map and friends, currying) and powerful function overloading is nice. And the syntax is concise yet readable.

One comment on the website: The only font-family specified for code is Menlo so I see an ugly variable width font on my PC :-(.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can we port numpy/sklearn to this?

</comment><comment><USER5> How many more new languages do we need? This is getting ridiculous. What does this thing do that Python doesn't do?

<comment><USER6> How many pointless comments do we need? This is getting ridiculous. What does your comment add to the conversation that a million other whiners don't do?

<comment><USER5> It points out that we don't need more and more computer languages that no one uses. If you can come up with a language that really makes new contributions or really works better than the existing ones, great, but instead it seems we just have a bunch of me-too languages doing almost the same thing. Languages aren't useful unless there's a critical mass of people developing them, making libraries for them, making good compilers for them, and providing mindshare for them, so that there's enough people competent in them to use them. This is why languages like C and C++ are still used even though there are many valid criticisms of them and supposedly superior alternatives have been developed: the alternatives just haven't been good enough, in many/most cases, to justify switching. C++ may have its warts, for instance, but with all the libraries that exist for it and all the existing code and all the workers familiar with it, it usually makes sense to stick with it rather than switch to something like D or Rust or Swift or Go unless you have a really good reason (like you're developing on iOS where Swift is really well-supported).

These days, Python is the de-facto standard for general-purpose type-optional programming, and has a huge amount of libraries and mindshare, and is growing. So why do we need a clone?

<comment><USER7> The alternatives to C/C++ are so popular that most programming is not done in C/C++ anymore, so your premise seems off. The alternatives have done stunningly well.

Rarely, RARELY is someone going to make a language that's radically better than what's currently available. But every new language is a chance to step in the right direction, or confirm that nope, no one wants something like this. We need MORE languages. Hundreds, a thousand more. Mostly they won't be used, but sometimes things will move forward.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you support yourself while validating a technology? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I've done a bit of this myself. You really have 4 primary options.

1\. Save enough money so that you can live off your investments in a minimal way while working on your project. How od you do this? Calculate your yearly spend and multiple it by 25. Need 100k per year to survive? That means you need 2.5 million invested in index funds in order to "retire" and be able to withdraw 100k/yr from your portfolio to use.

2\. Save enough money to cover your expenses for a set amount of time. Think you need a year to prove that your tech works? Save up enough money to cover your living expenses for a year.

3\. Raise funding. If you can convince a VC that your idea has a probably chance of success, there are VCs willing to take risks on it. Getting VC funding will allow you to pay yourself a very small amount of money to hold you over while you build and experiment with your tech.

4\. Survive with the help from a family member/spouse. Move in with your parents for free rent/food, or live off your spouse's income for a while as you experiment.

These are the primary options most of us have.

<comment><USER3> Depending on what is actually meant by "validating a technology", you could also take a more reasonable approach: do it part time and keep a regular job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> By support yourself do you mean economically? For endeavors like this

1\. Save beforehand: Save six months of living expenses. Estimate cost of technology validation, and multiply that by three

2\. There's no same in working part-time as a barrista or waiter/waitress.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I meant economically, I'm working on a pretty cool ML architecture that makes use of Modular Neural Nets with adaptive Topology, but I don't see a clear commercial application for them yet, so i was wondering how I should go about surviving while working on it. Your advice is excellent, thank you</comment></comment>


Browser extension that strips Google Analytics tokens from URL query strings - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jparise/chrome-utm-stripper <comment><USER2> Why do you need this? Is it because you are paranoid of being tracked?

UTMs offer a transparent, honest way of tracking where a user is coming from. This is super important for any company that runs multiple channel marketing.

Making impossible for company to track their marketing effort doesn't protect your privacy. It just makes it tougher for companies to manage their marketing spending.

Marketing is not evil. It's how the world works. You need to market something to be able to sell it.

I feel there is a paranoia about being tracked and privacy, where anything that is somehow tracking, is evil and must be stopped.

UTMs parameters are absolutely harmless and stripping them away offer no privacy benefit whatsoever.

<comment><USER3> This issue will get worse... As people choose to remove transparent forms of tracking... utm parameters, cookies, etc... we find "better" ways that aren't as obvious. Really it's a choice... we can have clear tracking or we can have hidden tracking... blanket blocking is going to lead to a much harder to block and aware form of tracking. As the saying goes... "be careful what you wish for"

<comment><USER4> Alternatively we could just regulate matters until the only way for them to make money is to stand in front of a frier and make french fries.

Acting like this is a losing battle makes such a foregone conclusion. Marketing is like 0.0001% of the population its ok for the rest of us to disagree and regulate them to the degree required to ensure our continued wellbeing even if this means regulating them virtually out of existence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just going to pile on here and say that GA is pretty benign. I'm very anti- tracking, but GA at least provides a minimally invasive way to verify whether or not you are providing value to a specific audience.

It's impossible to always create something perfect for the right audience. It's a lot of guess work. Without having at least a little data, it's like shooting in the dark.

<comment><AUTHOR> So, just to repeat my stance: Google already knows everything about me. I have accepted that, sort of.

However, they have crossed a line: they have made URLs ugly by default.

<comment><USER6> Google doesn't know everything about me. I don't use gmail, I don't use google search, and I have an iPhone.

GA gives them basically all of my browsing habits. It's crazy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There is also this extension that strips tracking parameters from all kinds of trackers and not just from the Google one:

[https://github.com/newhouse/url-tracking- stripper](https://github.com/newhouse/url-tracking-stripper)

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/url-tracking- strip...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/url-tracking- stripper/flnagcobkfofedknnnmofijmmkbgfamf)

<comment><USER8> Damn. Not for Firefox though. Can't find it at least.

Looks great otherwise!

<comment><USER9> Someone linked this elsewhere: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/neat-url/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/neat-url/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I used to use something called UTM Mangler that would replace the referral links with shock sites. I felt that was much better than simply removing them.

Here's the github, it looks like the chrome extension linked in the README is no longer there: [https://github.com/huntwelch/UTM- Mangler](https://github.com/huntwelch/UTM-Mangler)

<comment><USER11> I don't see how deliberately providing false data to organization is amusing here. If you don't want your web sessions tracked that's fine, but there are legitimate reasons for websites to want to understand user behavior. Some of it is for digital marketing purposes but also for usability, for example, how are folks getting to our documentation, is this prominent enough?

Seems a popular opinion that user tracking = bad but it's more nuanced than that.

<comment><USER12> Would it change your mind if the OP were doing it as a form of guerrilla advertising for those sites?

<comment><USER11> No. It's still deliberately injecting misleading data.

<comment><USER13> So what? Is "portugee" your real name? I have no obligation or contract that I will "not modify URL parameters".

<comment><USER13> Cool that no one responded and I just got downvoted. Let me just say I openly laugh at anyone that thinks I have some implicit responsiblity or obligation to not modify the URL of a website I'm visiting. Actual laughter that someone would get indignant about that.

edit: And somehow this is auto-downvoted within 30 seconds? This website is so fantastic!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For those on Firefox, NeatURL[1] does this too.

