Ask HN: Please review my startup - techofnow - <AUTHOR>

Hey everyone -- I wanted to run a project I have been working on for the last few months by the folks at Hacker News:
LINK: http://www.techofnow.com/
techofnow is an aggregator for technology memes -- similar to techmeme, although there are a few key differences. In particular, the method by which articles are clustered into memes and ranked is completely automated. This means an article which is considered important and promoted by an editor at techmeme may not be promoted on techofnow since it is not a significant meme.
A little background.
I started techofnow as a weekend project a few months ago after completing undergraduate (CS + Math) about a year ago. I thought building a meme aggregator would be a good challenge outside of work and graduate school to learn and maybe gain a little bootstrapped entrepreneurship experience.
Any feedback, thoughts, guidance, or criticism would be appreciated. <comment><USER2> Some thoughts:

\- Domain/name sounds somewhat awkward, which is not good for a place to get news.

\- favicon looks rough.

\- The front page is unfortunately a wreck, UI/UE-wise.

\-- Don't use scrollover/hover to highlight part of main page name like some exciting link when it is just a link back to the main page.

\-- Remove "Top Technology Memes". You don't need it.

\-- Reduce unimportant UI elements by removing the icon next to where the link goes to and the site where the link goes to above each headline.

\-- Story title on one line, text on the next. Don't start text on the headline line.

\-- Text should probably not be in black because it is competing with the headline being blue and standing out. Pick one or the other to stand out if you must have both. I think the headline by itself is enough.

\-- Get rid of the myriad of links to all the sites it came from under the headline and text.

What you have left unfortunately is a lackluster list of headlines, but basically- that is the gist of what you are providing currently. If you are trying to be google news, have categories, etc.

Why not pull content into the page dynamically via Ajax pushing the headlines down as soon as they come in?

Think about this: what is the feature (not content) that will distinguish you from every other site like this on the web?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the great feedback.

Your spot on about the UI/UE, it is a serious weak point. It is a pretty big gap in my own skill set (which by iterating on this site, I am hoping to improve).

I think the core competency of the site is meme tracking for a given vertical category. Given that, the thought is additional features can be added that leverage the memes.

Some examples I am thinking of short term:

-Which memes are having the biggest impact on social networks (in terms of "tweets", "likes", "diggs", etc..).

-What media, such as videos and images, are associated with a particular meme.

Longer term:

-Given a list of sites and article I track on say, Google Reader, only show me the entries which are part of significant memes.

-What memes are my friends "liking", "tweeting", or "digging", etc...

-Topic search which returns memes rather than single articles.

The overarching plan is to release early, and often -- and hopefully to update the folks here at Hacker News to make a good feedback loop.

<comment><USER2> Thanks!

You have some good thoughts on it, and your plan to get input is great. But, I think you need to continue thinking outside of the box on this.

What you are saying you want it to do is the cliche of existing sites out there that do social link promotion or link/news aggregation (regardless of whether there is a great logic to how you are pulling those stories, etc.). There is no value add significant enough in anything you are listing there to make me want to visit the site at all, much less with any frequency.

You need something significantly new or niche about the site. If you are looking for a challenge, surprise me (and everyone else) and come up with an idea that I'd be interested in that I've not heard before. I know this sounds harsh, but better now than later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm a noob when it comes to web design, but I think you'd be much better if you converted "Discussion" links into expandable form. They take up too much space, if a visitor is really interested in the sources that mention the news, they can click on the discussions and see the results.

Other than that it's a good idea, why don't you add Monthly/Weekly The Most Popular memes?

<comment><USER4> i agree the discussion links are consuming way too much real estate. if you reduce that you would have room for more stories.

right now the news seems a little google and android heavy.

however overall... it's pretty cool. i am going to bookmark it and check it periodically. do you have a plan to distinguish it more from techmeme?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Beautiful. Absolutely Beautiful.

It would be wonderful if it was implemented here on HN. Instead of having a page full of "Angel-Gate" stories, there would be only one, and it would include all the others. Similar for every other duplicate submission.

At the moment, I believe HN has a very much simplified and inaccurate version of this concept implemented. If an exact url is submitted a second time, the second is simply added as a "vote up" for the previous submission of the same thing.

</comment><comment><USER6> Actually to me it looks a lot like the tech/sci section of google news. I think in order to differentiate from them you need to add some more features, like tech related subcategories. Otherwise I would also look at them as a source of inspiration.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hi, I am sorry.. I didn't get the difference between Techmeme & techofnow. can you elaborate more? may be I am too used to techmeme that I was seeing whether the "+" symbol comes up before the dicussion section. Also, you can probably show few discussions and show a link as "more discussion on the same topic"

<comment><USER8> He wrote that techofnow is completely automated, while, I am guessing, techmeme is crowd-sourced or somehow manually edited.

I think that's a good differentiating point.

FWIW, 10 out of 15 stories on the site is, as of now, about mobile technologies. Does techofnow need more diverse sources?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right. The automation versus editing is the key difference between techofnow and techmeme. Techmeme has several editors that will promote stories, or alter conversation grouping, based on an editor's discretion.

I think your right. techofnow is too mobile heavy right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Clickable link: <http://www.techofnow.com/></comment>


Ask HN: Apple copied my App Name, what do I do now? - <AUTHOR> I woke up this morning to see some really confusing news. An app with the exact same name as my soon to be released app had been released by Apple. What do I do now?
Some backstory.
I had begun work on this app in 2009 but got distracted thanks to a hectic life (marriage etc) and had early this year started working on it again. I registered the *app.com domain and submitted a basic binary to Apple for Review. I pulled the binary and began working on it, trying a whole heap of ideas and talking to family and friends on what they'd want in the app.
I work a day job and money is tight so I don't have tons of time to spend, and definitely not the money to register the trademark locally (Australia) let alone the US. I'd say I was about 2 months off of release at this stage after spending a ton of time working with server components to store and share the information on a budget. The site is also blank as I didn't have the bandwidth to set it up nicely and I wanted to be a bit stealthy as the name gives an extremely obvious indication of what it does.
So now Apple has released an App with the exact same spelling as my app (and obviously a very similar functionality based on the name) while mine is still in iTunesConnect ready for binary submission and approval.
I just feel gutted, I'm not sure I can release the App now (since it directly competes) and I don't want to rebrand all the artwork and domain. If I do release it, I feel like I'd look bad for trying to hang off Apples success and not sure I can cope with the support required for users who install my app and wonder why their friends aren't on it. I didn't even get a notice from Apple about any of this. Do they even check for existing apps?
Does anyone have any input on where to go from here?
Thanks <comment><USER2> We know what Steve would say:

        Change your apps name. Not that big of a deal.

        Steve

        Sent from my iPhone

[http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/11/steve-jobs-to- develop...](http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/11/steve-jobs-to-developer- name-change-not-that-big-of-a-deal/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hand't seen that before. Not quite the same situation but applicable, I learnt a crash course in trademarks and cover your ass for startups. Guess I should look at it as a big learning experience instead of a downer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You'll probably now have to reconsider name as Apple most likely has filed a Trademark on this. So whatever " _" is, any derivation of that:_ app, _central,_ etc... would probably be blocked now.

Best course is to probably brainstorm what differentiates your app from Apple, as potential basis for your new name.

Maybe you can take your domain expertise you've gained and go 'vertical' or specialized to build your beachhead adjacent to Apple's mass-market focus?

</comment><comment><USER4> I guess you're talking about Find My Friends.

Apple either doesn't check or just doesn't care; see "iTV", "iPhone", and "IOS".

At this point you cannot go to market with the existing name. If you think your app is worth less than the cost of changing the name (really?) then admit to yourself that you weren't serious anyway and abandon it.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not that the app is worth less than the cost of changing the name. Though right now it seems a bit worthless to try and compete with Apple.

It's the fact that I thought I had made my intentions very clear of my intent to use the brand with Apple through iTunesConnect. Apart from releasing it I did everything else. Just feels like Apple didn't even care to look and it makes me question developing for their platform.

I kinda thought that the whole iOS platform was perfect for the little guys without needing the hassle of the cover your ass lawyers. Guess I was wrong, lesson learned the hard way.

<comment><USER5> If the app is on IOS by default, it's probably not worth competing with. But if it's in the app store and you have to click to download/buy it, then it's definetley worth competing with, if you can do better than Apple. All Apple does is raises the awareness and build the 'want' for that application for you.

Oh, and Apple is great for us small guys, the same way Paypal is. It's great, unless/until they decide to stomp on you and crush you, then it's not so great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sounds like Apple has validated your idea for you - it's a good one, change the name, release the app. People like choice anyway and if you capture a piece of the pie from good keywords and app description, you might be able to ride on a demand that Apple will create for you through their marketing.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd be pretty stoked, personally - i mean, it proves that you're onto a good idea for an app if apple also spent the effort to make a similar app. So rename it and launch!

</comment><comment><USER8> So, in addition to the existing advice, the one thing I'm not seeing that I would suggest is kind of novel...

Keep the app. Keep the name. Release it on the Android market.

