Wanted: Online Pubs Doing Real (and Therefore GDPR-Compliant) Advertising - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2018/05/30/post/ <comment><USER2> Non tracking ads used to be the norm, but two things got in the way:

1\. Any kind of even vaguely targeted advertising is better than none. It's common sport on HN to jeer about how badly the ads that people see are targeted towards them but non-targeted is so much worse. It's ads for restaurants that won't be in my area for decades (if ever). Male and female specific medicines, and on and on.

2\. The rampant abuse and fraud on the part of the publishers. Much of the js and tracking on sites is not about _you_ so much as making sure that the site that the ads are embedded on isn't just a VPS that someone is flogging with bot traffic.

<comment><USER3> Don't forget language. In the EU this is a pretty important point and it's something you can't even estimate based on IP in some countries.

<comment><USER4> Accept-Language: en-GB,en

<comment><USER5> My systems have

      LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
      LC_MESSAGES=C

There is substantial disagreement among the programs that I use [1] whether this constitutes a German locale or an English locale.

[1] True, only those programs which are dumb enough to assume that locale is described by a single word like "German" or "English".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting that WaPo's free option seems to be in violation of GDPR. It has no option to reject personalized ads and third party trackers - you can simply accept and view the site, or go away:

[http://prntscr.com/joqj3d](http://prntscr.com/joqj3d)

That seems to be in direct conflict with GDPR provisions that force web publishers to give people the option to reject personalized ads while still giving them the services they were trying to access. I'm sure that when regulators come calling, they'll claim "legitimate interest," but if this model is acceptable under GDPR, then almost nothing has actually changed under it.

<comment><USER7> That is only if you use consent as your lawful basis.

The reason why nearly everyone is using consent currently is because the other straightforward one which is:

(f) Legitimate interests: the processing is necessary for your legitimate interests or the legitimate interests of a third party unless there is a good reason to protect the individual's personal data which overrides those legitimate interests. (This cannot apply if you are a public authority processing data to perform your official tasks.)

Is so vaguely defined as far as benchmarks go and no one is up for taking the risk of being at the mercy of the judgment of 28 different regulators and court systems.

<comment><USER8> I don't think it's necessarily the case that everyone's using consent currently. They just think (probably correctly) that regulators will be more favorable to a company that always makes disclosures and asks for permission up front.

<comment><USER7> The disclosure part is unrelated to the basis, you need to tell the user what you collect for what purpose and what is the lawful basis for it. Consent is no more lawful than interest however it's less open to interpretation despite its likely not the most appropriate basis for many cases. Consent doesn't enables you to do more or less all the lawful bases by definition are equal in their scope.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Lets see it is $6 with tracking ads or $9 with no ads. So with non-tracking ads, it will cost somewhere between the two. Is there really a need for that. Honestly if I was going to pay $6, I would just pay a little more and get no ads.

<comment><USER10> Eventually it becomes $9 with tracking ads. Do the world a favor and just nip it in the bud as soon as you start getting ads embedded in paid content. And do it loudly so they, their advertisers, and other customers know exactly why they're not getting any more of your money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> [https://officesnapshots.com](https://officesnapshots.com) here.

This describes us as we sell our own ads, self-host them, and only allow static jpg graphics.

After changing our MailChimp signup form and removing sharing button scripts I think the only 3rd party things we use are Google analytics (now with anonymous IP settings activated) and a google font and jquery cdn.

For me, the goal has been to create a site that attracts a specific audience and target the ads based on the content.

</comment><comment><USER12> There are some missing steps between the idea that Post readers (at least say they) want non-tracking-based ads more and the idea that they're worth more. Readers may well be willing to pay some amount more for tracker-less ads, at least until they experience the joys of seeing that most ads are for things they can't use. That doesn't mean that they're willing to pay _as much_ more as what those eyes are worth to advertisers.

<comment><USER13> I currently see no advertisements, for free. GDPR just passed, so they can't track me without my consent. Why would I consent, given I don't see the ads either way?

<comment><USER7> They can track you without your consent if they can justify it through one of the other 5 lawful bases for data processing, consent is just the easiest to some extent since it transfers the much of responsibility to the consenting party however it's not without its own pitfalls.</comment></comment></comment>


Pharocloud – hosting for Smalltalk web-applications - <AUTHOR> http://pharocloud.com/

<comment><USER2> Smalltalk (as a language/environment) fits really nicely with 'the Cloud'. It already runs in its own VM as the normal way of distributing applications, so provisioning should be cake...

I've never heard of Seaside or AIDAweb, before, though. Anyone used Smalltalk for production?

<comment><USER3> Yup, although not lately. DabbleDB was (mostly) implemented in Smalltalk, until it was acquired by Twitter.

I would really like to see a version of the Smalltalk VM that runs directly on Xen. That way you could bundle a Smalltalk image with the VM as an AMI, and launch it as an EC2 instance. Smalltalk has long suffered for not integrating well with the "native" operating system on desktop machines, because deep down it really wants to be the OS for a Xerox Alto. Running in the cloud makes utter sense for Smalltalk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I looked at this earlier this year. Pharo is a fun development environment and it is good to see a PaaS offering to support it.</comment>


Resolved: Altman takes on the big dogs - <AUTHOR> http://thestimulist.com/sam-altman/

<comment><USER2> I would think that facebook (and their mobile apps) are a bigger threat than google. They could add a 'share my location with friends' feature that would be competitive.

<comment><USER3> Loopt has lots of users, especially through the carriers. But Facebook has the most popular free iphone app and a ridiculous number of users already interconnected.

It's stupid to say Latitude is the threat, considering the botched purchase of Dodgeball.

Articles like this are annoying when they are so easy to take apart.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Soon we'll see posts about sama eating breakfast (<http://paulgrahamatebreakfast.infogami.com/> )

In all seriousness though, glad to see Loopt is doing so well.</comment>


The SoCal Network: The companies behind LA's tech boom - <AUTHOR> https://story.californiasunday.com/silicon-beach-la-tech-boom <comment><USER2> I live in Houston, and am moving to LA soon over NYC (finance + commodities background) or SF (fits current career path). I know NYC and SF can be really cool places, but you really have to stop pretending they are unless you really are pulling in 7 or more figures. The people and lifestyle in LA are way more conducive, intellectually and otherwise, to the life I want and the way I see things going. I see places like Houston, Austin, and LA outperforming NYC and SF for the time being.

<comment><USER3> 7 figures is a huge exaggeration. You can live comfortably on 80-100k in NYC. Not everyone needs to live in Manhattan. Rent in the outer boroughs can be very affordable if you look in the right places. You can still indulge from time to time(a broadway show once a month, the random cheap concert every two weeks or so, brunch with friends from out of town) and still save a lot. I was making high 5 figures out of college and still managed to save 25% of my after tax income each year. Granted, I'd have been able to save more if I were living in say Philly or Chicago. But still it's very doable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would rather work in LA than SF. Obviously this part of the equation is _preference_

But the problem is I am dying to find something in LA but it's just really hard to find a tech company you'd want to work for where because there's usually only one company in that space.

For example. Let's say I want to find a job involving "bitcoin" I search and find this link[0]. Ignoring all the links to companies that no longer own their own domain names, NO ONE HAS ANY SPECIFIC JOB OPENINGS. 3 of the sites I went to give a generic form for you to enter info if maybe you are interested. But nothing specific.

Okay so maybe bitcoins are not a good startup idea in LA, let's go for Drones. Everyone LOVES drones right? So I goto "drones"[1] on that same website. There's like 8 links there, half of them don't go anywhere and the rest have no specific job positions either.

Part of the lure of SFBA is that your options are pretty varied but also the depth of each tech space is relatively deep. Don't like this company in tech space Y? Try the 4 other companies in that same field.

You can't even get two options in LA. You can either goto Snapchat if you want to be part of the big social media company or you can join... what?

You can go with the hot online dating startup Tinder, or.... what?

There is literally no alternative to seek another company in the same space in LA because most likely the company doesn't exist. You don't really have the freedom to still be in a certain tech category while avoiding certain companies in that space.