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/neat- url/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/neat-url/)

<comment><USER15> The linked repo does Firefox as well. Not sure why the HN title[1] is Chrome specific because that's not the title on GitHub. But it's still a handy submission regardless.

[1] At time of writing, "chrome-utm-stripper: Chrome extension to strip Google Analytics data from URLs"

<comment><USER16> It looks like Neat URL might block more than UTM tags:

[https://github.com/Smile4ever/firefoxaddons/tree/master/Neat...](https://github.com/Smile4ever/firefoxaddons/tree/master/Neat%20URL- webext)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This extension is only mildly useful. The UTM parameters are generally pretty coarse-grained. They don't add information that comes close to individually identifying users. Especially compared to the rest of what Google Analytics tracks by default, the additional data from UTM parameters is very small.

Your privacy is much more impacted by the GCLID and DCLID query parameters, which are added by AdWords and DoubleClick campaigns respectively. This are auto-generated by their respective tools and are much more granular.

<comment><USER18> IIRC GCLID and DCLID parameters can't be queried except by Google Analytics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I created another extension with the same functionality [1] but also added functions to fix other type of links, Amazon product pages [2] for example. Unfortunately, I moved to Safari and have had no time to port the code. If anyone is interested, feel free to fork and improve it [3] — _(the main purpose of the extension is to mark links as read though)_.

[1] [https://github.com/cixtor/markasread/blob/master/markasread....](https://github.com/cixtor/markasread/blob/master/markasread.js#L23-L41)

[2] [https://github.com/cixtor/markasread/blob/master/markasread....](https://github.com/cixtor/markasread/blob/master/markasread.js#L43-L62)

[3] [https://github.com/cixtor/markasread](https://github.com/cixtor/markasread)

</comment><comment><USER20> Is it safe to use any of these Chrome extensions? I get quite paranoid about them these days.

<comment><USER21> In the end comes down to whether you trust the developer, not the current code, as an "evil" update could come down the line. Heck the developer could even sell the extension and let someone else be evil...

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Unfortunately, or not, GA makes it very easy to work around this. By default, it will do its UTM parsing serverside these days based on the page URL the webmaster sends to it.

So all I have to do as a webmaster is start using `?aaa_source=foo&aaa_medium=bob`

Then I do `ga('send', 'pageview', location.pathname.replace(/aaa/g, 'utm')`

A more robust implementation would have to modify the web request to GA itself, assuming the goal is to destroy that data.

EDIT: Upon looking at the actual implementation (`chrome.webRequest.onBeforeRequest`), the points above should be addressable: the key is to strip out potentially URL-encoded utm values in the requets sent to GA [1], which may be either in the query string or the (beacon) POST payload shipped to google-analytics.com).

i.e. `google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&dp={url-encoded-path-with-utm-values}` should be purged as well.

[1]: [https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...](https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1/parameters#content)

</comment><comment><USER23> This is the bookmarklet I've been using for the same purpose:

        javascript:window.location=window.location.href.replace(/\?([^#]*)/,function(_,s){s=s.split('&').filter(function(v){return(!/^utm_/.test(v))}).join('&');return(s?'?'+s:'')});

</comment><comment><USER24> A Mozilla extension that covers utm_ and more: [https://github.com/idlewan/link_cleaner](https://github.com/idlewan/link_cleaner)

</comment><comment><USER25> Out of curiosity, do utm tags still offer much value beyond standard Google Analytics? I remember them being popular back in the pre-GA (Urchin) days. Since GA already tracks referrals coming from email, social media, web, mobile, etc.; perhaps the major benefit is tracking a specific campaign that is already a few steps removed from the initial referral.

<comment><USER26> There are a lot of use cases where they're still quite valuable.

\- Social sites tend to redirect outbound links to sanitize referral information. So you can get a bunch of traffic from Facebook, and have no idea if it's people viewing your page, going through their news feed, postings in Groups, etc. All of your Facebook traffic will have a referral of (l|lm|m|business|mobile|web).facebook.com/(l.php)? [1]

\- Unless someone is using a web client, any clicks from email will show up as direct traffic, just as if someone typed the url in their browser directly. So you can't evaluate email performance in GA without dedicated utm parameters.

\- The Source field in GA defaults to the referrer, but is overridden by any explicitly provided utm_source data. If you capture the true referral information separately (i.e. put the value of document.referrer into a custom dimension), you can compare the two and glean all kinds of nifty info like traffic from Site B and Site C resulted from a link on Site A.[2]

\- The concerted effort to upgrade sites from http -> https has led to increase in traffic marked as direct that's not direct, because of referral header stripping. Note that it's not inherently an issue with https itself, but with the fact that not everyone is using https yet, combined with the cumulative number of pre-existing http links.[3]

There are plenty more, but those are some of the bigger things I can think of off the top of my head where standard GA falls short and having utm-tagged links are beneficial.

[1] Yes, I'm aware that this regex is lacking escape characters. But having them reduced readability.

[2] If someone takes a utm tagged link from Facebook and shares it on Twitter, by default it'll look like it came from Facebook in GA. Unless you're capturing the document.referrer value manually in a custom dimension, you wouldn't be able to suss out that this was happening and would never know that they're actually coming from Twitter _based on a link you shared on Facebook_. Or even that they're coming from Twitter at all.

[3] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Referrer-Policy)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Seems like the extension is no longer supported (1 year) also it seems it doesn't work for https.

So, not sure what actually works.

</comment><comment><USER28> What are the chances google blacklists the extension? Seems like something outside the browser would be more reliable.

</comment><comment><USER29> Google has a history of policing their extensions to favor themselves, example being YouTube downloading extensions.

<comment><USER30> If you build it from source they'll have a hard time stopping you.

<comment><USER29> They can kill usability, like for this the benefit is being is to install and use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> pinboard does this by default when you save a link and its awesome.

</comment><comment><USER32> Does this do something that Ghostery does not?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I am not the author. I was just so tired of having to manually strip crap like "?utm_term=.b1e20fe33a88" from the end of URLs before sharing them. This extension solves that problem nicely.

I wonder why Google doesn't build something into Chrome that just hides this crap from the visible URL? I guess they could get some PR pushback from paranoids if they did that though. Better to just hide behind some fictitious UTM Inc.

<comment><USER33> I think the share UI in Chrome mobile already strips that data, provided the site you're on defines a canonical URL in a link tag.

<comment><USER34> I want my browser to strip UTM from links when I follow them, not just when I share them.

<comment><USER35> Why? Just install a blocker extension to stop all of these analytics and tracking solutions, rather than fairly benign UTM tags.

<comment><USER36> The site you visit can still use that information with an ad blocker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This will ruin a lot of legitimate uses that's not paranoia-induced security protection... I would recommend not using that and simply using uBlock Origin, so people can still read where their users are coming from on their campaigns.

<comment><USER38> What if I, the user, don't want the website I'm visiting to know where I'm coming from? Why does a website deserve to know what _other_ website I was on before??

<comment><USER37> See my other answers

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Installing this extension basically means trusting a random dude (the author) with _all_ the data passing through the browser just to screw over some random people trying to get coarse-grained stats on where people come to their websites from. Sounds like a rather idiotic idea, but I'm sure even this will have its users.