</comment><comment><USER9> Apple gives you only 90 days to register a name, and in fact, posting a fake binary to iTunes to hold the name is a violation of the ToS.

Frankly, it sounds like they beat you to market. It doesn't sound like they copied your name at all. (You'd have had to release the App for that claim to stick.)

Come up with a different name. If the idea is good, it won't be a big problem.</comment>


Coinbase Ordered to Turn Over Identities of 14,355 Crypto Traders to the IRS - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywnmkk/coinbase-irs-14000-bitcoin-tax <comment><USER2> The naivitee, ignorance, and arrogance of this thread astounds me.

The HN population (I include myself in this) seems to think everything is new, there are no precedents for any of this, and that we're building some kind of new society here. We aren't. Times like this make me wish people like us were less dismissive of history, liberal arts, and people-not-in-tech generally.

Case 1: a commenter below said something about "a guy moved his assets into BTC to hide from bankruptcy". Bankruptcy courts deal with this stuff ALL DAY. It's their job. You can't just make huge transfers/sales when in bankruptcy and expect people to think that's normal behavior. This has gone on long before bitcoin, and will continue long after it's gone.

Case 2: taxes. BTC is an asset. If you buy at price X and sell at price Y, guess what, you owe taxes on Y-X. I don't understand how this is news to anyone.

Case 3: money laundering and other types of financial crimes. There are entire companies who build software to detect money laundering. It's a well- understood problem.

All I'm trying to say is, just because you have a CS degree and work in San Francisco, don't think you're the smartest person in the world. Moving money is one of the oldest human endeavors and unlike a lot of topics in software development, it's an old profession with a huge body of accumulated domain knowledge. We shouldn't be so quick to dismiss it.

<comment><USER3> > If you buy at price X and sell at price Y, guess what, you owe taxes on Y-X.

This is easy when you buy Bitcoin, hodl and then sell but what if you convert it to altcoins, trade altcoins for altcoins and ultimately sell some altcoin for USD? How do you even keep track of your profits?

<comment><USER4> I'm sure the IRS will be happy to answer your question for you. The more complex is the scenario you get yourself into, the more you open yourself to getting shaken down by the IRS.

<comment><USER3> You make it sound like people do this to confuse IRS or avoid taxes. I simply like to daytrade altcoins a lot. Also, I'm not in the US but I'm interested in how this work.

<comment><USER5> I imagine it's exactly the same as how they tax currency trading.

<comment><USER6> This depends on the country.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This really reminds of the essay "Technologies of Control and Resistance"[1], which has really shaped my thinking over the years.

Bitcoin itself is a technology of resistance. Private crypt-currencies more so. (Cash too) But as long as you have to go through central portals (like Coinbase) to access the rest of the economy, the government will lean on those central parties to regulate you indirectly.

Central parties are technologies of control.

[1] [https://blog.elidourado.com/technologies-of-control-and- resi...](https://blog.elidourado.com/technologies-of-control-and-resistance- making-sense-of-our-stagnant-dynamism-d135149d0761)

<comment><USER8> The alternative is to do things off the grid, so to speak - meet people in person, exchange funds for cryptocurrencies. Actually that might be a small side business idea.

Of course, one of the goals of cryptocurrencies is to not have to go through central organizations at all. Not converting your cryptocurrencies back to fiat, and not storing them on an exchange will be the best way to dodge taxes. Pretty sure that if you hide your keys well enough, the IRS and co cannot prove that you have any assets in cryptocurrencies as long as how you acquired them can't be traced.

<comment><USER9> I always think of this quote from the movie, "Body of Lies":

"Our enemy has realized that they are fighting guys from the future. Now, ahem, it is as brilliant as it is infuriating. If you live like it's the past, and you behave like it's the past then guys from the future find it very hard to see you. If you throw away your cell phone, shut down your e-mail pass all your instructions face-to-face, hand-to-hand turn your back on technology and just disappear into the crowd"

<comment><USER10> Your supposed "enemy", has barely even noticed you. If the big bad government wants to shut down your little cryptobubble, it can do so anytime it wants with the stroke of a pen.

But yes: please walk into a forest and "life as if you don't exist". I suppose that includes not posting conspiracy fanfic online, right?

<comment><USER11> Why the vitriol. The comment was meant to allegorically offer a conceptual approach to fighting the dystopian onslaught of oppressive technology.

By oppressive technology I am referring to the kind of tech that obviously oppressive governments would have built decades ago if it had been possible, and that the US will gradually arrive at soon enough without explicitly seeking to do so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you're trying to use bitcoin to avoid tax obligations, the IRS is more than capable of coming after you.

Launder your coins? You bet they can track that.

Buy off localbitocins? Still trackable, given enough interest.

Never done anything with the coin, just a wallet.dat file? The money's no good if you can't use it, and they'll want what's owned the minute it moves.

The IRS will get what it is owed, whether you like it or not. The only real way to avoid them is to be worth so little it's not worth their time.

<comment><USER13> Moreover, if you take steps like laundering coins or meeting in person specifically to avoid paying taxes, you've handed the IRS evidence to prosecute you for willful evasion. You're trading money today for jail time tomorrow.

 _Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. Pay your taxes._

<comment><USER14> I don't know how they'd prove you met someone specifically to avoid taxes. I mean, prior to coinbase there weren't any good/easy ways to get bitcoin... it all seemed a little bit sketchy on the surface -- you were either buying it from someone in person or using the red phone in the back of CVS.

Coinbase was a godsend when it came along. No more explaining to my wife why I was going to the sketchy part of town because that CVS has a red phone... finally a legit company that I can buy from! But, even with coinbase and gemini and any other legit exchanges, you may still want to buy bitcoin from someone in person if you've hit your weekly maximum on the exchange.

I know some local computer repair people who buy lots of bitcoin to pay off their client's cryptolocker incidents. They easily hit their weekly limits for business purposes.

<comment><USER13> > _I don 't know how they'd prove you met someone specifically to avoid taxes_

I'm not saying using these services _per se_ is necessarily enough to warrant arrest. But if you're (a) not reporting taxable holdings or income, (b) using these services after alternatives are available and (c) running your mouth on forums about cashing in your Bitcoins while on vacation in Europe, you're in the easy pile.

 _Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal nor tax advice. Pay your taxes._

<comment><USER15> _Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal nor tax advice. Pay your taxes._

Your advice has been useful to read so far, but are you seriously concerned a username on here will hold you to account if the advice goes awry? It has a nervous/pedantic air (no offense intended, just the impression as a reader when seeing repeated footers).

<comment><USER13> > _It has a nervous /pedantic air (no offense intended_

No offense taken :). Most prominently, I do it as a courtesy. A lawyer's comments on these matters should carry more weight than my own. Second to that, one might characterize me as nervous and pedantic about such things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Good. If I have to pay capital gains on normal stocks I don't see why crypto traders shouldn't have to also.

<comment><USER17> What bothers me about this whole thing is that I never bought it like a stock. I mined it YEARS ago when it was worthless.

Now all of a sudden I have to pay tax on something I already own? Seems like the government is double dipping. After all I already paid tax on the hardware, the internet connection, the electricity, and countless other market products that allowed me to mine said coin.

I have a couple of choices now.

I can either sign up for Coinbase and sell it and kiss 15% of it good bye or I can go on Newegg and buy stuff directly with Bitcoin.... or go to a bitcoin meetup and sell with cash in-person..... or go on vacation in Europe and get Euro and again keep it off the books.

Which do you think I'm gonna end up doing?

PS: My address has never been tied to an IRL transaction.

PPS: God damn it's easy to troll HN. More salt than the dead sea.

<comment><USER18> If someone raises chickens from eggs; pays for feed and cares for them until they are full-size, and then sells them, he has to pay taxes on that income, even though he already paid for the food and the upkeep. There's no double dipping here.

You can find an accountant who can give you advice on how to account for the cost of mining the bitcoin to reflect your effective cost basis (or wing it; the IRS has reasonably good instructions for this sort of thing).

If you go to Newegg and buy stuff, you are obligated under US tax law to pay the capital gains taxes based on the fair market value of the products purchased. If you go to a bitcoin meetup and sell with cash, you are still obligated to pay taxes.

Your legal obligations are clear; whether you can commit the perfect crime or not and get away with it is another matter.

<comment><USER17> > If you go to Newegg and buy stuff, you are obligated under US tax law to pay > the capital gains taxes based on the fair market value of the products > purchased. If you go to a bitcoin meetup and sell with cash, you are still > obligated to pay taxes.

I recently bought a GTX 1080 TI with USD

Amazon wanted to charge me 7%. Newegg charged me no state tax.

Which do you think I went with?

Like our president said.

> "I'm smart for not paying taxes." \- The president Source: > [https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/26/politics/donald-trump- > federal...](https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/26/politics/donald-trump-federal- > income-taxes-smart-debate/index.html)

This is also why people shop in Delaware. I wonder how many of those people reported their purchases to Pennsylvania.

<comment><USER19> Newegg is not obligated to _collect_ sales take from you if they don't have a nexus in your state. Amazon has a nexus almost everywhere and thus collects sales tax from you regardless of where you order from. That's only true for orders place with Amazon itself; independent sellers at Amazon are responsible for specifying their own taxes that will be collected.