About the only tech space you have options in is if you want to be part of a tech boutique shop that does custom websites for the big movie companies. I know people in that field and they seem happy with what they're doing so if that is your thing, LA could work out.

Oh yeah and they also pay kinda shitty considering LA (especially Venice, Santa Monica, Playa Vista where Rubicon is) is not cheap. And although I'm sure some companies do offer free snacks/perks, I've heard a lot where they aren't expected to provide that because it's LA, not SF.

Yes yes, no free snacks, first-world-problems and all that. But if you're trying to attract tech talent then you should be offering something besides, "LA Cool"

[0] [http://startupsla.com/startups/bitcoin](http://startupsla.com/startups/bitcoin) [1] [http://startupsla.com/startups/drones](http://startupsla.com/startups/drones)

<comment><USER5> There's an important distinction between LA and SF: SF has startups with no revenue goals or strategic direction, but LA has _businesses_ with plans to generate revenue (and even profits). Most of LA's businesses avoid LA's startup scene. Like SF, the startup scene here is a self-congratulatory frat party fueled by VC money, where funding announcements are celebrated with raucous applause but profit announcements are greeted by a silent room.

 _There is literally no alternative to seek another company in the same space in LA because most likely the company doesn 't exist. You don't really have the freedom to still be in a certain tech category while avoiding certain companies in that space....About the only tech space you have options in is if you want to be part of a tech boutique shop that does custom websites for the big movie companies. I know people in that field and they seem happy with what they're doing so if that is your thing, LA could work out._

Your problem is that you used a single random list website as your data point. LA's a big place with many tech or tech-related businesses, and there are few if any websites that even attempt to gather all of that data.

LA has hundreds of companies revolutionizing media technology--nearly every VFX company in the area is working on some sort of innovative technology or software, companies like Machinima and Red Bull changed the way we produce media, and companies like Hulu have changed the way we consume media. LA is the home to hundreds of triple-AAA and indie video game developers, from the _Braid_ guy and Riot Games to EA and Square Enix. We've got dozens of companies in the tech advertising space that you've never heard of even though they're wildly profitable because they're purely B2B. We've got hundreds of companies in the fashion/apparel space innovating at every step in the fashion process, from design to end-customer sales. LA is still _the_ place to be for aerospace technology. While SF startups dream about one day dipping their toes into logistics, LA-based companies have already revolutionized the technologies and process underlying the biggest logistics operations in the Northern Hemisphere several times over.

And yes, we even have startups like Snapchat, a social app that no one in a media town would even remotely consider a media company.

 _Oh yeah and they also pay kinda shitty considering LA (especially Venice, Santa Monica, Playa Vista where Rubicon is) is not cheap. And although I 'm sure some companies do offer free snacks/perks, I've heard a lot where they aren't expected to provide that because it's LA, not SF._

Venice, Manhattan Beach, and beach-adjacent Santa Monica is LA's Silicon Beach area. Like most beach cities in desirable areas they are expensive, though it is possible to live inland and pay reasonable rates for housing. Most businesses are spread out across LA, and with the exception of the video game cluster in Playa Del Rel (a beach city south of Santa Monica) most of the clusters are not in the beach-adjacent areas.

<comment><USER4> > Your problem is that you used a single random list website as your data > point. LA's a big place with many tech or tech-related businesses, and there > are few if any websites that even attempt to gather all of that data.

Yup, never really trying to hide that. That was my cursory search example. Not a complete drill-down of every company in LA. I still can't name a bitcoin or drone company in LA.

> LA has hundreds of companies revolutionizing media technology--nearly every > VFX company in the area is working on some sort of innovative technology or > software

OK name some? Almost all VFX companies _make_ money but very few are looking for engineer/technologists are much as they're looking for people who know how to handle the expensive software. How many of those companies are actually hiring?

> companies like Machinima and Red Bull changed the way we produce media, and > companies like Hulu have changed the way we consume media.

Cool. Not sure how this addresses the problem I stated.

> LA is the home to hundreds of triple-AAA and indie video game developers, > from the Braid guy and Riot Games to EA and Square Enix.

"Braid guy" aka Jonathan Blow works in San Francisco now. Video games are definitely one of the few tech related fields where you have options, albeit with apparently poor pay. But again why work down in LA when SF have so many gaming jobs as well?

> We've got dozens of companies in the tech advertising space that you've > never heard of even though they're wildly profitable because they're purely > B2B.

So how would I even know to work at a tech advertising company in LA if "I've never heard of (it)?" And the problem again is there are tons of "tech advertising" in SFBA: Turn, Vivaki, Rocketfuel, Mopub, Facebook, Google, AOL, PubMatic just off the top of my head are all IN SF (although I think Google may do some ad stuff down in Irvine?). Why would I move down to LA to work at companies that are so bad at marketing I've never heard of them?

> We've got hundreds of companies in the fashion/apparel space innovating at > every step in the fashion process, from design to end-customer sales.

Are we still talking tech or fashion?

> LA is still the place to be for aerospace technology. Cool, if you're > mecheng or eeng.

> While SF startups dream about one day dipping their toes into logistics, LA- > based companies have already revolutionized the technologies and process > underlying the biggest logistics operations in the Northern Hemisphere > several times over. Okay...

Apparently you've mistake my comment as, "there are no jobs in LA" when I never argue that. I've lived in LA and grew up in SoCal so I would prefer to work there if I can find the right job. But from what I've seen that is available it's a lot of slim pickings compared to SF.

> Venice, Manhattan Beach, and beach-adjacent Santa Monica is LA's Silicon > Beach area. Like most beach cities in desirable areas they are expensive, > though it is possible to live inland and pay reasonable rates for housing. > Most businesses are spread out across LA, and with the exception of the > video game cluster in Playa Del Rel (a beach city south of Santa Monica) > most of the clusters are not in the beach-adjacent areas.

Cool, you don't address that the companies in LA still pay their Engineers shit. You can live further away but then you're paying with your time, gas and car maintenance.</comment></comment></comment>


A transcript of Donald Trump's meeting with the Washington Post editorial board - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2016/03/21/a-transcript-of-donald-trumps-meeting-with-the-washington-post-editorial-board/ <comment><USER2> So..more free press for Donald Trump?</comment>


Extreme tab browsing - <AUTHOR> http://glandium.org/blog/?p=2180

<comment><USER2> Open tabs are like frozen functions (or even better, frozen stacks or trees). In addition to the content itself they also preserve the info about how I got there and, hopefully, some notion about what I intended to do next. This wont be captured as easily in a bookmark or evernote.

Right now I have 8 browser windows open and on average each one of them has 30 tabs open and this is on a laptop that has 512Mb of RAM. I can pull this of with FF 3.6 (some what tweaked), which of course I leave open for months on end. On another machine I am running FF 8.02a, it definitely seems lighter, but most of the add-ons that I use do not support it yet. Using Chrome this way will kill my box(es).

So yes I am one of those incomprehensible corner cases that many complain about. The one that expects that software should be tight and memory leak free. This is in contrast to what I get to hear a lot, "leaks dont matter, just restart your browser" or "memory is cheap, go buy some". No thank you, I would still like to retain control over who gets to decide (a)when to close an application and (b) where my money should be best spent.

Why do I do this ? perhaps because its is the most unobtrusive way of deferring or saving a thread. Tabs are my poor man's alternative to evernote, reminders, frozen trains of thought etc etc, that I do not yet consider permanent enough to bookmark and those that I can organize spatially and into groups and all that with minimum effort.

So essentially this is my way of maintaining two sets of bookmarks one volatile, spatially mapped, (almost) random access, higher priority and most crucially with a history that I can access with back&forth buttons, the other more permanent bookmark has a different set of complementary properties. Some of my tabs graduate to being bookmarks but not all.

To do all this I have to enlist the assistance of a few add-ons that keeps the inactive tabs unloaded. I use one called restore-control[1] (that or bartabs[2]). The other add-on I use is searchTab[3] to index the contents of the pages so that I can search for it based on a few words that have stuck in my memory. But usually I have a fairly good handle of where spatially they will be located so I dont really need to search.

