Ask HN: What is your front-end stack of choice if you start a new web-app today? - <AUTHOR>

If you begin a new front-end-heavy app today, what is your stack of choice?<p>The front-end world is changing at a dizzying speed, and it's making me nauseous. I'd love to adopt React, but I'm curious how other people are using it as part of a complete production-ready 2015 web app.<p>* Angular 2 is not yet ready, and will not be backwards compatible. * There are a million choices for flux implementations, and it seems like the community hasn't yet converged on any one choice. * Are people successfully using Rails with their flux implementations in production? <comment><USER2> I would suggest Meteor. It is not purely a front end stack, but a full stack. However, since you mention flux and rails it seems you might also be interested in a backend.

Meteor has a bit of a reputation as a "playground" stack. The sort of stack you pick when you need to implement something quickly but might want to rewrite it before production. However, I find the Meteor stack to be very production ready and have a few applications I have built and use that have high traffic built with Meteor.

As for frontend heavy applications, I would consider looking into the Meteor React integration. Meteor is giving React first class support. The native blaze engine isn't bad but I do prefer React.

One final note, Meteor's community is fantastic. The irc channel always has a number of helpful people in it. And there are many people actively helping to answer just about all Stackoverflow questions. I highly recommend it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been heavily leaning towards Cycle.JS lately ([http://cycle.js.org](http://cycle.js.org)) for personal projects. I haven't pushed anything to a Production environment yet, but I really love Cycle a lot more than React. (Cycle is vaguely like React, and explores some similar goals, but Cycle is based on RX and encourages a stronger, immutable functional composition than React.)

For production applications at the moment I'm still mostly using Knockout as it is reliable and runs almost everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER4> Ractive.js is one of the frameworks I've been used for more personal projects as the learning curve is a lot less than other modern frameworks out there.

Otherwise for work, I'm mainly using Angularjs 1x version, not sure whats going to happen once Angular 2 is ready for production

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm also using 1x, but not sure what to do for new production apps right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> React, react-router, Backbone models, [https://github.com/magalhas/backbone- react-component](https://github.com/magalhas/backbone-react-component), systemjs, jspm

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't have a personal opinion on the matter, as I'm not familiar with the wide variety of JS stacks, but the most visually attractive projects I've seen so far were made with Rails + EmberJS (and React is some cases).

<comment><USER7> "Visually attractive" is completely orthogonal to the technologies you use.

<comment><USER6> Orthogonal means 'irrelevant'? Might be, CSS and JS comes in many flavors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What does anyone think of Aurelia? ([http://aurelia.io](http://aurelia.io))

<comment><USER3> I was a fan of its predecessor Durandal for providing a good set of conventions for a SPA built with Knockout. Once Knockout added components, however, I started switching back to raw Knockout and maybe a router library.

Aurelia to me is interesting. I appreciate that it's still modular and well architected like Durandal. In that regard I trust Aurelia more than I would trust, say, Angular (1.0 or 2.0). I like that Aurelia is encouraging people towards JSPM (and SystemJS), which I've been recommending as well.

That said, I don't think I would actually use Aurelia in a project. For applications that need a deep legacy support it's clearly still the best option to use Knockout and Knockout Components (and maybe Durandal, but maybe not). For applications targeting the "evergreen" browsers I've been leaning towards CycleJS, not just because the "Reactive" frameworks are the new hotness, but because even in my use of data-binding frameworks like Knockout I've been slowly leaning more towards the "Reactive ideal" anyway and now that CycleJS is 1.0 and stable that looks like a good place to start these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just over a week ago I thought I'd ask why HN itself seems so incredibly fast: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9990630](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9990630) I got some pretty interesting replies (and someone from CloudFlare even checked in at one point!).

I argue that if you want to make a site that's impressive and memorable, make something that loads like "∗clic∗--kaching!" At least in my case, you'll get an immediate "Wait. What? Wow." out of me. :P

It _can_ be done. I thought there was some secret sauce somewhere, for HN. _There isn 't._ The pages here are, on average, <25KB - one person showed that my post, replies and all, was only 12K (compressed). That's quite impressive, and it's what makes all the difference.

Obviously, though, there is a tradeoff: you have to be really, _really_ good at JS to get frameworkless code right, fast, without much mental effort. For prototyping and rapid development (and let's face it, rapid is the new "normal", sadly, and has been for quite a while now), using a framework is obviously the wise choice.

Looking at the problem from a slightly different angle, if you take the .NET- vs-WinAPI problem of a couple years ago, .NET slowly gained adoption and is pretty much standard now, and most devs use it for _everything_.

And yet you can build dependancyless ~30KB GUI applications with the standard API.

One of the big things that made .NET standard was the fact that it became a standard part of Windows. That hiked adoption up quick: suddenly people didn't have to download a 300MB support package.

But you can't "install" a support framework into the browser such that it stays put. _A JS framework has to download every single time._ This is so obvious it's almost a nonconsideration but I think it's worth remembering, because current mobile browser caches can decide to make themselves less than 200KB. _200KB._

I think that a "precious trusted cache" would revolutionize a lot of things, but looking at the current state of things, I doubt such a system is likely to be implemented. :(

For larger projects, or wherever you have an opportunity to slow down a little, I say strongly consider rolling your own code, so you can control everything and cut down on bloat.

If you want to go even deeper, here are a couple more links: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9791606](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9791606) (from a reply to my post), [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6825557](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6825557) (from a reply in #9791606)</comment>


Animagraffs - <AUTHOR> http://animagraffs.com/

<comment><USER2> For those interested in the mechanics of firearms, there is a great game[1] which teaches assembly and maintenance of various weapons along with X-ray views of their operation.

[1] [http://www.kongregate.com/games/vklimov/gun- disassembly](http://www.kongregate.com/games/vklimov/gun-disassembly)

</comment><comment><USER3> This graphics are great ,no question,but text in a gif image is not.This is a clear case where embeded SVG could help The graphics here are not interactive.What about stoping an animation,playing it forward,backward,...

</comment><comment><USER4> I absolutely love visuals like this. There are things that I don't think I ever would have understood had I not seen an animated sequence of events like the ones on this site. I can forgive the heavy use of text within the images, since it makes the images easier to share without missing critical info (it IS just a wordpress site)

</comment><comment> 97-109-107 Whoever enjoyed these, should also like EngineerGuy's productions: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2bkHVIDjXS7sgrgjFtzOXQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2bkHVIDjXS7sgrgjFtzOXQ) and [http://www.engineerguy.com/](http://www.engineerguy.com/)

</comment><comment><USER5> I've always thought xx-graphs would be better served with h264, with gif as a fallback. Each frame is almost the same, seems a bit of a waste.

</comment><comment><USER6> These are really cool! However I wish some of them animated a little slower or let me select a section to animate at a time.

</comment><comment><USER7> Amazing work! Love his about:

"f you're gonna do something you might as well do it RIGHT. Right?"

</comment><comment><USER8> I am impressed at the efficient compression. Low color depth and dithering I guess?</comment>


Bad-dragon: fantasy sex toys - <AUTHOR> http://bad-dragon.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Submitting this because it's also some valid startup project for me. They've been exhibiting this last year at the roboexotica.

<comment><USER2> Honestly, I was torn between clicking the link and not clicking the link...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've purchased and used one of their toys. They have great customer service and their products are fun. 10/10</comment>


Cubeteam: A collaborative 3D voxel editor in the browser - <AUTHOR> https://cubeteam.io/

<comment><USER2> Looks a lot of fun!

And brings back fond memories for me. Back in the 90s as a high school student I made a Will's Voxel Editor for the Tiberian Sun games. Was wonderful. Found a screenshot: [http://www.ppmsite.com/newspic/vxlseIII12_big.jpg](http://www.ppmsite.com/newspic/vxlseIII12_big.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's a really cool project and performs reasonably well but I have issues with some of the interface choices:

1\. The navigation controls are non-intuitive and don't follow most 3D movement conventions. I wanted right-click panning and some shortcut for orbiting (not having to change modes).

2\. Positioning is erratic. When building something it would randomly refuse to let me draw on top of some cubes even when I precisely positioned my cursor on the top cube surface. Positioning guides would be nice: Highlight adjacent surfaces, draw alignment axis, etc.

3\. Conversely, erasing a bunch of blocks would fail because the erase cursor would "hop" on top of (some not all) blocks I wanted to erase.

4\. The "thicken" operation sounds handy but never worked for me even once I figured out (I think) that you have to select blocks first. I expected I could select blocks and then pull them up or out to duplicate them.

5\. Having a multiuser environment default to fill/drawing mode is a horrible idea since _everyone_ spews blocks all over the landscape destroying stuff before getting the hang of it. Suggestion: Give everyone a protected 30x30x30 home sandbox where no one else can draw. Everywhere else would be free range.

Overall, you have the tech down but the UI needs playtesting. Watch novices and Minecraft-ers try doing something more than scribble with it. You'll know your interface is working when you start seeing more than blobs and piles littering your world.

</comment><comment><USER4> Running fine on my "work" laptop :) (Win7 64bit i72760qm@ 2.4GHZ 8GB RAM)

I just realised that my company laptops is A LOT better than my desktop at home :/

</comment><comment><USER5> Super fast and fluid on Ubuntu 12.04 64bit, 8GB RAM, Core i7 QM, GT630 2GB. (yeah beefyish box but it does work great)

</comment><comment><USER6> It worked eventually, a little bit, but my laptop has never revved it's fans this much before. Seems cool though.