None of this, whether it's collected or not, eliminates your requirement to pay the sales or excise tax of your home State. In fact, if you go out of your way to order something or perform a transaction in a way that explicitly evades sales tax then you could be in legal trouble with your State's tax agency.

They might not care about a $200 graphics card but they do go after large offenders. Here's an example: [http://www.nj.com/mercer/index.ssf/2017/05/broker_from_princ...](http://www.nj.com/mercer/index.ssf/2017/05/broker_from_princeton_charged_with_tax_evasion_ove.html)

> > "I'm smart for not paying taxes." \- The president Source: > [https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/26/politics/donald-trump- > federal...](https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/26/politics/donald-trump-federal..).

> This is also why people shop in Delaware. I wonder how many of those people > reported their purchases to Pennsylvania.

Avoiding paying taxes through legal means is smart. Evading paying taxes is illegal.

<comment><USER17> Yea.... I'm sure you report all your purchases at the duty free as soon as you get to American soil.

<comment><USER20> Duty-free goods have special dedicated legislation in most countries, I assume in the US too.

<comment><USER21> Up to like $800 or something, unless I'm confusing it with yet-another-limit in the tax code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is a net good for bitcoin and all crypto currencies isn't it?

I mean the IRS is treating it the same way that they treat other securities, isn't that what the majority of the bitcoin community wants? Just some clarification as to exactly what bitcoins tax situation is and now we are getting it.

I mean at this point if you traded bitcoin and didn't pay taxes on your capital gains, that is 100% on you, you can't claim ignorance at this point.

This, more than CME and CBOE futures, though those are important, and more than a sane way to store them without having to worry about lost keys or being hacked, is what institutional investors really want before they get into bitcoin.

In the long run this is a very positive event for bitcoin adoption by the masses, and more importantly for speculators, large inflows of institutional money.

<comment> lloyd-christmas > This is a net good for bitcoin and all crypto currencies isn't it?

No. A quote from the article:

 _" asking for detailed transaction information on so many people, simply for using digital currency, is a violation of [customers'] privacy, and is not the best way for us to accomplish our mutual objective."_

The point of the article isn't about regulation or enforcement; it's about the methodology of enforcement. If A business magically has more money than they should given their transactions in a year, issuing a subpoena on their information is completely legitimate if they are under an active investigation. Similarly, if a _specific_ person is under investigation, and they are suspected to be evading taxes, an investigation into _them_ is grounds to get _their_ info from coinbase. It's not grounds to get _my_ info from coinbase. People also try and evade taxes in the stock market, that doesn't mean the IRS is entitled to investigate me just because I also happen to use schwab and made a trade on nasdaq.

At the end of the day, this ISN'T good for crypto currencies because it demonstrates that enforcement obeys different rules than other assets.

<comment><USER23> > it demonstrates that enforcement obeys different rules than other assets

Like stock exchanges and banks? Right, because they certainly don't report your gains/losses to the IRS voluntarily. /s

Seems bitcoin IS being treated exactly like other assets. Parent said this is a good thing. I agree (and I am a crypto trader). Maybe it's because my disdain for taxes-are-theft libertarians is much stronger than my reluctance to pay what I owe for my gains.

Also, it's one thing to not want to pay taxes if you're working a plow in a field all day. However if you're sitting at a computer pushing a few buttons and earning money from it, then yeah, no excuses to not pay.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> And this is where the "promise" of anonymous currency/assets falls apart. Some folks might be able to obtain or sell it anonymously, but so long as these exchanges exist and given the ease at tracking coins through the publicly visible blockchain, it only takes one transaction at a broker who can be raided/subpoenaed for the government to track your assets.

Much like any other form of anonymity on the internet - it often only takes one tie between your physical and digital identity for the whole thing to fall apart.

<comment><USER25> Bitcoin is not much of an anonymous platform. And anyone using it expecting anonymity is bound to end up disappointed.

<comment><USER26> Just tumble your coins, you'd need a super computer to find where they go. That's what things like Monero automatically do.

<comment><USER27> For tax purposes, it doesn't really matter that you laundered the money. They'll get you when you use it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> As Coinbase user I always assumed that all of my transactions are automatically reported to the IRS - I'm actually surprised that this didn't happen yet.

<comment><USER29> I'm in this category too. I just assumed that Coinbase was handing all this to the IRS for audits or future prosecution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This was bound to happen. What many people outside of the USA don't realise is that the Common Reporting Standard (CRS) means that the IRS is very likely going to share this info with a great many other countries. However at present I don't believe the USA has signed up to the CRS.

If your tax residency resides outside of the USA, and you made a taxable capital gain, I strongly advise to report it to your tax authority.

<comment><USER31> I wonder why there hasn't been an attempt at making a country where regulations are kept minimal and taxes nonexistent or only dependent on what you use.

It would probably attract a ton of economic activity. Does it exist?

edit: rephrase

<comment><USER30> If you are American the answer is no... Americans are taxed by way of citizenship. The only way out is to give up your citizenship and that's not easy.

Other countries have different rules that apply to their citizens and also to residents.

Generally speaking I think it's far better too focus on making the money more than mitigating the tax.

So while I believe there is no moral obligation to pay more tax than legally required, you would have benefited from the tax of previous generations so why should you have a free ride?

<comment><AUTHOR> If a US citizen lives somewhere else how is he supposed to pay taxes to the country he lives in? Only to the US usually? Double tax treaty? I bet many countries do not like that. Just asking out of curiosity.

<comment><USER32> Taxes paid to another country are (generally) deducted from the tax to pay to the US. There is also a rather high total income exclusion. In practice most US citizens living and earning money overseas do not pay significant tax to the US, but they must still file the paperwork (most expats who renounce their citizenship do so because of the expense/time to do so, as well as the difficulty of banking as a US citizen overseas due to the restrictions the US effectively enforces on foreign banks who have US citizens as customers).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Last year IRS reported 800 people reported BTC holding and paid taxes on it. I know at lease two people that transferred their money in to BTC before filing for bankruptcy to side their assets.

Hopefully laws can put in place for proper taxation.

<comment><USER34> > _I know at lease two people that transferred their money in to BTC before > filing for bankruptcy to side their assets._

Hopefully actions like the above continue and those two people go to prison.

<comment><USER26> Hah probably some VC :D, really think about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Coinbase now top 10 in the App Store

[https://twitter.com/FEhrsam/status/936014373562195968](https://twitter.com/FEhrsam/status/936014373562195968)

<comment><USER36> Sign #4024209230 that we're in a bubble.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Your information will also be shared with the IRS if you used your Coinbase account to transact with one of the "$20,000+" Coinbase accounts.

<comment><USER38> >any user who bought, sold, sent, or received more than $20,000 worth of Bitcoin in _their_ accounts between 2013 and 2015.

Your own account needs to have had $20k worth of bitcoin, not simply interacting with someone else who does.

<comment><USER37> It isn't mentioned in the article, but from the order:

"and, where counterparties transact through their own Coinbase accounts/wallets/vaults, all available information identifying the users of such accounts and their contact information"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Que 14,355 people searching for "punishment for not reporting capital gain"...

<comment><USER40> Cue?

<comment><USER41> Well, it could mean "Queue them up" as in "make a line".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> this is interesting. I get the FX angle, but what if you never convert your BTC to USD? in that case your profits are not "realized" and so long as you pay for stuff in BTC how can they possibly calculate your gains

<comment><USER43> "Realization" has a meaning in accounting and swapping property for property does, generally, realize the gains.

This might or might not generate an informational return to the IRS. Most transactions in the economy don't. They're still taxed. The tax system functions on a combination of informational returns and auto matching, human- intensive audits on a small selection of returns each year, and the honor system.

"They can't tax us if we don't write stuff down!" is believed by many people, including Bitcoiners, and they are often surprised to find that the IRS has thought of this clever strategy before. For example: "I see you own a boat. What year did you buy it in?" "Oh I dunno." "2015. Let's try again: how much did you buy it for?" "I dunno." "List price, great answer. OK, you understated your income from 2015 by $65k. Here's your bill for $150k." "You can't do that!" "I get that a lot."

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> The more interesting question is whether or not Coinbase will do the responsible thing, and provide its American users with the right tax forms to report their net gains/losses/sales.

I have a feeling that they'll leave the users holding that bag. Move fast, break things, crowdsource all compliance costs to your users.

I, for one, wouldn't know the first thing about filing to the IRS that I spent $250 to buy BTC in Feb 2016, and then spent $27.43 of BTC to buy a widget in May 2017, and then cashed out the other $1,530 into my bank account in November 2017.

How many of Coinbase's users do?

</comment><comment><USER45> The internet initially was an anonymous way to access information. Now its the least anonymous as corporations, ISPs, government and ad agencies watch what you do.

Crypto currencies used to be anonymous too, wont be long before everyone is watching your wallet as well.

<comment><USER46> The internet was anonymous only because it was obscure. The Man barely knew it existed, and couldn't be bothered to figure out how to track people.

