As Republicans Concede, F.C.C. Is Expected to Enforce Net Neutrality - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/25/technology/path-clears-for-net-neutrality-ahead-of-fcc-vote.html <comment><USER2> It is Comcast, Verizon, et al.'s heavy-handed, deceptive, anti-customer business practices that will decide this debate. Anti-government ideologues always used to talk about how awful the DMV is but people love the DMV compared to the telecom monopolies. They're universally despised. Despite all their lobbying money there is luckily still some democracy remaining in our government.

<comment><USER3> Instead of being anti-government, people should be pro-individual-freedom. Corporations can inhibit individual-freedom as easily as government if government doesn't actively support individual freedom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Still disappointed they didn't unbundle the last mile. It seems to me that's where the biggest pain-point is right now, and doing that would've been far more effective in getting ISPs to play nice in the market, since then they'd have actual competition.

<comment><USER5> Any large-scale unbundling proposal, which would necessarily target the cable networks, would be fairly unprecedented. To date, unbundling has been applied where the government had a stake in the networks to begin with. The POTS network was constructed by AT&T, a government-sanctioned monopoly. In the U.K., the phone network was built by BT when it was a public corporation. The modern cable networks were built mostly after cable companies lost their local monopolies in 1996.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The FCC fines people for broadcast obscenity. It requires the 'v-chip' censorship technology in televisions.

The FCC enforces telecom system wiretap rules (CALEA).

The FCC's decisions on mergers and spectrum auctions often amount to giant handouts to politically-favored corporations.

Had the 'Clipper Chip' been a mandated encryption technology in the 90s, the FCC would've enforced its use. The national internet blacklists of the UK and Australia are maintained through their local equivalents of the FCC.

Title II regulation was designed for the plain-old-telephone-system monopolies, where there was even less choice (one provider!) than the very worst of current local broadband markets. The internet, without any FCC rules, thrived and completely eclipsed that slow-moving regulated market.

But after this 'reclassification', new federal rules will limit what ISPs can offer and charge, regardless of what paying customers prefer, under the 1930s telephone/utility model.

Upstart services offering novel cross-subsidized speed/latency improvements will require federal pre-approval or risk outright prohibition.

ISPs will have to keep a DC commission staffed by loyalists of the two national parties happy, or else discretionary interpretations will go against them.

This is not a victory for either the internet or the "little guy".

<comment><USER7> The FCC has made its share of mistakes, but that doesn't necessarily mean this will be one.

"Title II regulation was designed for the plain-old-telephone-system monopolies, where there was even less choice (one provider!) than the very worst of current local broadband markets."

My mom has one ISP to choose from (and dismal service.) More than half the population of the US have access to a single broadband provider.

"The internet, without any FCC rules, thrived and completely eclipsed that slow-moving regulated market."

When behemoth broadband providers began openly plotting to predatorily damage some of the things that had helped provide for the internet's success, it was clear to most that some kind of regulations were needed.

"new federal rules will limit what ISPs can offer and charge, regardless of what paying customers prefer."

I have yet to hear from a single paying customer that actually wanted what the ISPs were plotting.

"Upstart services offering novel cross-subsidized speed/latency improvements will require federal pre-approval or risk outright prohibition."

Yeah, they would need approval if they wanted to offer that particular service, though I am not sure how to find that disappointing.

"This is not a victory for either the internet or the "little guy"."

Perhaps, why not see what actually happens before making broad speculative declarations, though?

<comment><USER8> > My mom has one ISP to choose from (and dismal service.)

Net Neutrality changes this how?

<comment><USER9> Net neutrality does not change the monopoly of ISPs. Net neutrality is necessitated by the monopoly. Where the market forces have failed, only regulation can protect the consumers.

<comment><USER6> If the problem is monopoly, why not use antitrust enforcement, rather than dictating service/pricing details?

And why impose net neutrality regulations on all the markets where there are multiple competitive providers? Why not let localities where there's an actual problem fix it locally, rather than set new nationwide rules?

<comment><USER10> " _If the problem is monopoly, why not use antitrust enforcement_ "

Because these are government created monopolies, as all enduring ones are. State and Federal for the telcos, local for the cablecos.

And as has been noted elsewhere in this discussion, for some inexplicable reason, as reported (strange, how only the FCC commissioners have access to these 300+ (!) pages, and for less than 3 weeks), this new regime leaves these government created last mile monopolies intact.

It's not an exaggeration nor necessarily hyperbole to call this Obamacare for the Internet, when it enshrines the existing order of things, merely wrapping it in even more regulation. And, somehow, I seriously doubt a reduction in prices for us or companies like Netflix.

<comment><USER11> > strange, how only the FCC commissioners have access to these 300+ (!) pages, > and for less than 3 weeks

Its not strange, its how the regulatory process always works. Until its been voted on, its not a formal regulation or regulatory proposal, and is not published. If it is passed by the commission, its published. It can be passed as a formal regulatory proposal for comment (like the NPRM from last year that this is a follow-up to) or as a regulatory order (what is most likely in this case, as they've issued a formal proposal for comment, gathered the comment, and are now finalizing how to move forward given the comment received on the proposal.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Warning in advance: The following musings are not positive, you may wish to skip this comment.

The last references to the proposed text I read still had "lawful content" as a phrase, one I consider to be a key phrase.

In order to allow lawful content, a definition of lawful (and therefore unlawful) will be required, as well as inspection of content to allow enforcement.

I am inquisitive, this leads me to questions:

What words will I be disallowed from using to keep a website online? What speech will I need to silence?

Will this be similar to free speech zones? Will I be allowed to run a webserver as long as I put up certain warnings/guarantees? Or carry a specific type of rating in a revamped website rating system?

This inspection: Will my ISP be required to perform packet reconstruction to analyze my content to decide whether it should be given a pass or not? Should we be looking to products like Comodo's PrivDog as a model of how the government should set this up? Assuming they address the invalid cert part, maybe our government should take over all CAs, to make sure they can read all encrypted communications to confirm they are lawful?

I am deeply disappointed that I feel like I can start quoting George Orwell to make my points...

On a positive note, with all of this extra traffic and the subsequent requirements, maybe the US will have to invest in faster network infrastructure without having to rely on Google Fiber threatening the local monopolies.

And since the FCC is involved, rather than this being a market-driven cost approach, it will likely be more a tragedy of the commons-based cost approach - My fellow tax payers and I will all foot the bill. At least we won't be as likely to notice that it is much more expensive than it needed to be. And it can be passed on to more than one generation.

Depending on who I listen to, there are rumoured to be quite a few people out of work who could benefit from more job creation, maybe we will get a new governmental organization, similar to the DHS, to oversee this.

There seem to be so many ways this does not end well.

<comment><USER13> This looks like an example of pretending there's no precedent and using that as an opportunity to invent an arbitrary strawman that supports your hobbyhorse (in this case extreme paranoia). Internet copyright laws (NET, DMCA, etc.) don't work anything like what you've proposed and there's no evidence that the FCC is trying to use net neutrality as a backdoor to reverse that precedent.