[1][https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/restore- contr...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/restore-control/)

[2] <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bartab/>

[3] <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/search-tab/>

<comment><USER3> Have you looked at _Tree Style Tabs_ [1]?

I think it fits right in with your characterization of tabs as frozen stacks of information. It takes the concept even further by visualizing the relationship between tabs. I compulsively open stuff in background tabs, and it's very nice to have those tabs as children to the originating tab. In part because it lets me kill a parent tab along with all children, but without affecting anything else, with a few clicks. It also lets me drag a whole thread of tabs to a new window or bookmark it etc. etc. Finally, having a vertical tab list makes efficient use of wide-screen displays and you can still read useful amounts of the page title even with 25+ tabs.

Oh and here's another one that might be even more useful to you, with your emphasis on the browser history: _Tab History Redux_ [2]. Tabs opened from links (e.g. via mouse3) retain the history of the originating tab. Yeah. This is one of those things which I can't understand why it hasn't been part of all browsers for years. It just makes sense.

Both addons work fine in Firefox Nightly (9) with forced compatibility using the _Add-on Comaptibility Reporter_ [3].

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style- ta...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/)

[2] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab- history-r...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-history- redux/)

[3] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on- compat...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on- compatibility-reporter/)

<comment><USER4> When I used Firefox, Tree Style Tabs was the _first_ addon I always installed. It's wonderful, and it's one of the two things I most wish Chromium had (the other being good bookmark management).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The fact that people do this is a strong indication we're missing something fundamental with the browser UI. I'm not nearly as bad as the guy in the article but I do open ridiculous numbers of tabs at times.

It seems to me that tabs + bookmarks doesn't quite cut it. Perhaps with the exception of pinned apps we need to move away from the idea of 'open' pages entirely and really rethink how navigating the browser's history works.

<comment><USER6> >The fact that people do this is a strong indication we're missing something fundamental with the browser UI.

When I hit the backspace key, there is a significant probability that I will have to wait for the old page to download and render again. (Wether the re- download and re-render happens seems to depend on how the maintainer of the web page set the cache-control.) Although I understand the advantage to non- technical users of doing things this way, as a technically-adept user, I would have preferred for the back button never to cause a re-download or a re- render. (I know that I would have no trouble figuring out when manually to cause a re-download (using e.g. the reload button) because that is the way Lynx did it years ago.)

My point is that the main reason I open new tabs is so that I can definitely return to the current page without waiting for the page to re-download and re- render. I would be happy with the back and forward buttons and the history menu if using these things did not often cause me to wait.

<comment><USER5> I switched to Opera for exactly this reason; it's way faster at jumping back and forward between previously rendered pages. As a consequence I open far fewer tabs than I did in Chrome or FF* but I still open a hell of a lot. So speed is definitely a factor, but I still think there's UI issues at play.

* _Especially when searching Google or reading HN; I'm more inclined to navigate back and forward between results rather than middle click everything into new tabs_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I browse this way. Here's my best guess as to why (which could possibly be useful in understanding why others do, too).

* Some sites (Netflix, banking sites, etc.) can be annoying to have to log back into and get to a certain page so I just keep them open. Yes, some of those sites will expire the login anyway, but I don't know when I'll want to visit them again.

* Keeping tabs open just feels abundant and allows me to ignore having a certain discipline for awhile (closing tabs when done). It kind of feels like opening the Sunday newspaper and tearing out each section and throwing them on the table. Yes, it is a little messy, but it helps you feel good for awhile. Further, at some point you can just discard it all and nothing was really lost beyond possibly feeling embarassed by people watching you or feeling inefficient.

* I think it also metaphorically better fits how I learn. I like to build connections between my previous knowledge and things that I read. Keeping something open after I'm done with it can be convenient in that I might discover it again later after learning related information (helping me to understand it in a different way). Or perhaps the page has been updated with new comments that I don't care enough about to subscribe to, but would like to see again if I happen to run across it. I think it also helps flow, especially if I'm working on a new project.

This only works if you have plenty of memory (which I do.)

</comment><comment><USER8> If I had one wish for future browsers, it it is:

I wish there would be a good/convenient way to open several independent browser instances for different purposes. There should be a way to name each instance.

For example at work I really wish I could have one Chrome instance for research on project 1, one instance for project 2 and one for private stuff. When I close on of the them there should be a way to reopen it later exactly in the state I left it.

On startup I want to see a main browser window which list all my instances. When I click on one of them, a normal Chrome broswer opens with all the corresponding tabs (and perhaps specialized bookmarks).

Right now I have about 100 tabs open for different projects and private stuff. With the proposed systems I could put several browser instances on different workspaces next to the editor/console of the specific project.

<comment><USER9> Firefox profiles?

<comment><USER8> Yes, profiles would be some kind of solution but I'd like to have something more dynamic where I create/delete/clone profiles/instances on the fly.

<comment><USER10> Shouldn't actually take more than 5 minutes of you writing a few scripts.

      open: firefox --no-remote -P <profile>
      create: firefox -CreateProfile <new name>
      delete: rm -rf <location of profile>, e.g. %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\<profile name> on Windows
      clone: cp -R <location of profile> <new name>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Makes me think of the alleged OS X philosophy that you should never worry about closing apps. So what if bookmarks and tabs are essentially the same? If you never worry about closing tabs, they are essentially just bookmarks that load really fast. It seems inevitable that things will head that way. So there should be better tools for managing tabs, similar to bookmarks (and there are no great tools for bookmarks yet, either).

</comment><comment><USER12> When you're trying to use awesomebar to find a tab you already have open based on a URL, and the tab itself is not loaded into memory until you switch to it, and the page will load in <1s (ie. most web pages).

Why bother leaving the tab open?

I'm quite compulsive about keeping my tab bar tidy, getting back to recently closed tabs or commonly used ones is generally done through awesomebar or some TMP clicking shortcuts.

</comment><comment><USER4> I used to think I was a freak for having, sometimes, as many as 20 or 30 tabs open. My kid looked over my shoulder once and laughed at me, said "Really Dad?"

But I see by the other comments that I'm not a freak. In fact I'm an amateur.

I can now hold my head up, and not have to slink around and hide my browser and its completely normal 15 tabs.

</comment><comment><USER13> > Switch to an existing tab when following a link to an already opened url

I think this would be pretty jarring unless you restricted it only to tabs that had just been opened. A better approach would be to cache the URL you typed and any URLs it redirected to in the AwesomeBar lookup table.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think it's possible that this extreme tab usage could be pretty common. I don't have 500 tabs like him, but I can get into the 50-100 range. For me, too many tabs isn't the problem - it's just that browsers can't seem to handle so many tabs without using up all memory.

<comment><USER15> Try Opera--my only multifarous-tab problem is clicking on one to select it without closing it when I have so many open that the "x" is the entire width of the tab.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Opening hundreds of tabs in different browsers across multiple 2560x1600 resolution monitors is the reason the computers I use have 16gb+ of ram.

(And running VMs, but that does not make it as extravagant)

</comment><comment><USER17> People that do this are NUTS. Ever heard of Evernote, Read It Later, or the plethora of websites that exist for this very reason? Man up and shell out a few bucks...there is NO reason you should have more than 10-12 tabs open on a regular, consistent basis...

<comment><USER4> There are a lot of different ways to use different tools, because there are a lot of different people who think and organize differently. Yours is not the only way that people manage information in their head, but I'm sure it works great for you.

A couple scenarios for how I get a lot of tabs open:

\- <ahem> Hacker News. Scan down the page, and for each interesting article, middle click the article and the comments link. Work your way through the tabs (maybe going back and forth between "work" and HN).

\- Search. Middle click the most promising results. Work your way through the tabs, possibly bookmarking something that you know you'll want again.

ReadItLater or any other temporary archive seems like procedural overkill for something you intend to come back to in a few minutes to half an hour.

Bookmarking the same sort of material seems inappropriate since most of what's in those tabs isn't yet determined to be bookmarkworthy.

I didn't dream this up, it's just how I naturally organize my short term browser use. I think "short term" is the important phrase there.