<comment><USER40> In general I would agree, but the source code is so short here that you would be able to glance through it first to confirm nothing sketchy is going on there: [https://github.com/jparise/chrome-utm- stripper/blob/master/b...](https://github.com/jparise/chrome-utm- stripper/blob/master/background.js)

<comment><USER41> Are you going to notice and reinspect every invisible OTA update?

It's a perfectly valid concern when you install a plugin. We just don't care because most people are trustworthy.

But for example there's a market for selling your browser addon to someone that wants to do this.

<comment><USER42> You're basically arguing that open source isn't really open because you don't have the time to inspect every commit...

If you build this from source, you'll have proof of any malice by the developer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Please don't remove these tags. Our system needs them to tie up your orders to where you came from and your personal information. Which we can use to analyse and ensure we spend more money on targeting people like you.</comment>


No ifs…alternatives to statement branching in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://javascriptweblog.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/no-more-ifs-alternatives-to-statement-branching-in-javascript/

<comment><USER2> I thought this was going to be about booleans from nothing at all:

        true = function(x,y){ return x; }
        false = function(x,y){ return y; }
        ifelse = function(x,a,b){ x(a,b)(); }
        not = function(x){ return x(false,true); }
        and = function(x,y){ return x(y,false); }
        or = function(x,y){ return x(true,y); }

        bool = and(not(true),or(true,false))
        ifelse(bool,
          function(){ alert("true!") },
          function(){ alert("false!") }
        )

Amazing, isn't it?

It gets better.

Pairs:

        pair = function(x,y){ return function(f){ return f(x,y); } }
        fst = function(p){ return p(function(x,y){ return x; }); }
        snd = function(p){ return p(function(x,y){ return y; }); }

Unions:

        left = function(x){ return function(f,g){ return f(x); } }
        right = function(x){ return function(f,g){ return g(x); } }

Pairs combined with unions make lists:

        cons = function(x,y){ return left(pair(x,y)); }
        head = function(l){ return l(function(p){ return fst(p); }, function(n){ alert("Can't take head of nil"); }) }
        tail = function(l){ return l(function(p){ return snd(p); }, function(n){ alert("Can't take tail of nil"); }) }
        nil = right(false)
        isnil = function(l){ return l(function(p){ return false; }, function(n){ return true; }) }

        map = function(f,l){
          return ifelse(isnil(l),
             function(){ return nil; },
             function(){ return cons(f(head(l)),map(f,tail(l))); })
        }

        filter = function(f,l){
           return ifelse(isnil(l),
              function(){ return nil; },
              function(){
                return ifelse(f(head(l)),
                         function(){ return cons(head(l),filter(f,tail(l))); },
                         function(){ return filter(f,tail(l)); })
              });
        }

Isn't it neat how you can build everything, including conditionals, booleans, pairs and lists from functions?

Note that this code was not tested in any way, so it likely contains bugs.

<comment><USER3> You really can build everything out of anonymous functions, including all of arithmetic:

        zero = function(x,y){ return y; }
        succ = function (f) { return function (x) {return f(n(f(x)));};}
        one = succ(zero);
        two = succ(one);

Look up lambda calculus if anyone is interested.

<comment><USER2> The only problem then is, how do you do pred the inverse of succ? ;)

<comment><USER4> The same way you build the integers. Built it out of pairs.

a --> (a,0)

-a --> (0,a)

succ((a,0)) = (a+1,0)

pred((a,0)) = (a,0+1)

<comment><USER4> via something like: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2030649>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's worth noting that these techniques also work in other languages - I've been doing this more and more often in the Python code I write.

If you aren't used to it, it looks a bit unusual (of course) but it makes for _much_ cleaner, and therefore more maintainable, code.

</comment><comment><USER6> An alternative to 'if' that I like but havent seriously used before is <expression>.true? {block}. an example in ruby:

(3==3).true?{'Yes'} => "Yes"

(4==4).true?{'Yes'} => nil

using this implementation:

class Object def true? yield end end

class FalseClass def true? end end

class NilClass def true? end end

<comment><USER7> I'm only familiar with Ruby syntax, and not 100% fluent in it, but it seems to me like this kind of shortcut could make your code much less readable for not a whole lot of gain. I'm curious what the major benefit is over doing it 'the old fashioned way'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This seems to boil down to a preference for expressions over statements. It's easier to reason about the meaning of a value than a listing of commands, and more insightful to recombine subexpressions to make values than to recombine statements to get side-effects and void.

</comment><comment><USER9> A previous round of comments:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1581830></comment>


Why investors all hate the "If we only capture 1% of the market " line - <AUTHOR> https://capitalandgrowth.org/questions/2185/why-do-professional-investors-all-hate-the-if-we-o.html <comment><USER2> Part of the problem is that saying 1% sounds very arbitrary and therefore implies you have not done your research. Makes me think you just make that up and have no actual realistic plan on how to achieve it. Getting 1% of most mass markets is incredibly hard.

</comment><comment><USER3> The real issue is that capturing 1% is the "what" but it doesn't explain the "how". You build a better "X" but 1% won't magically flow to you, otherwise there would be 100 competitors in every market with 1% each. But if you build a better "X" and you have a proven (or at least well thought out) plan to take 1% away from the dominant player in the field, then investors will like what you have to say.</comment>


Any funny *nix one-liners - <AUTHOR> https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/1716/any-funny-nix-one-liners <comment><AUTHOR> It made me laugh, I searched this board and I couldn't find any topics about it. So, pardon me if I missed it.</comment>


In Praise of Dullness - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/opinion/19brooks.html?_r=1 <comment><USER2> I don't understand where the study he sites leads to the conclusion that good corporate leaders should be dull. He mentions: "The traits that correlated most powerfully with success were attention to detail, persistence, efficiency, analytic thoroughness and the ability to work long hours."

That doesn't mean someone is dull. They could be funny, engaging and thoughtful and still be detail-oriented and hard working. Brooks is just playing off of stereotypes to reach his conclusion.

<comment><USER3> True. Wouldn't you have to say that Steve Jobs has all those traits? Does anyone think he's dull?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another one in the same (dull) vein by Brooks: 'Genius, the Modern View': <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/01/opinion/01brooks.html>

It seems that Mr. Brooks likes to do at least some of his editorializing based on actual research. We need more like him.

</comment><comment><USER5> Good article but I found the last paragraph to be wildly speculative and not particularly well thought out.

</comment><comment><USER6> This essay seems particularly relevant (and contradictory): <http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/09/stratified-by-c.html>

<comment><USER7> I think that two different cultures are being discussed here.

> I expect that my life experience constitutes an extremely biased sample of > the power elite. I don't have to deal with the executives of arbitrary > corporations, or form business relationships with people I never selected. I > just meet them at gatherings and talk to the interesting ones.

I would be more interested in a study of CEOs that looked at the kind of company being run. I expect the subset of CEOs that deal with transhumanism or new technologies to have a more winnowing route to the top than the CEOs of larger or more traditional companies - a Sears can only innovate so much, and even with a looter CEO can manage to stay afloat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > On the contrary, a study by Ulrike Malmendier and Geoffrey Tate found that > C.E.O.'s get less effective as they become more famous and receive more > awards.