<comment><USER6> The FCC's traditional role as broadcast obscenity-and-violence censor provides evidence that its powers will be used that way.

Part of the FCC's traditional regulation of phone networks also included ensuring wiretap-capability.

FCC appointees, loyalists to the two national parties, will have new discretionary powers over ISPs' businesses.

When the next scare about terror, or child-exploitation, or piracy, or violent/subversive/harassing/offensive media comes along, and DC needs to "do something", will ISPs thumb their noses at their new minders at the FCC, or "go along to get along" as "team players"?

<comment><USER14> > The FCC's traditional role as broadcast obscenity-and-violence censor > provides evidence that its powers will be used that way

Congress has _explicitly_ made broadcasting obscene material illegal. This is completely irrelevant to Title II regulation of the internet.

<comment><USER15> And, in fact, ISPs being classified as Title II common carriers would actively prevent the FCC (and ISPs) from censoring the internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Anybody have a link to the actual text of the rules?

<comment><USER11> > Anybody have a link to the actual text of the rules?

Members and staff at the FCC have copies of whatever current drafts are circulating (which, by reports that there may be active discussions on at least one key point, there may be more than one), no one else does except as an unofficial leak (and any version that exists now may or may not be the version that gets voted on.)

Otherwise, no. FCC orders are not released in preliminary form before they are approved. This is consistent with regulatory agency decisions in general, there is a formal process for release of orders, that involves approval. Certain orders are released as proposals for comment before being finalized -- this is called a "Notice of Proposed Rulemaking" (NPRM). The FCC did, in fact, issue an NPRM on its open internet rules, which (along with the public comment on the NPRM) got plenty of notice here, in the mainstream media, etc.

After comment on an NPRM, the agency reviews the comments, conducts further policy discussions, and can either abandon the effort, revise the policy and issue it as an order or issue a new, revised NPRM. All of these -- except abandoning the effort entirely -- require the agency to conduct a vote.

Regulatory agencies don't release draft orders prior to vote of the agency (as distinct from NPRMs, which, while they aren't final orders, are final _products_ of the agency, not pre-vote drafts) much the same way that courts don't release draft opinions before the judges have voted on them.

<comment><USER16> I had a feeling. So just to be clear, this is not unique to the rule making surrounding Net Neutrality - this is the general process for federal agency rule making.

<comment><USER11> Exactly, despite the fact that some people are trying to make this out as if this were some kind of special, unusual process that is evidence of nefarious intent.

<comment><USER17> Traditionally the rules would appear in the Federal Register ( [https://www.federalregister.gov](https://www.federalregister.gov) ) with a request for comment (check the proposed rules section).

<comment><USER11> > Traditionally the rules would appear in the Federal Register ( > [https://www.federalregister.gov](https://www.federalregister.gov) ) with a > request for comment (check the proposed rules section).

No, traditionally -- as a preliminary draft that has not been voted on by the commission considering them -- they would not.

They would only appear in the Federal Register for comment if and when they were adopted by the appropriate decisionmaker (which, in the case of the FCC or similar multimember regulatory commission, is by a vote of the commission) as a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (which is a proposal with a comment period) or an Interim Final Rule with Comment Period (which is an adopted rule which also includes a built in comment period.)

They would also appear in the Federal Register (but not with the intent of soliciting comment) when adopted as a Final Rule, though that does not include a comment period.

Preliminary drafts that have not been adopted by the appropriate decisionmaker (such as proposals that have not yet been voted on by a commission such as the FCC) do _not_ appear in the Federal Register.

The NPRM in the matter under consideration _was_ published in the Federal Register last year [0]. Whatever drafts Wheeler or other commission members have circulated based on the discussion, comments, etc., subsequent to that NPRM are not formally proposed regulations, and would not be expected to be published before being voted on.

[0] [https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2014/07/01/2014-148...](https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2014/07/01/2014-14859/protecting- and-promoting-the-open-internet)

<comment><USER17> When I dealt with DOE, the actual rules proposed were put in the Federal Register for comment, so that we could actually comment on the rules making. I guess it works differently now or the FCC being an "independent board" does it different.

<comment><USER11> > When I dealt with DOE, the actual rules proposed were put in the Federal > Register for comment, so that we could actually comment on the rules making. > I guess it works differently now or the FCC being an "independent board" > does it different.

The DOE is a single-decisionmaker hierarchy, and so there is no body that has to vote on proposals before they are formal proposals, the appropriate decisionmaker simply decides, and its a formal proposal.

But what is published in the FR for comment as "the actual rules proposed" would generally be an NPRM -- a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking -- which, in this matter, _was_ published last year (linked upthread.) The internal drafts that are discussed after the comments are received but before either a second NPRM or a Final Rule is finalized on are _not_ published in the Federal Register. And that's what the draft(s) circulating in the FCC prior to the upcoming vote are.

The difference between a department like DOE and a commission like the FCC is that the _way_ that a formal proposal (NPRM) or rule -- the kind of thing that would be published in the Federal Register -- is decided on by the FCC or other commission is by a vote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> access competition, please, pretty please...

anything else isn't satisfactory and may have worse unintended consequences (or intended consequences, depending where you sit)

</comment><comment><USER19> > As Republicans Concede...

Do they ever do anything else?

</comment><comment><USER20> It seems to just be more federal regulation from DC. I'm as much of a fan of a free and open internet as anyone, but why risk the FCC getting involved?

Also, can anyone honestly see rates being reduced because of this? Sure, all of us would love to see more competition (I actually only have one choice where I live, sadly), but the truth is, the companies that invest the capital to build the infrastructure deserve to reap the profits. I'm not quite sure what the solution would be to having more competition.

What worries me the most is the bureaucracy of it. Are we the people really getting a say? The FCC is made up of unelected officials (appointed by the Executive branch, Republican or Democrat) plastering on their views. Why not let our elected representatives take care of this? You may say that they would just block it, it would never move, etc. Perhaps it's not as much of an emergency as we think, then? I guess this is just the same old federalism versus statism argument. Good ol' American politics.

<comment><USER21> > why risk the FCC getting involved?

In national communications policy?

> Also, can anyone honestly see rates being reduced because of this?

Prices are pretty much an orthogonal issue to net neutrality. If you don't have a source/destination neutral network, it's possible you won't be able to buy the services such a network supports at any price.

> The FCC is made up of unelected officials

I think it's reasonably clear that doesn't mean they're unaccountable. Congress or the President can heavily influence policy if they screw it up.

But strangely, at the moment, they seem to be doing policy better than most elected officials. :/

<comment><USER6> "Last-mile" broadband need-not be a 'national' issue except to the extent national politicians want to grandstand about it.

The options at every location are different... from city-to-city and even block-to-block. Some local broadband markets are competitive; others aren't. Creating options requires specific locally-adapted work – new wires, new antennas, new hardware. Three regulators signing-into-law new regulations adds no capacity, only new constraints on the people doing the real work.

