Real time view of SF Muni vehicles - <AUTHOR> http://supermuni.com/

<comment><USER2> A tiny suggestion: the field where you type the route should say "Or type it and click go", not just "Or type it and click." It's a little clearer. I see that you fully spell it out at the very top, but I skipped past that, and I suspect a lot of other people will, too, because it's so small.

This is impressive, though -- good job.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's really awesome. What did you use to build this? What inspired you to build this? My idea generation brain cells could use a jolt.

</comment><comment><USER4> Where are you getting the data? The UI is pretty bad (or maybe just doesn't support Chrome?) but still better than other sites/apps.

<comment><AUTHOR> The UI is designed for mobile!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is really cool. I can't believe nobody's made this before.

<comment><USER6> NextBus has something similar, but it's java, so no-go for mobile.

[http://www.nextbus.com/predictor/publicMap.shtml?a=sf-muni&#...</a>

<comment><USER7> They have a mobile app version. I've been using it for years. You get yellow arrows instead of buses, and it's route specific. Sometimes busses disappear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Where is the data from? How reliable is it?

<comment><USER9> A quick inspection of the source code indicates that the data is being fetched from NextBus. (Examine <http://supermuni.com/js/services.js> )

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nice app mark. How long did this take you?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1 day of hacking and 90 days of muni frustration :)</comment></comment>


Brad Feld Discusses The Pending Accelerator Bubble  - <AUTHOR> http://infochachkie.com/techstars-brad-feld-startup-accelerator-bubble/

<comment><USER2> I'll believe there's a bubble in tech accelerators when I see too many of them here in RTP. Here, we still aren't close to having enough accelerators, angel investors and seed-stage funds to help worth entrepreneurs get funded and get off the ground.

When I see this phenomenon of (supposedly) "easy money" for startups happen here, then I might believe that something extraordinary is going on.</comment>


Twitter Drops The Ecosystem Hammer: Don't Try To Compete With Us On Clients - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/11/twitter-ecosystem-guidelines/

<comment><USER2> "We need to move to a less fragmented world, where every user can experience Twitter in a consistent way." What utter bullshit. As though any user has ever been confused by a multitude of interfaces for something that consists of: a name and a couple lines of text.

<comment><USER3> "We control the user experience" has become the slogan of monopolists everywhere!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like how the second paragraph of the quote ends "...ensure a high bar is maintained."

I am taking it out of context but it seems like a good pun for the dickbar.

</comment><comment><USER5> While it's unfortunate that they're setting the precedent of discouraging certain uses of their API, it's also understandable. They're right to want their product to stay consistent and avoid fragmentation.

The irony of it is that they acquired their official client.

</comment><comment><USER6> If Twitter wants cool apps, it better get around to building/supporting/documenting the @anywhere-to-oauth bridge, something Facebook (js-api to oauth) has had for a long, long time.

</comment><comment><USER3> So, is an agregating client like seesmic still allowed?

<http://seesmic.com/>

Edit: I see Seesmic mentioned as favored but the description sounds a lot different than what they describe their client as doing (that is, combining tweets with other alerts, something one might imagine would stand in the way of twitter's precious user experience).

<comment><USER7> Same thing with Trillian, which I use. I won't be using a standalone Twitter client for windows, so I guess it just means I won't be using Twitter if they remove the API access for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is total blogspam. Original message at [http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-api- announce/browse_t...](http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-api- announce/browse_thread/thread/c82cd59c7a87216a), discussed at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2314791>.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why was the direct link story from earlier today deleted?

<comment><USER10> probably because It was a dupe of <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2314791>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Twitter is a long con just like many other successful businesses, for example Google.

<comment><USER12> Right. A company providing a free service is probably looking to monetize your data, which is definitely a con job. Clearly you are being robbed by not monetizing your personal information directly.</comment></comment>


Electric scooters aren't as eco-friendly as they seem, study finds - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/02/electric-scooter-eco-friendly-greenhouse-gases <comment><USER2> "...traveling by scooter produces more greenhouse gas emissions per mile than traveling by bus, bicycle, moped or on foot"

I can't find the source study - but even so I'd have to see some caveats on bus + moped (2 cycle are brutal pollution wise).

I know there's a lot of hate for e-scooters, but I really like them. They're a nice transportation option that supplants taking uber/lyft in many cases and definitely an improvement over cars.

<comment><USER3> It looks like the study is linked? [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab2da8](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab2da8)

Also, it includes the scooter company driving around at the end of the day to pick up all the scooters. Obviously not applicable if you are using your own personal scooter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Prior discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20597711](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20597711)

Something I pointed out yesterday is that these articles are focusing on greenhouse gases. We still have a major pollution problem in large cities. Reducing this alone makes scooters worth it, IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER5> _Shared_ electric scooters are undoubtedly pretty damned dirty, due to the very short working life of the scooter and the fuel use in collecting and returning the scooters.

 _Owning_ an electric scooter looks pretty damned clean - ~200kg/CO2e to manufacture the scooter, plus 0 - 300g to generate enough electricity to charge the battery.

</comment><comment><USER6> Still 1000x better than cars, and anything that gets people out of their cars is great.

<comment><USER7> Expect you many need to literally manufacture 1,500x as many scooters. 'The average vehicle went 163.2 miles over 92 trips during its lifetime' [https://qz.com/1561654/how-long-does-a-scooter-last-less- tha...](https://qz.com/1561654/how-long-does-a-scooter-last-less-than-a-month- louisville-data-suggests/)

So, odd as it may seem, electric cars may be better for the environment.

<comment><USER8> The average bicycle isn't any better. Huffy knew this and purposely designed their bikes for a lifetime of 50 miles. We should get rid of them too.

<comment><USER9> I've never seen any bikes that has a lifetime of 50 miles. But I'm all for anti-planned obsolescence laws. Maybe just forcing manufacturers to put the expected life of the device next to it would help ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just buy your own e-scooter or electric unicycle. Solves most of these issues and takes stress off of existing public transit (not to mention personal electric transit is almost always faster than public transit during rush- hour).

<comment><AUTHOR> > Just buy your own e-scooter or electric unicycle

...or stick with either a (kick) scooter or standard bicycle? Definitely better for the environment and almost certainly better for your health, too.

<comment><USER10> Unless you want to show up to work a sweaty mess. I have a bike I ride for exercise as well, but commuting really only makes sense on an electric scoot / EUC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "the materials it took to manufacture the frame, wheels and battery"

How is this worse than a moped? Silly article.

<comment><USER12> The scooters have very poor durability. They're lasting on the order of 100-200 miles in rental fleets. The study actually underestimates this effect and assumes that they last about 5x longer than they empirically do. Bird and the scooter manufacturers are trying to address this by making beefier scooters that don't fold with bigger batteries, but the abuse they take in a dockless rental fleet and from having such small wheels make durability a big challenge.

A moped typically lasts 10,000-100,000 miles, so even though it's much heavier, the energy and cost are amortized over a far longer period.

<comment><USER13> There is no way the average lifespan is only 100-200 miles. That would make the cost per mile 2-3 dollars which is completely unrealistic.

<comment><USER12> [https://www.google.com/amp/s/qz.com/1561654/how-long- does-a-...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/qz.com/1561654/how-long-does-a- scooter-last-less-than-a-month-louisville-data-suggests/amp/)

"The average vehicle went 163.2 miles over 92 trips during its lifetime"

[https://www.theinformation.com/articles/hit-by-big-loss- bird...](https://www.theinformation.com/articles/hit-by-big-loss-bird- seeks-300m-in-new-funds)

They lost $100 million on 40 million in revenue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Cars/bikes etc don't have carbon footprints to manufacture? This is an idiotic comparison.

<comment><USER15> Unless you're buying some really crappy cars or bikes, they generally last for several years or decades, compared to the estimated month-6 months lifespan of e-scooters. (Bird has newer scooters coming out that are supposed to last almost a year. _Almost a year._ For an average of 3 rides a day.)

When you're arguing that your mode of transport is green but it only lasts a few weeks with relatively sparse usage, then the manufacturing carbon footprint is absolutely relevant. When the mode of transport lasts for decades and the manufacturing footprint is spread out amongst millions of others vehicles, the manufacturing footprint isn't very relevant.

<comment><USER14> You have a very good and valid point that I completely missed as I was fooled by the category it resides in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What are your guys thoughts on Revel, the electric moped that you can use in Brooklyn. They seem to be more robust, thus potentially stay on the road longer? [https://gorevel.com/new-york/](https://gorevel.com/new-york/)

</comment><comment><USER17> I'd love to see cities roll out docks for the scooters, where they could charge while parked.</comment>


Cambridge University Launches Archive of Aerial Photos Going Back to 1945 - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/feb/22/historical-google-earth-project-changing-britain-aerial-photography <comment><USER2> So much potential here.

A few years ago I put together a project overlaying aerial photography of Denver from 1933 on modern satellite imagery.

Check it out if you're interested [https://oldcity.io](https://oldcity.io)

Edit: I have the imagery to do the bay area in 1939 too, just have not gotten around to it.

<comment><USER3> This is awesome. How did you work out the position of the maps so they overlay correctly?

<comment><USER2> Thanks! It was a lot of fun and simultaneously a big headache.

The original bounds came in a shape file from the city's open data catalog [1].

After that it becomes a multi step process that has to be repeated at each zoom level.