Finally, there's a middle ground between lots of tabs and ReadItLater. Chrome has a nice extension called Session Buddy, that records the tabs in your current session. Hit the button and another tab (ironically) opens, showing your current and recent sessions. Now close as many tabs as you like, get back on task, and gradually work your way through the sites listed on the session buddy tab.

Lots of ways to do everything. I really don't think I'm nuts for doing it this way.

<comment><USER17> A few minutes or half an hour are different...this guy has upwards of 500 tabs - you can't come back to that in a few minutes or half an hour...

I said 10-12 tabs consistently - and by that I mean app tabs that remain open. The rest should be opened for research as needed AND THEN CLOSED WHEN FINISHED. For everything else that you need to consistently check updates on, you need to find a way to turn it into an RSS feed or Twitter feed or whatever that feeds into an existing tab for an app you already have open (e.g. Google Reader or your social media aggregator of choice).

This is not "my" way - this is the way of the human brain. You can't do that many things at once and you can't focus on that many things at once. You would be overwhelmed by 500 tabs of information...that's why most of us have 1 site where all our information aggregates and 1 email address where the rest forward and 1 cell phone rather than 5-6, etc. I'm saying that people that do this type of EXTREME tab browsing are inherently disorganized and lack focus and attention to anything they do.

Yeah, downvote it to hell, I really don't mind. If you do this on a regular basis though, I'd love to hear from you and how you feel about whether you are an organized individual and one who adequately focuses on the things that are important to you.

<comment><USER18> I tend to have about 100 tabs open in my web browser. Of those, 10-15 are for pages that I always have open, ~50 are for pages that are relatively temporary (as in a few weeks), and another ~25 for more temporary (days), and then up to 50 for very temporary (like when I'm browsing through hacker news and so on).

I would say that I am relatively organized, but apparently in another way than you are. As an example of how I organize my tabs, I have 8 tabs open with minecraftwiki/forum, 5 imdb tabs with bad '50s horror flicks for a movie night I'm planning, 4 tabs with articles about an emacs customization that I'm planning, 10 tabs with doxygen generated documentation for a C++ project I'm doing, 6 tabs have arduino documentation for a hardware project I'm halfway through, a few appdb.winehq pages for games I have problems running, some wiki-pages with books I'm thinking about buying, and a few with articles I'm thinking about sharing with my friends. This is in 3 windows on 2 virtual desktops (on my main machine, I have another 20 tabs open on my laptop).

I don't get "[1]00 tabs of information", I get perhaps 10 different topics that I can choose between, and when I have done that I can just scroll over the group of tabs that make up a topic to get a quick overview. After this, I'm usually synced up with what I was thinking the last time I was working with the project.

Btw, I use 2 rss readers (google reader and akregator), the akregator one for things I shouldn't read while working. I have 2 cell phones. I also have 3 email endpoints, one for studies, one for personal mail and one for work.

There is nothing inherently disorganized about this (IMO), since it gives me a very clear distinction between my different tasks.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to Give Mars an Atmosphere, Maybe - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/how-to-give-mars-an-atmosphere-maybe <comment><USER2> Use one of these to do it:

Dyson-Harrop satellite

[https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19497-out-of-this- wor...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19497-out-of-this-world- proposal-for-solar-wind-power/)</comment>


The new rules of ethical design in tech - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlassian.com/blog/technology/ethical-design-in-tech <comment><USER2> This seems more emotional based than logic based. All the problems with Pokemon Go are problems caused by users and their choices. No one is saying we need to banned fire because it kills so many people.

Side note: ethics/morality is subjective and doesn't actually exist.

</comment><comment><USER3> The one thing missing there is role of ethics in Atlassian products. Are they the best they could be? Is JIRA used to force people into overworking and bad work-life balance?</comment>


Ask HN: Creating passive income online - myth or doable? - <AUTHOR>

If you've read the "4 hour work week" you know what I'm talking about. Do you think it's doable to create a passive income stream online "on the side" with a small investment. What techniques have you found that work? <comment><USER2> Once it was very easy. Now it's very hard. But still doable. By passive income you probably mean a content website monetized with ads. Some time ago there were people that made millions of dollars only with google adsense. I don't know if this technique still works but I think Google bans every time black- hat adsense users if they manually discover them.

Most of adsense millionaires used this technique: they select most paying keywords (there are several paid tools for that) and they make microsites about this keywords. With some black-hat SEO, they make fortune with adsense. They write codes, and automate the whole process. Some make content aggregation, they don't write anything, everything is automated.

Google updates its algorithm to prevent this kind of abuses, but still, there are too many people smarter than google engineers.

I've read too much about this kind of business. 7 years ago I made a small site to test if it really works. I made a blogspot site with only 2 articles, it brought me 100-200$ per month. I was in high school that time. Than I read some interviews from big content website owners that they make too much money with their website. And I made a decision that I'll learn SEO and build a big content website with a unique idea. I was 5 years long a premium user in SEOmoz. From articles by Rand Fish I discovered Hacker news. And the community blew me away.

I started university and started to build my "unique idea content website" but it was never finished because of Hacker News. I saw that although it's still a good idea to make money with a content website, there is better way to make money and it's more passive than that. It's just simple idea. Start a startup.

I'm still a student at a medical faculty. Last year I started a startup to see what it looks like and if I can build something useful. I bought a domain name for 10$ and 9$ hosting from hostgator. Now it makes 20-30k $ per month and I don't do anything. I'm the owner of my small company and I have 12 workers and one CEO to organize the work, and I continue my study at the university.

After seeing how it's simple to start a startup, (of course starting is not so easy and the idea, marketing also important) I think I'll continue my life as an entrepreneur, not as a doctor.

<comment><USER3> Interesting. Is your site a content site or are you actually providing a service? I am a physician with hopes to start something too (see my profile if you are interested).

<comment><USER2> No, as I said I didn't started the content site, because starting startup is much more interesting, easier and brings money fast and easier, if the idea, execution and marketing are well done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You have to create value commensurate with the return you expect. If you're exceptionally clever or knowledgeable, you may be able to create a lot of value in a relatively short amount of time, then implement a system that allows you to continue to benefit from that value indefinitely - the sort of thing described in the Four Hour Work Week.

People fail because they ignore the need to create value. They fall for sucker schemes that promise vast reservoirs of cash on tap if only you know the secret. There are rare opportunities that arise from market inefficiencies, but you can bet your ass that if someone has identified one of these opportunities, they're not going to cut you in on it.

If you want passive income, you need to create something of real value, then work out how to sell it. It's usually easier to identify the market first, then find a product to sell to it, rather than vice-versa. There are an infinite number of possible products, but relatively few viable markets.

<comment><AUTHOR> "If you want passive income, you need to create something of real value, then work out how to sell it"

Can you give a few examples that are doable on a small budget online?

<comment><USER5> Selling case studies and reports can make it happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have done it, but it ended up being a lot of work relative to what I earned (and eventually I lost all the income after a Google algorithm change.)

The thing is, it's generally easiest to create lots of value (and correspondingly, earn a lot of money) in an area where you have very little competition. 10 years ago nobody understood the internet, so passive income online was easy. 5 years later it was doable, but harder. Today you'll probably get a much higher RoI by learning R and doing some Data Science consulting.

</comment><comment><USER5> One good thing to make passive income is by selling Reports about something , gather lots of useful data and sell it as pdf.

If you can put some graphs, charts ,or infographic in it to make it more insightful.

Here is great example : <http://www.marketinghotsheet.com/>

One of my friend used to do it, he had made good mullah through it.

</comment><comment><USER7> It did work in my case. I have a design blog which did help me get a lot of design clients!

PS: What might work for someone maynot work for you. You have to find that unique thing (idea) that might work for your case. Based on your skill set.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just to qualify this further - what if you're not selling a service on top of your blog? (i.e. design services in your case) - could you still create a labor of love, like a blog and pay rent with the cash it generates? how?

<comment><USER7> Don't think about the end result while you're starting off. I didn't create a blog because I wanted clients. I created a blog to show the world my work (showoff) and people just happened to like it and the offers started flowing.