</comment><comment><USER7> Works on firefox, but had a hilarious bug: I allowed the "hide pointer" mode, but after I hit ctrl-W to close the tab my pointer was locked in the middle of the screen on all the other tabs.

Since you're using FPS controls for navigation, I found I was missing space/ctrl for up/down. Also, for another sandbox map-editor (but desktop- based not web-based) see Sauerbraten.org

</comment><comment><USER8> Around 30-50 fps with a lot of geometry on the screen, sometimes peaks at 60 with an i7 950, 12gb, 280x and the latest version of chrome.

</comment><comment><USER9> This got to be the closest I ever come to feeling cyberspace and I have tried my share of things.

The whole thing works flawlessly, lightning fast and it's thrilling to see others building at the same time while I can walk around in a first person view.

Beautiful, just beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER10> here is the same .... but different [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6731386](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6731386) (in 2D and with snowmen and flowers instead of voxel) built on top of meteor.js (on github: [https://github.com/franzenzenhofer/snowmen](https://github.com/franzenzenhofer/snowmen))

<comment><USER11> So -- actually not "the same" _at all_ then ;)

<comment><USER10> well

        voxels = {x,y,z}
        flowers = {x,y}

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I like it, but I am confused by the interface. How does one switch between navigating the left-side menu and using the crosshair to look around?

</comment><comment><USER13> Building thrones at the top of the world is so fun!

</comment><comment><USER14> Slow and unusable. Cool UI though.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, sorry about that. The sandbox is a stress test and geometry doesn't get thrown away if you've ever loaded it. Can I ask what kind of hardware/browser you're running? Is it immediately unusable or only after loading a bunch of stuff?

<comment><USER16> It is very slow for me as well...

Latest stable Chrome, MacBook Pro (end 2012), 16 GB of ram, OS X 10.9. Immediately unusable.

<comment><USER17> It should be more usable now. We don't do much in the way of culling yet, and the amount of data in the sandbox just then was far too much to render at once.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Learning about evolution from species who thrive without sexual reproduction - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/42/fakes/when-pseudosex-is-better-than-the-real-thing <comment><USER2> Interesting comment in the article's native discussion:

> Chris Jankowski • 2 hours ago

> The author says that sex "imposes a huge cost on a species, and that cost is > called "males."" Well, if the males are such a cost to a species, then why > nature does not respond by heavily skewing the sex ratio of the offspring > towards females. Males produce sperm which is cheap compared with the cost > of producing eggs. A male could fertilize eggs of many - tens or hundreds of > females. So the ratio could be 1 to 10 or even 1 to 100. But I do not know > of a species that would do this.

> Some marsupials - possums and kangaroos create some skew, but is is slight > and in response to environmental conditions or is more sequencing oriented > depending on the age of the breeding female.

<comment><USER3> The answer to the first question is Fisher's Principle [0]:

 _Suppose male births are less common than female.

A newborn male then has better mating prospects than a newborn female, and therefore can expect to have more offspring.

Therefore parents genetically disposed to produce males tend to have more than average numbers of grandchildren born to them.

Therefore the genes for male-producing tendencies spread, and male births become more common.

As the 1:1 sex ratio is approached, the advantage associated with producing males dies away.

The same reasoning holds if females are substituted for males throughout. Therefore 1:1 is the equilibrium ratio._

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_principle)

<comment><USER4> That's not really an answer though. Females could choose to reproduce asexually. Even some large animals can still do it, like sharks. The mystery is why they don't do it all the time. What's the genetic benefit of making daughters that need males to reproduce, instead of making daughters that can clone themselves? Handwaving about "introducing variation via sex" doesn't help, because bacteria are the fastest evolving critters around and they reproduce asexually.

<comment><USER5> Bacterial genomes are much, much simpler than animal genomes. They reproduce very quickly, and even if many bacteria suffer from a problematic (or fatal) mutation, others will be OK, and some may even have adaptations to changing conditions.

Animals have much more complex genomes. They are more at risk from mutations, and they cannot reproduce as quickly. There is more incentive to "get it right", if you will. With asexual reproduction, selection occurs at the level of the genome, meaning you are as good as your "worst" gene. You can't get rid of harmful mutations, and it seems like (complex) species that get stuck in asexual reproduction go extinct.

With sexual reproduction, selection can occur at the level of the gene, allowing beneficial mutations or recombinations to spread through a population AND correcting (many) harmful mutations.

<comment><USER6> The dropout regularization method for neural networks was sort of inspired by this observation, i.e. that recombination (combining genes of more than one individual) makes the resulting structures more robust [1]. The idea is basically that it avoids overfitting to the evolutionary context. This has two effects: the fitness cannot change very quickly in response to single mutations, and, conversely, it avoids that genes co-adapt such that the entire genome becomes inflexible at exploring alternatives.

To achieve the same without sex, mutations would would have both break up the co-adapted genes without breaking their functions and also find a good alternative mutation. With sex, it does not matter if co-adapted genes are broken up, because they are forced to evolve to deal with it. (This is kind of similar to the concept of _learning to learn_ in neural network research.) Also, if a parent gene is unfit, it is possible that the child can escape this mutation by receiving that part of the genome from the other parent instead by a 50% chance.

[1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1207.0580](https://arxiv.org/abs/1207.0580)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is very interesting. This particular whiptail lizard carries 3 sets of DNA, instead of the regular 2 that the sexually reproducing species have.

This seems to be a hybrid species that resulted from the sexual reproduction of two different species many thousands years ago.

From the 3 sets of DNA, 2 are from the ancestral mother and 1 from the ancestral father, and using this trick, each generation manages to keep the whole DNA information of the original two without loosing it, like it happens in the sexual reproduction, and also provide enough genetic variation in newborns to allow evolution.

So I would say that basically, each individual is the child of that ancestral pair that generated this lineage.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm reminded of the asari, an all-female race of aliens from Mass Effect. They reproduce asexually and so don't actually have sex, but there's a thing they do called "embracing eternity" that's very pleasurable for both partners and somehow lets the asari introduce genetic variation into their offspring.

(They also _look_ very sexy -- to several different species -- allowing them a wide pool of partners to "embrace eternity" with.)

</comment><comment><USER9> Reading this article, I had a minor epiphany: Sex is just really _really_ sophisticated ASLR.

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

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't understand what nautil.us tries to be, it seems neither more interesting nor more scientific than the science/tech column of any major newspaper.

<comment><USER11> It started off more interesting and more scientific, but once it had established the brand, it quickly had a reversion to the mean. Shitty content will always be cheaper to find and produce; hyperbole and specious associations will always attract more clicks. The magazine business is tough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> That article title is unfortunate, because it's actually the most interesting thing I've read all week.

<comment><USER13> The title is pure clickbait that has little to no relation with the actual content.

<comment><USER2> It's not 'pure' clickbait if you read down to the part about the whiptail lizard's being able to take on either sexual role which stimulates reproduction but that's a rather minor detail. Also it's not at all supported that unisex whiptail lizard's are better off than normal sexually reproducing lizards.

In general I tend to agree title is not well fitted and the subtitle does better:

> What we can learn about evolution from species who thrive without sexual > reproduction.

One can only speculate that their editor came from a publication with a habit of writing clickbait titles.</comment></comment></comment>


Electric Meter Saga (2017) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nattaylor.com/blog/2017/electric-meter-saga/ <comment><USER2> I had a very similar experience with a water meter. When our small town installed smart water meters, they accidentally switched ours and our neighbors. It took me far too long to figure it out as I became progressively more obsessed with water conservation and monitoring of usage and watched our water bill continue to climb.

The penny finally dropped when I was standing in front of our house having ripped open the latest water bill to see an amount now having grown to be over $200 for the month (more than twice where it had been to start with) and looked at my dry, parched lawn that I had barely watered and my neighbors luxurious, green lawn. Getting our money square with the city took another 4 months and resulted in a rather unhappy neighbor.

<comment><USER3> Keeping historic readings of your meters is extremely useful. I made a habit of scanning in the bills I got from my water company, which showed that on average I was using ~40m^3 of water a year - I'm very conservative with water. In 2015, a bi-annual bill dropped through my door asking for payment for 120m^3 of water in six months. I hadn't changed my usage patterns, and by phoning them and quoting the previous bills, they quickly agreed it was extremely unlikely I was using four times my annual supply in half the time. They took it from there, investigated and discovered a leak just after my water meter (under panels in the road). From my previous bills, they quickly agreed to knock 99m^3 off my bill, bringing it in line with my usage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I had something very similar happen. Our power bill went up 30% in March of last year over what it was in February after the power company installed a smart meter. This was odd because March was so temperate that we didn't use our HVAC once and we have a gas water heater. I called the power company and we confirmed they were reading the right meter. Trying to evaluate it further went nowhere as they claimed that despite the increase, we were in-line with other homes of our size and suggested maybe our analog meter was wrong. After a few weeks of arguing with them, I ordered and installed a Sense. It absolutely doesn't track at all with what the power company is reading and I shared the differences including my own measurements with an ammeter on the 120 lead legs into my meter which match with what the Sense is reading but the power company won't investigate further. To mitigate the increase in electricity use, I decided to get into the cryptocurrency mining business and have gone from ~$200 to ~$600/month power bills, all of which are easily paid from the mining. Since I was lucky enough to start last year, all the hardware is paid as well (thanks December crypto currency market madness).