I can't help but think of Buffett's investors-as-coin-flippers.

> After ten flips there would be approximately 260,000 people that had > successfully called ten consecutive coin flips. After 20 flips, based purely > on chance, there would be approximately 250 people that had called 20 > consecutive coin flips - a seemingly miraculous feat.

from <http://www.investorhome.com/coinflip.htm>

</comment><comment><USER8> _"...extroversion, agreeableness and openness to new experience did not correlate well with C.E.O. success. Instead, what mattered was emotional stability and, most of all, conscientiousness — which means being dependable, making plans and following through on them."_

</comment><comment><USER9> Brooks' article greatly simplifies CEO personality traits as compared to different types of roles they must fill (growing a small company, turning around a failing business, etc.) just as the original article Brooks cited (<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=972446>) is reporting on data collected mostly by private equity companies to take charge of companies they own. The traits of that sort of CEO may be quite different from a startup CEO, a CEO who is hired to pump and dump, etc.

</comment><comment><USER10> A surprising conclusion, for the NYT.

<comment><USER11> Brooks is one of their designated conservative columnists. Don't expect the op-ed page to sing with one voice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Obama is the US's CEO. Maybe he should be more dull.</comment>


Fake books sold on Amazon could be used for money laundering - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/27/fake-books-sold-amazon-money-laundering <comment><USER2> This story touches a nerve for me because I recently tried to make a small market service but couldn't get it off the ground specifically because of money laundering concerns from my payments processor (Stripe). They shut me down even though I was a small player and would have been very low risk for large money laundering transactions (which I could have detected anyways). I guess they had a point - it would have been very hard for me to detect and eliminate money laundering from my service, if it was done very cleverly. However, in doing research for my anti-money-laundering strategy (that they had requested) I came to the conclusion that not only could I not solve that problem - no one could! After all, all one has to do to launder money through Venmo is label all the transactions as alcohol purchases. All one has to do to launder money through Stripe is tell them you're selling pizza (hypocrites)! And now apparently all one has to do to launder money through Amazon is sell a crappy book for $25,000. For that reason I'm sort of annoyed to have been shut down. Oh well, I've got other plans now...

Edit: To be fair to Stripe, they did tell me that it was not them, but their underwriters that were responsible for the decision.

<comment><USER3> Money laundering regulations are one of those things that started out with good intentions (prevent people who obtain money via theft or fraud from being able to spend it in the legitimate economy) but has now morphed into a kafkaesque burden that isn't obviously a net positive for society.

This is one of the reasons I'm a big fan of cryptocurrency. Your service would not have been shut down by the payment processor if you were able to handle the money yourself without relying on a third party.

The world probably hasn't reached the point where going cryptocurrency-only would be viable for your service, but onerous anti-money laundering regulation is just pushing more people towards cryptocurrency, at the margin.

<comment><USER4> > _This is one of the reasons I 'm a big fan of cryptocurrency. Your service > would not have been shut down by the payment processor if you were able to > handle the money yourself without relying on a third party._

If your cryptocurrency-based store wouldn't comply by the same regulations that third party was required to comply with, though, then you, as a merchant, would be breaking the law. Which takes you back to square one, cryptocurrency or not.

It's just that with cryptocurrency you get to decide to break the law and continue accepting payments, instead of being based to Stripe.

<comment><USER5> Why on earth would a cryptocurrency-based store have to comply with the same regulations as a card payment processor?

One is just accepting payments, the other is processing them for vast amounts of third parties.

<comment><USER4> > _Why on earth would a cryptocurrency-based store have to comply with the > same regulations as a card payment processor?_

Because money laundering can happen at any level, and specific regulations apply, you don't need to be a card payment processor processing "payments for vast amounts of third parties".

As long as you accept payments, even for a lemonade stand in the corner, you need to comply with these.

In fact you probably misunderstood what Stripe demanded on the parent's situation: they didn't demanded the parent's store comply with the same regulations Stripe does as a card payment processor. They demanded they comply with the regulations a store should comply with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Bad title, this is Office Space levels of misunderstanding. The claim of money laundering is by some author that has no idea what he's talking about. All it really is: scammers use Amazon to cash out stolen credit cards. That's not money laundering, it's just fraud.

The money isn't even clean if they're using the wrong SSN.

<comment><USER7> You're absolutely right, the described scam is not money laundering.

I think you could, however, use a very similar method to actually launder money. The SSN/account would need to be accurate; the taxes would need to be paid; and the contents/price would need to be a plausible if low-quality example of the typical self-published book. You'd pay people dirty cash to buy copies of the book, and/or use single-use debit cards bought with dirty cash.

<comment><USER8> If I we're to use my ill-gotten gains to buy cryptocurrencies, I could, at a small loss, buy Amazing gift cards from independent sites which accept crypto. At that point, aim straight up money launderin

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The problem is that there is good money and bad money that looks identical. The only way to tell the difference is to get arrested, have your business shut down, or lose access to all financial services.

And why is there 'bad' money? I think we have to take a detailed examination of what constitutes 'bad money'. I think they are mostly all underserved markets that are being served by the worst of society.

I think most things can be fixed with more sensible approaches. Decriminalizing drugs is a good place to start. Especially considering our own CIA and pharma industry created a lot of addicts that then get fed into the prisons, bureaucrats profiting at every step. They helped create the drug kingpin monsters.

This seems like just another problem created by government where the citizens have to pay the price. No shortage of those these days.

</comment><comment><USER10> Any two sided marketplace has the potential to be used for money laundering. This really ought to be something everybody that runs a two sided marketplace is aware of.

</comment><comment><USER11> Amazon has huge fraud and counterfeit issues that you dont have with traditional large brick and mortar sellers. This is going to be a major crack in Amazon's armor in the same way that privacy was a crack for Facebook. Wait until Amazon sells some kind of counterfeit and tainted baby product that injurers or kills. It will happen and it will be on Bezos because Amazon is clearly turning a blind eye in the name of profits.

</comment><comment><USER12> Is it worth it for a launderer to give up 30% to Amazon, and then of course pay taxes on the income? Also I assume you can't launder cash this way.

<comment><USER13> You can buy gift cards with the cash. Gift cards as a concept are so funny to me. As a recipient, I would always want cash over a gift card. As a gift giver, I'd think "if I was receiving this gift, I wouldn't want a gift card, so why would I give it to someone else".

But they exist, and they're huge. Obviously merchants love them for the float and captive customer spending more than the gift card balance. Businesses might love them to give out to employees since it's not taxed income, and similarly, money launderers would like them.

I guess I could see some niche use, like wanting to give a child funds for a movie ticket, but to avoid them using it for other purposes you restrict it by giving a movie gift card. But I don't see that supporting a large market.

<comment><USER14> In many cultural circles it's very rude to gift money (or to even left the gifted know how much something cost).

Giftcards are seen as a way around that (although they're not really better). They also show that you thought about the gifted (what would this person like), but respect that they might not like the specific gift you'd pick.

e.g. if you know someone is a LEGO collector, you gift them a LEGO gift card, instead of buying a specific collectors model that they might already have.