Just like other types of security, anonymity through obscurity is a bad idea and only works while your obscurity holds out.

Cryptocurrencies are going through the same transition. Initially they seemed anonymous because nobody with power cared about them. Now that's changing.

If you care about being anonymous, take steps to ensure that it works even if The Man starts looking.

<comment><USER47> I'm sure you know The Man evolved the Internet from ARPANET so they clearly knew of its existence. Unless you meant to say that The Man didn't think much of tracking people on the Internet until it become economically viable when it reached critical mass.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_the_In...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_the_Internet)

<comment><USER46> Here, "The Man" refers to law enforcement, not the government in general.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Not for no reason does Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism [0] refer to cryptocurrencies as "Prosecution Futures"

[0] [http://www.nakedcapitalism.com](http://www.nakedcapitalism.com)

</comment><comment><USER49> so let's say you buy Bitcoin and instead of selling it back for a $ profit, you go onto Overstock and buying 10,000 worth of stuff.

Is buying stuff on Overstock using bitcoin a taxable event?

<comment><USER50> Yes. The same applies to when you trade bitcoin for other cryptocurrencies. Although it is technically one transaction, if you want to be safe you should treat it as two separate transactions:

1\. Selling the bitcoin for USD (this is taxable)

2\. Using the USD to buy whatever it is you want.

<comment><USER49> That is going to be really challenging for users to use this as a currency in the USA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Title should say Cryptocurrency instead of Crypto

</comment><comment><USER52> All cryptocurrencies are down today. BTC lost 25%. I wonder if it is because of this news or sth else?

<comment><USER53> Normal profit taking for the asset. Many projections continue to look upward...outrageously upward. Not sure where it goes, but I put a little bit of money in just to satisify my FOMO.

<comment><USER52> Which projections? I don't see many serious analysis for Bitcoin climbing further up, what I see is the opposite. Do you mind sharing ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Isn't that the whole reason why they ask for identifying information? Hardly news

</comment><comment><USER55> it can't get any simpler than this .

> Case 2: taxes. BTC is an asset. If you buy at price X and sell at price Y, > guess what, you owe taxes on Y-X. I don't understand how this is news to > anyone.

</comment><comment><USER56> The old Death & Taxes rule still applies, even for Bitcoin.

<comment><USER57> And who's face is on the bitcoin? Pay Satoshi what's due to Satoshi?

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Haven't you guys heard? Just trade bitcoins IRL. Fast, convenient and secure, why would anyone bother with a bank?

</comment><comment><USER59> This is GOOD news for bitcoin/cryptos.

Pay your taxes on your gains. If the IRS can turn this into a revenue stream, it will solidify and legitimize it.

</comment><comment><USER60> This was inevitable and a good thing.

Crypto has been extremely risky because there is no sure-fire exit strategy. Now that reliable exchanges like coinbase are popping up, and playing by the rules, that risk is going down drastically.

A reliable exchange means much less risk, and one of the ways it does that is accurate reporting. That means accurate reports to you AND the IRS. If you want a reliable market, that market has to play by the rules.

<comment><USER61> Absolutely. But you're still going to see prices fall or bad price fluctuation behavior in the short term, because:

\- A chilling effect/scared-lemming effect from the news will rattle some people, with or without reason.

\- A reliable market is usually (not always) a less volatile market. A lot of crypto traders who were capitalizing on the volatility of these markets will now exit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Big brothers always going to get a cut of your $$</comment>


Study of Minneapolis dynamic priced lanes shows tolls as proxy for congestion - <AUTHOR> http://tollroadsnews.com/news/study-of-minneapolis-dynamic-priced-lanes-shows-drivers-see-posted-tolls-as-proxy-for-congestion---more-likely-to-choose-toll-lanes-when-posted-prices <comment><USER2> I've been commuting into downtown Minneapolis by bus for a few months now and I have to say I'm really surprised by how sparsely populated the HOV lanes are. Especially now that crowdsourced traffic congestion apps like WAZE are available, I would have thought that more people would be using them to avoid traffic. But even with lanes to stopped traffic to my right, the HOV lanes remain almost empty.</comment>


How Outsourcing Companies Are Gaming the Visa System - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/11/06/us/outsourcing-companies-dominate-h1b-visas.html <comment><USER2> Already posted 3 times today.

Lots of comments here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10539100](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10539100)</comment>


Feedback on landing page nevermiss.it - <AUTHOR> http://www.nevermiss.it

<comment><USER2> I like the idea, and the general construct looks good and the picture works well. But there are too many fonts in the text area [the white one is especially eye bleed worthy]. And the wording is a bit hard to get around. It should be _really_ easy to read - i shouldnt have to put commas in and change the tense of a word for it to make sense... Also i feel the whole page is a bit dull, either the text box needs brightening up or the background image. Interesting service idea, i look forward to seeing where it goes!

<comment><AUTHOR> I will try to fix it as soon as I can and will let you know

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Current copy on the page:

\----

 _NEVER MISS ANYTHINGS LIKE EVENTS/BIRTHDAY OF YOUR FRIENDS/UTILITY BILL DUE DATES /ETC

In our busy day to day activities we forgot so many things which will make us some time mad, like missing to wish close friend's birthday or forgot to pay your utility bills or no time to revisit your yearly goals you set...

We don't remember dates we Remember moments..

Our app is currently undergoing development. Sign up now to be notified of our launch!_

\----

Suggested edits (Not saying it's perfect -- I'm not being paid for this and it's a lazy Saturday morning, not together enough to do real writing, like for my own websites, but I think I can do better than the above):

\----

 _Never Miss Anything Again, Like Events, Birthdays, or Paying Bills on Time.

In our busy day to day lives, it can be hard to keep up with everything, like a friend's or loved one's birthday, paying utility bills on time, and revisiting our list of long-term goals to make sure our lives are on track.

Never Miss It remembers dates for you so you never again will miss a Moment.

Our app is currently under development. Sign up now for ongoing updates!_

\----

Best of luck with this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for helping me out to get right text

<comment><USER3> You are welcome.

PS: The green text is very hard to read. You might want to either darken it or brighten it.

Best of luck.</comment></comment></comment>


Keyword and Optional Arguments in PLT Scheme - <AUTHOR> http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4221

<comment><USER2> The most interesting part was the comparison of how various languages implement keyword args.</comment>


Ask HN: Resources for creating a pro forma? - <AUTHOR>

I'm about to start fund-raising for my startup, which means we're going to need some financial projections. (We're pre-revenue.) I know the basics—start with your core assumptions, see how they play out, think of it as a learning exercise, etc.—but I'd like to know more specifics. For instance, how should I go about estimating fundamental numbers like the cost of customer acquisition?
I'd really like to see some real examples of startup pro formas. There must be some out there. Has anyone who's gone through the process written a good guide, or a detailed reflection on their experience?
I'd also like to know if there are any good alternatives to using Excel. Or is that sacrosanct? Are investors likely to require a spreadsheet in .xls format? <comment><AUTHOR> For posterity, here's a similar Ask HN that I found after the fact:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=424964></comment>


Use Project-based Interviews Instead of "GitHub" - <AUTHOR> http://ejohn.org/blog/project-based-interviews/ <comment><USER2> I would argue that take-home project-based interviews are one of the better developer interviewing tools I've encountered. They're realistic work-sample tests, they're low pressure, and they are very high-signal.

They do have the flaw that they might not weed out candidates that are really slow (since they can generally take as much time as they want on a take-home project). They also don't weed out candidates who are willing to have someone else help them significantly with the project.

As such, I've found take-home projects useful _in addition_ to an onsite interview. At a previous company, we would follow up a take-home project with an onsite interview involving a couple 1-hour "code this using any tools/resources you want with no one looking over your shoulder" questions to prove that they didn't cheat on the take-home and that they can get things done in a reasonable timeframe. I always felt it was a pretty useful way of evaluating programmer skill without stupid whiteboard coding.

<comment><USER3> After the work is submitted the following day, if it looks good then call them in for an interview and ask them what were the weak points of the solution. If the developer is good, they will have worked it over in their head for the next day or two, and will have an answer ready.

Asking questions about the work produced is a good way to identify people who cheated. Ask questions about why and what was your intent with this.

<comment><USER2> Yep; we did that too. The flow was something like:

\- Phone screen with our HR rep to figure out if you're even remotely what we're looking for \- Takehome challenge to make sure you can code \- Engineer reviews the challenge and, if good, calls you to discuss the challenge and discuss your experience in depth. \- If good, come onsite to meet the team, do a couple 1-hour use-anything challenges, and answer a few higher level long- form questions. \- Offer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think it's stupid to reject people who don't have an active Github account. Lots of very talented programmers work on proprietary code, especially outside the narrow niche of advertising-driven products where companies tend to produce closed-source software.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. (I hope that wasn't in response to the blog post, which was in strong agreement with you.)

<comment><USER4> No, just a comment based on Chris Andersen's tweet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have been approached with the project-interview and it left a bad taste in my mouth leading to me ultimately turning down the interview. Getting a candidate to do work for you in their free time for no compensation is perhaps not the best way to attract and find good talent.