<comment><USER5> My story is sort of similar too.

Many years ago, I noticed my power bill was around $190 when it should have been closer to $120. I wasn't home for most of that month, and I know I turned off everything I could. I didn't even have the refrigerator running. I talked to my neighbors who had heat and everything on in their apartment and their bill was $110.

I called the power company who said there's nothing wrong and that I need to have someone "look at my apartment." I got another bill for $190, while everyone else's were low $100s. This went on for 6 months. My bills were always $190ish. I had a $190 bill near the end of spring when I just had my windows open for air.

I looked at the meters and found they replaced one meter, which happened to be mine. I called several times asking if they replaced it, that my bills were ridiculous for what I was doing and to look at it.

No word back on anything then my bills went from $190 a month to $15. So instead of saying anything, they just started to cut my bills down for what I overpaid. When I called asking why my bills were lower, they just said because I overpaid my previous months bills. My bills were around $15 a month for close to a year afterwards...

So stupid. They ended up discounting me for a few hundred more than I should have been, but I had to cut a few things out of my budget just to pay for something I wasn't using, but needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Having had a casual interest in power usage, I bought a little inductive meter with a wireless display. It proved itself, so I upgraded it to a cloud- connected one which stores huge amounts of historic data. Every so often, I download the logs and compare the usage the device has logged with the usage the electricity company has billed me for. So far, it's added up roughly correctly.

</comment><comment><USER6>
       body {
          max-width: 400px;
       }

Typographically speaking a line of body text shouldn't run in excess of 60 characters, but this is a bit extreme. Firefox' Reader View really comes in handy for these kind of websites.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a TV channel for hackers? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> While there's no channel dedicated to hackers, there are certainly shows out there geared towards us

Make TV comes to mind as one: <http://makezine.tv/broadcast/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Found good hacks from this site: <http://www.hak5.org/></comment>


McDonald's Real Estate: How They Really Make Their Money (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wallstreetsurvivor.com/2015/10/08/mcdonalds-beyond-the-burger/ <comment><USER2> An important point about owning the franchise real estate: a rental agreement is far stronger for the landowner than a franchise agreement is for a franchiser. The McDonald's franchise agreement specifies the address the franchise must be located. In effect, McDonald's can cancel a franchise agreement by ending the rental agreement. This gives them enormous power to enforce company-wide standards on cleanliness and mandate suppliers. Other chains (eg: Burger King) do not own the majority of their franchise properties and have had more significant problems with enforcing franchise standards.

Source: McDonald's: Behind The Arches, John F. Love (July 1, 1995)

Edit: changed ie to eg, thanks for the correction all

<comment><USER3> > Other chains (ie: Burger King) have had more significant problems with > enforcing franchise standards.

Why have Burger King in particular had this problem?

<comment><USER2> ie -> in example. Burger King is the only example I explicitly recall.

<comment><USER3> Ah, right, no. "i.e." is an abbreviation for the Latin "id est", meaning "that is".

"For example" would be "e.g.", ("exempli gratia" in Latin.)

"E.g." is illustrative, whereas "i.e." is exhaustive.

I hadn't heard "i.e." expanded to "in example" before - that explains one source of misunderstanding (despite being grammatically incorrect in its own right).

Edit: It seems you've since been unfairly downvoted for explaining what you meant. Please folks, don't do that. _I_ asked the question, and @fraserharris answered honestly.

<comment><USER4> I forget where I picked this up, but I use the following to keep them straight:

i.e. == in essence

e.g. == example given

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What impresses me most about McDonald's is the highly effective and efficient incentive structure. You have the franchise owner who is very committed financially and can make a high income, plus lots of low cost labor following a very precise process. And they seem to be able to replicate it at almost any scale.

What impresses me least about McDonald's is their ruthless child-targeted advertising.

EDIT: in sort of a quaint way the incentive structure is reminiscent of the manorial system.

<comment><USER6> What is wrong with advertising to children? They don't have any money, the parents can always say no or the kids can learn quickly how to determine if they should do what ads tell them to do. They will greatly need that skill in modern America. Teach them early haha.

<comment><USER7> >the kids can learn quickly how to determine if they should do what ads tell them to do.

The problem is they can not do this at all. Children are extremely easy to manipulate, and that is pretty much what advertising is.

<comment><USER8> As a kid I quickly learnt to distrust ads, so I'm not sure why you think kids can't do this. They may not be adults, but they're not robots either.

<comment><USER9> I remember at that age understanding that ads are not truthful at a deep level and filtering them. I find it's much harder for me now. Everything seems like an ad now a days and I may not believe the message but having the money to pay for so many ads on expensive platforms gives me a different message. If a company can afford a superbowl ad it gives me the impression the product has resources behind it and I can assign a level of trust.

Kids are better at filtering in some ways.

<comment><USER10> You're talking about the demographic who believes in Santa Claus, right?

<comment><USER11> In a Country that largely believes virgin birth and one very specific zombie.

One crazy belief is not sign of universal insanity. Perhaps though it is a sign of susceptibility, which is what we seem to be talking about.

<comment><USER10> I just knew some smartass was going to liken Santa Claus to God.

<comment><USER12> Both make a list of the naughty and nice boys and girls. One substitutes brimstone for coal, nebulous "eternal happiness" for toys, but they seem pretty similar to me.

<comment><USER10> I think that's excessively reductive and there are other differences, like incontrovertible proof there is no Santa (as opposed to merely a lack of evidence), the fact that Santa often has the exact same handwriting as Mom and Dad, the fact that no supernatural powers are attributed to him and yet he would need them to do what he supposedly does, etc. Besides that a debate about Christian apologetics kind of takes us away from the point I was making.

<comment><USER11> Santa Claus is Saint Nicholas, in order to become a Saint you have to performed miracles in the eyes of the Catholic church. He certainly does have super power, at least the ability to resurrect childre, if he is real.

<comment><USER10> I think we can safely say that Santa Claus the children's character is almost completely divorced from the guy who punched Arius at the Council of Nicea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Watch _The Founder_ ,

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4276820/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4276820/)

for an entertaining and educational dramatization of the McDonald's story, including the franchising and real estate leasing aspects.

<comment><USER14> Really glad you brought this up. It was indeed an interesting movie but I didn't really have the time to compare it with the facts. How much of what we saw was actually accurate?

<comment><USER15> I happened to have read the book a month or two before watching the movie. They were very different. In Ray's biography, he passes himself off as a "My word is as good as a contract" and "When I say I'll do this, I'll stick to it." The movie interpretation has him much more ruthless.

<comment><USER16> "If any of my competitors were drowning, I'd stick a hose in their mouth and turn on the water. It is ridiculous to call this an industry. This is not. This is rat eat rat, dog eat dog. I'll kill 'em, and I'm going to kill 'em before they kill me. You're talking about the American way - of survival of the fittest." \- Ray Kroc

<comment><USER15> The language is obviously graphic, but what he's describing is what every company would do. Why would they help a competitor? They have a responsibility to the shareholder to grow the business.

<comment><USER17> Well, entrepreneurs are humans, not robots, and humans have this instinct to help each other. At least here in Germany I hear from time to time about (SME) businesses helping their competitors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It was an eye-opener for me when I was a teen and bought a gallon of soft drink syrup from a McDonald's for use at a party. It worked out to about 5 cents a cup for the drink in a soft drink, which sold for 75 cents (if I remember correctly). McDonald's doesn't make money selling burgers, they make money selling the soft drinks and the fries.

The same goes for any restaurant, it's why they ply you for drinks.

<comment><USER19> I've always assumed the costs surrounding a cup of soda (machine, CO2, ice, cups, lids, straws) are actually much higher then the cost of the syrup itself.

<comment><USER20> The up front cost of icemaker/dispeners?carbonator is high but the cost of electricity, water, and CO2 tanks is basically nothing on a per drink basis. Just think about everything that went into the factory which makes that syrup, the factory that makes the syrup bag, and all the logistics that deliver the finished product to the store. Then remember that costs pennies per drink. Even if all the other costs associated with that soda cost as much on a per drink basis, we're still talking ~10-20 cents per drink. Assuming every input cost is on the same scale also makes for a huge overestimate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The Founder is a movie that tells the story of the birth and growth of McDonald's ([https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_founder/](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_founder/)), and it covers much of the ground covered in this article.

In addition to being a very well-done movie, it does a superb job of describing the relationship between the visionary founders of a startup, and the sales guys and bean counters who turn it into a successful business. It doesn't matter that the McDonald brothers were revolutionizing burgers, the telling of this part of the story captures perfectly the same sort of activity that goes on at any startup with a new idea, (emphasis on new). It also captures very well how the suits recognize a good thing when they see it, buy into the vision (but for very different reasons from the founders), and finally take over and render the founders obsolete.

Really great movie for anyone involved with startups.

<comment> aaron-lebo I watched that the other day.

Kroc was just as visionary, if also greedy and manipulative and ready to succeed at all costs. He's clearly not afraid to steal a business or wife. He's also somehow easy to relate to (thanks Keaton).

You can see him lying to himself and justifying his actions. Got the feeling that Kroc wasn't all that different from many SV founders. You don't go to SV to make a burger stand, you go there to make an empire. There's a reason Kroc is discussed in business schools.

On a side note, reading about the founding of Twitter there's a lot this kind of back and forth.