One set of national service-shaping rules for all, because _some_ localities have limited choices, is an overreach that doesn't match the problem.</comment></comment></comment>


'Blockchain' is a semantic wasteland - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@nic__carter/blockchain-is-a-semantic-wasteland-9450b6e5012 <comment><USER2> The "blockchain to multiple copies of an excel spreadsheet" extension should be installed on all browsers and enabled by default. Several years and several crashes and hacks and countless scams and fake startups later, and people still don't get it. I can't see any other way to stop the stupid.

A Thompson Reuters recruiter recently contacted me looking for a neuro- linguistic programming expert to help them with their new ai blockchain chatbot. It's driving me insane.</comment>


Show HN: Agon.i – a different perspective on news - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/apps/testing/house.heka.agoni <comment><AUTHOR> Agon, Greek root of the word agony, means contest or fight. The ancient Greeks considered agon to be one of the fundamental building blocks of life. Agon could occur internally, such as fighting against your responsibilities by playing a game on your phone, or externally. The personification of contests such as the ancient Olympic games was called Agon. In more general terms agon represents a contest of wills, be it in debate, art or physical exertion.

With our app agon.i we hope to revive the spirit of Agon with regard to our consumption of news. We host and publish previews of news articles from around the world. Unlike other news aggregation services, we make no attempts to monitor you or discover what you want to see. We believe that such an approach creates an echo chamber environment.

Instead agon.i draws content from GDELT updates (Global Database of Events Language and Tone), a dataset designed for scientific analysis of news published online. This data feed provides approximately 3000 articles every 15 minutes. We collect the feed and filter it to English articles we can cleanly parse for a title and photo, then submit each of them to IBM's Watson for topic identification.

Along with each article agon.i presents the option to concur with the articles sentiment or to contest it, the only requirement being you either post your reasoning or agree with reasoning someone else has posted. Once you have staked out your position you are then able to discuss your position or that of others through threaded replies.

All of this communication is completely anonymous, you are assigned a persona when you make your first response on an article and it will remain with you throughout any interactions you have there.

Check out our beta test and let me know what you think!

</comment><comment><USER2> What is the requirement of this app? I signed up as a beta tester, but Google Play says that "This app is incompatible with all of your devices" (two android phones and one android tablet).

Is it because I'm not US based that I cannot install the app?

<comment><AUTHOR> Guessing it is because you are not in the US?

I opened it up to all countries with the latest update.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hmm it should be available for anything above Android 4.4, maybe I did something wrong with the beta.

Will look into it now.</comment>


Blockchain - <AUTHOR> https://granolashotgun.com/2017/12/08/blockchain/ <comment><USER2> The revolution isn't in building niche complications.

Progress looks like tearing things down. Replacement with automatons. Direct transactions.

<comment><USER3> disruption is progress for a long time going forward</comment></comment>


Show HN:  HowToSubscribe.com - Email Newsletter Directory - <AUTHOR> http://howtosubscribe.com

<comment><USER2> Are you screening submissions to eliminate poor quality newsletters? Or will you down the track?

You could sign up to newsletters and auto-post recently received issues as examples of what people could expect?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes - every submission gets emailed to me and I auto post them.

Yeah, that sounds like a pretty cool idea. I'm thinking I might even integrate it with Easy Unsubscriber somehow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Seems like a great idea. Just submitted my Hacker Newsletter project (<http://www.hackernewsletter.com>).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I couldn't find a reliable directory of newsletters, so i decided to make my own.

Any criticism or suggestions would be appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER4> You need some type of categorization for this to be valuable to someone looking for a newsletter.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great point. Right now it's only Wordpress Tagged Categories, but I'll be changing the home page to a categorized landing page when there's more than 10-15 newsletters in total.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great idea! Can pay newsletters be submitted?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure - there's no restrictions at this point.</comment></comment>


Show HN: YabTab – automatically converts webpages to tables - <AUTHOR> https://yabtab.com <comment><AUTHOR> YabTab ([https://yabtab.com](https://yabtab.com)) automatically converts web pages to tables. There is tonnes of information on web: think of product listing pages, course catalogues, job postings, reports - and all of them are essentially tables. Product listing pages, for example, are tables with one row for each product, columns for product information like name, features, price, etc. However all current scraping tools either require extensive configuration to extract such information or are domain specific (yet rarely works). The idea behind YabTab is to build a tool which can auto-extract such "tabular" information from all websites irrespective of their domain or underlying structure and technology. YabTab uses Machine Learning techniques to recognize these patterns in any web page.

I am the author and would love some feedback. Please do try our free trial hosted on [https://yabtab.com](https://yabtab.com)</comment>


Ask HN: Show your startup - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I'm co-founder and CEO of Taskade ([https://www.taskade.com](https://www.taskade.com)), our Chrome Extension turns every new tab into a productivity super-tool.

You can use it on the web, mobile, to make checklists, capture ideas, and collaborate with your team in real-time.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'v started PressKitHero [https://presskithero.com](https://presskithero.com) as a side project in 2016, and grown it to ramen profibility since.

It's a very simple SAAS app for companies to manage their press kit. I have no plans of growing it into a "full" pr suite, like my competitors, I'm happy to stay in my niche and just build the best press kit builder there is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm the founder of [https://www.recapped.io](https://www.recapped.io), a collaboration platform between buyers and sellers.

You can streamline the entire sales process (or freelancing/contracting negotiation) with an evolving page that guides buyers.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm the founder of STOMT: [https://www.stomt.com](https://www.stomt.com). We're centralizing customer feedback and make it scalable for large scale businesses.

It's a pretty holistic approach to closing feedback loops at scale and use that to retain, win back and upsell customers.

Can be integrated anywhere, even on Twitch, Unity, Unreal (strong focus on gaming). And it's an open platform. So feedback can be escalated into support tickets and pushed to Zendesk or Helpshift, etc..

<comment><AUTHOR> Pretty Good

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I´m the COO of our startup Zenkit [https://zenkit.com/](https://zenkit.com/) and we continue to grow. It´s a cloudbased tool for task management, project management and collaboration. You are able to organize anything by switching between list, kanban, table, mind map and calendar views. We were named "Trello-Killer" by the American press and are very happy to constantly update Zenkit. By the way, as a German company, we are GDPR compliant.

<comment><USER7> Can you switch the same list between different views? Our startup uses Asana (free tier) but I am happy to give your startup a go. It looks promising

<comment><USER6> Sorry for the late reply! Yes, you can switch between views whenever you want to and even create multiple views (learn more about that here: [https://zenkit.com/documentation#/lists/HJQBQ1Hw/sections/By...](https://zenkit.com/documentation#/lists/HJQBQ1Hw/sections/ByG-c9G0/entries/rJzNlM4tM?_k=eiqbpw))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am the founder of Tesults [https://www.tesults.com](https://www.tesults.com) \- a web-based storage, reporting and analysis application for automated test results data.