If you think about the end result (pay rent in your case) then you maynot be able to succeed! Okay I don't want to talk philosophy here buy you got the point, didn't you?</comment></comment></comment>


China's Bitcoin Trading Volumes Fall to Insignificance - <AUTHOR> http://www.trustnodes.com/2017/09/22/chinas-bitcoin-trading-volumes-fall-insignificance <comment><USER2> wonder how it effects mining difficulty</comment>


Reversing a MacOS Kernel Extension - <AUTHOR> https://lightbulbone.com/posts/2016/10/dsmos-kext/ <comment><USER2> > Reversing the Unprotect Algorithm

Protected binaries have everything after the first three pages encrypted with 512-bit Blowfish. The key is the "Don't steal Mac OS X" poem (I believe with spaces removed):

Your karma check for today: There once was was a user that whined his existing OS was so blind, he'd do better to pirate an OS that ran great but found his hardware declined. Please don't steal Mac OS! Really, that's way uncool. (C) Apple Computer, Inc.

Fun fact: CommonCrypto doesn't do Blowfish with a key size this large anymore due to CVE-2016-1802: [https://blog.timac.org/2016/0710-blowfish-operations- with-ke...](https://blog.timac.org/2016/0710-blowfish-operations-with-key- size-longer-than-448-bits-in-macos-10-11-5-ios-9-3-2/)

<comment><USER3> What would be the purpose of such a "bad" encryption? Apple must have known that it is not difficult to decrypt the protected binaries, so what is the point? To deter people who are not determined enough to learn about the code? To tell people who do decrypt them not to seal code?

<comment><USER2> It's probably meant as a slight deterrent. People who are determined to Hackintosh are going to do it anyways; this just puts a small barrier in place to them doing so. Plus, the poem makes them feel bad about their actions.

<comment><USER4> Technical Protection Measures.

<comment><USER2> It's not a very good one, is it? Nothing close to what iOS does.

Nice username BTW ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is interesting, I wonder if this the same encryption used to encrypt app store apps as well, I believe on iOS the kernel extension is fairplay, it would be interesting to know if someone tried to decrypt an app without a jailbroken device.

</comment><comment><USER6> Funny - reverse engineer C++ calls by using google instead.

</comment><comment><USER7> (2016)</comment>


The Missed Red Flags on Groupon - <AUTHOR> http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/the-missed-red-flags-on-groupon/ <comment><USER2> Who missed these red flags? Nobody I know in the valley. We've all been mocking @Groupon as an un-defensible and unsustainable ponzi scheme. For at least a year and a half there have been enough major news organizations backing this sentiment.

Come on. Online coupons. Groupon is the hype of boo.com, webvan, and Kozmo.com all rolled into one, with greedy investors hoping they can make a quick buck before people realized what happened.

Groupon is a glorified wordpress blog with 10,000 sales reps propping up the fake market with unsustainable or warranted demand. It's like watching Boiler Room play out in real life. There is no business process innovation here or technical innovation. The only innovation here is using huge marketing dollars to perpetuate a pump and dump ponzi scheme long enough for an IPO. Oh wait, that's not innovative, they did the same thing with dozens of companies a decade ago just before the first web bubble burst.

<comment><USER3> I am not at all a Groupon apologist (I think their base business is declining and doesn't make sense for most local businesses in the long-term), but you have gone way overboard by comparing Groupon to boo, webvan, and kozmo.

For all its faults, Groupon is on track for $1.5Bn in NET revenues (this doesn't include pass-through that they initially included in revenues) this year, and will probably still IPO somewhere around 10 billion dollars. All of the companies you mentioned only existed for 2 years before being liquidated.

As for everyone in the valley knowing Groupon was a ponzi scheme for the past year and a half - then the folks from Battery, Accel, Kleiner Perkins, Greylock, NEA, TCV, Silver Lake, etc (all of whom made investments in Groupon this year) would have to be complete idiots to invest in Groupon, and that is certainly not true.

Sidenote- a quick reminder on what it was like in the 00 bubble that you reference: [http://feefighters.com/blog/ff_infographic/tech-boom-or- bubb...](http://feefighters.com/blog/ff_infographic/tech-boom-or-bubble-lets- look-at-the-data/)

<comment><USER4> You can call a loan Revenue that does not make it so. And when you need advertizing to sustain your business you don't get to call it revenue neutral, it's still just another expense.

June 2nd, 2011 "Groupon lost $456 million last year, and another $147 million last quarter." [http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/02/groupon- growth-2-6-billion-...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/02/groupon- growth-2-6-billion-revenue-run-rate-charts/)

PS: The #1 investing rule is the second a company starts playing games with their books avoid them.

<comment><USER5> Much of business consists of selling product before paying vendors. Have you heard of "Net 30/60/90" terms?

The advertising is to acquire customers. But then it can obviously promote deals to existing customers for essentially no cost. This is also the reason it wasn't crazy to consider the mailing list an asset and account for it accordingly. Progress is only made when someone pushes.

<comment><USER6> What, they are going to lay off their massive sales staff and the vendors are going to keep coming back to offer zero-margin daily deals because...? This company doesn't have a USP; its business model is being cloned left and right, and customers have zero brand loyalty to the coupon broker. I can't understand your unshakeable faith in it. Your pricetack.com project looks vastly more interesting to me than Groupon ever has.

<comment><USER2> Even then, Groupon was basically a modified rip-off of Woot.com and other deals sites. Bernie Madoff would be proud of Groupon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Groupon is a huge, fun target but there are compelling fundamentals under all the noise and pre-IPO PR blunders:

1) "66% of Groupon deals are profitable for the seller, and 40% of businesses would not use Groupon again, according to a Rice University study."

[http://www.quora.com/Groupon-IPO-S-1-Filing- June-2011/What-i...](http://www.quora.com/Groupon-IPO-S-1-Filing- June-2011/What-is-Groupons-redemption-rate)

2) Groupon has a hidden vat of PURE margin - breakage / un-redeemed deals that could be a shocking amount of money once financials are disclosed.

3) They have enormous growth potential in key markets which is why they are spending money like drunken sailors on customer acquisition. They can grow by 10x in the restaurant space alone.

[http://answers.ask.com/Food_and_Drinks/Restaurants/how_many_...](http://answers.ask.com/Food_and_Drinks/Restaurants/how_many_restaurants_are_in_america)

4) Restaurants, spas, and other retail vendors have fixed (and perishable costs). This means that at particular times they can offer incredible deals as the alternative is burned or thrown out resources.

Groupon's team has indicated their #1 mission moving forward is to figure out this perishability equation.

Their VP says "If we can eliminate 10 percent of perishability, we can change the dynamics for small business owners," he says. Small businesses would become more like airlines, matching supply against demand to maximize revenues."

[http://moneyland.time.com/2011/03/18/impulse- shopping-2-0-gr...](http://moneyland.time.com/2011/03/18/impulse- shopping-2-0-groupons-new-deals-tempt-anyone-whos-hungry-or-bored-right- now/#ixzz1OFeK6lY0)

<comment><USER6> #4 is a viable point, but the problem for Groupon in trying to capitalize on reducing this wastage is that the demand for such services is highly elastic. To a large extent the problem here is a time-of-day issue that Groupon can't particulary assist with. Sure, a restaurant is burning valuable energy outside of lunch and dinner hours, but if such a business owner wants to give a discount during certain hours why use Groupon? That's what 'happy hour' is for, and merchants have a pretty good idea how far they can go with price discrimination without alienating their busy-time customers.

Also: <http://xkcd.com/951/>

<comment><USER7> Speaking to Bloomberg Businessweek, Groupon showed off what it hopes will take its business to the next level: A new service for smartphones and computers called Groupon Now, the centerpiece of which consists of two buttons: One that says "I'm Hungry," the other of which says "I'm Bored."

So: Impulse buying for Groupon customers, and a means for merchants to sell off their spare capacity, and, hopefully for Groupon, a big, untapped market in which to serve as the middleman.

<http://www.geekosystem.com/groupon-im-hungry-im-bored/>

<comment><USER8> >the centerpiece of which consists of two buttons: One that says "I'm Hungry," the other of which says "I'm Bored."

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "All of this raises an obvious question: How did so many Wall Street firms desperate to underwrite the Groupon I.P.O. miss these warning signs when pitching such a sky-high valuation?"