<comment><USER22> Can you recommend any reading on the founding of Twitter?

<comment> aaron-lebo I've been listening to:

"Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal"

[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CDUVSQ0/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CDUVSQ0/)

As you can tell, it's the kind of thing meant for the best seller list and isn't a scholarly work or anything, but the preface stresses it's based on lots of interviews.

If nothing else, it's a fun read and the background of the founders is pretty interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Kind of OT but the company I work for has more locations than McDonalds, and Walmart. Not combined but separate. Which baffles me. When I first started here I never knew what went into a retail store, from architecture, construction, store layout, buying, merchandising, it's insane... We call our headquarters the 'Store Support Center' because our mission is to support all 16,000 if our stores nationwide and a few in Canada.

<comment><USER24> Starbucks?

<comment><USER23> No. Dollar Tree, we recently acquired Family Dollar which is how our store count is so high.

<comment><USER25> Hey, sorry to leave this here, but didn't see any contact info in your profile.

Would love to chat with you about the dollar store industry, if you'd be so inclined. I'm particularly curious about Dollarama in Canada, if you're at all familiar with them. My email is in my profile.

The basic question: why is Dollarama so much more profitable than everyone else?

<comment><USER26> Don't they sell seconds and then cheap generic Chinese crap?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Misleading. Sure, _technically_ McDonald's doesn't make much money from selling burgers because most of the burgers are sold by franchisees. But by the same argument, Amazon doesn't make any money from selling EC2 instances -- those are sold by Amazon Web Services Inc.

When people talk about McDonald's "selling burgers", what they mean is McDonald's _and its franchisees_.

<comment><USER28> Amazon Web Services Inc. is wholly owned by Amazon, Inc.

That is not true of the franchisees. That's a pretty big difference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I just watched "The Founder" last night. I had always assumed Ray Kroc was the genius who pivoted to focusing on real estate for their expanding franchise model when really it was Harry J. Sonneborn who convinced Ray that was the way to go. Worth a watch.

<comment><USER30> That model was only viable because Kroc found a way to scale the franchise, which the McDonald brothers had previously failed to do. Pretty much everyone involved in the early days seems to have contributed something to the ultimate success of the business.

A good startup movie, by the way.

<comment><USER28> One of the things I really liked about the movie is that Kroc didn't actually come up with many of the ideas at all. He was just very successful at recognizing good ideas, good talent, and synthesizing them together.

Traits of a good founder.

Plus one on it being a good startup movie.

<comment><USER18> Ideas are a dime a dozen. It's implementing them that matters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Well now I'm pretty curious, how does McDonald's operate all of their distribution channels with the whole franchise/renting model? Most of the Micky D's I've seen have tons of freezer food that they put through various machines to make all of the food items quickly. I can't imagine they let owners get their primary products from anything other than a distribution center. Do the owners need to buy those products separately? Can they buy from alternate distributors? Do they franchise their distribution somehow? Maybe I'm overthinking all of this. But I am genuinely curious how that factors into the franchise model since that means McDonalds is still very liable for food production.

<comment><USER32> The owner/operators purchase from approved vendors; I've been out of the game for awhile, but we bought everything through two distributors; bread products from an approved vendor, and everything else from a second vendor.

<comment><USER33> It is all through one distribution vendor with regards to product now. Only plant(equipment) purchases are outside of the primary distributor now.

<comment><USER32> It's killing me that I can't remember the distributor! Sixteen years of working through them and my mind is a sieve. This was in SoCal, and they had the contract for almost all of the region.

<comment><USER34> I will guess that it was Golden State Foods. They are a supplier to McDonald's, and California is The Golden State.

<comment><USER32> Ah yes, Golden State Foods! TYVM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This has been well know for a long time. However the fact is the only reason that McDonalds is able to collect rent (in the dollar amount that they do) is if their product and service, the franchise, is able to sell hamburgers to customers. As such the value of the real estate (if the franchise fails to operate) is nowhere near what it is with a profitable operating restaurant. While the locations are valuable if you have ever seen a vacant McDonalds, and who typically rents those, you will know that the rent received and royalties is nowhere near what it is with a McDonalds restaurant.

So I think it's a bit misleading and hyperbole to say 'how they really make money'. The only reason the can make that money is because of the product and the customer base that patronizes the McDonalds. So in the end it is because of the product. "How they really make their money" is because of that product.

</comment><comment><USER36> McDonald's business model of renting premises to their franchisees sounds similar to the way many pubs are operated in the UK.

Breweries (and "PubCo's") typically own the premises, which is leased to a tenant (publican) who is required to purchase the brewery's products.

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

<comment><USER37> In a pub setting the pub owner is free to select food and furtineture and such. Breweries will assist, but there's a lot of freedom.

In franchise you have to stick to the branding and menu offers and in practice you have to follow the prices (legally they can't force independent franchise companies to sell a burger for the same price, but there are ways) giving very little freedom.

<comment><USER38> There is no freedom in a UK pub franchise that will help you, because if you do well they will screw you the month after on tied beer prices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> One of the core arguments of article is misleading, since it claims McDonald's is a real estate company based on the share of Net Income coming from owned versus franchised restaurants. The share of Net Income is a misleading comparison, because (1)it fails to account for the cost of capital associated in owning real estate (2) over 85% of McDonalds are franchised, the remaining 15% produce all of that income, so even on this misleading basis of just considering net income, the profits are more balanced than the article makes it appear.

\- percent franchised vs owned [https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/04/03/what- perce...](https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/04/03/what-percentage- of-mcdonalds-restaurants-are-owned.aspx)

\- quote from article that is misleading"Of that $18.2 billion generated by company-operated stores in 2014, the corporation keeps just $2.9 billion. Of the $9.2 billion coming from franchisees, the corporation keeps $7.6 billion."

</comment><comment><USER40> I remember watching a documentary a few years back where Ronald was talking to some uni grads telling them that in reality he's one of the largest real estate owners globally since the trend is to OWN the space they occupy and not just rent.

Well, if one thinks of how many of these burger joints..

And yes the burgers also make some good money ;)

<comment><USER15> I assume you mean Ray.

<comment> jon-wood I prefer the image of Ronald McDonald turning up in full clown gear to give a hard nosed business lecture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> 20 years ago when I did some consulting for the Gap, I saw inside their data systems and realized they were a large real estate organization. It was the first time I witnessed the dynamic nature of corporate America.

<comment><USER26> How does the work with malls?

<comment><USER42> At a guess the company owns a long lease on the space in the mall and sub-lets it to the franchisee.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Sure, but the burgers are a critical component of the whole picture.

It's almost like saying that grocery stores are not really in the grocery business, they are in the business of accepting cash and credit card payments. True, that's where they "make their money", but that business would dry up pretty quick if they didn't stock groceries.

<comment><USER44> Yes, it's how they "really" make their money in the sense of how _precisely_ the money goes from franchise owners to them, rather than anything surprising about how the money is made.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> "Retail-as-Real-Estate" plays don't always work. e.g. Sears, KMart.

<comment><USER46> Losses are useful, too! McD's has been renting a lot in my town(85331) for 5+ years now, and yet to break ground. ~6 months ago the local "fish wrapper" ran a story on this very topic.

As an aside, back when oil was >$100/barrel Exxon/Mobile had numerous boarded up properties around Phoenix with For Sale/Lease signs that were neither for sale or lease, as the losses/write downs were valued to dilute the windfall profits they were raking in at that time(my source was an agent for CBRE).

<comment><USER47> That makes no sense. Sure, you can make a $1 loss to save 50 cents in taxes. Or 5 cents, in the US. But why would you?

Also, real estate investments don't actually have a direct impact on profits when reporting on accrual basis (as all larger companies are required to). Those costs can only be deducted over time (something like 10 years for buildings).

<comment><USER46> Forgoing revenues, potential profits and taxes on selling/leasing the property(@ pre-2008 market highs); writing off loses of rental income; property depreciation; betting on rising real estate prices(all were still chanting "buy RE, it will only go up" pre-2008). Those are some some possibilities I can think of, but IANAL or CBRE agent, but when I asked one why the blighted corners owned by the biggest earners on Wall Street during the skyrocketing RE bubble were sitting vacant for years, the answer was there was no expectation to sell or lease. And it was not a tank problem, the tanks were removed as the boards went on the windows.

edit: rewording & added last point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Off topic: I've trained myself to look for a McDonald's first when in a pinch and need coffee. This vs looking for a Pete's or a Starbucks.

If all you need is a basic drink, they get it more or less right for several hundreds of a percent lower.

<comment><USER49> McDonalds is surprisingly not bad at coffee these days. They overtook Costa and Starbucks in the UK in terms of cups sold.

Also the new self service kiosks make ordering a bit less grim [http://burgerlad.com/2015/02/mcdonalds-touch-screen- ordering...](http://burgerlad.com/2015/02/mcdonalds-touch-screen- ordering.html)

<comment><USER34> Ahhh, London. When I spent some time there 30+ years ago, I bought coffee from the McDonald's across from the Warren Street tube station (still appears to be there according to Google Maps).

But it was of necessity. It was very difficult to get a good cup of coffee from other UK fast food outlets. Has coffee caught on in the UK? At the time, coffee seemed to be mostly an after dinner drink.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> If you're ever at a meetup, and the presenter dances around the question: "How does your company make money?" then ask yourself, is it possible that this company is in marketing/advertising? More generally, ask yourself: Does this company's operations give it high quality information about a particular market?