If your team needs something like this get in touch because we can handle integration, including writing code if necessary to get you setup.</comment>


Cisco: The Internet Needs More Control - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/29/cisco-the-internet-needs-more-control/ <comment><USER2> Cisco says - you need to buy more of our hardware to make the internet a better place. Think of the children!</comment>


Some search engines besides Google - <AUTHOR> http://davidhiggerson.wordpress.com/2009/10/09/five-search-engines-other-than-google-for-journalists/

<comment><USER2> well there is another 'duckduckgo' i.e duckduckgo.com worth trying ...

</comment><comment><USER3> Upvote for the Cuil reference...I get it.</comment>


Series of bizarre deaths in the financial world this week - <AUTHOR> http://business.financialpost.com/2014/01/31/chief-economists-apparent-suicide-is-the-latest-in-a-series-of-bizarre-deaths-in-the-financial-world-this-week/ <comment><USER2> * Chief Economist at Russell, suicide, after problems at work

* A retired Deutche risk manager, suicide

* An MD at Tata Motors, suicide

* An IT manager at JPMC in London, apparent suicide

* An unnamed marketing professional at Swiss Re, cause unknown

This is more like numerology than a "series of deaths in the financial world". The "financial world" employs many hundreds of thousands of people. especially when generalized to include commercial, retail, and investment banks, asset management firms, the entire insurance industry, hedge funds, market data firms, and analysts. Also, apparently, the automotive industry.

Moreover, these are people with wildly different jobs and levels of seniority.

You can probably generate similar patterns every year, if you look carefully and track, say, IT executives and marketing managers alongside the Chief Economists. If you Google some of the names in this article, you'll see that the news coverage for them frequently does exactly that.

This seems pretty silly. What am I missing?

<comment><USER3> The only thing that stands out, for me, is suicide. For instance Tata Motors CEO Karl Slym committed suicide after an argument with his wife [0]. He was heading a $35 billion company, and from what I can see, was facing no fraud/bankruptcy/arrest either.

Makes you wonder what can turn someone at those levels so despondent enough to end it all?

[0] [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/thailand/1060...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/thailand/10600321/Tata- Motors-boss-Karl-Slym-rowed-with-wife-before-apparent-suicide.html)

<comment><USER2> I don't understand what Tata Motors has to do with the financial industry.

<comment><USER4> Like most car companies now, it's mainly a financial service (to offer financing options to pay for the car) that subsidises a car-making operation.

<comment><USER5> I'm pretty sure that isn't the case.

US car companies seem to operate under this model, but in the rest of the world the financing income is seen as a useful supplement to income from selling cars.

For example, Tata's increase in profitability last year is attributed to increases sales of Jaguar and Landrover cars[1], not profits from financial services.

[1] [http://www.industryweek.com/finance/tata-motors-profit- soars...](http://www.industryweek.com/finance/tata-motors-profit- soars-71-quarter)

<comment><USER4> I know it is the case for both French car companies and Volvo -- meaning the influence of financiers over the company decisions is stronger than any engineer: CEO track, risk assessement is about liability not engineering excellence. Most Japanese and Korean companies are better seen as a conglomerates (zaibatsu). I've heard similar stories for US companies, but I don't personally know anyone working for them. It is indeed not the case for German brands, were the engineering excellence still matters. Tata is a large group that works far beyond cars: they handle personal finance, pharmaceuticals, etc. Your link is specifically about the car company, Tata Motors.

<comment><USER5> The OP isn't talking about profit vs loss financial management, they are referring to the practice of US manufactures of offering finance packages to purchase a car.

These finance packages are quite lucrative in the US market, and for many US manufacturers are more profitable than manufacturing.

(The suicide referred to was an executive of Tata Motors)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What would be useful would be a tool to determine how really unusual is some series of events X. Obviously, you'd have to keep in mind that every day some number of "highly unlikely" events occurs [1].

Not to dismiss this series of bizarre death but rather, just feeling frustrated that I can say neither "Woah, something's going on" nor "nothing to see here folks, move along".

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem)

<comment><USER2> Suicide incidence per 100,000 people in the US is ~21 people annually. JPMC and Citigroup alone employe over 500,000 people. This story cites something like 6 deaths, in wildly different roles, including that of a retiree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Since 2007, most bankers have described their situation as significantly more worrying and stressful. I'm estimating the number of senior executives in that industry at 50,000 people. Suicide rate for stressed 50-somethings is around 15 per 100,000. That means on average one every three weeks.

That would make a week with seven deaths seem suspicious, but let's consider the Bernouilli distribution, considering there has been roughly 700 weeks since 2007: ( (1-( 1-(15/100000/52))^50000 * (15/100000/52))^7 ) ^700 )

Yeah, that's unlikely.

<comment><USER2> These aren't all bankers, they aren't all senior executives, they aren't all 50, the entire financial industry employs over 1,000,000 people, and you've understated the suicide rate (you may only be counting the male stat).

The article also doesn't count seven financial industry suicides in a week. It counts 3 (in that week, and in the [insanely broad] finance industry), and an auto executive.

<comment><USER4> With your numbers, it indeed become reasonably likely - thanks for that. I'm always confused by how titles can be inflated in the financial services.

My point was more: when it comes to conspiracy, stay away from story-telling, and do the math. That forces you to focus on assumption, such as the actual size for the group considered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Was just now researching this (procrast:on). Here's an incomplete list:

1) Tata's managing director Karl Slym

2) Swiss Re's Tim Dickenson communications director

3) Russell Investments' chief economist Mike Dueker

4) Deutsche Bank's William Broeksmit to become chief risk officer (didn't materialize)

5) Zurich Insurance Group's finance chief Pierre Wauthier

</comment><comment><USER8> More like a bunch of people died in a bunch of different jobs this week, so lets make some faulty correlations on a small sample size.

</comment><comment><USER9> Sounds very much like in a movie. Very eerie.

<comment><USER10> I don't know. They're casting a pretty wide net in their definition of "financial worker." Basically if you helped run a business, or worked at a bank, they were willing to count your death.

Without knowing the baseline population they're willing to consider in assembling their count, it's hard to say, but this might very easily be explained as a stochastic process that happens to be hitting a peak. It might even be the case that this sort of death rate happens all the time among the vast pool of "financial workers," but the Financial Post just happened to notice it this week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything...</comment>


Show HN: Best time to meet - <AUTHOR> http://www.besttimetomeet.com/

<comment><USER2> Error: Problem has occured and has been reported! We'll fix it soon!

Minor nitpick of your error page: occurred, not occured.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> fixed, thank you, I'm embarrassed

<comment><USER2> Overall the site looks good (I've bookmarked it for possible personal use). That said, your use of the word "term" when actually planning a meeting (i.e. "choose possible terms for meeting") threw me a bit. You may be better served just switching "term" to "time" in most instances.