So say zoom level 20:

\+ Size the image where 1 px = 1 mercator pixel @ zoom level

\+ "Seat" the image. Map tiles are usually 256x256 and your large image probably does not align correctly. i.e. probably (width % 256 != 0 && height % 256 != 0). So you have to calculate those offsets and add them as a border to the huge image.

\+ Tile the large image into 256x256px tiles. (~240k of them at zoom level 19!, 60k at 18 etc etc.)

\+ Repeat @ next zoom level

\+ Store all the raster tiles on S3 and put CloudFront in front

\+ Have your app implement a custom tile overlay (iOS, Android, GMaps JS all support this)

\+ ???

\+ Profit (just kidding, this costs me money)

There might be a better way to do this. I couldn't find a lot of good resources when I set out on the project so I made it up as I went along.

[1] [https://www.denvergov.org/opendata](https://www.denvergov.org/opendata)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Direct link to the photo archive: [https://www.cambridgeairphotos.com/](https://www.cambridgeairphotos.com/)

<comment><USER5> thank you

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Google Earth supports historical imagery, and it'd be neat if these images could be added.

Based on the age I suspect they're missing a lot of necessary meta-data, though. Maybe it could be crowd sourced in a "captcha" somehow?

<comment><USER7> I didn't know this... how can you access historical images in Google Earth?

<comment><USER8> Here's how: [https://support.google.com/earth/answer/148094?hl=en](https://support.google.com/earth/answer/148094?hl=en)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What an interesting archive! Pity the website has the most terrible UX, whereby it's impossible to browse the pictures easily or search them well. Or at least if it is, they don't make it easy to figure out how.

</comment><comment><USER10> Impressive pictures, it is strange to see colour pictures from the forties in focus, compared to all of my family's blurred snaps.

Good though the pictures are the UI for this website really doesn't do the images justice, with 1/2 million to be added I assume that a more enticingly navigable website is in the works.

Text search for towns would be helpful by year, or via points on a map. Paging through images in no apparent order 10 at a time through 170 pages gets me climbing up the wall.

<comment><USER10> Ah, here's a map navigation of the pictures just in case anyone else is gingerly dismounting the wall:

[https://www.cambridgeairphotos.com/map/](https://www.cambridgeairphotos.com/map/)

Now slowly banging head against aforementioned wall

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> [https://www.historicaerials.com/viewer](https://www.historicaerials.com/viewer) is amazing for this purpose. They've aggregated decades of aerials and topo maps covering most of the US.

A great way to analyze urban development patterns and answer local historical questions.

</comment><comment> 52-6F-62 I enjoyed being able to see my grandparents' region from the sky above Derry and County Down (N.I.) before they moved here.

I'm happily anticipating what's to be seen around Largs and Fairlie Moor (Ayrshire) as well as Uphall/Broxburn/Kirkliston (near Edinburgh) for my other grandparents!

Thanks for posting this!

Edit: typos/grammar

</comment><comment><USER12> Slight aside: I was searching previously and came across a few different archives - including the UK's National Archive - with historic aerial photo collections. It seemed like there was much needless duplication.

I wonder if the people involved here considered adding the images to an existing aerial photo archive?

</comment><comment><USER13> Good job!</comment>


Ask HN: Do US companies regret entering China? - <AUTHOR> Some US companies flourish in China (e.g. KFC, Costco) while most end up being defeated by local rivals due to multitude of reasons.  For those that entered, has the money and effort been worth it?  What ended up costing more of your time than expected? <comment><USER2> Abro certainly regretted it: [https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/03/15/702643451/epis...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/03/15/702643451/episode-900-the- stolen-company)

<comment><USER3> But they never actually entered the Chinese market. They just had a counterfeiter that was based in China. And, through the help of Chinese officials, they were actually able to shutdown the counterfeit manufacturer. Tim, the ABRO rep from that podcast, even claims that the Chinese government is doing a great job at protecting foreign IP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I know of a Swedish company that made a deal with a Chinese company, the Swedish company no longer exist.

<comment><USER5> Funny, I know of a Finnish company who placed as its CEO an ex-executive of an American company.

The company then adopted said American company's platform, had consecutive huge losses (for the first time in decades), and was forced to sell several divisions to the same American company...

<comment><USER6> Nokia, right?

<comment><USER5> I can neither confirm or deny this

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Micron regrets it, essentially having a significant amount of their chip IP stolen by Chinese firms they were involved with one way or another.

<comment> dis-sys Please read more recent news before posting out of date info not useful for anyone. Micron is actively seeking more technical cooperation with Chinese companies completing in the NAND business. Source here [1].

[1] [http://www.businesskorea.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=3...](http://www.businesskorea.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=35665)

<comment><USER7> I read the article you linked, and don't see where that is incongruent to what I said.

Micron has stated they regret the situation and how they were forced to do business in China (which many other companies have expressed too, e.g. forced JV's etc). China is a substantial amount of Micron's sales, so they cannot walk away and they have to find a way to mange the situation and still protect the company. They are a business, having regret doesn't mean you take your balls and go home, they need to make money for their shareholders so they will do what is required.

To be clear, the US opened a trade investigation last year into it [1], and China opened it's own anti-trust style investigation as retaliation [2].

[1] [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-justice-china- espiona...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-justice-china- espionage/u-s-indicts-chinese-taiwan-firms-for-targeting-micron-trade-secrets- idUSKCN1N65R2)

[2] [https://www.investors.com/news/technology/micron- technology-...](https://www.investors.com/news/technology/micron-technology- stock-china-antitrust-probe/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Who ever regretted training their replacement?

<comment><USER9> And why make China come here to steal your IP when you can just ship it to them directly?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It would be nice to show statistics, isolated cases are rarely really interesting to discuss. I've been in China recently and there are plenty of foreign brands, the most successful ones are those who adapt their message, naming, colours, etc.. to the Chinese taste, which of course should be expected.

<comment><AUTHOR> KFC famously sold congee on their menu and Costco only sells foreign made goods (ie. made in Canada/USA) in China.

<comment><USER11> The Costco part is not true. There is definite evidence the recently-opened Costco in Shanghai sells Chinese Moutai (or at least sold at its grand opening, not sure what happens after they got snapped off the shelves). This is not specific to China either; it is common for Costco to sell goods local to its stores, not just made in Canada/USA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In "AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order", Kai-Fu Lee (former president of Google China) says many US companies don't give enough resources to their Chinese branch and that's why they fail. The Chinese internet ecosystem being so different than the Western one.

For example, Western users are used to refining their search query and clicking a single link among the results. Whereas Chinese users click most of the links and are used to them opening in different tabs.

However, it took months of convincing to get Google to create a new tab when clicking a link in search results.

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

</comment><comment><USER13> Google probably regretted it: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China)

</comment><comment><USER14> Prior to my involvement in my current company, they were discussing setting up production in China. After my involvement in the company, I have no idea how they thought they could pull it off. For whatever reason, they did not do it.

Rumor is a Chinese owned company is already ripping our products off; I can only imagine if we had production occurring there.

</comment><comment><USER15> This will be a very interesting topic to talk about for me, I beg and hope that it will not be subject to "automatic" deranking.

The topic getting controversial, by far does not indicate it being unworthy of discussion.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, this submission is already flagged. I am genuinely interested to know. And it wasn't meant as an anti-China question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Depends on the business model. Some businesses cannot operate without outsourcing manufacturing to China. China also has more potential for growth than US and Europe combined.

</comment><comment><USER17> For a holistic overview it's useful to read Chamber of Commerce surveys, there's a recent one by CGCC (China General Chamber of Commerce - US). The basic gist is that growing market and financial motives play biggest role in something like 85% of respondents. Kind of no-shit take away. Don't rely on cherry picked anecdotes of XYZ failed ventures or attributing "regret" because some IP got stolen. There was an interview covering a recent American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai poll of US data on top priorities for current trade talks and 0.4% of respondents think force tech transfer is an important issue. Which should be obvious since the vast majority of foreign businesses operating in China don't have extremely technical IP that can't be easily replicated, or have very well funded and vocal lobbying groups state side, or is an legitimate intersection of commerce and security with respect to dual use technology, or even that the cost of stolen IP is not factored into these business decisions in the first place. Many US companies are not in China as supply chain operators, they're there to meet demands of Chinese consumers and serve Chinese market to the point where China is a significant share of their revenue. Another example, latest U.S. China Business Council's (USCBC) survey tldr was basically US companies overwhelmingly convinced Chinese companies receive (alledged) unfair state subsidies but they literally don't care because even with the tradewar, 97% of respondents said their China operations were profitable which is UP from 85% in 2015. There's also good podcasts like The Trade Guys (CSIS), Sinica / ChinaEconTalk that covers these topics by actual subject matter experts.

E: I think it's important to highlight that while that data suggests profit seeking US companies overwhelmingly do not regret entering China, that doesn't mean it's beneficial to long term US interests. You have to understand that on paper, China - US trade accounts for a few percentage points of each other's GDP, and indeed both economies are actually not very trade dependent. Many companies and people will still get hurt, the pain will be disproportionately applied, but this tradewar is mostly political theater that both leaders are exploiting since there is no existential risk.

</comment><comment><USER18> Why US companies specifically?

<comment><USER19> Some HN'ers forget that not all of HN is from the US. Not too werid given the amount of local SF news on here. OP likely means "non-Chinese" or "Western".</comment></comment>


Is it too late to split Windows 8 into desktop and tablet versions? - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/101097-windows-8-is-it-too-late-to-split-it-into-desktop-and-tablet-versions

<comment><USER2> If you want the pure Metro version then just buy an ARM tablet. The battery will last longer, and none of that awkward old-fashioned desktop software will run on it, so you won't have to be bothered by it!