The takeaway: Don't dismiss a useful service that you can't directly monetize. It's possible that you can gain high-quality information which can be monetized indirectly. It's all about getting better information about a particular market than everyone else.

<comment><USER51> While this is true, it is extremely hard to do in practice. You have to get good information, make sure it is good information, convince a market that it is good information, and then prevent your competitors and your clients from simply replicating your process.

<comment><USER50> _You have to get good information, make sure it is good information_

Yes, but often much of this can happen largely as a consequence of your doing something else, and you may not realize it.

 _convince a market that it is good information_

Which is just basic Marketing.

 _and then prevent your competitors and your clients from simply replicating your process_

Which is also a common issue with startups in general. Good word of mouth can keep you ahead of competitors, and you can make it cheaper for clients to just pay you than it would be to do it themselves. All basic things.

<comment><USER52> Some people have done sorta ok with this as a fallback position when their business model failed. I think it's a pretty dicey proposition. Foursquare did it after failing at everything else, and while they're ostensibly 'profitable' they're deeply in the red with little hope of a return to their investors. They're surviving to fight another day, but... eh.

<comment><USER50> _Some people have done sorta ok with this as a fallback position when their business model failed. I think it 's a pretty dicey proposition. Foursquare did it after failing at everything else, and while they're ostensibly 'profitable' they're deeply in the red with little hope of a return to their investors._

Sounds like they are deeply in the red because they were chasing something else? What if they realized this much sooner and didn't get so deeply into the red? Then they'd just have a solid and profitable business. I wouldn't discount this kind of business model. That kind of "sorta ok" is only a disappointment if you were hoping to be the next Facebook. Isn't that just greed clouding people's vision? A goose that lays copper eggs is still pretty darn nifty.

<comment><USER52> Well, the data comes from a substantial investment, which much be returned, or the business will be a failure. This is not a public service-- if you did some cool shit, but ultimately the bottom line is turning a dollar invested into fifty cents returned, you have explicitly and decisively failed in your work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> "They used to hold the promise of good fast-food but now the food is neither fast, nor good. In fact, in 2014, the average drive-thru wait time was over three minutes (the longest it has ever been in about 15 years)."

Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded.

I know it's a serious worry, but seems like one of those good problems to have.

<comment><USER54> > Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded.

Then why is it crowded?

<comment><USER32> It's a Yogi Berra-ism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> The site is getting slow, so here you go : [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://blog.wallstreetsurvivor.com/2015/10/08/mcdonalds- beyond-the-burger/)

</comment><comment><USER56> I thought about this recently when a new cafe opened up in a prime location (replacing another cafe). The rent must be enormous, and it occurred to me that no matter how good or efficient the cafe operates, the rent will probably simply rise until the cafe is merely earning at average market rates.

I found that rather depressing. All those people struggling to improve their business are merely struggling to increase the income of the property owner. (I guess if I had the money and inspiration to become a property owner it would be less depressing).

</comment><comment><USER57> I heard a professor tell a story about the founder of McDonalds going to a business class as a guest. He asked the students "What business am I in? Can anyone tell me?" and they all laughed, "why hamburgers of course". Then he corrected them. They're not just in real estate but they are very, very good at selecting franchise locations. The professor also claimed that Burger King's primary consideration on where to put their stores is the relative distance to McDonalds.

</comment><comment><USER49> >During the 2008 recession, McDonald's leaned heavily on this facet of their business as they capitalized on an anemic property market – buying up more of the land and buildings where it operates.

I think a lot of why real estate works for them is that the business is not affected by recessions - they may even sell more burgers if people can't afford fancy places. So they can buy real estate cheap when others can't.

</comment><comment><USER58> This doesn't preclude McDonalds from holding risk. For a long time people said "Buy Kmart and Sears because the value of their real estate is more than their stock values." Then the real estate market tanks.... Real estate is an illiquid investment.

Also - when people choose to eat less burgers, or there is less innovation in the menu, the stock price dips.

</comment><comment><USER59> Reminds me of the story of Family Video: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/noahkirsch/2017/02/21/the- last-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/noahkirsch/2017/02/21/the-last-video- chain-the-inside-story-of-family-video-and-its-400-million- owner/#2d813359da60)

</comment><comment><USER60> Along similar lines... with Donkin Donuts

[https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2014/09/17/the- secret-w...](https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2014/09/17/the-secret-world- dunkin-donuts-franchise-kings/pb2UmxauJrZv08wcBig6CO/story.html)

</comment><comment><USER26> Many times I get cold and cardboard crispy chickens. It sucks. And 99% of the time it's from the drive thru..

I've been to multiple understaffed McDonald's and man does the quality suck. When they have staff things are decent but now I can predict when a McDonald's will be bad.

</comment><comment><USER61> This is somewhat false. McDonalds amassed all of this real estate during the normal course of doing its main business. It would be like saying Walmart is in the shelf business because they have a lot of shelves. If amassing large amounts of real estate is the end goal, selling burgers for 50 years is probably not the best way to do it. I think McDonalds fears that if it spins off its real estate holdings, those properties will have no loyalty to McDonalds and could become a Starbucks or whatever. The value that McDonalds provides is that it is everywhere and at low prices. If it isn't everywhere, then it can't provide low prices and the whole thing crumbles.

<comment><USER62> When Starbucks went public, they explicitly told the investment community "don't invest in us because of coffee, invest in us because of real estate, we are a real estate company that happens to sell coffee"

<comment><USER63> Perhaps that explains why their coffee tastes awful.

<comment><USER64> Their coffee tastes awful for the same reason that McD's makes awful food: it's optimized for standardization/consistency.

Starbucks roasts all their coffee to relatively exorbitant degrees to cover up the inconsistency brought about by their very-multi-origin sourcing.

Some Starbucks locations sell "single origin" coffee which tastes quite a bit better, if only because they don't have to hide the variance in taste and can afford not to roast it to hell.

<comment><USER65> That consistency is worth a _lot_.

I can grab a coffee and sit down with my laptop in Portland, Boston, or Yuma, and I will have the exact same mediocre experience. I don't care about having a transcendent coffee journey; I care about getting a predictable cup of coffee, a kinda-comfortable space, and wifi to check my email. That's it.

I can hunt for some coffeeshop that might be great or might be awful, or I can head into the local Starbucks and know exactly what I'm going to get.

<comment><USER66> So, instead of taking the 50/50 chance of something being great, you'll accept downright poor instead.

I'm not actually poking fun of you, one of my friends has the same attitude - something that I just can't understand. I'd rather try and find something that was decent than something that's not.

<comment><USER63> Sounds like for the OP the coffee isn't the product, but rather a space to work and think.

Having to choose a coffee show, see if they have wifi, charging, not to noisy etc. is an inconvenience if you want to just get started on something quickly. You might only have an hour before a meeting if you are travelling for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Already seen in "rich dad poor dad" 20 years ago !

</comment><comment><USER68> Same was true for Tesco for a while - they did very well on land speculation.

<comment><USER69> This has nothing to do with land speculation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Another one is Wawa. They seem to be everywhere now.

<comment><USER71> I wish this were true and not hyperbole. It's the part of the mid-atlantic that I miss most in the midwest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> There is a danger here. McDonald's system = Windows

Franchisees = OEMs

Franchisees not doing their best = laptop filled with crapware

</comment><comment><USER73> I wonder why this is sitting at the stop when the MS critique with less votes in less time in at the bottom of the page?

Hacker News story placement can be confusing at times. I would understand if they have some tech centric metric somehow, but this isn't even tech?

<comment><USER65> From the rules:

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes > more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the > answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Personally, anything that is counterintuitive or surprising gratifies my intellectual curiosity. "You thought that X was important for this business, but you've been bamboozled this whole time! It's actually Y!"

The discussion has introduced a couple of great documentaries as well as anecdotes from people who have worked in similar circumstances in retail, (i.e. the business is important, but the valuable real estate that they're sitting on is even more important) so I don't have a problem with this sort of submission.

<comment><USER73> Makes sense, more curious about the opaqueness of voting and what shows at the top!</comment></comment></comment>


Controlled Quantum Levitation on a Wipe'Out Track - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zqmdv5iyIOY

<comment><AUTHOR> And for those wondering how it was done, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhlpyP-2ooE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhlpyP-2ooE)

<comment><USER2> tl;dr: It was a hoax video, with combines actors and computer generated graphics.

Can we add a [hoax] or [cgi] to the title?</comment></comment>


Living with Depression in Tech - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=7437 <comment><USER2> I applaud your self-improvements. Though what you suggest hasn't worked for me -- too many betrayals by people in my family, by those I thought were friends, by the ones who committed suicide, and as a final nail by my two wives (ten years apart).</comment>


The Rise of the Fidget Spinner and the Fall of the Well-Managed Fad - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/magazine/the-rise-of-the-fidget-spinner-and-the-fall-of-the-well-managed-fad.html <comment><USER3> If you read between the lines this is the broken window fallacy: We need people to make useless junk in order to have jobs.

But now there is no one making sure the useless junk stays popular, so less jobs.

Except that's exactly the broken window fallacy: We could instead spend that money on other things.

<comment><USER4> Not exactly. Economics is all about trading. Trading is all about wants, desires, and needs. If I make something that everyone wants, it is not useless junk, useless junk is something nobody wants. So it's actually very important to have feedback from middlemen who's livelihood is actually tied to successfully making available desirable things.