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you! I've been thinking about switching from "term" to "time", I think I'll do it tomorrow. (p.s. I've checked my server logs, I didn't expect users to have IPv6 addresses :))</comment></comment></comment>


Slashdot discovers Lisp - <AUTHOR> http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/25/1553220

<comment><USER2> While I think reading Slashdot comments is bad for you're outlook on the world, saying that they are just now "discovering" Lisp is pretty ignorant.

<comment><USER3> Very true. I'd guess that 90% of pg's audience for _A Plan for Spam_ (which led on to the popularity of his later essays) came from Slashdot. It's where I first heard about pg, and Trevor and probably rtm for that matter. Lisp has been discussed for years on Slashdot.

Also, folks here may not realize it, but Slashdot still wields a mighty traffic hammer; it is not some irrelevant also-ran that redditors/diggers/HN readers might think. At least one of our websites has appeared on TechCrunch, Reddit, Hacker News, and Digg in some context (never a major story, but usually getting some votes and some discussion, and occasionally making the front page)...one time my co-founder mentioned something we were working on _in a comment_ on Slashdot. It was the highest traffic day we've ever had (to this day, and our traffic has increased steadily since launch, so every few weeks we have a new peak; but always less than Slashdot day). Our traffic is pretty good, in general, for the kind of business we run. But Slashdot is the motherlode. I speak of it fondly, still.

Anyway, for a site with a user base that large and diverse, Slashdot isn't as entirely idiotic as it could be. It's certainly no worse than Digg, and only slightly worse than reddit. And 10+ years ago when it was the size of Hacker News, it was roughly equally interesting and smart, though its focus was somewhat different (less business, more Open Source). The signal to noise is too low for me to spend much time there, but it's silly to imagine that Hacker News would remain as good as it is with a user count in the millions, like slashdot.

<comment><USER4> I picked up Hackers and Painters because of a review over at Slashdot five years ago: <http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/07/0456241>

My life hasn't been the same since.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's been awhile since I've actually read any discussions on slashdot, but it seems like the default presumption of bad faith that ruined so much of the conversation when I did hasn't gone anywhere. This is an unfortunate phenomenon that seems to dominate much of online culture.

<comment><USER6> I think it runs deeper than simply the assumption of bad faith. When growing up children go through phases of conforming to their parents and then distancing from them, and also conforming to their peers and then distancing from (most of) them as well. This seems to be a part of the personality formation process - at some point people feel compelled to disagree in the most confrontational form (and even demean their opponents) not to look for truth, but to define their own self. They also often engage in group identity defining behaviors, such as rallies about persecution, "real men/hackers/programmers never/always do X" posturing etc. Also voting on agreement/disagreement axis (instead of useful/wasteful axis) is one of those. Incidentally, 18 yo is the typical drafting age for many draft armies, this is when "us vs them" mentality can be readily utilized.

What's remarkable is that with the advent of the Internet we have places where this process never ends. Rather than growing up, slashdot community is in perpetual adolescent disagreement mode. The most mature members are leaving and going elsewhere, to be supplanted by the newcomers.

I'm not necessarily right, but this narrative helps me make sense of what's going on and provides a perspective on the community dynamics.

The two questions that interest me now are:

1\. Where are new HN members coming from?

2\. Where are they going to when they leave?

<comment><USER7> 1\. digg. I still visit digg once in a while but for tech news HN is a better fit. HN has great comments while it seems that a lot of commenters on digg are trying to make puns.

<comment><USER6> I think we're this '' close to an avalanche of puns here as well. I only hope the leaves hold.

Example: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=555296>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What disgusts me is all the "C is faster" talk. Common Lisp was used with bare metal on a particular type of machine. In fact, the Movitz OS still deals with bare metal but on x86 and it's so so strange to see a bunch of hex mixed with Lisp code.

<comment><USER9> Common Lisp is sometimes frighteningly more bare-metal than C. I spent all last night moving stuff from kernel-space, into user space, messing with them in Lisp and sending them back up stream to the networking stack. By hand :-)

In C, even though you work with low-level memory regions and system primitives, you're not _interacting_ with them. By the time you see side- effects the process has long exited. In Lisp you can have open descriptors floating around in your shell where you can echo and read stuff to them; you can share a working buffer with a unix system call or signal, and _see_ it get filled, changed and emptied! To realize that you can layer higher-level conceptual tools over these primitives, including the entire CLOS metaobject protocol, is something that's utterly gorgeous.

See what iolib does to Unix, specially see the multiplexing framework; that's right, first class CLOS classes as wrappers for poll, select, epoll and kselect; your choice. Writing specializing methods for system calls is something no C programmer could ever imagine, much less enjoy ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like his his closing sentence from a presentation: "This project was a huge waste of time! And it's not finished." [http://tlug.jp/meetings/2008/11/serving-dynamic-webpages- in-...](http://tlug.jp/meetings/2008/11/serving-dynamic-webpages-in-less-then- a-millisecond_john-fremlin_handout.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER11> Thanks for the comments guys, if anybody's interested in trying it I've an explanation here: <http://john.freml.in/teepeedee2-using>

</comment><comment><USER9> You made it to /. John! :-)

Not fair, you didn't tell me you're going for a world record when you tossed your "little webserver" project so casually in IRC.

I guess tis the season for beating nginx in Lisp ;-)

<comment><USER12> He didn't benchmark it against nginx. Per the linked presentation, all he actually benchmarked it against was mongrel and lighty w/fastcgi for php.

<comment><USER13> Its amusing how often slashdot summaries are wrong and no one reads the original article...

the actual quote is:

"It is faster than all(?) other web application frameworks for serving small dynamic webpages. Please let me know if you have a case where another framework is faster!"

Not once does he say it is faster than nginx or anything of the sort, just a bad summary and away people go with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Anyone willing to take up this challenge?

[http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1244601&cid=280...](http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1244601&cid=28085625)

<comment><USER15> Sounds like something the Alioth performance game was meant for. I'd point him towards chameneos-redux; the current haskell implementation ([http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=ch...](http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=chameneosredux&lang=ghc&id=2)) is taking 3.73s to run, while the C champion ([http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=ch...](http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=chameneosredux&lang=gcc&box=1)) is taking 12.29s. The current C implementation is also small, so I would imagine that it qualifies as a "relatively simple task".

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The title is not fair at all. Slashdot introduced me to PG via "Beating the Averages" many years ago.

</comment><comment><USER10> Please help me to run this from ClozureMCL! The later is up and running, teepeedee2 is there but README not even mention how to start it up. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER17> Actually, the slashdot article is about LISP, all uppercased. It is the clueless variety of the language, not unlike PERL.

</comment><comment><USER18> Nothing could be faster today than nginx for static content. =) As for backends, even php in fastcgi mode along with eaccelerator would be faster, let alone memcached-balanced storages.