If you want to hire me but want to see some real-world work first, give me an 8 hour contract and a fair wage.

<comment><USER7> So you have invested 2+ hours writing a cv and a cover letter, and another 4 to 5 getting ready for, going to and finally attending one or more interviews, and you balk at investing another 4 hours on a project, where your abilities can really shine over the competition?

<comment><USER8> I don't think the argument was about the misc. time it takes to do things. It takes time to commute, it takes time to shower, it even takes time to eat.

The issue is that you're working for a prospective company while not being compensated for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The benefits don't stop on the hiring side. I would _gladly_ do this for any position it looks like I'm qualified for, for two reasons. One is that it gives at least some idea what the work is like. The other is that I've discovered I turn into an idiot when asked to code in an interview setting while someone else is watching. :P

(Shameless plug: I am looking, if anyone is after a decent Python programmer. Email in profile.)

<comment><USER10> We're hiring Python programmers at Khan Academy too, not just JS! I can't promise that you'll get a project-based interview but I promise we'll be friendly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's interesting to see that employers are essentially requiring more effort from potential job candidates in order for them to be seriously considered, when the tech industry is currently a candidate's market.

<comment><USER12> I think tech is definitely a candidate's market but the corollary is that the tech market attracts a lot of candidates who can't perform. Real programming exercises are perhaps the only way to weed them out.

<comment><USER13> While I 100% agree you need some kind of code based part of your interview practice, there is a large range of exercises that are being spoken about.

It goes roughly from whiteboard problems to sitting at a computer with them over your shoulder to a couple hours before the interview to a full week of work. Everyone knows the lightest form is necessary the big question is how much you can get from increasing the complexity before people get annoyed.

<comment><USER12> We give prospective candidates a take-home programming project that should take 3-5 hours and is clearly not something we could use in production. We think that's a fair compromise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For a long time, the whole 'Github profile' stuck in my craw, but recently my thinking has changed to more of a 'show us your code portfolio', which isn't much different than a lot of creative job interviews.

When hiring a designer, part of the interview process is showing things that you have done. It doesn't matter if they're real or not, only that you were the one who created them. You also talk about 'your process' when designing those things.

Much the same, I believe that hiring an engineer should be about showing your portfolio and talking to your 'process', whatever that may be. It's a far more interesting way to get to know a person, how they reason and what they're capable of.

<comment><USER15> Hiring a designer is so much different than hiring a software engineer. And the process of designing should be the least of your worries.

Design is an artistically creative process. Takes talent, I wouldn't hire a designer if I don't perceive the work they've made as _beautiful_.

But hiring an engineer, there are certain things you can overlook in favour of their capacity to actually build something. I can overlook their code quality, but only because we have a boarding process in which one of the things we make sure a new engineer understands is our quality standard in writing code, the systems we use to enforce that standard from code reviews to pre-commit hooks and lint checking.

An engineer has the capacity to adapt to these changes of both quality and process.

IMHO, you can't teach a designer who isn't talented how to make beautiful things. Albeit beauty is subjective, but there's still a common ground upon which the majority will perceive this piece of art work as beautiful.

<comment><USER14> I agree that they are different, however it sounds like I'm not communicating my idea correctly.

I'm very much _NOT_ interested in code quality from an engineer. I very much _AM_ interested in how an engineer thinks and approaches solving a problem.

One way to start that conversation is to have a code portfolio that they can talk to. Why did you do this? What were thinking about when you did that? Did you start writing some code then refactor? Did you think about the problem for 3 days before you started writing? Do you diagram on paper? Did you model the data structures before you modeled the application itself?

These are the sorts of questions I'm interested in when I hire someone; They're also the sorts of questions I want someone who is hiring me to be interested in.

Using your words:

To me, writing code is an artistically creative process as well, which takes talent. I wouldn't hire an engineer if I don't perceive their thinking as _beautiful_

The process for creativity doesn't change just because the expression changes. Compare the process of writing code with that of painting and you'll find a lot more similarities than differences.

PG even wrote a book about it.

<comment><USER15> I'm inclined to agree with you, I'm not saying writing code isn't an artistically creative process.

If I'm are hiring an engineer, the last thing I'll consider is how well is their code because that can be enhanced (albeit to a certain level, as per pionar's comment which I also agree with)

If you are hiring a designer, then that's likely the main aspect you'll be looking at, how _beautiful_ / _creative_ their work/solutions are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Bravo.! Let me tell you my story. I have been rejected just because I don't have enough activity on my github account. I am a young college senior. My most of "good" projects aren't on GitHub. They are not open source. So does that mean that I don't add up ? No. How can you expect undergrad college students to have 1000s of commits in popular repos ?

</comment><comment><USER17> I tried project-based interview, the requirement was very simple build a tic- tac-toe iphone app (player vs device) sometimes device wins and sometimes player wins.

I made this iPhone app([https://github.com/jyothepro/tictactoe](https://github.com/jyothepro/tictactoe)) but they rejected me. Reason for rejection was not very clear. I felt I wasted my time :(

<comment><USER18> Maybe there were a swarm of applicants. You were obviously qualified but they just went with someone else for no reason that reflects on you.

<comment><USER19> > You were obviously qualified

Not so sure about that. I looked at parent's code submission. In particular, his game logic looks like this - [https://github.com/jyothepro/tictactoe/blob/master/TicTacToe...](https://github.com/jyothepro/tictactoe/blob/master/TicTacToe/TicTacToeGameModel.m)

This is unduly verbose & has newbie programmer written all over it.

Here, I just wrote up the same tictactoe over lunch in the repl - [https://gist.github.com/krishnanraman/7591435](https://gist.github.com/krishnanraman/7591435)

Without much thought into optimiziation, refactoring etc., its about 20 lines of actual code. Random TicTacToe is a very simple game. Even if you take that Scala & translate line by line into Objective-C, you shouldn't see an exponential explosion from 20 lines to 400+ lines for game logic alone.

<comment><USER17> When you say "unduly verbose" I am not sure what exactly the interviewer/you are looking here. I purposefully made it verbose so that anyone who calls himself a programmer should understand what I am doing.

Even I dint spend any time in refactoring or optimization as this is just a hack to get past a job interview.

When an interviewer gives you tasks like this do they expect optimized and refactored code?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am very much in favor of a low time commitment project interview, something that takes maybe 3-4 hours to complete.

I've written a ton of code in my career, and 99% of it is wholly owned by the companies who I wrote it in the employ of, and I don't have the legal right to show it to anyone much less put it on public display. Some people would say the answer to that is doing OSS/other projects in my spare time... but I have hobbies, and other interests, and don't want to spend my whole life writing code.

Give me an opportunity at no cost to you and low (time) cost to me to show what I can do, and we will both be in a better position to evaluate each other.

<comment><USER21> the intensity of the project should ramp with the seriousness of both sides; we start with a 30 minute phone screen then a very simple 30 minute "make these tests pass" and then bring people in for a day of coding/chatting. requiring a project as a first-pass filter is a bit much to ask of candidates and interviewers.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, that's essentially what I meant. A coding challenge that takes a handful of hours as a post phone screen/pre onsite screen.. not the first step in the process :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If AT ALL possible I prefer to contract developers. We pay a candidate for their time and pair program with them for a week. This lets us evaluate not only their ability to code but also their desire to learn and their team culture fit. Since I've started doing this with a new team it's been a lot easier to manage the people that I work with. All the existing developers get to know someone and they all get veto power over whether its someone that they'd want to work with AFTER they're worked with them.

<comment><USER23> It's hard enough trying to find good people; as pleasant as that sounds, I can't imagine narrowing my criteria to "good people who can take a week off their current job to do contract work while we decide whether to make them a full offer."

<comment><USER24> That definitely seems tough. Maybe shortening the project time to a couple days (over a weekend?) or a few weeknights would help. From the hiring side at least, the time investment would seem worthwhile, considering you're evaluating a potential team member.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Come on, a place like Khan academy, who is creating virtual, anywhere classroom, and they don't have remote positions?

<comment><USER5> Sure we go! At least 3 people on our dev team are remote, myself included.

<comment><USER26> World-wide?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> For all these types of coding interviews I think that the company should state up front how they evaluate it. Is that clicking keyboard in the background someone typing in the code to run it and see if it works? Are they looking for clear communications, do they want you to just solve the problem or is it more important to lay out that whiteboard code exactly the way you would in a source code file?

And what about unit tests? If they give you a problem to code on a whiteboard, do they want to see TDD red green refactor cycles?

And is this the only problem they want you to work on in the hour or is there another one coming when you finish?

</comment><comment><USER18> What if I have a Bitbucket profile? Or is that not hipster enough?

<comment><USER5> You should probably read the blog post. "And to clarify, some people seem to be getting caught up in the terminology – I see many people using 'Github' as a placeholder for 'any OSS activity', I hope no one is being that literal."

<comment><USER18> I know, I'm referring to the tweet you are responding to. But let's be honest, Bitbucket and hg do get some irrational hate in certain hacker circles.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Umbrella JS, a 2kb jquery alternative - <AUTHOR> http://umbrellajs.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> OP here, I created this for fun then it started growing and now I released it in case anyone want to play with it, I hope you like it. It's not a clone of jquery so it's not exactly like Zepto.js.