<comment><USER3> I think the bigger issue isn't that arm customers don't want a desktop, It's that desktop customers don't want to be forced to use an ill fitting touch interface.

<comment><USER2> Then don't run any Metro apps!

I can happily continue to run all of my existing apps without having to touch the Windows App Store, or any other locked down stuff.

The only downside is, apparently, the launch screen. If they don't see sense and allow a launch direct to the Desktop then I'll be annoyed.

<comment><USER4> I bet 3rd parties will provide a solution if that's not possible out of the box.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you wanted a tablet that had no compatibility with Windows - why would you get a Windows tablet?

You are stuck in the problem of either adding a 'bit' of backwards compatibility until you get into the state of supporting 1980s netware apps because some customer in one focus group mentioned them. Or you deliberately change things to differentiate it.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. This is why Windows 8's future is still very uncertain. If it wants to compete in the tablet market, it will have to be on ARM, no ifs or buts about it. But the problem is Windows 8 is starting from scratch on ARM, not unlike WP7 in the smartphone market. So why would anyone still want a "Windows 8 tablet" over an iPad or even an Android tablet, which would still have many more apps that work on it than Windows 8 for ARM? There's not a very big compelling reason to want it.

<comment><USER5> Corporates will buy it because it's Windows.

Average Joe will buy it because MSFT has a massive ad budget

Of the rest; (money>sense) > iPad : Android ;

<comment><USER7> I think you meant:

      (money > sense) ? iPad : Android ;

i.e. the 2nd '>' should've been a '?'</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Domain Models - Thinking differently in Scala & Clojure - <AUTHOR> http://debasishg.blogspot.com/2010/09/domain-models-thinking-differently-in.html

<comment><USER2> Interesting post showing 2 approaches both leading to good composition.

The Scala version is particularly noteworthy, as it is quite a good example of OOP which gets rid of inheritence as a pattern of code extension and uses mixin and function composition instead. This is going into the right direction.</comment>


Menu Matters - <AUTHOR> https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/menu-matters-on-alison-pearlmans-may-we-suggest/ <comment><USER2> Sure, menus are a linear experience disguised as choices.

Rich 60 year olds have been eating at restaurants for decades, though, and maybe only using smartphones and software for a few years.

This is a big deal when the average age of a congressman is 55 and senator 60. Why?

Menus are a kind of retail that manipulates your psychology. So is Amazon, and in some senses YouTube and Facebook. Those things have a bigger impact in our lives than menus, but people barely understand how software works.

If you wanted to communicate to a congressman (or the public really) why profit-optimizing collaborative filtering looks like a series of choices, but is really an experience that tells you what to do, good luck using that abstract algorithmic language.

But a restaurant menu? At least they'll know what the hell you are talking about.

Ironically, the most relevant part of this piece for the software audience will probably be, "Oh great, I can explain to investors how my product recommendation engine funnels people into the best-paying affiliate products, even though it's disguised as an informed choice, by using the metaphor of a menu."

</comment><comment><USER3> I remember the first time I saw "Scottish Salmon" on a menu. It was the only salmon dish on the menu, so I'm not exactly sure why they were trying to differentiate it. Was it just to justify a higher price for it? What other adjective command a price premium?

What I did know is that more important than where a salmon is from (whether it be from Alaska or Norway) is if it is wild or farm raised. The fact that it was called out as "Scottish" but not "wild" made me think this wasn't going to be a particularly good dish.

Finally, I thought, did any 3rd party actually verify that this salmon was, in fact, from Scotland? Would the restaurant get into any trouble if I happened to be a super salmon taster and determined that this salmon was in fact from somewhere else and alerted the authorities?

All in all I was surprisingly disconcerted by this one little adjective on the menu, and I don't think that was the restaurateur's intent.

Anyway, if menus are of interest to you, the New York Public Library has a digital collection of menus going back to the 1800s: [https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/the- buttolph...](https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/the-buttolph- collection-of-menus#/?tab=navigation)

<comment><USER4> > The fact that it was called out as "Scottish" but not "wild" made me think > this wasn't going to be a particularly good dish.

Might not the perception of the average client and not oneself be more important in determining the intentions of whoever wrote that menu? I imagine that if you're going to put one adjective in your dish name, "Scottish" might elicit a better perception in more clients than "Wild".

I agree with your perception, though. From a client's point of view, "Wild" should be better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > helped differentiate a modern dining concept — the restaurant — from the > coarser table d'hôte, where your choices depended on whether the proprietor > liked you...

And as is customary with fashion, the table d'hôte is now an exclusive, where it can be used to connote "freshness" (itself another concept called out in this lovely essay).</comment>


Pika/pack – NPM packaging, reimagined - <AUTHOR> https://www.pikapkg.com/blog/introducing-pika-pack/ <comment><USER2> First, I really like the idea behind this. All the babel rollup typescript stuff is a big mess when trying to publish a package.

That said, I feel like the authors made some choices that make their lives easier at the cost of having shipped a virtually useless tool. For example:

        - The standard typescript builder can only generate ES2018
        - The web bundler can only generate ES modules

These two together means that your package won't work on anywhere but the most modern browsers and Node versions, except if your package's users somehow configure their Webpack (or whatever) to run your module through Babel (totally beating the purpose of all this). This is exactly the kind of complication I'd want tools like these to _solve for me_.

Sure, there's a place for the "this will only work on cutting edge environments", but i'm not sure a tool intended for publishing reusable libraries is that place.

Additionally, a core feature I miss is the ability to have different entry- points for different environments (eg one for node and one for browsers). My library uses the DOM for some heavy lifting and imports JSDOM on Node for that - I'd not want to ship JSDOM to the browser and bloat the download for no reason.

Hope all this improves, I could see myself using this.

<comment><USER3> To be honest, ditching IE support is hardly "cutting edge".

<comment><USER4> YMMV but [http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market- share/desktop/world...](http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market- share/desktop/worldwide) points to IE at 5.74%, FF at 9.5%, Chrome at 70.88% in January 2019. Of course, you should look at your own user logs to determine usage statistics, but many government sites still recommend using IE.

<comment><USER5> Also internationally, some countries have disproportionate IE usage and dropping it basically drops that market. In some market segments, IE users also spend more $$$ per user because of corporate customers. It can be really expensive to give up. If your market is young affluent westerners with MacBook pros it might be easier

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Soo... I thought this was a competitor to Yarn or NPM itself from the title... It's not. It's for publishing NPM packages. It'd be nice if the title of this was what they have on their site as it more accurately describes what this is: "npm package building, reimagined."

<comment><USER7> Strange, the title felt pretty accurate to me. I had a good sense of what I was about to read (basically guessed it would handle TypeScript from the title), and then was impressed with the additional features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've always thought that we should publish our sources to NPM, then during the `npm install` phase, the sources would be compiled (if needed) to your project's settings.

<comment><USER9> Then you'd have to have your compiler (like typescript or babel) be dependencies instead of devDependencies.

<comment><USER8> That's not exactly what I meant. I was thinking something along the lines of a more universal way for npm to serve up compatible code without the package publisher having to pre-compile everything to make it compatible with every possible usage scenario. I'm not exactly sure how that would work, but I think it's a bad idea to push all that to package publishers .

<comment><USER10> That's a cool idea, assuming you mean something like:

npm install some-library -type umd

and have npm server handle this automatically.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fast Fuzzy Text Search in Postgresql With Phoenix and Ecto - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cometaworks/fast_fuzzy_search_in_phoenix_and_ecto <comment><AUTHOR> Author/Poster here. If anyone has any feedback, questions in general or anything I'm more than happy to answer. PR's welcome if you spot any errors :)</comment>


Prison vs. Harvard in an unlikely debate - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/an-unlikely-debate-prison-vs-harvard-1442616928 <comment><USER2> This isn't far off from how the Putnam competition started: In 1933, five years before it launched as an annual competition between universities, the first Putnam mathematics competition was held between Harvard and the United States Military Academy. Allegedly nobody thought the Army had much of a chance, but unlike the students from Harvard they took the competition seriously, and as in this latest competition the underdogs won.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was expecting to read about a debate on the relative merits of going to prison, or to Harvard.

<comment><USER4> I was thinking it was the article about the merits of a Harvard education versus being a prison guard. [http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527487041322045762854...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704132204576285471510530398)

<comment><USER5> Classic example of ignoring the std deviation and using mean instead of median as if it holds any significance given a very unusual distribution curve. Its truly a textbook example.

Selectivity in lower socioeconomic class jobs is hardly limited to great paying jobs; there are similar stories about McDonalds being more selective in hiring than the Harvard acceptance rate.

There's also a cause/effect malfunction in that kids going to Harvard is an effect of getting rich, but getting rich is an effect of being a prison guard in CA, two entirely different concepts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Republican politicians () argued that many law-abiding families struggled to afford college and shouldn't have pay for convicted criminals to get degrees"\- while this opinion has merit, it shows again Republicans have no compassion, it's a paradox that many called themselves Christian when in the Bible Jesus explicitly commanded to help the imprisoned.

<comment><USER7> Surely you see the difference between helping the poor vs. taking other people's money and using part of it to help the poor.