People at facebook not so stupid as people used to think.</comment>


Ask HN: What would you do with a newspaper-dot-com's built-in audience? - <AUTHOR> I work dev for a newspaper-dot-com that gets ~5M monthly uniques. If you were at a (local) newspaper-dot-com, and you had that built-in audience, I'm curious: What would you do with it? <comment><USER3> Write an article system that allows for multivariate A/B testing, performs multivariate regression and "decides" upon the version of the article that converts best. Then use that data for subsequent articles to suggest changes that convert better.

eg. {Wall Street Lays an Egg|Stock Market Crash 1928}

Today, {Chief Economist|Fed Chief|Money Czar} decided...

The system would randomly pick changes to the article and as it had more data it would more often pick the options that convert better. So lets say it found that "Wall Street lays an egg" and "Money Czar" converts best, then in the future when it sees Chief Economist the software could suggest that using Money Czar converts better and automatically add it as an option.

eg. Chief Economist -> {Chief Economist|Money Czar}

If you can get demographic information, lets say from facebook, then you're really golden as you can offer a service that will tailor an article to a demographic, or conversion goal. eg. articles that convert for car ads, or articles that convert for teenagers. With 5 million uniques you would probably have enough facebook connect users to get decent demographic data. Heck, if you had the facebook data you could tailor the article to the demographic profile of the user, so the system would use the general profile for unknown users and once demographic info was available would re-tailor the content. Put an API on the service and then charge a cent per milli "tailorized" articles.

<comment><USER4> Would you mind defining conversion?

<comment><USER3> In general from a lower value activity to a higher value activity. eg. from a reader of the paper to someone who clicks on an ad

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Build a local deals engine a la groupon.

Yah this is obvious, but the reason that this works so well for newspapers:

a) Newspapers have a built in sales force to sell local merchants on the concept.

b) Newspapers attract a hyper-local audience and building a list of people interested in local deals is a money printing asset.

c) Newspaper execs, consumers, and merchants are familiar with the model so it's not a hard sell to anybody.

<comment><USER6> Our local TV station has done this and has promoted it heavily via on air commercials. It looks like it has given a good boost to their floundering local craigslist knock-off.

<http://www.wcax.com/>

<comment><USER5> Just FYI that local deals engine is supported by <http://secondstreetmedia.com/> which does white label deals sites - <USER2> cheap and easy way to test.

<comment><USER7> There would probably be room for multiple start-ups in this field if they worked quickly. Likely one per country with a few in the US too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Newspapers have a huge amount of unrealized value. They are probably one of the most trusted sources of relevant local content available, even today. But if newspapers maintain business as usual and don't fully leverage this advantage, this power will continue to slowly erode with ocassional landslides when revolutionary tech companies emerge.

But I'm not here to bash newspaper, we're here to talk about how to fix it.

One of the hardest things about getting any business up and running is getting early users and visibility. Newspapers by default have the distribution platform built in. My recommendation is that newspapers move away (not completely) from relying exclusively on classified to make others money. And use their INCREDIBLY VALUABLE distribution platform to promote locally relevant services which they have equity in.

Andrew Mason from Groupon stated that the only real competition he'd really have is from newspapers or local radio stations. And he's right. But I haven't seen newspaper really doing this. (I believe Boston Globe did a deal with BuyWithMe but I haven't been in boston in a while).

The failure to really innovate on approaches like this is partly a function of the expertise of people who work for newspapers. You've got reporters, who know their city inside out, ad managers that know the local businesses and sell ad space, web devs who do layout for stories and awesome infographics, but you don't really have a "product development" team. Folks who's responsibility it is to create marketable products FOR the newspaper. I guess this is where you come in, but from your post, it looks like this is a side project for you.

I've thought about this some, and really think this is the way forward for them. There needs to be a big structural change in how revenue is generated and how the business is run. Classified alone won't cut it.

I've got one largely developed project and several early stage plans that I think would work well with a newspaper partnership, so if you'd like to talk, drop me a note (email in profile).

</comment><comment><USER9> Don't just sell ad-space, resell white-labeled products to your advertisers. Give them tools to improve the conversion from leads generated by your newspaper. I have ideas here. Sent you an email if you're interested in chatting.

</comment><comment><USER10> There are three major benefits presented by the internet to traditional media. First, the ability to offer far greater depth and breadth of coverage than could reasonably be offered in print. Second, the ability for the media to be instantly interactive. While letters to the editor did allow some interactivity, they aren't nearly as interactive as what can be done online. Finally, along the lines of interactivity, digital display should allow the media the ability to offer content that doesn't necessarily have to appeal to everyone; it should be much more feasible to target niche markets and offer content tailored to them, while profiting from the greater ability to monetize a niche market.

Having said that, my company, Barhopolis (check out <http://barsannapolis.com>), is currently looking to partner with newspapers to more easily reach an audience. This gives you a great breadth and depth of information, in the form of hundreds of local events updated daily. Interactivity in the form of reviews, comments, and photos shared by visitors. And, most importantly, it gives you access to a niche market that is easy monetizable. We'd also be able to incorporate current and future editorial content, as well as customize the branding. I'd love to talk to you more about it, my email is firstname.lastname@example.com.

<comment><USER11> By any chance, did you found a tax software company that was acquired?

I feel like I've met you after seeing Barhopolis.

<comment><USER10> That actually may be us. One of my business partners was involved in a company that produced tax and accounting software for Wang Mainframes that was later acquired by ManTech International.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Enable your local audience to become part of your news-gathering operation, perhaps even hosting citizen journalism pieces (clearly marked) that help bring hyper-local news that the newspaper wouldn't carry/couldn't resource.

Depends on your Metro, but take San Francisco - I rely on local blogs to tell me what is really going on in SoMa because the San Francisco Chronicle does such a poor job. I'd love to see those blogs get some distribution on SFGate.com (SF Chron's website).

</comment><comment><USER13> Engage them in one of the following ways 1 a. Urge them to become citizen journalists sending you video's etc on stuff which they observe or come across. 1 b. Run a column showcasing some of the work done by such citizen journalists. e.g. NDTV (Indian channel) runs a similar thing.

2\. Call for people interested in helping local community building.

3\. Ask for feedback on what can be done to improve the paper. for e.g. if Toronto Star would ask me this I would urge them to slim their Saturday paper from 200 pages to 10 pages so that I do not feel bad about not being able to read it even when its free

</comment><comment><USER14> Improve the classified ad system.

Our local paper has _horrible_ system. Make sure you take all major credit cards and paypal.

Improve the rummage sale finder. My wife loves rummage (garage sales) and the system is not good.

Our local paper is owned by a large syndicate and I can see the content management system is used by several other local newspapers.

Generally bring your paper into the 21st century. And for Zeus's sake, don't do those stupid pop unders that make me want to ban you in my firewall. It takes more CPU power to view to the paper's website then running a game!

</comment><comment><USER15> In all seriousness, if you've got a local-business section you think might benefit from statistics, we need to talk. (No, I'm not trying to sell you anything.) Email me: firstname.lastname@example.com.