Come. On. Is it really necessary to ask questions like these about the motivation of Wall Street firms? They didn't miss it. They saw a trend that they thought they could exploit, namely, the growing tech bubble and its darling that they could flip (along with an eight figure underwriting fee). Although, I am surprised they didn't manage the process (and Mr. Mason) better. They let it get away from them, which is not like Goldman Sachs.

<comment><USER10> <http://www.crunchbase.com/company/groupon>

Funding Total $1.14B

        Series D, 1/11            $950M
        Digital Sky Technologies
        Morgan Stanley Venture Partners
        Fidelity Ventures
        Andreessen Horowitz
        Battery Ventures
        Greylock Partners
        Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
        Maverick Capital
        Silver Lake Partners
        Technology Crossover Ventures

The only thing more ridiculous is Twitter.

Funding Total $1.16B

How much hardware would it take to clone Twitter, if done efficiently?

A year ago they were at 1,000 tweets per second and 12,000 queries per second. [http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/10/twitters-new- search-a...](http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/10/twitters-new-search- architecture.html)

The Steve Jobs news set a new record of 10,000 TPS. TPS Report: [http://techland.time.com/2011/10/07/twitter-breaks-tweets- pe...](http://techland.time.com/2011/10/07/twitter-breaks-tweets-per-second- record-in-response-to-steve-jobs-death/)

As of 7 months ago, they were at a billion tweets per week: <http://blog.twitter.com/2011/03/numbers.html>

If the average message is half the maximum length, then that's around 70 gigs/week naïvely (not counting multibyte characters or metadata).

Around 3.6 terabytes per year. Older tweets are probably almost never accessed so they can stay on mechanical HDs, and stuff that IS needed can get temporarily promoted to SSD storage which can handle all that random seeking. And older tweets can probably be nicely compressed.

Search is the only real challenge, but they "solve" that by not indexing most tweets. A subset of recent tweets, not indexed in real time, pushing out older ones.

<comment><USER11> I've never written a "twitter clone" but I would suspect the real problem isn't pure throughput but rather the mixture of having to n-way route messages to the proper recipients combined with having to spread the load of that across potentially many systems. I do not think doing that is as trivial as it may seem.

However, I'm sure you're right in that someone could reimplement what twitter does more efficiently than they do it if they paid proper attention to all the mistakes twitter made along the way. Not sure it would be worth the bother though, because twitter's real win is having their company name define the action in much the way googling has come to define web search. You can't overcome that by being marginally better.. or, as it happens, even by being marginally better and giving away tons of free money (just ask MS/Bing).

<comment><USER10> Apparently up to 4B tweets monthly now: [http://blog.twitter.com/2011/09/share-photo-via-text- message...](http://blog.twitter.com/2011/09/share-photo-via-text-message.html)

Sending messages to recipients and load-balancing don't faze me. SMS gateway costs do.

I could have cloned it, web-only, missing out on what I assume to be the main userbase.

Of course now with smartphones, web-only is increasingly feasible.

Snappier performance, longer messages, and actually indexing them might make it worth a shot. Except it wouldn't make any money either (I refuse to inflict more advertisements upon the unhappy world).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't see how Groupon is anything more than a huge bubble waiting to burst. They may be worth something, but nothing even close to the valuation that Groupon/bankers are trying to create with accounting tricks.

From a merchant perspective, I don't see how using Groupon helps long-term profitability. Almost everyone I know who use Groupon regularly only visit the participating merchants when using a Groupon and never again. Furthermore, they are reluctant to pay full price at any merchant if they know that that that merchant has previously had a Groupon promotion.

So the merchant not only effectively spends marketing $$$ (since Groupon is supposed to be considered a marketing expense) for customers that will only use the loss-producing (likely) coupon, the merchant also devalues itself in people's (including those that did not previously use a Groupon) eyes.

Additionally, the daily deal industry itself doesn't have strong reasons to remain tied to a company (unlike social networking where people tend to stay where their friends are) and there are very low barriers to entry. Granted, if you're the biggest player in the market, you have certain advantages like economies of scale, brand recognition, but I don't know if that is sufficient to thrive in this industry where people jump from site to site depending on which site has the best deals for that day.

Add in pre-IPO accounting tricks and early cash-out (while the company is running hundreds of millions in the red)...well, you get the point.

</comment><comment><USER13> Sure. Groupon has a few problems.

But the idea that an underwriting firm such as Goldman or Morgan is some kind of arbiter of wholesome business fundamentals is ridiculous.

Sorkin knows better than to suggest that.

</comment><comment><USER14> I am curious where is the Group in Groupon these days. Groupon is more like a coupon company now than the group buying phenomena that made it successful.

</comment><comment><USER15> "[we are]...not one of those uglies." (CEO using sonogram analogy in memo to employees.)

This is the $310M man? Are you kidding me?

Next he'll be off killing elephants with the GoDaddy guy.

Bob

<comment><USER16> The "one of those uglies" quote is from the CEO, Andrew Mason.

The guy who took $319 million was Eric Lefkofsky (Groupon chairman). Nice pay day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think all of the people who just didn't "get it", did the boring thing, actually read the IPO and then started throwing around inflammatory words like 'Ponzi'...

...are feeling pretty smart right now.

</comment><comment><USER18> I find it strange that Groupon gets so much attention on HN. It's not a technology company. It's a marketing/advertising company with seriously questionable ways of doing things.

Andrew Mason is a cool guy and I loved his talk at Startup School last year, but his company is more into financial engineering than innovation, just like Wall street and the banks.

</comment><comment><USER19> Hindsight bias is probably the most important 2 words here.

</comment><comment><USER20> Cooking the books before an IPO to hide an unsustainable ponzi sceme? Shouldn't someone be going to jail? At both Groupon and at Goldman.

</comment><comment><USER21> I personally (if I could afford to) would buy as many put options that my broker would allow on this stock on day one.

</comment><comment><USER22> We haven't even SEEN the local merchants bail on Groupon yet, and that is going to happen. Believe me. I deal with disenfranchised Groupon merchants everyday, and they almost all hate it. The craziest part is they're all considering doing it AGAIN just because they feel blackmailed into it by the "if I don't do it, my neighbor will. At least this way I might get something out of it" situation.

I love selling an alternative, because it sells itself. You're NOT like Groupon? SOLD!

</comment><comment><USER22> All it took for me was for their revenue model to be revealed. Discounts of 50-90% THEN they take 50-90% of what is paid by the customer? Borderline robbery.

<comment><USER23> It depends on how the merchant treats a Groupon customer. They may make up for the customer acquisition cost by offering less (hurtful to them) discounts in the future. Take this spa for example, they did a follow up for Groupon customers offering the same 50% deal, but this time they kept Groupon's share:

[http://feefighters.com/blog/who-groupon-benefits-the- contrac...](http://feefighters.com/blog/who-groupon-benefits-the-contractor- vs-the-business/)

<comment><USER22> And I think we can all agree that hurts Groupon in the longterm. So.... doesn't seem like it depends at all, regardless people are trying to avoid using Groupon.</comment></comment></comment>


Viacom so devastated by piracy that CEO only gets $50 million raise - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/11/viacom-so-devastated-by-piracy-that-ceo-only-gets-50m-raise.ars <comment><USER2> That's the funniest piece of relatavistic morality I've read in a while. Nice.</comment>


Show HN: O'Reilly using our new contest software to giveaway full JS bookshelf - <AUTHOR> http://www.facebook.com/OReilly?sk=app_148918675171161

<comment><USER2> I can't complain about this not working, because it clearly does. And I can't complain about the technology being used to do it, because it looks great.

The types of companies trying these sorts of things nowadays surprises me though. It's like the sweepstakes that were everywhere online in the late 90s. This time, essentially they're cashing in on lots of other people's social capital (with a game or two thrown in) with the negligible cost of a few prizes to the most ardent promoters. Nothing wrong with that if people know what they're going in for, but it seems rather inelegant for the likes of O'Reilly.