<comment><USER8> Surely you see the difference between just taking other people's money vs requiring everyone above a certain means to pay into the social contract that brings order to chaos and keeps us from Darwinian anarchy?</comment></comment></comment>


Oklo's Jacob DeWitte on Building a Nuclear Reactor People Want - <AUTHOR> http://themacro.com/articles/2016/03/jacob-dewitte-oklo-interview/ <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11238850](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11238850).</comment>


Random Video Game Titles (via Markov Chains) - <AUTHOR> http://namuol.github.io/game-title-generator

<comment><AUTHOR> Just something I made to introduce myself to Markov Chains.

The actual algorithm should work well for any sort of title, so I generalized that bit into a library (javascript): [https://github.com/namuol/titlegen](https://github.com/namuol/titlegen)</comment>


Measuring data structure sizes: Firefox (C++) vs. Servo (Rust) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2015/06/03/measuring-data-structure-sizes-firefox-c-vs-servo-rust/ <comment><AUTHOR> A draft of this blog post was on Hacker News a couple of days ago ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9640367](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9640367)) but the discussion ended up mostly being about the fact that it was a draft that wasn't intended for wide distribution.

In contrast, this is the final version and it _is_ intended for wide distribution. So please, discuss away! :)</comment>


Coming Soon to Pastebot: Music in the Background - <AUTHOR> http://tapbots.com/blog/pastebot/pastebot-music-in-background

<comment><USER2> I'm a happy Pastebot customer and use it all the time, but I don't think I'll be using this feature. It's ingenious, but it just feels like the kind of hack I associate with less UX-focused platforms.

I'm actually kind of glad the silent version wasn't approved, though. As logically strange as having to play music while using clipboard sync is, having another music app interrupt that sync is almost worse.

I'd rather Tapbots had gone the Task Completion API route, where they can run whatever they want in the background for ten minutes (what the Colloquy IRC client uses). That kind of functionality has an intuitive, physical analog in timed light switches; one can't say as much for a light switch that requires the stereo to be playing.

Apple really needs to increase that time limit, though.

<comment><USER3> Task completion is unreliable for background processes. It's meant for finishing something quickly before an app goes into an inactive state. The OS is likely to kill the app at any time if it's taking too long or other apps need the resources.

Unfortunately there just isn't a nice way for Pastebot to do what they want to do. It's one of those edge cases where none of the available options for multitasking are useful. They're doing the best they can, but this is still a really hacky solution and I wouldn't depend on it staying in the App Store.

<comment><USER4> I think Apple doesn't have to be quite as restrictive. They could allow developers to do some general purpose multitasking and take steps limit its use.

They might only allow general purpose multitasking if it's off by default and the user has to explicitly opt-in. They might add something in their settings app where you can turn turn general purpose multitasking on and off for each individual app which uses it. They might reject all apps which use general purpose multitasking when the dedicated methods would do, too. They might reject all apps which use general purpose multitasking without providing any functionality to the user. They might require all apps which use this general purpose multitasking to have some gracious failure mode if memory really gets low and the app has to be quit. (I'm not so sure about this last one. You would have to notify the user because otherwise the experience would be terrible, i.e. suddenly and without any apparent reason or warning Pastebot would stop to work. But adding a modal dialog would also lead to a terrible experience, they would have to make it more subtle which in turn can be easily overlooked. How does Android handle this?)

<comment><USER3> There's a lot of ways they could go, definitely. But they're trying to keep it as simple as they can, from the user's perspective anyway. The best feature of the three multitasking styles they allow is that I don't have to think about it, which can't be said about the Pastebot solution, nor really any of your options either.

<comment><USER5> "From the user perspective"

You don't really believe that do you? You can't honestly tell me that it's easier to explain to a user that they have to play a silent audio clip to have an application keep working when it's not visible. And you can't tell me that for <any multitasking app>, it's easier for the user to use because it can only work in the background if its a short potentially volatile task, a location or audio service. How is that 'easier' for the user?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So just to get this straight. You have to have music playing from Pastebot in the background for it to remain active? (even if it's a silent song) If you stop the music, does iOS freeze the app?

Well luckily the iPhone has a very long audio playback on it's battery I guess!

</comment><comment><USER5> It's not a feature, it's a workaround for a limited multitasking model.

<comment><USER7> On top of that, it's liable to be rejected by Apple as an abuse of public APIs.

Just last week there was an article on HN about a guy who got rejected for using the VoIP background API for an IRC app. Which actually is bending the rules a lot less than playing a silent audio file on loop in order to claim to be an audio client.

<comment><USER8> They were already rejected for playing a silent audio file. But this post mentions they have re-submitted the app, allowing users to play their own audio files. So this is 100% legitimate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Release for Android instead? The iPhone is dying.

<comment><USER10> Ha! I'm no iPhone fanboy but increased competition->(slower growth,market share)!=dying. They just sold like 18,000,000,000 of these things in a month, did they not?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How does onlyfans.com work around the "no porn" Stripe rule? - <AUTHOR> For reasons beyond this ask, I'm needing to use a payment processor that is fine with high-risk transactions (which the porn industry certainly fits in) so started looking around what adult websites are using.
Many are using probiller, vendo and similar, since Stripe and others have rules against porn/adult industry, citing high risk transactions for this.
But then I came across onlyfans.com, which is using Stripe for its payments, although Stripe has a strict "no porn" rule in their terms of service.
How does this work? Onlyfans is by now a huge website, with lots of transactions, so it's surely not flying under the radar. It's the only adult website I could find that is using Stripe.
Is it as simple as they have an agreement with Stripe to bypass the rule? Or am I missing something else obvious here? <comment><USER2> Cascading payments might be the real answer, and shuffling higher risk charges to non-Stripe providers, but in my experience, Stripe can get pretty moralizing pretty quickly.

We built an adult ecommerce site (purely toys for purchase, no porn) and because other adult toy sites had been successful on Stripe, Stripe assured us this wouldn't be a problem.

Six months and several million dollars processed later, Stripe informs us we're going to be deplatformed because Wells Fargo (their banking partner) had reviewed our account (apparently because of its volume) and determined we violated their standards because of the nature of the toys.

We did a bit of back and forth where Stripe suggested we alter the colors available (seriously) to assuage Wells Fargo's puritanical concerns, and Stripe insisted it wasn't _their_ moralizing, but rather Wells Fargo (paragons of fucking virtue as they are), but we weren't willing to compromise on the nature of our product or have our product's options or colors dictated to us by one of the most corrupt banks on the planet.

We ended up deplatforming and moving to a high-risk processor who was willing to match our competitive Stripe rate. That processor sucks and their fraud protections are weak and their interface is garbage, but they're not telling us how to run our business.

Was mostly disappointed that we went through an arduous review process with Stripe beforehand and received assurances we'd be fine since our chargeback rate is insanely low and we ship actual physical product and have no nudity on our site, but alas.

<comment><USER3> This is an incredibly frustrating read. I know, I know there are far worse things in the world but _fucking_ Wells Fargo dictating to people when they evict homeowners who have no relationship with Wells Fargo, commit wholesale wire fraud, destroy people's credit and then turn around and lecture a _honest_ business.

This is why banking is a rent-seeking and though we need the financial industry they are ghoulish vampires sucking the lifeblood out of everything they touch.

/rant

<comment><USER4> > we need the financial industry

Do we, though? I don't know whether the answer is distributed blockchains, or the Department of the Treasury creating an API for USD, or both; but the current banking system seems to me like the legacy code of feudal landed aristocrats. (I will never stop being disappointed that we didn't let the financial system crash in 2009.)

<comment><USER5> > Do we, though?

Why, yes? Isn't it blatantly obvious? What exactly leads you to believe we don't?

> I don't know whether the answer is distributed blockchains, or the > Department of the Treasury creating an API for USD, or both;

I'm dumbfounded how someone even comes close to believe that any one of these ideas comes even close to provide the service that financial institutions provide. Either you have a very specific and very niche usecase in mind, or maybe you have absolutely no idea about the services that financial institutions provide to society.

> but the current banking system seems to me like the legacy code of feudal > landed aristocrats.

This comment leads me to believe that you are confusing stuff that has no relation whatsoever. Your dislike of caricatures and ideological strawmen you associated with financial services has absolutely no relation with the services provided to society by the whole banking industry. Just because you don't like Scrooge McDuck that doesn't mean most of us don't depend on loans to, say, buy a house or a car or store our savings or pay for everyday stuff.

<comment><USER6> We don't need usury. I'm confident we could figure out how to make things work without it.

<comment><USER7> We know how it works without it - stagnation and the those currently at the top staying there due to lack of capital. Usury is a religious fundamentalist term divorced from the systemics and the reality of what works and what doesn't.

<comment><USER8> > those currently at the top staying there

And you're sure you're not describing the current day, but instead some hypothetical bad scenario if we had no financial sector? It seems to me that if we have this problem now _and_ without a financial sector, that's not really related to them at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Since, I know a friend in this industry, let me explain what's going on here. Yes, OnlyFans uses Stripe, but that's not the entire story.

In the adult/porn world, there's a high amount of chargebacks and fraud relative to low-risk industries like SaaS software. If you pass a certain chargeback threshold in the adult industry, your account is terminated, and no payment processor will do business with you.

To reduce the likelihood of passing that chargeback threshold and being banned, OnlyFans uses "cascading payments", which essentially load balances the payments across multiple payment processors in order to reduce their chargeback ratios across their merchant accounts.

The payment is either processed by Stripe, Securion, CCBill(the leading payment processor for adult), or another company.

Last time I checked the network requests, I noticed it was storing the card on Stripe, CCBill, and Securion, but using CCBill or Securion to process the payment.