</comment><comment><USER16> Extend the content of the print version rather than duplicate it. Conceptually this is what NPR does with their website. The Daily Show website extends broadcast content similarly for their interviews.

Audio is an excellent medium for journalism and today is nearly as portable dead trees for many people. It's potentially salable and suitable for longer news stories.

Have an advertising policy which respects your readers as readers. The biggest asset of newspapers is trust. Highest bidder ads about my credit score destroy it.

</comment><comment><USER17> leverage the userbase. build a social network around local news, and let your readers do most of your work for you. they'll bring you leads, distribution, etc.

host your own reddit? submitting all of the articles to it, and letting users crowdsource the headlines, as well as the comment curation. you can offer a more interactive experience and can engage readers beyond hit and run comments or avoid the youtubeish free for alls that sadly seem to dominate the discussions on most news articles. put the power in your reader's hands, because frankly you guys need all of the help you can get.

i really love the way comments sections works in the new york times, for example. it would be really interesting to try take that even further.

</comment><comment><USER18> newspaper readers is a natural social network. please build tools to allow them to easily communicate and expressing their views with each other. For example, letters to editors should also be a topic that others can contribute also. Ads should be voted and/or comments upon. News items can be submitted and voted on. etc...Good luck, I'm cheering for you.

</comment><comment><USER19> Get more embedded with adding value related to experiencing the local community. Let the barrier between online and offline fade.

</comment><comment><USER20> Leave them alone?? Why would you want to DO something with them?

</comment><comment><USER21> tl;dr a glorified affiliate merchandiser.

One tremendous asset papers have left is trust. They should leverage this trust to offer deals on high-quality products to their readers. If they vet the products to ensure they are high quality, they retain trust. If they retain reader trust, the goods producers benefit from association with the newspaper. Thus, they can offer good deals.

Papers already do this, inn a half-assed way. But leveraging their history of goodwill, built up over decades with readers, has to a great way forward for them.

</comment><comment><USER22> I would start crowd-sourcing articles and pay the authors a small amount when they get published.</comment>


Analyzing stylistic similarity amongst authors - <AUTHOR> http://markallenthornton.com/blog/stylistic-similarity/

<comment><USER2> This is very cool work! Some years ago, I was interested in text mining. I ended up playing with latent semantic analysis using Lucene etc. But that was a largely random choice, driven by the availability of open-source software and online discussion.

However, as cool as stylistic analysis is, I'm concerned about implications for online anonymity (which I consider valuable). But maybe the risk is limited by typical text length and false positive rate. I welcome suggestions for further reading.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very cool. I wonder why the author decided to use igraph within R instead of Python, as he was already using Python for the frequencies.

<comment><USER4> Hi - I'm the author. Glad you liked it! I'm afraid I had no particularly good reason for switching to R for the visualization other than that I'd used R for network graphs in the past so I already had code written.

<comment><USER3> I can understand that. I find it's easier to use igraph in R, especially if you're going to be doing visualizations. igraph is alright in IPython notebooks, but getting the visualizations to work is a bit of a pain, whereas it works out of the box in RStudio.

I don't even really like igraph for visualizations, though. It's great for graph algorithms like community detection, but for visualizations I'll usually jump into something interactive like visNetwork. Check out this slide, for example: [http://nicolewhite.github.io/neo4j-presentations/RNeo4j/Visu...](http://nicolewhite.github.io/neo4j-presentations/RNeo4j/Visualizations/Visualizations.html#32)

<comment><USER4> Yeah, igraph's visualizations aren't perfect. I've explored using d3 a bit in some of my other work (e.g. [http://markallenthornton.com/blog/price-of- flavor/](http://markallenthornton.com/blog/price-of-flavor/)). It's great for interactive graphs, but it starts to tax the browser pretty heavily for larger ones (though perhaps that's just my poor coding). Thanks for the visNetwork suggestion - I'll have to check that out!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


I started accepting 0-conf Bitcoin payments, and it was great - <AUTHOR> http://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/zeroconf-payments.html <comment><USER2> Interesting experiment . . . I'd love to see an update a month or so in.

<comment><AUTHOR> As it happens, this is about a month in!</comment></comment>


Why Medellín Is the Perfect City for Digital Nomads - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@dougmill/medell%C3%ADn-is-the-perfect-city-for-digital-nomads-2c1a7e8a52cd#.o7m9ik2za <comment><USER2> I love Medellin. I visited and fell in love. I pretty well travel and hope to spend some decent time in Medellin. Starting a business to get to point where I can sustain a life in Medellin.</comment>


WWDC 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/ <comment><USER2> A bit early, don't you think, given that the keynote doesn't start for another six and a half hours?

<comment><USER3> Pretty revealing that this does seem premature. This is named the developer conference. There ought to be plenty of topics to discuss for developers before hand. But really the compelling conversational piece is the specter of what they may release during it.

<comment><USER2> Well, if you're here to speculate, we already have the Xcode leak to talk about, as well as possible plans to move towards a new, more cross-platform UI framework. Also some subdued hardware rumors.

<comment><USER4> There was an instance of a Macbook with a 6-core cpu appearing on a benchmark site too today.

<comment><USER5> If only the benchmark sites could detect MBP with improved keyboard. It's a sad state when that's the only feature I look forward to nowadays lol.

<comment><USER3> It's highly frustrating. So many companies used to be able to make decent laptops. Now even Apple doesn't seem capable of keeping a straight face with their releases (in the sense that they don't seem to be targeting an end user that owns a Mac anymore)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Honest question to those attending. How do you pick which sessions to attend from the schedule list? They all sound so vague... [https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/schedule/#!/](https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/schedule/#!/)

<comment><USER7> Akin purchasing one of the new butterfly-keyboard Macbooks, treat it as an exciting and expensive gamble.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Watching this, I can't help but feel that Apple has committed fully to a very specific target audience, and that audience is mostly the global affluent.

While this is not entirely surprising, it's still fascinating to see how much emphasis they put on things that I, a working-class-but-now-tech-middle-class, truly don't care about. Until a year or two ago I felt Apple still targeted at least my audience, but recent developments feel strangely alienating.

The alternative explanation is that Apple is spinning its wheels and just doesn't know what to do next, but what with the rise of global uber-affluent (Chinese and Russian elites, for once, see: gold themed products), this doesn't seem like a bad choice considering the competition. It just feels saddening somehow.

<comment><USER9> Can you explain in more, concrete terms (with examples) what you are saying?

<comment><USER8> I'll admit it's more a feeling than something I'm convinced of, but I'll try.

The Airpods, Apple Watch, Apple TV and the HomePod are products that relatively few people around me bother with. It's mostly the few techies (that make well above median wage) and more well-off friends (couples or otherwise) that can afford these kinds of 'extravagances' or care enough to make the expense. But even those wouldn't bother with much of this because they lack the house/space or lifestyle for it. The slightly older iPads are sort of like this, but I know quite a few people who do have one of those lying around, I suppose because they're both cheap and useful enough.