Nonetheless, if it works, hats off to everyone and perhaps I'll be forced to give it a go one day! The standards are clearly changing when it comes to encouraging retweets and Facebook likes of your business.. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback and I know a bit where you are coming from. It's something that is on our minds constantly with this. When we looked at contests on Facebook and Twitter now, almost all of them force one thing: the use of social capital to buy entry. Most sweepstakes on facebook put up the "Fangate" where you are forced to like the page before you can even see what the sweepstakes or contest is even about.

I'm not in love with Fangates. I'm also not saying we won't experiment with them though. But I think I know what you are saying and feel a lot of the same stuff.

But that's why we thought we were making this a lot more interesting. We've had Cityposh contests being played and won from people who don't even have Facebook or Twitter accounts. They just like playing the games. We have 6 other games right now and will continue create more that have nothing to do with "social capital".

So we try and offer all this stuff up as a menu. You pick and choose what you like. If you are having fun with the games feel free to bring in your friends on Facebook to help you win. If you don't think it's worth it, there's 6 other or so ways to just play and get points.

It's a great point though Peter, and one we aren't forgetting about as we iterate on this.

<comment><USER2> Good points. Having extra options through the games is a great addition here that I don't recall seeing before (but I'm not exactly researching this topic ;-)). The problem is, grabbing a quick 1000 points for doing a "like" is pretty tempting.

I know I'm in the minority here, though. These sorts of things clearly work, but I'm the guy who'd rather put down $10 for something than send a tweet to get it for free (or pull out one of my "spare" accounts I don't care about, of course ;-)).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Going to that page in my browser (Chrome 14) gives me a warning about an insecure script that has been disabled - the learn more link points here: [https://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=1...](https://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=1342714)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, thanks for letting us know. Will work on better ssl support.

<comment><USER3> Fun tip: If you do something like src="//website.com/resource.js", then browsers will use SSL if the source page was sent over SSL, and won't if it wasn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you don't have or want to use your Facebook account, here's the bigger version

[http://cityposh.com/contests/play-to-win-free-oreilly- ebooks...](http://cityposh.com/contests/play-to-win-free-oreilly-ebooks-and- videos)

</comment><comment><USER4> Note to college students and other professionals, you might have access to all of these ebooks via Safari Books Online. Stop playing the game and get back to coding in JS.

</comment><comment><USER5> Typing words into the "sloggle" challenge, oftimes the textbox won't clear after hitting enter (but are accepted after a short delay), so the first few letters of the next word are removed along with the previous word.

<comment><AUTHOR> Bah, that's annoying! :) Thanks for the report. We'll look into getting that fixed soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's too bad they don't also give away the dead-tree version. Some things are nice to actually have on your shelf...

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll let them know about that. Thanks for the feedback.

<comment><USER6> Thanks.

Also: I take it that you have to be in the top 10 to get something? Or is it that the top 3 get something, and 10 others are randomly selected to win a book? The award system is not explained too clearly...

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, I'll mention this could be cleared up. It's the top 3 people get the 1/2/3 prizes mentioned. The raffle is run amongst everyone who plays at all. So even if you just tweet or like the thing, or take the minimal amount of time to enter, you are elegible for the raffle. So you don't have to be anywhere near the top 10 to win a javascript ebook.

<comment><USER6> ...and I was feeling reasonably good about reaching #18 efficiently. But don't really have the time to burn to claw my way up another 15 places. I was hoping that the raffle would be weighted by the number of points you have...oh well. Time to just hope I'm lucky.

By the way--thanks for babysitting this thread and responding to everyone.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, yes, weighted raffles. We'd love to have weighted raffles. We were fooling with that awhile ago, but there's a sticky legal point. The whole no purchase necessary clause. If we had weighted raffles it sounds like we'd need a way for people to send us a postcard and have equal treatment as the highest person on the leader board with the raffle. That didn't sound fair. We'd love to figure out a way to do it though.

<comment><USER7> > The whole no purchase necessary clause.

But none of the games/tasks cost anything anyway... so no purchase is necessary. (What am I missing?)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dust 514 is free-to-play, but a top loadout costs $0.24 - <AUTHOR> http://www.incgamers.com/2012/06/dust-514-is-free-to-play-but-a-top-loadout-costs-0-24/ Genius business model: Dust 514 costs $0.24 to die. <comment><AUTHOR> If you ask me thats a genius revenue model, per death. I have no idea if its like that in other games though.</comment>


When an Anonymous Troll is Revealed - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/uk/2010/01/14/anonymous-troll-commenter-revealed/

<comment><USER2> Above every comment box on every forum there should be a small little warning, it should read 'you are not as anonymous as you think you are'.

I've helped busting a few people that were distributing child pornography using my servers, and I can tell you that in each and every case they were completely surprised that they had been discovered. So secure were they in their feeling of being anonymous that their disbelief was only surpassed by the sentences they got.

<comment><USER3> This guy wasn't distributing child pornography, making hate speech, or even being personal.

His worst comment was that the poster was 'lying round drunk' which is, unfortunately, a large portion of the London tech scene for some people.

Using a security exploit in Disqus in some kind of revenge on the critic is more a reflection on the person who would do such a thing.

<comment><USER2> Absolutely. But do you think he would have made those same comments if he had made them in the knowledge that his identity would be revealed ?

<comment><USER3> It sounds like something someone would say in person in polite company, though not in front of a person - since the article was _about_ the subject, not by it, this would be reasonable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow, the article casually mentions a Disqus bug that allows anyone to find out an an anonymous poster's email address.</comment>


Ask HN: need recommendation on payment solution / gateway - rush-tea

Just curious, other than Paypal as a payment gateway for your web startup, do you have any other preference for web startup to start their business?
I think Square only do physical credit card processing.
Thanks in advance. <comment><AUTHOR> You should check out Payfirma (www.payfirma.com) They do payments for businesses - mobile, ecommerce, web terminal, even traditional POS

<comment> rush-tea payfirma looks OK, but they charge many overhead fees to start (i.e startup fee $230, monthly fee $30) while their swipe fee is 1.99-2.99% + 25c. I wonder what is the criteria that differ the % from 1.99 - 2.99%?

paypal and stripe do not charge overhead, but a higher %. They both charge 2.9% + 30c per swipe. I like this as they charge flat fee.

I think for a web startup, it's best to take no overhead fee until business is established. If I have to pay payfirma 2.99% + 25c per swipe, it would be good to go stripe or paypal.

Has anyone use stripe? Any good/bad experience? How's their dev support for API integration support?

Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> If you're looking for an all-in-one solution, there's FastSpring and its sister service for SaaS offerings, SaaSy.com

</comment><comment> rush-tea there are only two alternatives, paypal and stripe?

no other payment gateway?

</comment><comment><USER3> Stripe?</comment>


Jobs-To-Be-Done  - <AUTHOR> http://daslee.me/Jobs-To-Be-Done

<comment><USER2> Let's assume for a second that Christensen is right and that the best products are just trying to help consumers do what they're already trying to with some other product. If that's the case, why does the consumer start trying to do something in the first place?

Can't there also be disruptive companies that create new technology that help consumers do something they had never tried to do before? or are all consumer aspirations decedents of a singular, universal desire?

<comment><AUTHOR> Really good point. Christensen was always interested in finding causality in disruption, innovation. It's easy to look back in hindsight and say that X product tapped into a certain fundamental need but maybe in fact it helped them do something they never tried before.

Short answer - I dont know!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I also highly recommend Christensen's 2010 followup HBS article, "Integrating Around the Job to be Done." [http://hbr.org/product/integrating-around-the- job-to-be-done...](http://hbr.org/product/integrating-around-the-job-to-be- done-module-note/an/611004-PDF-ENG)</comment>


CERN turns to open source software as Microsoft increases its fees - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2019/06/13/cern-microsoft-alternatives-project-open-source-software/ <comment> tony-allan Also see [https://home.cern/news/news/computing/microsoft- alternatives...](https://home.cern/news/news/computing/microsoft-alternatives- project-malt)</comment>


Ask HN: No reply link as you get further into comments causes silly editing. - <AUTHOR>

This seems to be a fairly recent feature, but it just doesn't seem the right way to go about things to me. Fairly irritating.
I was just reading the comments here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830939
Interesting discussions, but then you have people editing their previous comment because they can't reply yet.
>> EDIT: good points in reply to this... (I can't reply any deeper in the thread, so I'll just acknowledge it here)
Is there a description somewhere of the problem this solves and why it's needed? Hacker news seemed to function pretty well when you could reply to whatever you wanted whenever you wanted to. <comment><USER2> The reply link does appear eventually; there's just a delay that gets longer as the nesting gets deeper.