I think Stripe is there for models on the site who don't sell adult content. OnlyFans probably does a check to see if the page is adult-related and if it is, then routes it to the correct payment processor.

<comment><USER10> loading across multiple providers won't alter the chargeback ratio so what is the point?

<comment><USER11> Chargeback ratio's are per account, but also have a minimum absolute threshold. So it's say, 2% chargeback AND at least 200 chargebacks before penalties kick in.

In a past life I worked for a place who had a few hundred processing accounts to load balance it all out because their chargeback rates were way too high. If an account gets close, you just don't use it for a month, or you throw a bunch of "safe" recurring charges at it to dilute it, or you hold a batch and send them through right before the rollover. Lots of ways to play number games.

Most of the execs did go to prison though, so don't take this as advice, but to be fair, the processors are the ones who told them to use those tactics.

<comment><USER12> They went to prison for load balancing, or how does this relate?

<comment><USER13> Gambling.

<comment><USER11> The business was just run of the mill "get rich on google" and "free government grant" garbage that was common in the 2000's.

Ironically, they made so much money doing their regular business the owner bought a small US based bank and was running online poker processing through it.

When "black friday" in the poker world happened, the bank failed and everything fell apart, but so far as I know, no one involved was ever charged with anything related.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> My understanding is the rules are dictated by Visa/MC/Amex, and are largely based on chargeback risk for categories of merchants. There are likely further legal and pearl-clutchy reasons that combine to just out and out ban.

Anecdote: we talked with every payment processor around for a product we were making that involved storing and spending value from a digital wallet. It was close enough to various Visa/MC rules and money transmitting statutes that the usual response was arguing for a few weeks about why we comply until higher management decided something akin to: well if you had a lot of volume we'd take the risk dealing with it, but you don't so it's not worth our time.

Last ditch effort was Stripe, who said: sure! And we asked again with more detail, making sure they saw the same issues and wouldn't make us tear it down in a month. They said: sure! Did it a third time higher up for diligence, and finally just came to the conclusion they have different priorities and are getting big enough to use their scale to throw some weight around for all the small merchants.

<comment><USER15> +1 to the rules coming down from Visa & MC. Amex doesn't allow adult.

There's a bit more nuance there, as the rules actually come from the bank issuing your merchant account, rather than some master "Visa" entity. So if you're a big player in the adult game you're going to work to find the right banks willing to issue you merchant accounts.

Those banks will also have a compliance department which will look at your content and make sure it's inline with what they're willing to allow. If you want to make adult content where consensual adults do things together there's one group of banks you can go to. If you want to make niche content with acted out violence and such you're going to find a much smaller group of banks willing to issue you merchant accounts. Or possibly no banks at all. It's interesting that the thing deciding what adult content will be easily monetizable on the internet is small merchant account issuing banks.

On the charging side I believe Stripe uses Wells Fargo, which has pretty strict rules.

Source: worked for one of the large players in the adult market a while back. Some info may be dated.

Note: one of the fun things about credit cards is that Visa and MC are issued by banks, and Amex is issued by Amex. There was a new fraud style a few years ago that amex was able to lock down pretty quick due to its centralized nature, while Visa and MC had a harder time.

Note2: I may define fun differently than you.

<comment><USER16> Visa is absolutely a master entity that dictates nearly everything including consumer credit reporting requirements and minimum credit lines. They publish an 886 page "public" version which is actually kind of an interesting read:

[https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/about-visa/visa- rules...](https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/about-visa/visa-rules- public.pdf)

<comment><USER17> > They publish an 886 page "public" version which is actually kind of an > interesting read:

yet a search for "adult" only yield one result, and it's in the context of a card for minors.

<comment><USER15> and as with all things, interpretation is key.

<comment><USER18> As pointed out, the banks also have a say. And banks are notoriously risk- averse and prudish. It's much easier for them to say "no" than "yes".

<comment><USER19> +1. For anyone, watch the movie "Yes man", with Jim Carrey. It's a run of the mile chick flick, but the bit about banks, which is fairly at beginning, it portraits the "we prefer to say NO" policy of banks very accurate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Often, when the market doesn't provide an essential gateway service to a law- abiding subpopulation, some sort of 'public option' is proposed.

Not enough market housing, offer public/subsidized options. Not enough low- or no-cost private education, offer public schools. Too little affordable healthcare/insurance, offer Medicaid, a 'public option', single-payer. Public transport.

Should the government offer a 'public option' payment-processor of last resort, with guaranteed service for all legal but unpopular businesses? A service that couldn't reject camgirls, weed-sellers, Alex Jones, gun shops, etc?

<comment><USER21> You have this already. It's called "using checks and money orders."

The problem is that people want the convenience credit cards use, and don't want to wait for the check to clear to get their stuff.

<comment><USER22> Banks can and will close your account for any reason under the Sun. How do you write a check or receive one without a bank account? I'm not familiar enough with money orders, but I assume the same applies.

Then, on top of all of that, you can't run a business through a personal account. So you still require a business type bank account, and the above options are terrible for any eCommerce site, which is pretty much the only kind of business that will be discussed here on HN.

<comment><USER23> You can get a money order without a bank account. There's often a limit on the amount, so in some cases you may need to buy several in order to amass the full balance. You may also need to show ID.

You can also cash a money order without a bank account.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> How do you find out what payment processor(s) a given site uses?

I know that some provide methods whereby a site can have the actual payment entry form served and processed by the payment processor instead of by the site's own server, so you'd be able to see from the user's end where they payment is actually being processed.

I've never done a survey, but just anecdotally most sites I've encountered seem to not be using that option. Their payment entry form comes from their own site and posts back to it, where their own back-end handles dealing with their payment processor's API.

Using the method where the user interacts directly with the payment processor does have the advantage that it simplifies PCI compliance. If your systems never even see the credit card, just receiving a token from the payment processor at the end of the transaction that you can use to initiate subsequent on-file or recurring transactions, most of PCI goes away for you.

On the other hand, that also means that you are stuck with that payment processor for on-file or recurring transactions for that customer. Your token from payment processor X is completely worthless for doing charges at payment processor Y.

If I was in a business that has a significantly above average risk of running into payment processor trouble so I might need to change processors, I'd want to store the credit cards myself. That makes it possible to change payment processors without having to get all of your subscription customers to come back and re-enter credit card information [1].

[1] Well...at least for now. I'm not sure if that will still be possible if the Visa stored credential framework ever actually becomes required. Briefly, under the SCF requirements when you store a credit card, you have to send a flag to Visa with the transaction saying you are storing it. On subsequent on- file or recurring transactions, you have to send a reference to the transaction that stored the card.

The problem is that you reference that transaction by sending Visa's transaction number. But Visa's number for transactions is generally _not_ the transaction number you get from your payment processor. The payment processor has its own transaction numbers and those are what you see.

I believe MC is also doing SCF. Not sure about Discover and Amex. It was supposed to become mandatory something like two or three years ago, but payment processors kept asking for extensions.

<comment><AUTHOR> > How do you find out what payment processor(s) a given site uses?

I'm a developer so looking at what kind of request the application is doing when interacting with anything involving payments. In the case of OnlyFans it was easy as they make direct requests to Stripe. In other cases, I've looked at the data structures stored in the current page by using the JS console and compare it to the API docs of various payment processors.

<comment><USER25> I'm not a web developer but I always assumed that happened on the backend, so it wouldn't be visible. I guess not?

<comment><USER26> Most websites can't/shouldn't store the card number, they embed Stripe JavaScript that sends card number to Stripe and get a token id to use on the backend later on. Can't store CCV or number without passing PCI compliance.

<comment><USER24> For the CVV you can't store it even if you have passed PCI compliance. You are only allowed to collect it for a specific transaction, and are required to forget it when that transaction is complete.

<comment> 8192kjshad09- That can't be right. I entered my credit card information once into uber eats and I can buy food whenever without entering a CCV and my credit card is immediately charged.

If this were true 1000s of large companies would not be PCI compliant.

<comment><USER27> It's possible to process transactions without a CVV, but it often costs slightly more due to the increased fraud risk. In the case of Uber Eats, they've presumably decided the increase in purchases from removing that friction makes up for the higher fee.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Many of the rules aren't rules. We ran a travel company and used Stripe in the past, which is also one of the disallowed industries. We got approval from Stripe after proving that we have a negligible fraud & chargeback rate due to being focused on business users

<comment><USER29> This, one of the biggest blinkers technically-inclined founders have is that they forget or ignore that so much is relationship driven.

Rules like Stripes (+ Wells Fargos) are not interpreted like code, everything is open to negotiation and degrees of freedom depending on the relationship established.

<comment><USER7> Those blinkers are called "not being utterly insane". The whole model of disruption is seeing a stupid practice saying. "No we aren't doing that stupid shit." watch practicioners of the existing stupid froth at the mouth and then either succeed or fail.

Seriously that is why honor based lending died to banks centuries ago. Relationship driven is a fucking stupid way to do finance.

<comment><USER29> Finance is totally relationship driven (and 'honor systems' isn't really a good example of it). My bank waives fees on everything because of my personal friendly relationship with my banker. They gave me preferred terms of my mortgage rate because of my formal relationship - it wasn't just the product of a formula at the end of the banker's computer screen.

I know they'll do all sorts of shit for me because of the hard (account age, $$) and soft (personal) relationship.

But my point is more broad - API agreements come to mind as an example, just because that is a space I've played in prior jobs. "But the API Ts&Cs say you can't do _xx_ but they are doing _xx_ ". Yeah, they have a relationship and got a dispensation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Onlyfans is a platform for content subscriptions. It just happens to be a popular platform for adult content.