The Apple Watch is perhaps the best example of how it feels Apple is shifting their focus. As far as I can remember, it's the first of their products that offered insanely expensive versions (and wristbands) that couldn't be justified as 'pro user stuff'. And even the cheapest version is one very few people I know would by unless they had plenty of disposable income (or bad with money / huge Apple fans). I mean, the thing is basically Apple's entry into the jewelry world.

There's a few other things that made me feel like they were changing direction, but they've slipped my mind. And again, it's more of a feeling than something I'm utterly convinced of. I do mean to investigate this properly sometime, because aside from a slight 'sadness' I also find it fascinating.

(let me add that perhaps it's more that, in a broader sense, the 'tech/gadget/digital lifestyle' world seems to be moving/aiming upwards in society somehow. I remember reading an interesting BBC article that argued the 'techies', who I suppose are both the creators and primary audience of a lot of this stuff, are becoming a class of their own, and one economically above what we would traditionally call the working class. maybe that has something to do with it.)

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure how large of a timeline you're looking at Apple with, but in my experience, they've always catered to the "wealthy", or those who didn't spend their money well.

They've always been a company that made beautiful hardware, the kind that serves an aesthetic purpose in addition to it's function. Far cheaper alternatives exist, but that's never been Apple's goal.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, that's a fair point, but my feeling is mostly that they've become _more_ catering to wealthier over time. Could very well be I'm wrong.

I'd say for timeline the Apple Watch (so about three years ago?) is probably when I started feeling this way. This is also around the period they released their weirdly pretentious/impractical cylindrical Mac Pro, and moved to the new, generally-disliked-by-the-pro-audiences MacBook Pro's (to the point where I'm about to buy a 2015 model in the near future).

EDIT: actually, the new MacBooks are a great example of why I feel there's been a 'shift' of sorts. The whole things seems to mostly aimed at the affluent than the pro users: thinness at the expense of everything else, a touchbar that looks cool but is the last thing pro users want, and removal of ports which strikes me as exactly the kind of thing that wouldn't bother a fancy executive with a gold iWatch, but cause major trouble for most power users.

It's like they decided the original MacBook Air customer is now their primary one, or at least more important than before.

<comment><USER9> Ahh, I see your point. While they have generally been marketed as a "premium" product, it's really the rise of these "pretentious/impractical" products + features that indicates their catering to a wealthy / elite class.

Interesting. Could be as wealth has become more striated, they've decided to double down on the affluent.

<comment><USER8> Another less cynical reason why Apple might be 'changing' is that their usual approach to things just doesn't work as well as it used to.

The usual approach Apple takes, or so it seems to me, is to first release a 'luxury' iteration of a product and eventually make it accessible to a broader market. I remember the first iPhone felt like a bit of an excess, and few people around me bought it other than die-hard fans and people with more disposable income (often techies). But around the 3GS (I think?) this changed and it became a mass-market thing.

The same happened with iPods, and the MacBook Air is an even better example. The first iteration of the latter was clearly just for the fancy few, but eventually its innovations (unibody, thinness) became core to their more affordable range.

The iPod and iPhone and MacBook are the kinds of products everyone needs, wants, and is willing to pay a decent chunk of money for. But already with the iPad and Apple TV that seems more difficult. And the latest iPhones also seem to suffer from a lack of proper innovation that has mass-market appeal. A watch or, say, a car strike me as even more difficult to turn into a smash hit. Same goes for smart home stuff.

So perhaps it's not so much that Apple is intentionally targeting the affluent, but rather that their later products are stuck in a kind of first- iteration-for-the-fancy-people limbo.

I don't know whether this is lack of creativity on their part, or an actual issue. Probably a bit of both, but I have to admit that I also find it difficult to come up with an iPhone style innovation or new product that wouldn't suffer from this problem. I suppose something AR glasses could be a thing someday: start with luxury versions, Apple Watch style, that end up having mass-market appeal in a way the Watch clearly doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Apple clearly has a sense of humour here. Checking the schedule, there is clearly something FISHY going on. I mean, no squidding around here...

</comment><comment><USER11> WWDC's website feels so bland compared to the Google I/O website. Monotone design, awkward text positioning.. there's just no excitement. Ditto for recent Apple keynotes.

There isn't anything new anymore. This isn't the Apple we knew a decade-or-so ago. It feels like Apple peaked around then, sad! They just don't try anymore.

I for one, really want to see Apple do something creative (but before they do anything new, PLEASE FIX IOS NOTIFICATIONS.. THEY'RE A JOKE COMPARED TO ANDROID)!

<comment><USER12> >PLEASE FIX IOS NOTIFICATIONS.. THEY'RE A JOKE COMPARED TO ANDROID

What? They way more usable than Android's mess.

<comment><USER13> said no-one ever

edit: clearly some people share your sentiment, but whilst introduction of iOS notifications were a relief, I can't understand why anyone would think they are better than Android.

It's a commonly shared sentiment at least that Android notifications are leagues ahead of iOS.

My biggest gripe is the lack of grouping, and I do miss the fact Android used to give me 'active' notifications such as a progress bar on the download of a Spotify album, for example.

<comment><USER14> Aside from grouping, iOS notifications are better for me.

It feels like you control the messages you get, how they're positioned, what priority they get etc; much more on iOS. I'm sure this is actually release dependent, I can only speak from the old CM and modern Samsung ROMs.. but iOS generally >feels< a lot nicer, like I'm in control; non-removal notifications, general frequency and lack of notification location control contribute to this.

<comment><USER15> Newer Android version do bring a lot of control, you can disallow applications to send specific types of notifications and set up how the notification will be made notifiable; vibration, tone, none at all, blink LED, etc.

You can set priorities too IIRC.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google's Project Fi cell phone service is simple, until it's not - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/8/9118283/googles-project-fi-cell-phone-service-is-simple-until-its-not <comment><USER2> Great writeup. I was eager to switch to Fi myself and mad when my friends started getting invites and I didn't. But then the day came when I got my invite and I started reading what it would do to my google voice # and red flags kept going up and I ended up not switching.

One thing not explicitly covered here too is I actually don't want to lose either my carrier number nor my google voice # and you do need to lose one of the two. I've had the same cell #, albeit most people have my GV #, since ~1999 and I don't want to lose that or my 6+ year old GV #. The "solution" for me was to port my GV # to a different google account and then get a new GV # for Fi but I opted to just keep Verizon for now..</comment>


Robinhood malformed ACH caused thousands of failed transactions - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/RobinHood/comments/d0fni0/funds_reversal/ <comment><AUTHOR> Some context: All Robinhood funds transfers (withdrawal and deposits) failed overnight because of a malformed ACH file.

Deposits that failed were automatically charged a $9 fee and had instant deposit capability frozen.

This is particularly devastating to folks who were depositing funds, who were automatically subject to margin calls.</comment>