<comment><USER15> It's a weird cultural quirk of the west that you shouldn't gift cash. In China people are perfectly happy to give money in red envelopes.

<comment><USER16> Wealthy cultures tend to spend extra to hide the visible evidence of the financial reality of their existence. It's silly but common.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Amazon doesn't appear to be doing much about its problem with fakes.

But this, if it does include money laundering, may attract regulators with teeth.

Also, Amazon wouldn't be able to get away with this nonsense if they were compliant with EU data protection laws:

> Reames says Amazon has told him that it can send him a letter "acknowledging > than I'm disputing ever having received the funds, because they said they > couldn't prove I didn't receive the funds" and won't share the details of > the payee.

<comment><USER17> > Amazon doesn't appear to be doing much about its problem with fakes.

Sometimes it seems like they are actively helping them. I wrote a review pointing out that an author[1] is a fake person[2] and they didn't respond to me and deleted the review. Meanwhile, the obviously fake reviews on "her" work still stay up.

It used to be that I could go on Amazon and judge by reviews and know I'd get something good, but these days searching Amazon means wading through a lot of crap and fakes and I don't get the impression that the company sees it as a problem.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Tina-B.Baker/e/B0716Q2Y4Z/ref=sr_tc_2...](https://www.amazon.com/Tina-B.Baker/e/B0716Q2Y4Z/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1524915767&sr=8-2-ent)

[2] [https://www.canstockphoto.co.uk/portrait-of-senior-woman- in-...](https://www.canstockphoto.co.uk/portrait-of-senior-woman-in- kitchen-9956766.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This isn't new..

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16428671](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16428671)

</comment><comment><USER19> This is more or less a rewrite of Krebs' post.

</comment><comment><USER20> I love how there are hundreds of (genuine!) reviews on those "how to call Amazon support" books. Very much a "googling facebook login" moment.

</comment><comment><USER21> Not entirely sure why the Guardian uses a hypothetical here. This is how amazon is used for money laundring. Fake products, and real products sold at 10,000% prices

<comment><USER6> Their source is an author that doesn't know what money laundering is. What he described is just a way to cash out a stolen card (fraud).

Can you tell me how you can laundering, say $100K in cash via Amazon? If you already have it on a credit card, you've already laundered it.

<comment><USER21> While in the US and Canada, "credit card" is the main method of payment, large parts of the world in which Amazon operates offer additional payment methods such as bank transfers, with credit cards offered as secondary option but not owned, let alone used, by large portions of the demographic.

If you already have a credit card, you're indeed almost certainly already good to go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What I've seen happening is people buying ebooks with stolen credit card numbers. Presumably, the criminal had published ebooks just for this purpose.

<comment><USER23> Possibly. For small value transactions there's also a lot of people doing tests to see if a card is still live before using it for real purchases. When I was at Yahoo more than a decade ago, we ran into a lot of attempts to purchase extra storage for e-mail (pre-Gmail days...) with stolen cards for that purpose.

<comment><USER24> I've always wondered the point of this. I had a card stolen (skimmed in a taxi) and the first thing they did was donate $1 to a charity, before buying $12k of aquarium equipment from another country. Why not start with the aquarium purchase? (side note, the bank didn't chargeback the donation because it would have cost the charity, and I wasn't going to challenge that).

<comment><USER25> Criminal A skims your card and sells a bundle of cards to criminal B as unvalidated.

Criminal B runs the cards through a donation engine to validate them, and sells to criminal C for more per card.

Criminal C buys one validated card to make an order for aquarium equipment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> But how is money from a fraudulent Amazon account actually "laundered"? I mean, wouldn't you want to launder such iffy income?

</comment><comment><USER27> That's very likely the case since money laundering always needs goods with very low intrinsic value but sold at inflated prices. From "modern art" works by unknown artists valued as masterpieces to poor football players priced and sold as champions who will never see the playfield, there are numerous cases which should raise alerts.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is actually a pretty old story. It's been happening for some time now apparently.

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm surprised this guy is still waiting for Amazon to play ball instead of lawyering up.

</comment><comment><USER30> Providing fake or incorrect income to the IRS is a crime and comes with a stiff penalty. If Amazon doesn't "fix" the problem quickly, I'd deal solely with the IRS.

</comment><comment><USER31> pretty sure this is what cryptokitties are for too

</comment><comment><USER32> Can't people just use crypto-currency for money laundering now?

<comment><USER33> How is the currency changing anything? It's like using cash.

Crypto-currency exchanges are not exceptions to money laundering regulations. You have to identify yourself and you may need to explain the source of money if you withdraw too much.

<comment><USER34> I'm not sure you need to involve exchanges necessarily. Just buy some CPU/GPU resources and mine your own currency. I've never had a hosting provider do KYC on me. Then you can store the cryptocurrency indefinitely and move it to real currency as needed. That step might require KYC, but you can buy physical items using cryptocurrency, so maybe not.

I have no idea whether or not this is cost effective given current mining difficulties and cloud hosting rates... but I'm sure someone somewhere is doing this.

<comment><USER35> How is "use cash to buy computing resources, mine bitcoins and keep them, convert them to cash as needed" money laundering? In that case, the much easier "keep the cash in a box and take it out as needed" solves the problem in a much simpler way.

<comment><USER6> Well suppose you have a million bucks of cash or Bitcoin from selling drugs. If you just buy miners and get clean Bitcoin, that might solve the issue by providing a clear and legal source of funds. But if they ask how you bought the miners in the first place...

<comment><USER36> Who will ask, and why? Perhaps you earnt the money through speculating on bitcoin using a computer that is now sadly destroyed.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple now censoring dictionaries in the App Store - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/2009/08/ninjawords <comment><USER2> I'm one of the developers for Ninjawords. Thanks everyone for sharing in our frustration. I thought this was a bit ridiculous as we were going back and forth with Apple, but I didn't know it would cause such public outrage. I guess Apple is really striking a nerve recently in exercising their totalitarian App Store powers. I hope they're interested in rectifying the developer experience, because it really is a great device to build software for. It's just that months of rejection over an innocuous educational utility tends to crush any excitement, you know?

<comment><USER3> I bought Ninjawords after reading the description and I just wanted to say that shit is fucking awesome!

Those pussies at Apple don't realize how badly they've screwed this up. Those cocksuckers need pull their motherfucking heads out of their motherfucking asses, unbunch the panties in their snatch, and start treating their users and developers with the respect they deserve.

Fucking shit pisses me off.

<comment><USER4> This does not bode well for Hacker News.ipa...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm waiting for them to reject a paint/drawing app of some sort for "illicit content" after an app store reviewer draws an inappropriate picture.

<comment><USER6> I guess it goes without saying what rating the "black screen that makes your phone like a mirror" app should get.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not to be the bearer of bad news here, guys, but I very much doubt that this is going to do much to slow apple down.