There's an economic study I remember seeing in the last couple of decades that studied the value of middlemen. The study started with the assumption that middlemen were parasitic entities, especially since so much economic value seems to come from "cutting out the middle man". But the study authors were most surprised about was that the countries they studied that had the most middlemen, also had the greatest number of economic health indicators. That is they found middlemen to be highly correlated with the economic output of an economy. Their conclusion was that it was probably more than correlated, but largely causative and that middle men probably provided a lot more value than they're generally given credit for.

This article seems to be providing some anecdotal data that supports the value of middle men. At the very least they are good at synthesizing back pressure data for factories so they don't end up overproducing, and have to fill landfills with stuff no one wants.

<comment><USER5> Making something that everyone wants is a separate thing than making everyone want something. You can do both and make a lot of money, but if the former is fixing the windows the latter broke people still aren't better off.

For the "middle man" study, I don't know how they came to that conclusion. But the more obvious assumption seems to be that economic output can support more middlemen, so I'm curious what data they used to argue that it works the other way around.

<comment><USER6> I think your vision may be colored a bit because here on HN everyone seems to think that manufacturers can just sell direct to consumers easily by tossing up a Shopify page and letting nature take its course.

The true value of a middle man is connecting buyers and sellers who would otherwise have no idea the other existed, or otherwise facilitating the transaction.

Here's an example that I'm currently involved with. I was approached by someone to create a device that's needed on the market, but doesn't exist. I'm quite capable of building the thing and familiar with the domain, but never knew the thing was needed. Similarly, the company approaching me doesn't have the internal skills to build the device, but they can sell it. The market for this particular device isn't very large (it's only businesses who have machinery that was built using a particular older technology and need to have repairs done), and there are alternatives, so that explains why no one is building these.

In this case, the company that approached me -- the middle man -- has excellent knowledge of the market and its needs and how to best serve them. I, the producer, had no idea this product was needed, and even knowing that now, have no access to this segment of the market, and it's simply not large enough to make it worth my time to begin a marketing effort in that direction. Similarly, the end customers have never heard of me, and have no concept that such a device could even be built.

So there you are, a middleman has just added value by offering to buy something that I otherwise would not know to build, and by selling it (along with other products and services), to a very underserved market that otherwise would be forced to purchase newer equipment they otherwise don't need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's hard to put my finger on what exactly unsettled me about the fidget spinner craze, but it seems related to this article. All the hype seemed ad hoc. For Beanie Babies, in retrospect, it felt like a coordinated center (the manufacturer/importer and its marketing arm) surrounded by a bunch of people jumping on the bandwagon. Fidget spinners just felt like every click-baiting view-monger jumping in with their hot take. There seemed to be, from the outside, no central brand or centralized messaging. The closest thing to the latter seemed to be the urban legend that these things were good for ADHD, somehow.

Even Baudrillard's hyper-reality seemed to be orchestrated from a center; his assertion that the Europe experience at Disney World was "more real" than Europe itself at least required Disney to have built it.

Spinners just arose out of the background radiation, with no apparent proximal cause.

<comment><USER8> Someone, somewhere created the first fidget spinner, named it, and marketed it. The fact that you do t know their name maybe just means they did a better job of staying out of the limelight while still profiting from the craze.

<comment><USER9> She couldn't afford the patent. I don't think she made much money from it.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14271914](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14271914)

<comment><USER10> Her patent doesn't really look like what we think of as a fidget spinner though. It's more like a spinning top.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > As Osborne learned when she started selling Beanie Babies, middlemen like > Joyce are often the ones who turn a fad into a sustainable business that > creates jobs.

So the NYT is saying that beanie babies were a sustainable business that creates the ever elusive "jobs". It was sustainable in that it lasted longer, but beanie babies are not still a sustainable business. If the metric of success is ~7 years of business then Maddoff was running a sustainable business.

</comment><comment><USER12> "Well managed" meaning artificially restricting the supply to create scarcity and inflate prices?

As for disintermediation, there's still plenty of room for travel agents and the like to add value. Sure travelocity, tripadvisor etc exist, but for higher end clients who don't want/can't afford to waste time sifting through pages and pages of data/reviews from anonymous internet people, they can hire someone with experience to do all that, or perhaps someone who has built a reputation of recommending excellent itineraries all around the world. Otherwise, it's nice to have the option to do it yourself much more cheaply and efficiently. That money saved by not hiring an agent can now be put into the vacation package for better airfare, lodging, restaurants, etc.

The money and jobs don't just disappear, they go elsewhere.

<comment><USER13> Yup, and as usual, a few folks were winners in the beanie baby craze, and the same goes for the travel industry. I can't see a single thing these "middlemen" create in the travel industry that's desirable for the consumer. I'm sorry, I don't need a travel agent to tell me how to find a cool, hip destination overrun with everyone else the travel industry is sending there. They probably sell fidget spinners at the arrivals area, anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's rise in India is so fast and deep that it's been sold in local trains for 40-50 Indian rupees (~70 cents). Almost everyone from kids to adults in office and park started spinning it for no reason because they saw someone else spinning and it was just cool.

PS: I bought two while in the local train. For me and my wife. A day before that a kid in my flat was showing off his skills and a week after that my 40ish manager was spinning it while walking around. And now I hardly see someone spinning.

<comment><USER15> > 40-50 Indian rupees (~70 cents)

Ha! They sold for CAD$15 around here...

<comment><USER16> They were selling for $10 AU here and somehow 3 weeks later I got one for free because the craze was dead and somebody has excess stock.

Being patient pays off so often.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Not all fads are the same. Some are genuinely interesting product lines that just happen to start as a fad, but stick around (Beanie Babies, video games, and Magic: The Gathering). Others are just fads with no legs (Fidget Spinners, Slap Bracelets, and Cabbage Patch Dolls).

<comment><USER18> They had to ban slap bracelets because the cheap knock offs weren't sanded down and ended up being sharp pieces of tape measures tape.

<comment><USER17> The first prototype was built using measuring tape: [https://gimletmedia.com/episode/you-have-to-invent- something...](https://gimletmedia.com/episode/you-have-to-invent-something- season-5-episode-1/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm confused... she sold tens of thousands of dollars of fidget spinners, getting on that craze immediately that she heard about it (she had product within 5 days) and knowing that it was a fad that was destined to die out (hardly the first... I remember Tamagotchi's pretty well, and the apparently New Zealand-only Chatter Ring).

I don't think the comparison to TripAdvisor and travel agents is particularly strong, and I think you'd be hard pushed to make the case that thousands of travel agents who'd maybe heard something about the place you wanted to go is better than thousands of reviews and photos from people who've actually been there. TipAdvisor has lots of problems, to be sure, but it's still better than travel agents.

Unrelated to the above, I'm actually excited for the craze to die out. I think I might be one of the people fidget spinners were originally made for. I don't have any problems focusing, but I habitually spin things in my fingers - <USER2> iPhone, my wallet (I've worn marks into the leather), pens... It's usually completely unconscious. So I'll be looking forward to trying a fidget spinner once the fad has gone away.

<comment><USER20> > I don't think the comparison to TripAdvisor and travel agents is > particularly strong, and I think you'd be hard pushed to make the case that > thousands of travel agents who'd maybe heard something about the place you > wanted to go is better than thousands of reviews and photos from people > who've actually been there. TipAdvisor has lots of problems, to be sure, but > it's still better than travel agents.

Do you remember what it was like using a travel agent? That's not what travel agents did. They didn't "maybe hear about a place", they actually went there. Resorts & cruises spent a ton of their marketing dollars to bring travel agents to the resort and get them to experience it first hand.

<comment><USER19> But most of them hadn't spend 3 months traveling in South East Asia, for example. They knew about the resorts and travel companies that could afford to bring them over and show them a good time. For everything else you had to trust Lonely Planet or something, which was a guaranteed meal-ticket for anyone who could get their business mentioned in there, without the benefit of feedback from the people who've visited recently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> My stepson went through the fidget spinner phase in about a month, I think he has a dozen of the damn things I keep finding them.

The longest he's stayed interested in anything is a cheap kite I bought him, so I think next year remote control plane.

<comment><USER22> (off topic sorry) but how about a better kite? A Revolution 4 line is an amazing kite, and stupidly fun to play with and brilliant to watch. And can be launched alone. Highly recommend them, example video - [https://youtu.be/sPSyuvCJF4M](https://youtu.be/sPSyuvCJF4M)

So much can (and will) go wrong with an rc plane - another alternative would be a quad?

<comment><USER21> The reason I thought RC Plane is because of the cool factor and you can get the polystyrene starter kits that can survive a hefty crash plus it's a change to teach him about electronics and we can attack a camera to it.

He also wants to build a robot so I'm thinking something tracked with camera's and sensors.

<comment><USER22> Nice - planes are great if you have the space - just remember how much time I spent repairing them ;)

Love my quads now - even a hubsan x4 is a great starter - can fly inside and outside - though not big enough to carry weight - anyway, sure you'll get him something cool - lucky kid ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > ''Now, in less than half a year, spinners are done,'' Osborne says. ''I'm > moving on to squishies'' — squishable toys that are also (questionably) > marketed as attention aids. ''I think they'll last at least a few months.''

As a side note, squishies have been around for a while too, at least since last year. My son is a big fan of them. I'm pretty sure he learned about them from YouTube kids, which sometimes seems like trove of toy commercials. Unlike what Ms. Osborne seems to think, I don't think fads in the future will be any shorter, I think they'll just be created in different ways.