Also, it surely makes them a ton of money.

<comment><USER31> You can say this about literally anything: Pornhub is just a platform for VOD. It just happens to be a popular platform for adult content.

<comment><USER30> I think that's a stretch. There _is_ a line and OnlyFans is at the very least _on_ it.

While I am aware of the adult content on the site, the only people that I know of that use OnlyFans are subscribing to physical training, musical talent, or other creative content. Unironically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> As a payment processing fintech builder for several decades the many comments about diversifying across processors is correct. The misunderstanding here for many may be that knowledgeable business owners (merchants) always have more than one processing account each with a different entity holding the risk, think multiple banks. Having multiple processors, aside from the point of this question, directly relates to up time and availability of which nearly all rely on the "middleman" \- Have a backup! However problem businesses and their business owners that get caught being nefarious earn a permanent place on the card brands "list" that forbids them from taking card payments in the future. An individual business can have multiple merchant accounts and as with anything else once one understands how a system works it can then be manipulated to fit ones need.

</comment><comment><USER33> Probably because the content is not public. I heard users just share cat pictures, so there is plausible deniability.

</comment><comment><USER34> That's a good question, since Stripe backed out at the VERY last minute for a customer of mine who sells alcohol over the internet, despite repeated assurances it would be fine.

<comment><USER35> Stripe can typically support alcohol businesses (assuming they hold the appropriate licenses). Could you get in touch at firstname.lastname@example.com and we can take another look?

<comment><USER36> I love the subtle indication here that someone who almost certainly knows "the" authoritative answer to this thread is reading it. Though obviously I understand why you probably aren't at liberty to answer the question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> My guess is Onlyfans has a very low rate of chargebacks/fraud and negotiated a special deal with Stripe.

The reason that rule is there is because most adult sites are dodgy.

<comment><USER38> I suspect Onlyfans (like Patreon) has social pressure going for it such that fewer people issue chargebacks because it'd be like yanking back money directly from a person and not a faceless company; like the social pressure against leaving a shitty tip at a restaurant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Doesn't Patreon (which also has a lot of porn content) also use Stripe as a payment processor?

<comment><USER40> Patreon did crack down on some extreme content, stating they were forced to do so by their payment provider(s).

<comment><USER41> Weird they wouldn't switch providers for specific use cases. Does Stripe require to be exclusive provider for site?

<comment><USER31> There are very few payment processors that will accept adult content, and those that do exist (e.g., CCBill) are both expensive - on the order of 10x the fees - and also a damn nightmare to work with.

I can _very_ easily imagine a scenario where Patreon looked at their options and decided it wasn't worth it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> How much of the internet traffic is actually pornography in general? I have heard a lot of anecdotal hearsay that it constitutes a majority.

<comment><USER43> The thing about the online porn industry is that it's highly diversified which leads a lot of people into making wild assumptions about its size. I doubt porn traffic is that high. Stats show that one in three Internet users are viewing porn, but the thing is that porn isn't something you can spend more than 10-20 minutes consuming[1]. So if we say that the average user spends some three hours online on average every day[2], then porn is about 5% of that time. So one in three users online spend 5% of their time watching porn. In total I'd guess that doesn't account for more than 10% of global traffic, taking under consideration that video consumes much more bandwidth than other forms of content.

That's all back of the envelope calculations off course.

[1] [https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2019-year-in- review#traffic](https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2019-year-in-review#traffic)

[2] [https://www.statista.com/statistics/319732/daily-time- spent-...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/319732/daily-time-spent-online- device/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Why do you think the porn industry is prone to more fraud/risk?

<comment><USER45> A man orders porn and pays using his credit card.

His wife looks at the statements and asks him what he's up to.

He denies having made the payment so the wife initiates a chargeback.

<comment><USER46> I kinda wonder if it isn't the kids doing it with a parents card.

<comment><USER47> My friend and I were 13 and called 1-900 numbers back when it was popular. We took his moms credit card and changed some numbers around. Eventually a number we made up worked.

It was a hilarious moment but I was scared to death we would be found out. Nothing ever happened but somebody got a charge.

<comment><USER48> Do they not ask for a CVV or any other verification?

<comment><USER49> We did something surprisingly similar once as stupid kids/teens and it was in the days before CVV. Just touch tone to enter a card number (although we did this little experiment from a payphone using a 1-800 (toll free) sex line). Typically, you entered a card number after some initial "pitch".

AFAIK, 1-900 numbers only worked by billing you on your phone bill.

<comment><USER48> Guess I'm showing my youth, because I've never seen a credit card be used without a CVV. And I think _that 's_ a poor security model…

<comment><USER47> It was at the end of the 90s maybe 2000. Messing with pay phones or prank calling on one was another fun thing to do. The good numbers (1-900) didn't work on pay phones. ;-)

Call collect!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> My guess would be that Onlyfans do a lot of fraud prevention on their end and negotiated an exception with Stripe...

</comment><comment><USER51> Would it be possible to sidestep the issue completely?

Is your industry one that you could start pushing for cryptocurrency for payments? You'd be basically reducing your risk to zero and by using a stable token you would also have no volatility.

</comment><comment><USER52> Somewhat related, a story that digs into who's running onlyfans.com: [https://forensicnews.net/2020/08/13/onlyfans-faces- allegatio...](https://forensicnews.net/2020/08/13/onlyfans-faces-allegations- of-fraud-theft/)

<comment><USER53> > Weeks before Radvinsky purchased the OnlyFans holding company in the United > Kingdom, he received a $250,000 tax credit from the state of Illinois. "The > purpose of the Angel Investment Tax Credit Program is to attract and > encourage the placement of investment dollars into early-stage, innovative > companies throughout Illinois."

Your tax dollars at work.

<comment><USER54> You know what a credit is?

<comment><USER55> It only takes the word "tax" to make many people internally scream. Crude heuristics, but hey it's human programming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> If anyone is interested in talking about fraud prediction or high risk adult payment transactions, I have been looking at this space and think there are some interesting opportunities. Email in profile.

</comment><comment><USER57> This thread is a aompelling argument for Bitcoin/LN as an intermediary--just saying. It's getting easier every day.

Bisq for exchange will get easier over the next 5 years or so, too.

<comment><USER58> It would be nice to see Bisq start to get more liquidity. It seems like a really interesting way to sidestep traditional banking on/off ramps for crypto. It's almost like local bitcoins with ACH.

I have to admit I don't fully understand how it handles disputes. I probably need to look a bit closer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> We would use a multi-gateway round robin setup for volume over 50k per month. I'm more than willing to point you in the right direction.

</comment><comment><USER60> There are other payment processors other than Stripe....

Ever heard of CCBill?

<comment><USER61> Who is behind CCBill and what does it need to launch a competitor?

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Probably cause Stripe likes money?

<comment><USER63> A company I worked for tried to use Stripe but couldn't because they don't allow "fantasy sports leagues with cash prizes". They definitely aren't willing to make exceptions for everyone.

<comment><USER64> In practice, unregulated online gambling is much closer to fraud than porn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> OnlyFans isnt a porn site in the same way that Twitter isnt a porn site. Many of the high profile users are in the adult industry but people use onlyfans for other types of content as well.

<comment><USER66> I'd venture to say that 99% of onlyfans content (that people are paying for anyway) is porn. Just because there's a small subset of non-porn doesn't change the fact that they're selling access to porn. Twitter is a completely different story as they're selling advertising, not access to nudes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> They are NOT using Stripe. Stripe has a no porn rule because they want to go public at some time and everything needs to look clean, also on their customer side. Also their (Stripe) backend banks don't tolerate porn.

Also there is not only Stripe out there!

Btw. you are in the wrong forum. Look on gfy.com forum for example

<comment><AUTHOR> > They are NOT using Stripe

Take a look at the requests their frontend is making and you'll see they are indeed using Stripe. At least they were last time I checked.

> Also there is not only Stripe out there!

Indeed, I listed some of the alternatives in my opening question, but is besides the point anyways, here we're discussing Stripe + OnlyFans.

> Btw. you are in the wrong forum.

Judging by the number of upvotes and comments, no, I'm not.

> Look on gfy.com forum for example

Thanks for the pointer, I'll take a look there.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to get stateful behavior in a stateless distributed environment? - <AUTHOR> In the past I worked a lot with standalone applications that could handle events such as OnChange, in which the change of an internal variable or system state could trigger an action. Now, with a distributed architecture I want to know the best practices on handling events. I have read about Observer Pattern, PubSub, but my point goes beyond. Imagine, for example, a system in which a microservice must be updated when a value is changed on the database.
Also this is a question about real time values in a stateless architecture. When you need to store current states of the system in a database, you want other parts of the system to watch this database for changes. How to do that in a efficient way? <comment><USER2> Look for "conversation patterns" on the Enterprise Integration Patterns site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Really interesting, I did not know about this website but I just added it to my list. Thanks!</comment></comment>


The death of self-rule on the internet @ eBay - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d0668334-d9d6-11dc-bd4d-0000779fd2ac.html

<comment><USER2> The title sounded pretty scary but the message is pretty simple: sellers can no longer leave negative feedback against buyers. This is an attempt by Ebay to allow buyers to leave more honest feedback without fearing retaliation.

I think this makes Ebay even more democratic.