Their core user base for the iPhone seems to be not geeks, but teenage girls. Even if it WAS just geeks, we make up a minuscule percentage of the population. Chances are that if I told one of my sisters, or my mother (who all have iPhones) about this, they would roll their eyes a bit, add an entry or two to the "brother is a conspiracy nut" column, and point me to the latest "omg cute!" app that they downloaded.

The iPhone and the appstore are not going anywhere. If developers like us stop building things for it, people who value cash more than they value principles will take our place.

As much as it sucks, this is the world that we live in.

<comment><USER8> What are you talking about? Just 6 months ago this place was so thick with iPhone devotees you couldn't swing a metaphorical light sabre app without hitting one. I don't think think there are too many 'cutesy type' teenage girls on HN (although it would explain some things).

Unfortunately geekdom was just as taken in as everybody else - perhaps more so and they were disproportionately responsible for it's rapid growth. Geeks are more likely to

\- be early apoptors

\- blog, tweet, talk about gadgets

\- be believed by non geeks when it comes to technical areas and products

Most importantly they are the ones who develop the software that makes the platform actually useful. Without geeks there's no 'App for that'.

This gives them (us) substantial influence. How to you think Firefox gain it's market share. Of course now that the iPhone has momentum they aren't so dependant on the approval of geeks. But over time if they don't attract developers and if they keep removing software then the platform will stagnate. Combine that with geeks putting their weight behind another platform and change could be effected fairly quickly.

<comment><USER7> During the initial phases of adoption, yes, you are absolutely correct. Geeks provide a sort of "buffer" for the rest of the public; we test things and report on what is the best.

The iPhone has reached a point where it isn't going to _matter_ what we say anymore. Look at windows, how long have we all been screaming from the rooftops that it is garbage? How much affect has it had? Some, maybe, sure...but people look at their computers, realize that they can more-or-less get what they need done done, and then they forget about it and go on with their lives.

People are NOT going to give up the iPhone on some silly ideological ground. Yes, this pisses me off, no I won't be buying an iPhone, yes apple is moving further and further away from something that I want, but NONE of this matters to my mom.

<comment><USER9> Look at windows, how long have we all been screaming from the rooftops that it is garbage? \---

For so long, that Windows actually became good, and that made the screaming irrelevant. I think that's what's going to happen to the iPhone too.

Version 1.0 was pathetic compared to other modern smartphones, but they released early and with each iteration made it better. Even though it is worse to develop for, the phone is getting better and better.

<comment><USER10> Windows still doesn't have a coherent way of managing installed applications of various versions, and various degrees of conflict, ie, a package manager and they probably never will... Just saying...

<comment><USER11> It does. .msi installers act as atomic packages like other systems. Windows doesn't have a _centralized_ system, nor does it enforce the use of msis. But they exist and provide a very nice way of managing resources.

The issue with a centralized system, of course, is licensing. Microsoft can't really have such a system because every developer wants to do their own thing.

<comment><USER10> The difference is that .msi doesn't handle dependencies, multiple versions or conflicts in a coherant centralized and useful way.

The current structure of the msi installers leaves them much like their exe counterparts. If this is package management then I'm going back to LFS and using make files.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This reminds me of a twitter update Wil Shipley[1] sent recently:

      "I feel like Apple should rate their new iDisk-access app
       for iPhone "17+," since my iDisk is full of porn. It's
       only fair."

<http://twitter.com/wilshipley/status/2921713963>

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wil_Shipley>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I love the fact that Apple required it be censored because if they typed in an obscene word, they saw an obscene word...

Priceless.

<comment><USER13> Then it sounds like Apple should review some of their own apps, like text messaging.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I first thought Android wouldn't be more than a concept platform at least for a next few years but I must say, I'm stunned.

Apple is working really, really hard to crank up the market pressure and to make Android a very lucrative, unrestricted cross-device choice of platform for all those totally pissed off by iPhone's AppStore.

I wonder what it's like having a day NOT seeing anyone blog a rant about Apple and AppStore.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, it's almost like Apple is trying to advertise FOR the Android market.

I've toyed with the idea of developing iPhone apps. But after these last few weeks, I'd be much more inclined to learn the Android API. Sure, the iPhone has a larger user-base right now, but there are dozens of Android handsets scheduled to be released in 2010.

<comment><USER16> Eric: Don't worry Steve, I'll take care of the app-store review process for you. We'll make sure it's a clean, safe place for every kind of customer. (muahahahahah)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I understand the frustration of the developers of Ninja Words, but I do not understand why we keep having these Apple Store rejected app stories on HN.

If Apple is behaving like a jerk, why invest any energy in them? AFAIK there are other interesting developing platforms with interesting hardware. The iPhone might have a nice userbase, but I presume this will not matter in the end since most phones seem to head into the direction of being complete pc's anyway, why bother with a mobile 'desktop' application as new mobile browsers are going to be supporting more and more of the common desktop pc browsers features?

I mean - excuse my ignorance - , but why would a developer voluntarily deal with the ongoing Apple App store dictatorship? Without a healthy ecosystem of applications the iPhone is dead in the water. As is the current silo approach embraced by Apple. Why would a developer invest any energy into their doomed silo scheme?

IMHO let Apple reject applications as much as they want, history has learned us that the most open system will prevail (Video2000 Vs VHS for example) and my bet is on the Web and open OSses like Android, Linux and perhaps Symbian (if the ever get serious about going FLOSS).

<comment><USER18> The point as I see it is to get developers moving away from the platform, and buying other phones _because_ there is no app-store-draconianism and _saying_ that when they get the phone. Voting with dollars and making it painfully clear why the decision was made is hugely important.

      history has learned us that the most open system will prevail

Really? So Linux on the desktop is _destroying_ Mac OS X and Windows? Honestly, I know of 2 developers (yes, _developers_ ) that actually seriously are Linux full-time. The rest are on OS X, because it's a better _system_ as a whole. They don't care about the openness of the underlying platform as long as it isn't managed like a POW camp.

The truth is that the iPhone would be a dream to develop for were it not for the draconian app store processes. I love Cocoa, and UIKit (aka Cocoa Touch) is equally clean to work with.

Also, there's no real solid indication as yet that Android is going to be worlds better, ditto for the Pre. We're all hopeful, especially given the heavy OSS roots of those platforms, but in the end they could have similar dumb restrictions on the hardware from the carriers and we'd end up equally screwed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is really getting ridiculous.

I think the hardest part to understand is that we all know that Jobs will come down on people who make mistakes with furious anger. He will protect those he agrees with even in the face of public outrage. We can also assume that Jobs is aware of what the App store reviewers are doing. Knowing all of this, we can only assume that they are doing what they do with his blessing.

That's the thing I can't reconcile. I keep waiting for an explanation, but I'm thinking its going to be a while.

<comment><USER20> This is something that I too keep on thinking about every time another incident happens. The best I have come up with is that SJ is not in control of this. It may have become bigger than he could totally control while he was away from the company. Who is to say he is not fuming each time one of these stories comes around and that they are working on a change(Apple has screwed up on the iPhone before and took their time fixing that).

Also I also think he nailed it with the last line in the story-telling sense.

"Apple requires you to be 17 years or older to purchase a censored dictionary that omits half the words Steve Jobs uses every day."