<comment><USER13> In the late 80s or early 90s there was a stress reliever squishy thing that was pink and had some odd shape.. I want to say like a brain or something. And of course stress balls have been trade show junk for decades.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think it started on Reddit, someone posted some gif, others asked what it was, and after several months we had craze going on our hands.

I remember specifically how I checked if any Chinese manufacturers where producing it by that time - none. In fact, item in post on reddit was done on some CNC machine.

then all the small-scale importers got on it. These days, it's really easy to move and market your own product small-scale.

I think all other fads will follow this fate - lot's of suppliers, rarely any brandname.

<comment><USER25> I mean we saw the same thing with "hoverboards" right? There was never a "branded" one, just a bunch of Chinese manufacturer brands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This week on Hackernews: criticizing big companies for turning toy crazes into huge profits.

Last week on Hackernews: a paean to Wham-O, manufacturers of the hula hoop.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm not sure a simple fad like the fidget spinner that explodes out of nowhere is the same as a meticulously marketed toy line.

</comment><comment><USER28> Same thing happens with twitter lynch mobs. Another day, another victim.</comment>


TwitHot: The hottest links on twitter (my latest web app, feedback appreciated) - <AUTHOR> http://twithot.com/ <comment><USER2> You might make your list easier to read by not displaying the full url. Try dropping the <http://> prefix and query string data. Just display the domain and the page title. Here's what I mean:

#1 www.youtube.com (YouTube - Alanis Morrisette "M Humps" video)

#2 triqqr.de/ (triQQr)

#3 www.digg.com (Digg - Using Apple's 24 yr old Lisa for Real Work)

#4 news.bbc.co.uk (BBC NEWS | UK | England | Merseyside | Relative Charged over Ellie death)

I think you'll increase readibility by using that kind of format. That said, I think it's a good idea. What kind of interest are you getting?

<comment><USER2> I guess my advice is chopped liver? ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> I like your advice and I'll be taking it soon but right now I'm busy fighting some nasty bugs in the backend :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Feedback (MO, please take with a grain of salt): Anything that enables twitter in any fashion should be avoided like the plague.

That being said your app might have potential. Right now it's just a source of information... maybe add some voting or comments to keep people on your site a little longer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback.

The idea was to see if I could avoid the problems of digg et all by not having votes/comments. Instead it listens passively to twitters public timeline.

A 'vote' is cast every time a url is mentioned in a twitter and a 'comment' is what is said around the url in the twitter message. I'll add 'comments' soon.

<comment><USER3> My issue would be, aside from a passing interest on what people are talking about... Why would I visit?

Perhaps a list of popular twitter people? Something to make people want to keep visiting...

<comment><AUTHOR> A list of popular twitter people already exists, see: twitterholic.com.

Your right, I would need to work on the value proposition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd like to see sortable views. Full links vs domains. I found myself filtering the links trying to spot new domains which would lead me to new things i haven't seen - kinda like how i got to emilys hub to just see what new 2.0s have popped up.

It'd be interesting a tag cloud view or word frequency count, kinda like that other site i saw where you can read whats on peoples minds in twitter the past min, hour, day etc.

I like the idea of at a glance views of twitter data since it so fleeting.

<comment><AUTHOR> re: frequency count for words; Check out <http://twitter.isite.net.au/twittering></comment></comment>


Apple, HK, and HN Submissions - <AUTHOR> So many stories ... see the comment here for links to the different versions, different takes, and occasional discussion.  Some of these are about the cop-tracking apps, other about "Quartz", but even so ...<p>So many submissions ... <comment><AUTHOR> Sorted by number of comments:

666 : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21210678](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21210678) : Apple Removes HKmap.live from the App Store (twitter.com)

200 : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21203247](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21203247) : China attacks Apple for allowing Hong Kong crowdsourced police activity app (techcrunch.com)

99 : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21211971](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21211971) : Apple is not your friend (twitter.com)

26 : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21210069](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21210069) : China Is Forcing Tech Companies to Choose Between Profits and Free Speech (onezero.medium.com)

4 : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21213581](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21213581) : Apple Has Removed a Mapping App That Let Protesters in Hong Kong Track Police (buzzfeednews.com)

3 : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21213694](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21213694) : After China Objects, Apple Removes App Used by Hong Kong Protesters (npr.org)

2 : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21210923](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21210923) : Apple Removes App That Tracked Hong Kong Police (nytimes.com)

2 : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21208379](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21208379) : Apple Removes Quartz News App from Chinese App Store (twitter.com)

1 : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21217260](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21217260) : Apple pulls map app used in HK protests (slate.com)

1 : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21210984](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21210984) : Apple Rebans Police-Tracking App Used in Hong Kong Protests from Its App Store (huffpost.com)

1 : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21210836](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21210836) : Apple finally decided to remove Hong Kong protest map app from its app store (reuters.com)

1 : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21208139](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21208139) : Apple removes 'Quartz' news app from App Store at request of the government (9to5mac.com)

0 : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21214321](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21214321) : Apple Has No Backbone (slashdot.org)

0 : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21214279](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21214279) : Apple, Google Pull Hong Kong Protest Apps After China Uproar (wsj.com)

0 : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21214078](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21214078) : Apple Removes Quartz News App from the Chinese App Store over Hong Kong Coverage (theverge.com)

0 : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21213832](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21213832) : Apple removes Hong Kong police tracking app (reuters.com)

0 : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21213501](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21213501) : Apple removes app used in Hong Kong protests after pressure from China (theverge.com)

0 : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21212818](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21212818) : HKmap app can survive Apple Store removal with use of PWAs (lukaszolejnik.com)

0 : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21211993](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21211993) : Apple removes Hong Kong protest app after China complains (scmp.com)

0 : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21211886](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21211886) : Apple Removed Hong Kong Protests Map from App Store, Again (qz.com)

0 : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21211709](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21211709) : Apple pulls tracking app after China criticism (theguardian.com)

0 : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21211504](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21211504) : Apple pulls police-tracking app used by Hong Kong protesters (washingtonpost.com)

0 : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21210742](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21210742) : Apple removes police-tracking app used in Hong Kong protests from its app store (cnbc.com)

0 : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21210515](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21210515) : Apple removes Quartz news app in China (theverge.com)

0 : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21204282](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21204282) : Apple Angers China by Approving Cop-Tracking Map App for Hong Kong (wsj.com)

0 : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21200584](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21200584) : 'Protecting rioters': China warns Apple over app that tracks Hong Kong police (theguardian.com)

0 : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21197661](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21197661) : China state newspaper criticizes Apple for app use by Hong Kong protesters (reuters.com)

0 : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21189288](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21189288) : Apple approves Hong Kong protest location app (bbc.com)</comment>


Scamming the scammers – catching the virus call centre scammers red-handed - <AUTHOR> http://www.troyhunt.com/2012/02/scamming-scammers-catching-virus-call.html

<comment><USER3> I had a freshly cloned WinXP instance running in Hyper-V when I was called by one of these scammers. I went through the same thing out of interest's sake. I thought they might clue in when Oracle 10g was the only thing in the Start Menu. They didn't.

The interesting bit is that I called LogMeIn with my other phone, excused myself for a moment "to answer the door", explained the situation, gave the session ID (whatever it's called) and they got to listen in on a good portion of the whole thing.

After I called them on what they were doing, LogMeIn told me there was nothing they can do about it. I suppose if the scammers are LogMeIn customers, LogMeIn is perfectly willing to facilitate this sort of behaviour.

That put the nail in the coffin for my ever using LogMeIn.

<comment><USER4> To be fair to LogMeIn, it's a privacy violation to monitor the traffic that goes on in the connections they facilitate, though they should at least investigate such warnings, and perhaps suspend accounts that have had a certain number.

<comment><USER3> Well the LogMeIn tech support rep got to actually hear the conversation between myself and the scammer by speakerphone, so that should have sufficed to start an investigation.

But I guess to be fair to LogMeIn, the tech support rep just might not have cared.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How about something like this for the "Card Services" scams?

These are the robo-calls with the female voice telling you that you can lower your credit card's interest rate, but it's only for a limited time, so press 1 to talk to a service rep.

I've gone pretty far down the road with a few of these "service reps". I'm convinced they want credit card number, expiration date and CVS/CVC for cards with a large available balance. They hang up on me if I just want the lower interest, or if I inquire too closely about who they work for, or why they need the CVS/CVC (3-digit code on the back of a card).

<comment><USER6> I had an interesting experience with these scammers.

I played dumb and got from automated to first line qualification to second line qualification to the person that closes the deal. At each level you could tell that the savvy-ness of the person went up dramatically. When I got to the closer, he was smooth as silk. He asked me for info from my credit card statement. I kept him on the phone a good 10-15 minutes playing dumb, then I hung up. He called back immediate and said "oh, we got disconnected" and I basically told him he was scum and I did this because I asked to be taken off their "list" about 20 times. He said "you'll regret this" and hung up. At this point my phone rang again and someone started screaming at me. He had redirected the complaining victims like myself to my phone #. I unplugged my landline and called AT&T on my cell. They really couldn't do anything, which I found amazing. After 30 minutes I plugged the phone back in and didn't receive any more calls.