<comment><AUTHOR> More democratic? I'd say so, even if, ironically, this meant more top-bottom control. But I guess that was needed:

"Now, we realize that feedback has been a two-way street, but our data shows a disturbing trend, which is that sellers leave retaliatory feedback eight times more frequently than buyers do ... and this figure is up dramatically from only a few years ago." Bill Cobb from eBay (source: <http://www2.ebay.com/aw/core/200801290559182.html>)

I originally took the link from Nicholas Carr's blog: <http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/02/crowd_control.php>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The social balance involved in such ecosystems can be very fragile. I have no idea if this will work. And how can ebay know, unless they test it before full-scale deployment? One option would be to apply it to new sellers at first and see how it goes.</comment>


Quora Launches Reviews - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/03/06/quora-now-officially-embraces-reviews-letting-users-include-star-ratings-with-their-responses/

<comment><USER2> It's interesting that the article never compares explicit reviews with the implicit reviews that Quora already generates. Consensus (upvotes/point scores) can review things the same way that a starring system can.

I can scroll through comparative star values of different movies, or I can compare the upvote scores for different movies that are answers to the question "What are the best 'twist' movies?" ([http://www.quora.com/Movie- Story-and-Plot-Themes/What-are-th...](http://www.quora.com/Movie-Story-and- Plot-Themes/What-are-the-best-twist-movies)). Both are relative scales, but I'd be interested see what differences the two scales would produce in terms of ordering and favoritism.</comment>


Ask HN: Learning "good" HTML/CSS (or at least a discussion on the subjective) - <AUTHOR>

I'm a fairly competent programmer who's looking to learn more about the web front-end.
While learning HTML/CSS/Javascript I've come across a lot of conflicting advice, for example every book I've looked at has implied that using tables in html is fine, which in another area I get told is a cardinal sin (though HN does this).
I'm sure a good deal is subjective but I'd like to read resources like this http://css-discuss.incutio.com/wiki/Why_I_think_divs_are_better_than_tables to get to grips with it. <comment><USER2> For JavaScript a good place to start is <http://www.crockford.com/javascript/></comment>


We need a simple ad free youtube alternative - <AUTHOR>

I'm just annoyed with new youtube video ads with delayed skip button. MAybe they're just trying to multiply their revenue by increasing ad impression by doing it mandatory but it's just suck as an end user. Maybe an early youtube(before google era) clone can succeed as a simple elegant video site. <comment><USER2> That sounds an excellent idea! In fact, it sounds so excellent, it's already built, deployed, and used by millions, under the domain name vimeo.com .

However, the business problem raised by mooism2 -specifically, revenue streams, and covering costs - have visible consequences, in that the vast majority of content producers would opt not to pay for distribution of their content.

Also note, that youtube was never built to generate revenue -it was specifically built to flop to one of the big players.

In short, to consider this as an opportunity, you need to radically innovate on extracting alternative revenue streams from viewers, producers, or third parties.

<comment><USER3> We also have Twitch.tv. You pay, no ads.

<comment><USER4> Very different content concept though: it's a gaming focus, and it's very much a live-content focus (can't remember exact figures, but their VOD viewing is tiny compared to live-stream viewing). And even then, the majority of their revenue is going to stay with advertising, not subscriptions.

<comment><USER3> I only enter Youtube to follow videobloggers gamers. I understand the point, but well, usstream I guess its wide open compared. I just gave an example.

<comment><USER4> Going off topic a little, do you follow any Europeans? I'm looking for suggestions of people to sponsor, and always interested to hear opinions!

<comment><USER3> There's Athene in Belgium. He's pretty huge videobloguer, but the EU are moving to USA and streaming a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I thing the solution lies in the distribution. Think competing against big Hollywood stuff: it is by now mainly a marketing-distribution issue. Say somebody made a movie and had to distribute to a big audience, how can he/she do it? How can he/she monetize it?

For puppies videos, I think you can't (and don't want) beat youtube.

<comment><USER6> Coincidentally, Vimeo has just launched their first exclusive feature film: [https://vimeo.com/ondemand/somegirls](https://vimeo.com/ondemand/somegirls)

<comment><USER5> Nice to see this. However, does it look like they solved the distribution part? None of this movies got to me through ads, social networks, friends advice, etc. While take "World War Z", I probably knew about it few days after it's launch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I believe Google was talking about introducing a premium feature for Youtube?

That said, video hosting is expensive, very expensive. Especially at the scale of Youtube. How do you propose that they should earn money? Ads is a damn good way of doing it, especially when you got the massive advertising organization that is Google backing it.

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't think you understand how difficult it is to create and maintain a video streaming website.

<comment><USER9> Couldn't we make an open source alternative to Bittorent Live and make it work in the browser? That would cover a lot of of the streaming costs.

<comment><USER8> I'm sure it'd be possible. Would be a huge undertaking though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't see any ads as I run blockers, but it is getting stupid- youtube is not buffering properly all over the world forcing people to restart their videos (and hence have to watch more ad's). I swear they have done this on purpose.

[http://tinyurl.com/oorppd6](http://tinyurl.com/oorppd6)

</comment><comment><USER11> How do you propose it would be paid for? (a) by uploaders; (b) by viewers; (c) by donations; (d) some combination thereof (can't see (c) co-existing with (a) or (b) though); (e) some other way?

What costs need covering?

</comment><comment><USER12> A video hosting and streaming service is very expensive to maintain. You have to recoup your maintenance costs in the most effective way. For youtube, that turned out to be video ads with their partner program.

</comment><comment><USER13> Use AdBlock, Luke!

<comment><AUTHOR> it's solution but consider it as opportunity for new startups. I'm considering it as a problem with current sites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Use AdBlock Edge instead of AdBlock Plus. ABE is open-source and consumes much less RAM than ABP.

</comment><comment><USER15> How else do they generate revenue if not for ads? Subscriptions?</comment>


Simulations suggest Planet Nine may have been a rogue - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2017-01-simulations-planet-rogue.html <comment><USER2> I'm really curious as to the outcome around this. The idea that a new planet in our solar system is discovered in our lifetime is exciting to me for some reason. I can't even really explain the feeling.

Even though for most people the discovery will make no difference, they might not even care about it, which is a shame I think.

<comment><USER3> Yup, and if we do manage to prove it's existence we should keep the name "Planet 9".

And pretty please let the math on the star collision in 2022 be correct. I really want to see that.

<comment><USER4> Formerly known as Planet X, before the Pluto demotion kerfuffle.

But Plan 9, er Planet, is good, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _They presented evidence suggesting that if Planet Nine is out there, it is > likely a rogue._

But the evidence seems kind of sketchy. In their simulations, a rogue was only captured by the Sun 40% of the time. Thats' better than 4%, but still not great. (Or is that actually a really good result? I don't know.)

I wonder how long it would be before we could reasonably send a probe to explore a potential rogue. New Horizons managed a fly-by; how plausible would entering orbit around something that far away be with a reasonable time to get there?

<comment><USER6> > I wonder how long it would be before we could reasonably send a probe to > explore a potential rogue.

New Horizons took around a decade to reach Pluto, which is about 50 AU from the sun.

The nearest distance Planet 9 could be is approximately 200 AU. Right now, waiting seems to best bet before sending anything, so that we can hopefully find ways to send probes faster and meanwhile try to better identify its location.

<comment><USER5> Oh sure, I'm not suggesting sending probes just to take a look around. But if we do positively identify another planet and its location, sending a probe there would be fascinating. If we could actually land it and do some materials science on a rogue planet, it would basically double our understanding of planetary formation.

<comment><USER7> The delta-V requirements for landing on an outer solar system body are… intense. New Horizons flew past Pluto at 14 km/s; in order to land, that relative speed would need to become zero. This concept likely requires new propulsion technology.

Agreed on being fascinating, though.

<comment> T-hawk We've already landed on an outer solar system body, Saturn's moon Titan. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens_(spacecraft)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens_\(spacecraft\))

Titan does have the advantage of a thick atmosphere to allow descent by parachute, and a large parent body to capture the spacecraft into orbit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Sumerians already knew it existed, and much more: [https://blog.kareldonk.com/planet-x-nibiru-an-analysis-of- ak...](https://blog.kareldonk.com/planet-x-nibiru-an-analysis-of-akkadian- seal-va243/)

<comment><USER9> Ancient aliens... yeah mmkay...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Abstract at [http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017AAS...22942405V](http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017AAS...22942405V)

<comment><USER11> Actually, Phys.org is one of the few commendable popular science sites that quotes the abstract at the end of the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's the Second Foundation. Duh.</comment>


OVH Kimsufi database leaked - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/4hdLMeHh <comment><USER2> The people at OVH explained (in French) that this database was leaked in 2015, and the leak was made public at that time.

So nothing new here.