<comment><USER19> I can't picture Steve fuming about it. I can see him kicking doors in and fixing it. But he's (aparently) not. That's the thing: either Steve lost control of his baby or he lost his sense of morals. Both are disturbing to me.

<comment><USER18> I'm not so sure - I think having 3rd party apps at _all_ is a concession from Jobs. ISTR (but don't have any references, so this could be an urban legend) that his original vision for the Mac included buying all software from Apple, and making the entire widget from the hardware on up. The iPhone pre-SDk was that kind of vision realized.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've got a language translation dictionary in the app store. When I tried to get an important 3.0 bugfix through, I was rejected by the same logic, until I changed the rating to 17+. Crazy thing is, you can set your app rating to "Frequent/intense profanity or crude humor", and it'll just bump the rating to 12+. Still unacceptable to Apple (presumably, at least. I asked the review team if this would be suitable, but of course heard nothing back).

So my dictionary now appears to have "Frequent/intense sexual content or nudity" because the review team tried to translate bad words.

In a moment of frustration, sent a sarcastic quip to Apple's review team about not allowing dictionaries to minors, and I'm left wondering if that knocked me into the slow queue - because it took well over a month to finally get the update approved.

<comment><USER22> No kidding. My app also features "Frequent/intense sexual content or nudity" because it displays information from wikipedia about parks nearby. And any third party content is 17+

<comment><USER21> All that this really doing is diluting their own censorship rules until they're meaningless. It's as if every movie featuring actors showing their legs above the knees was rated R.

<comment><USER22> It's more like if every movie that had a woman wearing a long skirt, that could possibly be pulled up, but isn't actually pulled up, was rated R.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I went through the same thing with my Japanese dictionary app (<http://banrai.com/nihongo.html>).

For the initial rating, I said it had no bad language, sex, or violence.

It got rejected for language (apparently, the first the reviewers do is try to use four-letter words).

So I changed the rating to "mild/infrequent" and it got rejected again.

Here's part of what I wrote to them after the second rejection:

" _I'm not sure how to respond to your comment that the rating is inappropriate.

"Nihongo" is a Japanese dictionary.

As such, it contains some profanity, sexual content, etc. but the bulk of the content is not in that category._"

That got no reply from Apple, so I went back, used the strongest possible rating (like Ninja Words, it's now rated 17+).

More than a month after it was first posted, it was approved for sale.

</comment><comment><USER24> What's interesting is that the Dictionary.com app (free) contains every single word mentioned as "objectionable content" and it's rated 4+. Gotta love the consistency.

<comment><USER25> I think the best possible change to the App Store (aside from complete transparency) would be a button in the submission queue labelled "resubmit under different reviewer." Every time it was pressed, the reviewer who had rejected the app would be banned from reviewing it again; thus, we'd be able to get over humps like thirty dictionary apps being accepted and one rejected, or the same app being accepted and then rejected later in an update for things it has contained since the original version. The number of bannings a reviewer collected would be a very helpful metric for Apple come review-time. Of course, if you ended up banning the entire review staff from looking at your app, it's not going anywhere (thus avoiding people bullying the "market" for reviewers into only ever accepting apps. If you're unilaterally rejected, all the reviewer-bannings on your app are lifted—and thus no longer count in the HR process—and _you're_ the one who gets banned instead.)

<comment><USER26> That defeats the point, since the guys who accept all apps will get a score of zero, while not doing their main job description.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> To any of you who are parents, how fined grained are the parental controls on iPhone? If I want my child to have Project Gutenberg and a dictionary in his pocket, do I then allow him to install any NC-17 application?

<comment><USER28> You can set a maximum "level of naughtiness":

      Don't Allow Apps
      4+
      9+
      12+
      17+
      Allow All Apps

So, the short answer to your second question is "yes". Pretty stupid, huh?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Repeat after me: 2009 has been a complete disaster for the iPhone.

Nothing has gone right. Even the new hardware and OS launches, which should have been all good news, were marred by bad PR. So far, all of these missteps haven't seriously hurt the bottom line. But, if Apple stays on this trajectory, isn't it only a matter of time?

<comment><USER30> They've sold more iPhones in 2009 than the previous 2 years combined and the year isn't even over yet. Something has gone very right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The more I read about the app store the more it looks like a classic bureaucracy. I mean what kind of people do you expect Apple has hired to "approve" all of these apps? I'll give you a hit it isn't some ace computer scientist with a degree from an Ivy league school. I have a hard time believing this is some conspiracy on the part of Apple the company so much as it is a few low level employees playing the CYA game.

</comment><comment><USER32> Can Jobs apologize like Bezos did?

<comment><USER33> "A-po-lo-gi-ze? Here, have an apple you little ape" - Steve Jobs using his mental dictionary

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> What's the point of the rating system if even dictionaries have to be rated 17+?

Wasn't the idea to allow finer-grained control over the content allowed on a given iPod/iPhone than was possible previously?

Why can't they allow filtering over the sub-categories rather than just the broad labels? There's a world of difference between "obscene" words and graphic pornography.

</comment><comment><USER34> This sucks, but the application is fantastic. If anyone has been waiting for a good dictionary app for the iPhone, this one is fantastic.

</comment><comment><USER35> wow!! This is just plain simple ridiculous. I have been using a dictionary since I was 10. I dont even know that one can buy censored dictionaries.

Apple needs to do something really quick before things go out of their hand.

</comment><comment><USER36> This whole nonsense bodes ill for Apple after Steve. In fact, I suspect it's a foreshadowing of how fucked up Apple will be if he ever leaves the company. Apple+Jobs is a bit like North Korea (though more successful) -- it's whole structure is built around a single personality. There seems to be no cultural ability to properly delegate authority.

If Steve had been full throttle over the last year, he would have personally vetted the first 500 apps, and carefully trained a couple lackeys to predict his innate reaction so well that they could proxy for him for 90% of the submissions (those from unknowns). Steve would have personally handled the 5 or 10% from developers deemed important enough to not completely piss off. This is how he's run the company since his return (and probably how he ran it in the first place).

In my experience negotiating with Apple, it was like talking to the staff of a very famous and influential person, rather than talking to people at a company with a normal distribution of responsibility. Everyone could give you an opinion or best guess about what might transpire, but absolutely nothing could be decided one way or another without the direct involvement of Steve.

I think they're in for a very rough period if/when Steve leaves. Obviously the app store has fallen off his radar or we wouldn't be seeing this kind of bullshit. It's all a factor of his personal bandwidth, which has obviously been impacted by his health.

</comment><comment><USER37> Reminds me of the old 'if your car was designed by a computer company' entry for Apple: You get in your car to drive to the store, but it takes you to church instead.

</comment><comment><USER33> "Apple requires you to be 17 years or older to purchase a censored dictionary that omits half the words Steve Jobs uses every day."

</comment><comment><USER38> This is [REDACTED].

<comment><USER39> ha ha ha xD

At least HN is (and hopefully it will remain) free of stupid Apple censorship.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'm not a lawyer... But, isn't it a legal issue?

My guess would be that the reason they're acting like they are, is that they have to strictly enforce the rules as they are written.