Then, googled "card services". It took me a while, but I found a law suit against some company from around 2002, and even found a PDF containing the complaint by some lawyer in TX, complete with a phone number. I figured, what the heck, I'll call it and see if anyone answers. Some old guy answered on the 2nd ring and I explained the situation and he was very surprised. He said the company had been shutdown soon after the law suit. I told him they were back, with a vengeance. They had been calling me at least once a day for a year. He told me to start a case with the FCC (I think... it was a few years ago), which I did by filling in a form on their website. Never heard squat.

After the incident mentioned above, I didn't get a call for more than a year. Then, they started up again. Now, I just hang up immediately. I'd say I get a few a week at this point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Where's Anonymous when you need them? There's probably enough people with enough chutzpa in that group to make business very difficult for these sorts of crooks if they were so inclined. Defending little old ladies against this sort of non-sense would go a long way toward polishing their image.

Anonymous: Get a bat-signal.

<comment><USER8> Their standard answer to calls like this is "we are not your personal army".

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> So how do you stop these kind of scams from continuing to go on? I would think the best option would be to revoke their ability to collect money. Visa/Mastercard/Amex should suspend their merchant accounts. Sure, it'll be a cat and mouse game but at least they'll be doing _something_.

A friends machine was infected with a fake virus demanding the user purchase software that'll clean the machine. I'm so surprised these guys are able to steal money like this. Suspending the ability to process the credit card would put a lot of these viruses out of business.

<comment><USER10> Not really. The way these guys operate is that they often load balance their charges over many merchant accounts.

Your merchant account can get into trouble if you have too many chargebacks _and_ have too high a percentage of chargebacks. So the way most people do it is try and stay under the hard limit. The percentage is still too high but as long as you stay under the hard limit you'll be fine. If you know you're going to bust that merchant account that month you pump as much of your transactions through and close the account before the chargebacks inevitably pour in leaving the issuing bank on the hook. I can't remember which of Visa or Mastercard gave more leeway but the numbers were something like 35 max chargebacks/month and under 2% of total transactions and the other 50 max chargebacks and under 2.5% of total transactions. The numbers may not be exact but they should reasonably close.

It's actually very easy to get a merchant account. You set up a dummy corporation, get a legitimate-looking website and request one. You usually get it. So if you just pay a web designer to make you a generic layout with 100 different logos/color schemes you can definitely get 100 merchant accounts.

One of my ideas was to create a crawler to detect a lot of these scams and alert the banks before the scammers cut and run. It's a decent idea (most of these scams run on very common patterns that can be detected scraping the web. The terms of service are a great place to start) and would definitely save them a lot of money but there's no way I want to get involved in sales to banks.

<comment><USER9> I thought your company had to have a credit history or you would have to use your personal credit to open the account. Is that just a requirement for the better banks with lower rates?

<comment><USER10> If you're going with a brand name bank you'll have to jump through many more hoops than going through a small one.

There are also boards out there that scammers hang out on and share which banks currently have the easiest-to-circumvent systems. I'm not sure where they are anymore they tend to go up and down a lot and I haven't paid attention to any of this for a couple of years now.

Some of these scams can be so profitable that the scammers literally buy small banks to make sure they don't get shut down and give great rates to people with legitimate business and high enough volume so that the blended rate between their legitimate customers and their scammy cash cow looks ok. They take a loss on the legitimate customers but the cash cow is a scam and almost pure profit so they still make a huge amount of money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have had it twice - both times I was working - so I pretended to go along with them. I faked crashes, and restarts (each that took ~ 5 minutes) while I went on with my work. At about the 50 minute mark they seemed to realise (both times) that it was a lost cause - so made excuses and just gave "advice" and hung up. So from that small sample I guess there is a limit to what they are able to sink on a given customer time-wise. My satisfaction was that it was 50 minutes they weren't perhaps attacking someone vulnerable.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm very familiar with the "you have a virus" pop-ups that trick helpless users into downloading bogus software, but I've never heard of a cold call version of that scam.

Am I misunderstanding something, or do these scammers literally call people's phones and tell them out of the blue that their computer is infected? What if they say "I don't have a computer"? What if they say "I have three computers, which one?" Seems like that would raise more flags more quickly than a pop-up showing on your actual computer, and manual phone calls can't scale like pop- ups... how is that still profitable or what am I missing?

Edit: OK, number of computers is easy. Still surprised that it is profitable given (what I suspect as) the inability to scale. I guess the conversion rate just isn't that bad.

<comment><USER13> > What if they say "I don't have a computer"?

 _click_

> What if they say "I have three computers, which one?"

"We're going to need to check all of them."

<comment><USER14> Exactly. Very low risk for them. If the call goes nowhere, they hang up and move on to the next target. The previous target thinks it a bit odd but what are they realistically going to do about it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have asked one of my friend who works in Bank of baroda to look in to this. Hopefully BOB will shut their account(s).

But even if Bank of baroda closes their merchant account they'll go somewhere else & open new account and continue their bad activities.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good work, I've also emailed Bank of Baroda directly and provided them with the information in my post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> My (hacker) friend gets these multiple times per week. He has tried being increasingly lurid and profane but they still call him. They obviously aren't doing much analytics.

<comment><USER10> Weird. You'd think they wouldn't want to waste their own time like that.

They were targeting my grandfather for a while but stopped calling when I would cut them off mid-sentence.

The first time I was thoroughly confused by the truly non-sensical gibberish the guy was spouting until he got to the point where he offered to fix it all. Then I just said I was a software engineer and that everything he just said was garbage. He replied software engineer? I said yes and he hung up on me.

On the second call we got I just cut the guy off and asked: what company do you work for? There were a few seconds of silence followed by a click and dial tone. No calls since.

<comment><USER17> _> Weird. You'd think they wouldn't want to waste their own time like that._

The same scammer will call back multiple times in case there are several people that might answer the phone at that number which could be the case for a household or small business (large businesses are not a target for this sort of thing as the people who answer the phone won't have the access rights needed for the scam to work). You knew that it was a scam but your sibling/parent/secretary/what-ever might not and so might go along with it.

Once they've retried your number a few times they'll just add it to the pool that they'll sell on to other scammers. By answering the phone you've proven that the number is valid and can be used to contact a human. Lather, rinse, repeat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> FWIW, here're some details about the company:

1\. It seems to be run from Kolkata (capital of West Bengal): Goto maps.google.co.in and search for Comantra. The result has a phone number _you can call_

2\. They seem to be hosted by GoDaddy. Does anyone want another go at that angle? Although, knowing GD this is the kind of customer they want!

3\. Linked in also returns somebody who calls himself Owner of GoMantra. Not linking here for obvious reasons of mistaken identity.

IANAL, and I couldn't find a resource that I could point you to from an indian legal POV. Cybercrime has only recently been defined by indian law and from all that I read (not much authoritative) there's not much in this area. Any law-savvy indian HNers care to chime in?

</comment><comment><USER19> I've done similar, although I didn't go as far because I got bored quicker.

In the end I asked the guy how he felt about scamming people etc, and the discussion that ensured convinced me that he _didn't actually realize_ what they were doing. He actually went to get his boss to convince me, and I half heard an argument before someone hung up my phone.

</comment><comment><USER4> They use two remote access clients most likely because the second one gives them invisible filesystem access - you can't see what they're looking at. The first one is probably just simpler to connect and helps them get you over the hurdles of the second one (which there aren't many of)

I had one of these scammers call, who was insistent there was an XP machine with a virus. He called back three times in quick succession, the third time I repeated that I used linux, not XP, and "I know you're a scammer, you know you're a scammer, just fuck off". That seems to be what's required to make them stop.

A friend of mine had one of these calls and decided to play along - <USER2> followed all their instructions, but played the dumb user... neglecting to tell them he was in KDE on ubuntu, not XP. "Yes, I'm clicking on the button in the corner...". He had them on speakerphone while preparing dinner and whatnot, went through several staff including 'senior advisors', and it finally ended when the battery on his phone died an hour later...

<comment><USER20> Luckily I had warned my mother-in-law about these - she's safely on Ubuntu, but I keep everyone in the family aware of scams.

So she played along for at least 45 minutes, before telling them their mother would be ashamed of them and they should get a useful job like sweeping the streets!

This seems like the best approach, if you can spare the time - tie up so much of their time that it is uneconomic.

<comment><USER21> Isnt your time more valuable than theirs, making the last statement sort of moot?

<comment><USER22> Speaking as an Australian that's had a few of these calls, it's kind of fun stringing them along the first few times and then after that you can just hand them off to the nearest grandmother or 13 year old and let them deal with it.

My nephew (13) thinks it's great fun to stretch these calls out as long as possible, but then he's into playing Skyrim & what not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This reminds me of a This American Life story in 2008 about scam baiters conning a 419 scammer and whether they went too far [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/play_full.php?play=363&a...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/play_full.php?play=363&act=1)

</comment><comment><USER24> I must admit I am quite shocked to see that there is now a new account on HN called Comantra advertising this "service". I am also quite sure that no one that reads this site would fall for this scam.

Edit: spelling and punctuation

</comment><comment><USER25> I love how at the end they kept trying to unsuccessfully explain how they weren't a scam.

</comment><comment><USER26> I must have missed the part where you "scammed" them, unless you really just meant to say "confronted on the phone". But that wouldn't get you as many clicks, would it?

<comment><USER27> the writer obviously put a lot of effort into this post ... I'd say trying to get a bit of extra visibility with a catchy title is totally excusable</comment></comment>