I specially love the build system I made with grunt, so each new function is just a folder in /src/plugins and it includes the "documentation.md" and "test.js" automagically.

PS, yes, it has bugs and it's probably not production-ready. However I would love as much feedback as possible. Of course ask me anything you want (:

<comment><USER2> unsure if relevant to you - but you might be able to show the documentation.md in the github directory view worstcase by renaming it to readme.md

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey thanks for the tip, I preferred to show a "Getting Started" and general information instead of the library documentation itself in the readme, I think it made more sense.

<comment><USER3> GitHub actually shows a README file for each directory (if one exists), so the recommendation was to change /src/plugins/x/documentation.md to /src/plugins/x/README.md so that you could see the documentation on this page: [https://github.com/umbrellajs/umbrella/tree/master/src/plugi...](https://github.com/umbrellajs/umbrella/tree/master/src/plugins/after)

<comment><AUTHOR> wow this is great! Thanks for the tip, I'll do it for sure

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like it! Since it's a jQuery alternative, I wonder if you've considered having the global name default to "$" rather than "u"?

<comment><AUTHOR> It was somewhere in the documentation but I took that off deliberately since it's not really 100% compatible, so it'd just confuse people long-term.

> Edit: HN killed all the fun, I am refering to this character: > [http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2602/index.htm](http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2602/index.htm)

Funny enough, the name actually comes from the fact that unicode characters are accepted. First it was just a wrapper for document.querySelector(), and looking for a single character for the name I found out that this could be used:

        [umbrellachar]('.demo')

Of course in the end I decided against it, but for some time the official name of the library/function was just that character.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice. There seems to be a resurgence of jQuery alternatives, see also Lea Verou's Bliss: [http://blissfuljs.com/](http://blissfuljs.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't know of that, I'll surely try to contribute, thanks! (:

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> wow your page uses an incredible amount of resources lol

[http://i.imgur.com/I9zeKxm.png](http://i.imgur.com/I9zeKxm.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know why, I know that the rain/cloud animation is really CPU-intensive so it might be cached? Do you mind testing the same for /documentation where there's no animation, please?

<comment><USER7> I got about 20,000K for that page. The animated page does seem to climb a bit, but now that I've reloaded the page, it doesn't seem to be that high, sticking around 21,000K. So... maybe it just wasn't releasing all the memory as fast or something in Chrome?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Note that it's 2kb _when gzipped_ \- but that is still a fraction of the size of jQuery when gzipped.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, but what developer slightly concerned about website weight doesn't gzip them? (:

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What is the current browser support?

<comment><AUTHOR> I test it regularly in IE11, Firefox and Chrome (last two in desktop and mobile). It might work in older IE versions, but it's not a goal since IE10 share is 0.85%, IE9 is 0.88% and IE8 is 1.15%, all of them decreasing month by month [1].

However it supports mobile much better since it'll load super-fast (:

[1] [http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop+mobile+tablet- browser_ver...](http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop+mobile+tablet- browser_version_partially_combined-ww-monthly-201412-201512)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Users who register but never activate - <AUTHOR>

I've been seeing several users come to my website (soundkey.com), register, but never activate their account by clicking on the link in the activation email they get.
So, I'm turning to the HN community to see whether you guys have any experience with this, and whether you think there is anything fishy behind it.
This behavior baffles me because I always activate accounts I register for, but maybe this is normal in terms of the average internet user?
Benign reasons I can think of:
(1) People get lazy,
(2) The email went to their spam folder and they can't find it,
(3) They gave a fake email when registering and didn't know they had to activate,
(4) Changed their minds about resgistering, (5) Other?
But, I'm a bit paranoid and wondering whether there are any "nefarious" reasons for doing so.
Do you guys know any way to exploit a website in this way?
Should I worry about it?
Should I email the users a reminder to activate? <comment><USER2> This has happened to me on more occasions that I can count:

\- click on something

\- oh, I have to register. Grumble.

\- register

\- confirmation email isn't in my inbox when I check

\- refresh a few times. Nope, still not there

\- forget about the site

</comment><comment><USER3> It's most likely not nefarious. The combination of your email deliverability and people's laziness will mean that a lot of people probably won't click the activation link.

How are you sending email? Are you using AuthSMTP or something like that, or are you just doing it straight from your server? Is your SPF record correct? Have you tried a Port25 scan?

You're not an average web user. For a lot of people, checking email is a separate activity from web browsing. If they use Outlook, they have to open a completely separate program just to use your site. They don't have GMail open in a separate tab at all times.

I would wonder if you really need people to activate their account that early in the process, but I'm not that familiar with how your site works.

<comment><AUTHOR> _I would wonder if you really need people to activate their account that early in the process_

Yeah, I agree. I'll see if I can remove the requirement to activate.

EDIT: Done!

<comment><USER3> Wow, cool. That was fast. Hopefully you'll get an increase in activity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just registered there to take a look at the activation email that gets sent. It looks like the link is wrapped to two lines - Gmail handles those kinds of links correctly, but some mail clients don't.

Do you have a way to shorten that link up some?

(I know you can copy & paste the link, but my experience has been that users will try clicking the link and if that doesn't work they give up.)

<comment><AUTHOR> _Do you have a way to shorten that link up some?_

I'm using Joomla, so I don't have much control over the content of the activation emails. I could go and probe to see which part of the code sends these emails and change it to something shorter.

Or maybe, I'll see if I can stop requiring activation altogether. Maybe this will open me up to spambots, but for now, since I'm just getting started, I think I should remove all barriers to adoption.

<comment><USER4> If I were in your shoes, I would leave the activation the way it is now.

Then I'd pick a few people who registered and never activated and send them a personal email asking if they had difficulties activating their account or if they decided they weren't interested in the system. If you decide to do this, be cautious in your phrasing or you may not get a response. You may get some good feedback from doing it though - and then you'll be able to make a fact- based decision instead of a bunch of guessing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've registered on several sites, only to find out that the service is not available outside of the US. It would be good if designers put this information front and centre on the registration page instead of telling me afterwards (ie. Kickstarter).

</comment><comment><USER6> you could peek at their e-mails to detect some pattern. if you don't "feel" like it's automated, you can delete their accounts after X days or send reminders.

</comment><comment><USER7> they didn't receive the registration link?</comment>


Couchbase document validation and connection manager for Python SDK 2.0 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ardydedase/pycouchbase

<comment><AUTHOR> Features:

\- Validate Couchbase documents.

\- Represent Couchbase documents as Python objects.

\- Easily manage multiple Couchbase connections.

\- Supports Couchbase Python SDK 2.0 operations.</comment>


Problems with infinite scroll - <AUTHOR> https://logrocket.com/blog/infinite-scroll/ <comment><USER2> The biggest problem I have with infinite scroll is that it breaks searching within a page. If I want to find something I have to scroll down to the bottom and then wait some arbitrary time until I think enough content has loaded. Even if I know roughly where the content I'm searching for is, I can't just click to a specific page. I have to guess how far I've scrolled and hope that it's far enough. I waste time and data transfer because I'm forced to overshoot if I want to reliably find things. I can't even bookmark a specific page, so I have to repeat this tedious process every time.

I've never seen a use of infinite scrolling that wouldn't be better replaced with lazy loading of images/video.

<comment><USER3> If the information you're searching for would have been in the next page, searching within the page would have been similarly "broken" in a paginated UI.

The alternative to infinite scrolling isn't to load infinite data up front.

<comment><USER4> But if I found that content via a search engine I would have been directed to the correct page to find what I was looking for.

<comment><USER5> I've had many occasions of clicking links from G to land on a page that should have what I want, the cached copy did but the landed page doesn't

<comment><USER6> That would be true of any site that updates its webpages at any time, regardless of static or dynamic webpages, and certainly regardless of pagination/infinite load.

The only difference really is that infinite load almost guarantees the page won't have what you want on it, when you visit it.

<comment><USER5> Yep, exactly.

And with my first problem, I can use the Next buttom and Ctrl+F (features others on this thread mentioned).

Infinite load is not the right answer everywhere (anywhere?)

Eg: What if StackOverflow adopted it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't like infinite scroll but for another reason not mentioned here.

If you're browsing something that's content heavy (lots of pictures/videos) there's usually a point after a certain number of "pages" where my phone just can't take so many things loaded at once and it crashes. Not all sites have this problem, some are really bad (\ _cough\_ tumblr \ _cough\_ ) but it makes me avoid infinite scrolling sites at all costs. The ones with "Read More" are slightly better (the crash doesn't happen unexpectedly x pixels from the bottom), but still have this problem.

I thought at one point unloading the content at the top might help, but I'm not so sure now. Discourse forums do something like this, where they only load what you're viewing but it feels weird, like it's loading things it's already loaded. Sometimes I do want to scroll to the bottom of something and feel like it's all loaded everything for offline reading.

But overall by far I prefer sites/blogs that have paginated content.