If they make exceptions or even approve an app that doesn't conform 100%; could that not later be used as a prior art opening up all sorts of discussions/legal-nastyness?

If they rephrased the rules such that they could use their own best judgement on a case-by-case basis, the discussions would just be bigger when one app gets approved and another one doesn't.

At least this way, it should be fairly clear as an app developer whether your app will get approved or not: If they can find _anything_ "bad" in it, it won't.

<comment><USER36> "I'm not a lawyer... "

Please, let's keep it that way. Their process is random, it conforms 100% to rapid cycling between capricious fascism and complete lack of attention. What they are doing seems almost designed to piss off the maximum number of developers, thus vastly increasing the probability of lawsuits and bad press.

Face it people, Apple is just completely screwing up. Get over it, they're human like everyone else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> This is a great story. Just reading it made me think of "Lucky Jim", not for the details but for the general level of absurdity. Somehow Apple has gotten out of touch with this particular market.

</comment><comment><USER13> I knew if I read this article, my blood would boil like it does with every other App Store article that's been coming out lately. Yet I read it anyway, and I can only ask:

How long will Apple get away with this?

</comment><comment><USER42> Strip employees of all decision making and reasoning because that stuff is expensive. Create a protocol that they must follow, how could it possibly fail?

</comment><comment><USER43> Apple is dammed if they do, dammed if they don't at this point. Do they even have a way out? If they open it up entirely, people will bitch about how it should have been that way from the start and now we can't trust them to not close it down again later, etc. If they close it down more, we get more of the same bitching which has been building for months now. If they finally settle on a solid list of rules and restrictions and actually abide by them, people will tear those rules apart for all manner of reason, too. :-/

<comment><USER44> Sorry, but Apple made their bed. They don't get my sympathy just because they've painted themselves into a corner.

In any case, there's a lot to be said for, "You know, our App Store approval model just doesn't work, so we're abandoning it. From now on, it's open and transparent all the way."

<comment><USER45> So from this we can deduce that their bed is in the corner?

<comment><USER44> Well played, sir.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I like the way they missed the word "Cunt" when developing the app. Doh!

<comment><USER47> I guess the devs were just too pure of mind to consider such words. :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> "The app store sucks. Look it up!"</comment>


Reigion vs Science and the Business Analyst - <AUTHOR> http://angryaussie.wordpress.com/2008/04/29/religion-vs-science/

<comment><USER2> An excellent analysis. I've seen this "faith-based" project management too many times, and it just might be that identifying it as such is the first step to correcting it.</comment>


Why I Still Use an iPhone 4 - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/80246bac4aa4

<comment><USER2> While the 5S is a pretty awesome phone, I have to agree with the author that it doesn't enable us to do anything fundamentally different than the 4. The major generational innovations:

3G - 3G data 4 - Retina display, FF camera 5 - LTE, screen size

All of those things are nice, but they simply make use of the phone faster, at a higher resolution with slightly more screen area. So I can check Facebook faster on a nicer screen.

I'd like to see some fundamental improvement in user interaction, something that enables us to do things we couldn't before. Google glass is pointing in that direction, but it's still along the same vein of more immediate, always on computing power. I don't think we've fully tapped the innovations that these devices can allow.

For example, I think the idea of the universal Ubuntu phone would fundamentally change the way people saw their phones, because it would allow their phone to become their ONLY personal computer by simply plugging into additional human interface devices (larger screens, keyboards).

<comment><AUTHOR> +1 for Ubuntu phone: THIS would be a fundamental game changer, and I can't wait to try it out.

I would have loved to expounded upon my thoughts on what the future looks like but I'm budgeting a certain amount of time every morning to blog and ready or not I'm hitting the publish button!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> tl;dr "It does everything that I want it to do."

I'm almost 50. I've been hearing this one since the Commodore 64 days.

<comment><USER4> Except in the 1980s the leap between a Apple II to a C64 to a 386 PC were tremendous.

Nowadays, the leaps are tiny and marketing based. Or artificially inflated "Oh, no Siri for you!" Incremental change really is worth criticizing and people just don't like to upgrade just because marketers tell them to do so.

The 4S is barely 2 years old. Early adopters are only getting off contract now and might be waiting to see if the newer WP or Android phones scratch their itch. No need to make an urgent move to the 5 series iphone. Heck, if it was me I'd wait out for the next iphone in the hope that the incremental leap is larger. Why not keep this phone running 2.5 or even 3 years? "Good enough" is a relative term. Its good enough because the alternative just isn't compelling yet.

<comment><USER3> The blogger has an iPhone 4. We are making quick improvements in mobile CPU technology. It's actually surprising and impressive:

[http://www.imore.com/sites/imore.com/files/styles/large/publ...](http://www.imore.com/sites/imore.com/files/styles/large/public/field/image/2013/09/iphone_5s_a7_cpu_40x_slide.jpg?itok=JNitS- an)

I've had the iPhone 1, 3Gs, and 5. Three years probably is a good amount time to wait between purchases to see a big improvement. The only problem is that since the phones are subsidized and we're paying for them in our data plans, AT&T is making more profit off of you after 2 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think the Lumia 1020 has introduced some pretty awesome features. In fact I think Nokia is the only company (soon to be Microsoft) that is innovating in the mobile space. *I have an iPhone 5 and probably won't switch ... MS needs non-ported apps.

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah the new Lumia is pretty interesting, as is the new Windows platform. I would be willing to consider the switch once there is truly seamless integration with Windows 8.1, as well as when the app store finally has quality apps.</comment></comment>


IBM drops patent bomb on Priceline.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/10/ibm_sues_priceline/

<comment><USER2> > The patents span 10 years, starting in 1999. They cover a setting up a user > account with single-sign-on in a federate computing environment; a way to > present applications as an interactive service; a method for presenting > advertising as an interactive service; and a way to preserve state > information between a client and server.

So any half an hour of drunken developer's work is patentable?

</comment><comment><USER3> So IBM has started to lay off its engineers to become a patent troll?</comment>


Startup Governance in Silicon Savannah (The other side of the Angani story) - <AUTHOR> http://whiteafrican.com/2015/11/23/startup-governance-in-silicon-savannah/ <comment><AUTHOR> See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10600226](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10600226) for background (the founders' perspective).</comment>


Genius hid a Morse code message in song lyrics to prove Google was copying them - <AUTHOR> https://bgr.com/2019/06/17/genius-vs-google-lyrics-results-on-search-copied-from-lyrics-site/ <comment><USER2> Related HN post from yesterday:

> > [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20194952](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20194952)

In particular this comment about "trap streets." > [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20195865](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20195865)

<comment><USER3> 99 Percent Invisible did a mini story on this[1], and touched on what happened when people took that fake street (or in this case, town), and then actually made something there and used that name.

1: [https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/mini-stories- volume-2...](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/mini-stories-volume-2/2/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I haven't seen this much blatant copyright infringement since I Googled for "book title pdf" or "album title torrent", or did similar on YouTube.

</comment><comment><USER5> Was Genius compensating the songwriters for the lyrics?

<comment><USER6> Yes. The music industry went after them in 2014 and they've been paying royalties since.</comment></comment>