[http://travaux.ovh.net/?do=details&id=23300](http://travaux.ovh.net/?do=details&id=23300)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Francois!</comment></comment>


What ever happened to email spam "block" lists that actually work? - <AUTHOR>

I get spam daily on my BlackBerry because of Microsoft's totally USELESS email account spam blocking/Junk mail feature. It has been like this for years, and Microsoft just launched a new revision of Hotmail... I was with them since they only allowed 5Megs, so as you can guess most of my clients won't get an update if I change my account entirely... When I first joined HotMail, they had a list {on one page} in account options in which I could put any email address to block it, or an entire domain, it worked so well, my list exceeded its standard capacity. That feature disappeared early on and it hasn't come back. It used to work.
I can't understand why most email service providers and devices like HotMail, Facebook, and RIM (The Blackberry Maker) haven't been able to provide more simple, intuitive, and consistent ways to block ALL emails from unwanted email addresses and domains on accounts and on cell phones. I have moved email to "junk folders" and labeled mail as spam in HotMail, it has only proven futile as the same email accounts keep hopping into my in box. Is this being ignored in attempts to keep me continually logged on? Mail accounts and devices should do what it "says on the tin", they should be smarter by now its 2010 FCOL [FOR Crying Out Loud]. I should be able to also block spam from repeat senders directly on my cell phone by now without having to buy an app, or logging on to a web site. I can't even put an email signature into my blackberry emails without logging on to my account with a computer FCOL!!
I am aware that I could use a G-mail account to filter all of my email more reliably, but on my Blackberry, my replies to emails would not be "From" the correct account, and that would make me look like a spammer (which I'm not) and I shouldn't HAVE TO do that to begin with...
Sorry for the rant, maybe one of the suggestions I get may greatly improve my quality of life. Thanks in advance, <comment><USER2> I don't know why you HAVE to use Hotmail with your blackberry, but as far as I can tell Hotmail has the worst spam filters ever. Can't you use POP3/SMTP with gmail on your blackberry? (I have never owned a blackberry so I don't know how does the e-mail application works on those devices)

Personnally, I was with Hotmail when it was cool. Then I started receiving dozens and dozens of spam per day, eventually receiving more spam than legitimate e-mails. And flagging e-mail as spam just doesn't do a thing. I have made a move to gmail and I have yet to receive spam that wasn't caught in the spam filters. You don't even have any configuration to do with Gmail, it's really intuitive. I still use my hotmail account to register to stuff when I don't want to give my real e-mail, and everytime I log into the hotmail account I am greeted by thousands of unread spam in my inbox. Again, I don't know why Hotmail would be your only option there, for me, Hotmail has been unusable for years.

<comment><AUTHOR> It would have been better if Microsoft stopped promising us that they're "improving" the services and/or features, I have 10 email accounts for sites I administer already, 2 of them are Gmail accounts. I can't transition yet because of a long history of using this cursed Hotmail account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You can have a gmail account to get your mail from your hotmail account and send mail from it as 1- your gmail account 2- as you where responding from hotmail

now gmail will handle your spam. I´d recommend the first because it would mean a slowly transition

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that could work, but I am primarily complaining about Microsoft's inability over the years to bring reliable spam filtering back, and about the total inadequacy of my BlackBerry to filter spam to begin with. I shouldn't have to use a convoluted setup to combat a simple function. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4>
      ...emails would not be "From" the correct account...

You might want to look into ways around that assumption.</comment>


The Lark-Owl Scale: When Couples' Sleep Patterns Diverge - <AUTHOR> http://nytimes.com/2016/01/10/fashion/sleep-marriage-couples.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> My wife and I are like this. When we first met, she called me at 5:30AM to see what was up. My question was "Who died?"

She's a 9p-5a kind of gal. Left to my own devices, I'd sleep 1a-8:30a.

It has been an object of contention to us over the years, but we work it out. Having our son and adjusting to the sleep deprivation afterward helped.

<comment><USER3> This is an object of contention between my current ladyfriend and I. How did you guys work it out? She likes to go to bed by 10pm and I am a stay up and code till 2am kinda guy. She comes and yells at me about it.

<comment><USER4> My girlfriend goes to bed at 10pm and I go to bed at 2:30+ am.

But I do the dishes before coming to bed.

So far it's been working pretty well. I get my alone time when I'm up late, she gets her alone time before she falls asleep. We both need our alone time, might as well get it when the schedules don't match up.

<comment><USER3> Interesting. She doesn't kvetch about having to go to bed alone? Because mine does! Do you guys wake up at the same time? My lady likes to get up at 7am and go running, then she comes back and cooks both of us breakfast, so that is one perk of her going to bed first I guess.

<comment><USER4> > She doesn't kvetch about having to go to bed alone? Because mine does!

I try to make sure to "put her to bed" where she then spends the next hour or two on her phone. The hard part is getting back out of bed if I'm tired, but I'm usually not tired that early.

> Do you guys wake up at the same time?

Nope. She has to get up at 8 so she can be at work by 9. I have to get up by 9:45 so I can be at work by 10.

The core of our day-to-day interaction happens in the evening between the time I come back from the gym and her bedtime. And we also have Saturdays where the whole day is reserved for being spent together.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Odd the article didn't touch on an obvious problem with differing sleep patterns among couples: sexual activity.

Going to bed after your partner is asleep makes it a lot tougher to initiate since it involves waking that person up.

The alternative is to initiate during other parts of the day but that may not be possible for many reasons (children being the most obvious).

<comment><USER6> You missed the 'connect' euphemism

"She advises couples who sleep at different times to make sure they find other times to connect, whether it's the morning, the half-hour before the first partner goes to sleep, or even the weekend."

<comment><USER7> Oh wow... have I been foolishly turning down sex whenever I block "let's connect" messages on LinkedIn? Damnit!

<comment><USER8> Apparently lots of people on Linkedin get confused about that too [http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/604502/LinkedIn-sexism- row-...](http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/604502/LinkedIn-sexism-row-lawyer- leers-at-men-lawyer-calls-daughter-hot)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For this and other reasons, it is usually a good idea to have a separate set of blankets from your partner to avoid interrupting their sleep.

</comment><comment><USER10> The article didn't even touch on sleeping in separate beds or rooms, which, from my experience, seems to be a growing trend.

<comment><USER5> Growing trend according to whom?

<comment><USER10> "from my experience" \- people in my circles, mainly, but it's a topic I see in popnews areas more than I used to.

[http://www.today.com/health/happily-united-separate-rooms- wh...](http://www.today.com/health/happily-united-separate-rooms-why-my- husband-i-sleep-apart-1D80287458)

[http://www.builddirect.com/blog/why-more-couples-are- sleepin...](http://www.builddirect.com/blog/why-more-couples-are-sleeping-in- separate-beds/)

[http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/personal/09/12/lw.sleep.alone...](http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/personal/09/12/lw.sleep.alone.when.married/)

From that link: The preference for separate spaces has even begun to affect home design. According to the National Association of Home Builders, there's been a steady increase in the number of requests for "two-master bedroom" homes since 1990, prompting the organization to predict that by 2015, 60 percent of all custom upscale homes will be built with two "owner suites."

It's now 2016, and I don't suspect 60% are being built that way, but a realtor I spoke with last year says it's a topic that comes up with some of her home buyers, although it's never been a dealbreaker. Granted, that article was from 2008, and we had a major recession in there, which may have reaffected architectural planning.</comment></comment></comment>


Early adopters  what's fair game? - <AUTHOR>

Hey guys, my wife and I recently joined the startup community and are looking for early adopters for our first product.
We read that people tend to hit up forums and meetups, that kind of thing.
However, forums and meetups explicitly state in their Terms of Service prohibiting promoting services or soliciting business. How do you reconcile the two? <comment><USER2> If you are providing real value, showcase what you built. If you are disingenuously shilling your product, dont bother. You will only damage yourself. What's the product. Happy to take a look at it if you have a website.

</comment><comment><USER3> There are sites like ProductHunt, which specialize in this type of thing. Might be worth checking out.</comment>


Ask HN: Hacker News Bug? I can not collapse comments - <AUTHOR> It looks like a long discussion here [1] broke some code responsible for displaying the comment collapsing buttons. I have visited other threads and can see them working but this specific link seems to be broken. The bottom of the page is also missing and that's probably why the collapsing buttons are nowhere to be seen.<p>[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23803539 <comment><USER2> I'm having no problem with Chrome, Edge or Firefox on Windows 10 on that thread - it might help potential investigators if you list your exact platform.

Also try different browsers and with extensions turned off, and after clearing cache etc.</comment>


TimescaleDB cloud service available in AWS, GCP, other clouds - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/TimescaleDB/status/971119438903808007 <comment><AUTHOR> TimescaleDB is now available as a part of Aiven PostgreSQL version 10. Aiven PostgreSQL is a fully-managed & hosted PostgreSQL service available in all AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, DigitalOcean and UpCloud regions: [https://aiven.io/postgresql](https://aiven.io/postgresql)</comment>


Möbius Strips Defy a Link with Infinity - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/mobius-strips-defy-a-link-with-infinity-20190220/ <comment><USER2> The subtitle is in clear contradiction with the paper, the first sentence of which claims that this was proven for 3 dimensions in 1962.

<comment><USER3> It doesn't seem to contradict it in my reading it. (Basically it refuses to be packed infinitely in tame [1962] and now wild embeddings])

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Totally different thing, but reminds me of the Hopf Fibration, which you should really look up if you never have before.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure I'm grasping the significance of this, is there an article or video you'd recommend?

<comment><USER4> Definitely this one! [https://youtu.be/10sDqSUjXHc](https://youtu.be/10sDqSUjXHc)

Think about how you could fill a 2D plane with infinite parallel lines, one for every single point on a real line. Imagine, for example, running vertical lines through every point on the x-axis, how this would fill the entire plane.

The Hopf Fibration is similar. It's a way of filling all of the space on the surface of a 3-sphere (which locally feels like 3D Euclidean space) with interlocking circles. Each of these circles can be mapped a point on an ordinary sphere.

Thinking of it in the other direction: for every point on the surface of an ordinary (2-)sphere, you can assign a circle on the surface of a 3-sphere. By taking into consideration all of the points on the 2-sphere, and all of the circles they represent, you can fill the entire surface of the 3-sphere with these interlocking circles!</comment></comment></comment>