It's supposed to slow down rapid back-and-forth threads that are usually between just two or a few people, often are arguments, and occasionally "take over" posts by generating dozens of comments.

</comment><comment><USER3> _Is there a description somewhere of the problem this solves and why it's needed?_

<http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah thanks. I think it needs tweaking personally. Maybe wait until 5 levels deep or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How often have you seen this? I find it's extremely rare.</comment>


3 Reasons Why You Should Quit Your Job - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/_patrickgod/3-reasons-why-you-should-quit-your-job-88g <comment><USER2> Something that really hit home for me in another post like this were questions around how your employer is helping you to develop, for example, how often do you have catch ups with your line manager? When was the last time your line manager took an interest in how you were getting on? Do you get feedback for good work or only when things are perceived to be going badly? How are you being supported in progressing in your career? And the piece went on to say, if your manager is not doing these things then the company probably does not give a shit about you, and perhaps not about any of its techies.

Thinking hard about these questions made me realise I've pretty much never worked for a company where they have any genuine interest in my progression. I'm not sure whether this is down to me, the companies I've worked for, or whether management in the UK is generally piss poor.</comment>


Interviewstreet - Hackers rejoice - <AUTHOR> http://uzairchutani.tumblr.com/ <comment><USER2> Hackers rejoice? Really? Should hackers "rejoice" at being asked to do silly puzzles for the privilege attending one of your wonderful interviews? Surely it's more like "companies with useless hiring processes rejoice"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey almost, we're almost getting to put up real-world problems soon! We had a soft launch earlier this week and are working on the feedback. That said, we've got quite a lot of hackers who solve the challenges for fun :)

<comment><USER2> Sorry for the negative comment. I think the headline just rubbed me up the wrong way :) I do think I would just be annoyed at being asked to use your site but I'm sure it's going to be useful for others.

I do sometimes (quite often actually) do programming exercises for fun, but if you want me to do them not for fun you'd better at the very least be wasting your time as well as mine...

<comment><USER3> Hi almost,

Original blog post author here. Generally speaking, interview processes have undergone a fraction of the innovation that industry has seen. Hence, After learning about Interviewstreet and checking out all the amazing companies they've partnered with, I got a bit excited but I definitely didn't mean to offend :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> tomh- I remember the last HN thread about Interview street they promised more 'real world' problems, instead they added more euler style algorithm quizes. I guess the companies have achieved good results basing hiring decisions on these algorithm quizes, maybe someone from interviewstreet can share some results?

<comment><USER4> About all these quizzes for hiring, I really found Techcrunch's _Why The New Guy Can't Code_ [1] quite insightful (at least for startups) and filled with great links.

 _Hiring Developers: You're Doing It Wrong_ [2] also delves a lot more into this paradigm, showing some hands on experience and show the evolution of their hiring process. This post got a lot of tracking and great comments on HN as well[3].

[1] <http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/07/why-the-new-guy-cant-code/>

[2] <http://devinterviews.pen.io/>

[3] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2385424>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Clearly this type of service isn't going to be the only way developers get jobs, and yes it may be somewhat insulting to people further along their careers to make them do this, but for someone starting out who doesn't have a large portfolio of achievement, or (even more importantly) doesn't have the degrees or college backgrounds that have increasingly become the primary metric for determining who gets entry level software engineering jobs (despite the ample evidence that these metric have minimal to any correlation with programming ability or productivity) this seems like a potentially life changing type of service. Anything that takes steps towards rationalizing the hiring process in our industry should be rejoiced. And if there are other services trying to do similar work too all the better- it's a big problem.

That said it would be great if you all did work on trying to push the meter more towards real world type of challenges as opposed to what do tend to be fairly contrived 'interview' style questions. The benefit of the platform you are building is that you can get people do work on larger scope problems that do a better job approximate the real day work of engineers. See as an example in this direction reddit's challenge to aspiring front end developers to build a reddit clone a couple months back:

[http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/11/reddit- programmer/?utm_sour...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/11/reddit- programmer/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29)

Congrats on the launch, good luck

</comment><comment><USER6> I like the concept, but these questions are nearly pointless. Great, you get someone in college that loves algorithm puzzles who scores really well. So then what?

Exactly what kinds of jobs are these companies presenting? Ops, frontend, backend, marketing, database, CTO, etc? None of that information is present here.

This would be very useful if a company could post a set of questions relating to specific job roles. Companies using the service could view the effectiveness of problems being used by other companies and either adopt them for their own interviews, or use them as a metric as to the effectiveness of their questions.

Perhaps I'm someone at my company who knows that I need to hire a frontend engineer, but I only have a cursory clue to the kinds of questions I should even be asking for that role. I could examine the most effective questions that other companies use and be able to pick and choose the ones that will best fit the frontend role I'm seeking to fill at my company.

This service needs a _LOT_ of polish and re-think before it becomes remotely useful to anyone.

</comment><comment><USER7> > _Heck, I don't even know how to code!_

And it shows. A lot, dare i say most, people who actually do code find solving puzzle after ridiculous puzzle for the mere hope of getting an interview very demeaning.

There are a ton of sites that do this, like Codility. Interviewstreet is a poor implementation of an already bad concept.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops - it's on similar lines. But, could you let me know what you didn't like about us, so that we could work on it?

<comment><USER8> hi, feedback here:

when I got to 100 lines and then clicked "Compile", I needed to select text to scroll down, your lightbox needs something like overflow:auto to bring up scrollbars.

likewise, google account means a bounce for me even though I've got one, try to delay showing that

was a bit disappointed with the end result - just shows two green boxes, when I really wanted to see the metrics page from your promo video (<http://www.interviewstreet.com/recruit/>) (that demo is also too well hidden imo).

A little more in the program description would help, specifically IRL I'll know a rough target time and how this thing is likely to be used (eg. repeatedly, with mostly small numbers, etc.)

Also, the UI is annoying, split into 3 vertical panes: Problem | Code editor | Compile Output

Also randomise the test cases...

      int getNumberOfPrimes(int N) {
          return N == 100 ? 25 : 78498;
      }

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah. okay, got it. That was just to give an idea of how compile & test, etc. looked, didn't think it would have an impact on the site, my bad. Would put up a proper sample test. Thanks so much for your feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd like to be able to use Lua, D, and some Lisp to solve these problems. It seems like supporting these languages is a bit of work with your current model, but if you move to a model like that of Google Code Jam or Facebook Hacker Cup, you instantly support every programming language. These contests procedurally generate input each time the problem is attempted and let the programmer solve it on his own computer within a period of a few minutes.

</comment><comment><USER10> Isn't it similar to codility.com or codeeval.com?

<comment><USER11> Well...also: <http://www.coderloop.com>, <http://www.gild.com/>, <http://uva.onlinejudge.org/>, <http://www.spoj.pl/>, <http://www.codechef.com/> :)

Coderloop has also RealTime problems <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13GaYDoRwOg>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> the nice thing about contributions to open source is that it fits into a larger picture: communication, tests, users.

<comment><AUTHOR> we're building a profile which would have only hacker stuff associated with it [stackoverflow, github, topcoder, etc.] serving as a neat link to a hacker if he/she wants to apply

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Seems like an interesting website. Will there be issues of the questions and answers getting out? Or will that be obvious in a second round interview?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, this acts as a pre-screener

<comment><USER13> In that sense it's probably a better pre-screener than a headhunter who says, "I see they're requesting a C guru, and my Word search found the letter C on your resume..."

<comment><USER3> Not only that, it seems like a lot more fun than going to an HR first-round interview!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> ah, no love for lisp :(

<comment><USER15> We just added clojure support today. That counts as a lisp, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> For me codility rulez!</comment>