<comment><USER8> I think Discourse does a nice job. It changes the URL in the address bar as you scroll down to viewed post ID, and I believe (but can't check now) that is has entire content loaded in the page, and just does the rendering of the viewport as you go down. Don't know how it handles 'JS disabled' case, though.

<comment><USER9> Discourse is one of my go-to examples of a terrible site that I will actively avoid. The find in page is terrible. It makes it impossible to find anything ever. Octoprint moved its documentation there and I'm really unhappy about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For me biggest issue is if you refresh or come back (or browser app restarted), you need to start over from the beginning again. Stuff gets dynamically loaded instead of static url. I prefer pages with number in url parameter (and ui to go to next/last/... page).

Things like this are more "ephemeral", rather that static pages with good content or index you can rely on.

</comment><comment><USER11> I dunno... I find that on most sites which implement infinite scroll, I like it.

Reddit lets me browse stuff without interruption, and it's not like I'm ever going to "go back" to somewhere earlier in the list... which has probably changed in the past 10 minutes anyways.

Shopping sites let me browse hundreds of shoes or shirts without interruption, and again it's not like I'm ever going to bookmark a segment of my search result. Same with Google Images.

It's easy enough to put footer content in the header, or in the About page or something. (How often do you use a footer anyways?)

And if you _really_ need to start somewhere in the middle... usually filtering/sorting is a better approach anyways. E.g. for a blog, it's better to have a link to Jan 2015 articles than have a link to page 9 of posts.

I find myself mildly annoyed when I have to click through to the next page of something.

Obviously there are plenty of sites where it _doesn 't_ make sense... but I don't see it there too often since it's usually more work to program. This feels like a non-issue.

And for example, here on HN when there are too many comments it requires me to click "More" to get to page 2. Why not just auto-load them when I reach the bottom instead? If I got that far, it's more likely than not that I want to read more.

<comment><USER12> Which ones? Standard reddit uses prev/next, not infinite scroll, and all the shopping sites I'm familiar with use prev/next as well, rather than infinite scroll.

<comment><USER13> Reddit's desktop site uses infinite scroll. Maybe you are using old.reddit.com or opted out of the redesign some other way.

<comment><USER12> Good point, I forgot I installed the "always prefer old.reddit" extension when the redesign completely wrecked image subreddits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Another issue with infinite scrolling on web sites is: what happens when there's a connection problem? I've seen sites where it silently acts as if the user had reached the end of the "infinite" page, even though that's not the case. Worse, the only way to recover (once the connection is working again) is to reload the page and start once more from the beginning.

<comment><USER15> This problem is readily solvable though so I don't consider it a showstopper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> As someone with ADHD, I immediately close any website that uses infinite scroll. I will become insanely focused on that site to the point that I tune out the outside world. What begins as "oh, I'll just look at this one article" turns into at least a half hour of wasted time before I'll be able to break out of it.

<comment><USER17> Is that actually a typical ADHD symptom though? I thought ADHD means not being able to concentrate for a sustained period of time, instead of being able to become insanely focused.

<comment><USER16> My variant is called "combined subtype". It essentially means that while I do distract very easily, I also can become insanely focused on the task with the least path of mental resistance. For example, I am writing this comment when I intended to only read the top stories on HN. I just realized that I was distracted from my original task and that I have spent five minutes describing ADHD. Phew!

Anyways, the CDC article[1] is really good about the symptoms of all three types. Pay attention to the DSM-5 spec if you decide to research further. The old DSM-4 spec from the early 1990s is still quoted sometimes even though it's horribly out of date.

[1] [https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/diagnosis.html](https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/diagnosis.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I swear that DuckDuckGo had infinite scrolling for its search results, but this was not the case when I recently tried a search. Blog posts from a few years ago seems to confirm my memory that infinite scroll was the default: [http://seanvwork.com/blog/duckduckgo-vs- google/](http://seanvwork.com/blog/duckduckgo-vs-google/)

> _DuckDuckGo doesn't paginate their results like Google does. Instead, you > just keep scrolling down to wade through an infinite amount of search > results._

Opening up DDG's settings in incognito mode, I see that its "Auto-Load" is now a setting that is off by default:

[https://i.imgur.com/yWrJ3uZ.png](https://i.imgur.com/yWrJ3uZ.png)

I also remember that DDG fans saw infinite scroll as an advantage DDG had over Google, which was known to have rejected infinite scroll for search results: [https://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer- google-9-2010-...](https://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer- google-9-2010-11)

I personally found it to be a detriment to user experience. If my query doesn't return something relevant in the first 2 pages of results, why would I want to keep going down any further -- as opposed to doing a new search? Google's pagination has an effect of protecting me from lazily scrolling through countless pages of increasingly irrelevant results, and I wonder if DDG saw the same thing in user behavior tests when deciding to make infinite scroll non-default?

</comment><comment><USER19> This trend is a big problem. We have to get to the bottom of it!

<comment><USER12> ...trend? People have been writing "infinite scroll needs to go" for over five years, most major websites that _used_ to have infinite scroll have gotten rid of it again, so I'm confused where this is suddenly a trend. It certainly feels like a "finally gone" aspect on North American websites.

<comment><USER19> I've looked into it. No end in sight.

<comment><USER20> Keep scrolling!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Users generally do not like the UIs when they feel they cannot control it.

> A scroll event is not very intentional to do something. People navigate the > page, and if they want to call an action they mostly click or touch (known > as triggers). They inform the UI about their decision. But scroll is > triggered without any decision.

Looking at you, TechCrunch! I've been burned by the suddenly disappearing article too many times.

</comment><comment><USER22> Another problem with infinite scroll is often incorrectly implemented "back" functionality in the browser. If you had scrolled down somewhere, click a link or image and then click on "back", you usually do not end up were you were before, but most often on the top of the page where you have to scroll down again to were you were. Very lousy UX.

Even if you solve this correctly by remembering the scroll position, you have to fire X ajax requests to restore the scrolling position, and have to wait until all images are renders or the content will jump wildly around.

</comment><comment><USER23> I've never found a site where it worked. It's one of the most annoying experiences on the web. Especially when you need to navigate to another page just to get access to the footer for getting to "contact" or similar.

</comment><comment><USER24> The only infinite scroll I'm kinda OK with is DuckDuckGo. When it comes to news sites with infinite scroll, I almost never want to continue scrolling past the original article.

What I'd like to see go more than infinite scroll is sticky headers. It's one thing if your site is effectively an app, but if a site is supposed to be mostly prose then I don't want your stupid useless header in the way of screen real estate. Worse yet, you make the problem _worse_ by having the header pop out and retract if I scroll 1px in either direction. ANNOYING.

<comment><USER25> Please check out my project[1] if you hate sticky headers.

[1] [https://github.com/yourduskquibbles/webannoyances](https://github.com/yourduskquibbles/webannoyances)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Infinite scroll was never a good UX pattern. It was invented to keep people from leaving the page and continue to scroll on. Pagination would interrupt this, and people might leave after clicking two or three times clicking the "next page" button.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'd argue that the author is actually under-representing the value of pagination by making an obvious mistake in implementation.

For example, under the ratings for pagination, they list: "Bad: Performance issues".

That bad rating is based on doing a dynamic post count for every page load, an approach that would only be used if someone wanted to maximize the performance penalty (or if your site/service is small enough that it simply doesn't matter if you do a new dynamic count on every page load). There's no common scenario where you aren't better off storing that post count, altered only as needed, rather than calling a new count of all posts for every single page load.

Even in a scenario of very heavy write, rare read, you're better off doing either a stored constantly incremented count or stored compromised occasional count that isn't perfectly accurate until or unless it needs to be.

Specifically the author uses this:

SELECT COUNT(*) AS total FROM posts

Instead of that, as a common scenario, let's say you have a posts table, and a comments table (which correlates comments that belong to posts by an id). You don't count how many comments each post has dynamically on every page load for a post, in the process of showing the comments. You have a counter in the post row, that increments only when a new comment is made, or decrements if a comment is removed. You pull that count at the same time you pull the core post information from the "posts" table, in the process of loading the post and then afterward pulling its associated comments.

The penalty is that you must update the post row when a new comment occurs. Assuming your service is heavier on read than write, which is almost universally the case, this is an easy win.

If all you wanted to do is track the post count, and not something further connected to it such as comments, that's also similarly trivial. There are numerous good ways to go about storing the post count until it needs incremented, rather than calculating it dynamically every page load.

All one has to do is consider a routine blog example, in which an author updates the blog once per day, and receives 1,000 or 10,000 visitors per day. There are 1,600 historical blog entries/posts spanning over four years. This article's approach is to needlessly dynamically count that over and over, perhaps tens of thousands of times per day, rather than altering and storing the count once per day when a new blog post is created. Performance bad indeed.

</comment><comment><USER27> The primary issue with infinite scroll is not the implementation, it's the idea that a page with "infinite" content is useful or desirable to begin with.

<comment><USER28> Compared to pages it's been a groundbreaking improvement to me at least.

<comment><USER27> I am specifically calling out "infinite" scroll here, i.e. the practice of artificially limiting the amount sent to a very small amount then populating it on the fly.

The comparison is with just sending all of the content (via API calls if necessary, whatever) and having the browser decide what to do with it, not breaking find, not having weird loading bars when you scroll down, etc, etc.

If you can't send all of the content you're probably creating a slot machine- type site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I hate infinite scrolling because once implemented nobody cares about disabled javascript case - like reddit, the experience is broken without it - you can only see first couple of topics and can't load more.

<comment><USER30> [https://old.reddit.com](https://old.reddit.com) should solve your problem. It does not make use of infinite scroll.

<comment><USER29> already using it, but i'm worried it'll disappear one day

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I have some scripts I use to scrape data from FB by manually spoofing keystrokes and I shudder to think how much energy is being wasted at both ends for the amount of data I am actually trying to collect.

</comment><comment><USER32> I always found Bing's infinite scroll for image search pretty awesome and superior and a reason to use it over Google. Haven't seen that feature much elsewhere though.

</comment><comment><USER33> Fundamentally, scrolling indicates that you haven't done a good job of surfacing the information that the user really needs in the first place. I see any form of scrolling as an admission of defeat on the part of the site designer.

Have terabytes of log results? Why would scrolling somehow fix that? Figure out how to fetch the stuff that matters, and put that in front of the user so they don't have to scroll.

Scrolling should be all but unnecessary in a well designed interface.

<comment><USER34> I don't understand. What about when you're just consuming a list of things like an image gallery or HN/Reddit frontpage?

Your complaint doesn't seem to make sense in this common context. In fact, I can't think of many contexts where your complaint does apply.

Let's say Reddit knows precisely the 100,000 things I do want to see. Endless scroll doesn't change that, but it makes sense to lazy load them that way.

<comment><USER18> Infinite scroll seems to be ideal with casual consumption and serendipitous discovery, which is probably why its the status quo for sites like Reddit, Tumblr, Facebook, and even Google Images.

But it seems to be detrimental for sites in which a user is looking for something specific, such as an answer to a search query or a product to buy -- i.e. they know what they want when they see it -- which would explain why sites like Google or Amazon haven't implemented it (though Amazon does have it for its mobile client it seems).

Years ago Etsy implemented infinite scroll in its search results, but killed it after finding "that people seeing infinite scroll purchased less from search".

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5017995](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5017995)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> > However, infinite scrolls cannot keep the state by its design. Users cannot > share their current state. Which also means you cannot track users' actions > using analytics tools.

This absolutely isn't true at all; for example in Discourse we update the browser address bar as you scroll to reflect the current post you're viewing.

<comment><USER9> But find in page is useless AND it hijacks the browser. You can't use print or reading mode to view the whole page either. Discourse would bea fine corner of the internet without infinite scroll. Instead it's a place I cringe about and use as an example to designers of what not to copy.

<comment><USER35> Print works fine; try it. Find is indeed contingent on what's loaded on the page, same reason you can't "find in page" when you're viewing paginated page 5 of 20. Not really a valid criticism, unless you're just splitting hairs for fun.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> While I often like infinite scrolling, I really hate it on the Google+ Android app, because I have no way to quickly jump to the top. If I scrolled way down and want to scroll back to the top, I have to scroll manually all the way, which is a pain, or kill the app and restart it.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm okay with infinite scroll being the default; just don't make it the _only_ way to navigate. Have an easy-to-find way to switch to pagination and/or query-by-example (QBE). A QBE form for a blog-type search would resemble:

         Date Range: [__/__/____] to [__/__/____]
         Word or phrase: [_____] ... [X] Search title only
         Sort by:
            (*) Date, latest first
            (_) Date, earliest first
            (_) Title

Except for the sort-by option, they'd all be optional

</comment><comment><USER38> The thing I dislike about infinite scroll is that almost everything that has it is intended to make you addicted and compulsively scroll more, to the point where I pretty much have sworn off any app that makes it a central part of the experience.

</comment><comment><USER39> What I don't like about infinite scroll is it not putting stuff in my history. Finding my way back a few days later ain't happening.

Overall though I think the pattern makes sense

</comment><comment><USER40> A few weeks ago I was trying to find a contact page on a site that had infinite scroll (don't remember the reason or the site). The link to contact information was in the footer, which was impossible to get to with infinite scroll. Absolutely ridiculous.

Ended up having to disable JavaScript to be able to scroll down.

</comment><comment><USER41> Stop visiting websites with infinite scroll. Problem should work it self out eventually...

</comment><comment><USER42> What if you used the cursor type with infinite scroll that put links to the page number inline so you could infinite scroll starting from any point?

<comment><USER43> You can't jump to the _nth_ page with cursor-based navigation because you don't know what id it starts at. 13? 21? 34?

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Infinite scrolling exists because it raises the average time users spend on your site.

</comment><comment><USER45> I always thought infinite scroll was the best thing since sliced bread when I first saw it in Google Reader. I still really love it for consuming my news feed.

For everything else though? Not so much.

</comment><comment><USER46> TBH, this article is a perfect example of the formulaic, semi-clickbaity articles that I can't stand. Take the title "Stop building websites with infinite scroll", but then the article itself goes on the give some examples of when infinite scroll _is_ appropriate. Even many of the arguments against infinite scroll feel like strawmen (e.g. "It messes up the footer." Well, seems obvious to me that putting a footer after an infinite scroll is a bad idea, but many if not most pages where you'd use an infinite scroll could do without a footer, or you could put that "footer data" elsewhere.)

All UX approaches have tradeoffs, and any UX paradigm can be implemented poorly or used where inappropriate. Bringing up some of these examples and then saying "stop using UX approach xyz" is disingenuous.

<comment><USER47> I have been often annoyed at infinite scroll, and never at any of the other options offered. It's part of a general anti-pattern of pages loading new content when I didn't ask them to, but by far the most prevalent and annoying. I dislike infinite scroll, and I believe I am alone in that, and perhaps not even in the minority.

<comment><USER46> Well, then we agree to disagree. Particularly with search results where it's likely I'm going to need to look through a lot of results (e.g. real estate, hotel, dating sites) I find infinite scroll, if done right, makes it faster to comb through results.

More importantly, though, I think this article is an anti-pattern of attempting to make broad conclusions from anecdotes and personal opinion with zero data to back it up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> TL;DR don't use infinite scroll because your users can't find the footer.

Office 365's Outlook Web uses infinite scroll for listing emails, and the thing I hate about it is as you're scrolling down, it removes things from the DOM at the top. So if you want to delete a ton of emails from a service that went wonky and spammed you over the weekend, you can't click the top and shift click the bottom, because by the time you reach the bottom, the top message is gone.

<comment><USER49> The Outlook desktop now client does it as well. I am not sure if it is exchange setting or something else.

If I scroll to the end of a folder containing mail it tells me "There are more items in this folder". I have to click for it to fetch more items.

I have years of email archived in various folders and it hides the results for every single folder behind this wall of "there are more items". Because of this I can't search through my archived email properly.

It never used to work with way. I think it changed when my organisation migrated to Office 365.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> This is a great example of why you should use data to drive decisions on features and not just broadly declare x or y feature is bad because you personally have gripes with it. You are not your user and you shouldn't be allowing personal feelings to cloud the debate. Decisions without data, what is this, 1996?

What are your users saying? What does the data tell you? A/B test it and find out. Do usability studies. etc etc.

<comment><USER51> My personal feelings when I use a site with infinite scroll are pretty clear. I don't think it is unreasonable to look at other sites, where you are a user, draw conclusions, and apply them to your own site.

<comment><USER50> Sure, now we use personal opinions to decide product direction. Sounds great! Why not just flip coins while we're at it? users love that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Nope, infinite scroll is superior. Just there are poor implementations. Proper infinite scroll has 0 downsides.

<comment><USER53> But I want to get to the footer where I'm pretty sure the contact details are. Not sure how you can design around that. I mean, you can try. My example was just one of many. But you'll never change the expectations of users who have been conditioned by the use of 1000's of other websites that _don't_ use infinite scroll.

<comment><USER54> Appending a dynamic anchor #page=n while scrolling and putting links at the top, not at the end, for example, address most of the problems</comment></comment></comment>


Police violently drag man from United plane after airline overbooked flight - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/JayseDavid/status/851223662976004096 <comment><USER2> At first they offered $400 for volunteers.

Then they offered $800 for volunteers.

Then when they still had no volunteers they randomly selected some people using (supposed) computerized random selection.

When one of those randomly selected people refused, they beat him, and dragged him bleeding, off the plane.

Apparently $800 was their limit. After the limit is reached they roll in the muscle and beat you up if you don't comply.

I smell a hilariously large payout for this poor guy sometime soon. This is a PR disaster for United.

</comment><comment><USER3> This story will probably get flagged and removed, but I think it's worth discussing.

Apparently United offered only $800 for that seat. As I understand it, they needed it to reposition crew so it was obviously worth a _lot_ more than that to them.

I think there should be better consumer protection laws for situations like this. If United wants to oversell a flight there should be actual consequences for them besides some ridiculously low payment to customers for breaking their side of the deal. They should have to do something like a reverse auction.

</comment><comment><USER4> Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14079837](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14079837)</comment>