skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Man, you get what you pay for. If you actually want a thoughtful design based on user needs and strategic goals with an actual rise in conversion rates, $46k is not even close. I've never seen it done for less than $200k. Agencies I worked for in the past wouldn't pick up the phone for less than $500k and we had clients tripping over themselves to hire us.

That being said, we did take on smaller clients from time to time just for portfolio or on the prospect of a "foot in the door" for a bigger account and we actually struggled mightily to scale down. We were used to large teams of dedicated specialists and didn't have geneslists who could wear all the hats at once. I'm wondering if this agency had the same problem.
Isn't the business model for Glassdoor to charge for the removal of unflattering reviews?
Terraform Stinks [audio]
In the United States, the American Prairie Reserve [1] is doing something along these lines in the area around the Wyoming/Montana border. In particular, their purchases (which often include private ranches that come up for sale) focus on building those corridors between existing public lands, effectively creating much larger continuous ecosystems that this article mentioned.

It's probably easier to do in the United States (a lot more land than in England, and with fewer entrenched ownership considerations), but I'd really be interested to see if similar projects would work in other parts of the country that are more densely populated, or in areas like the California central basin to where public water resources are being abused to farm a desert.

[1] https://www.americanprairie.org/
This is a good example of why some people have zero business being anywhere near management. They win the birth lottery and have it easy all their lives by sheer luck, but when a decision has real consequences - this happens.

Anyone in the trenches could tell you that rolling out a huge change to a money-making project on a "round" date is suicidal. They just have no idea of what they are doing in the first place - just playing darts - and it usually works due to the ants killing themselves, to make it all happen. Because health insurance.
The Upgrade Kit is available as of this morning on the Framework Marketplace, and is the complete set of hardware to bring an 11th Gen system up to what the new 12th Gen systems have.
Sounds about right. OP could have gotten someone at his beck and call to design his site for 15 dollars an hour. Instead he got some well-reviewed shyster. "Our other clients pay 40k a month." GTFOOH.
Are you rethinking your philosophy after wasting $46,000?

> you get into disputes about what is or isn't in scope,

This is to your advantage as the one who is able to withhold payment when delivery isn't up to your standards, and you are protected contractually. With pure time & materials it's much harder to sue for non-delivery unless you can prove they didn't work the hours they billed for.
A large tech company acknowledging that flashy convenience features can be a security risk is groundbreaking in itself. No need to be so cynical, this is a step in the right direction.
Also https://hnrss.org/ if you prefer feeds over mail.
Are you actually suggesting that people in need of this feature care about games on a phone?
Yelp does the same, and has for ages.
You are probably right that there is not malice on the part of the OP, but the original intention was clearly derogatory. If you believe otherwise I have bridge to sell you.
I've heard mixed reports that this used to be the case but is no longer a major thing they do.

I think in the past few years they added some more credibly binding statements on their site about not removing or identifying user reviews. However, I don't know if this is actually the case or not.
This is one issue like others where we have gone wrong a long time ago and don't have an easy way back. I think Scotland got it right when they passed a law that required a landowner to sell to a not-for-profit at the market rate if they were selling and they couldn't be outbid by a private buyer.

I would be interested to know the proportion of non-wilded land and how much is private farming land, national parks, private estates etc. and realistically how much of each would need turning back to nature to make it worthwhile. I don't think that buying from farmers is impossible, there must be plenty who would happily sell for market rate + 25% or something, something that could easily be done by a combination of crowd-funding and government grants.
I live through this every 2 years:

- Marketing team decides they want a new site.

- I tell them when/how we can schedule it.

- They decide they want to go outside so it can get done "quicker" by "professionals."

- It costs 5-10x what it would in house, the product is harder to work with, using some WordPress plugins no one has ever heard of, it's not responsive on mobile nor usable on our demographic's primary resolution.

- It takes 6-10 months of "clean up" to make the site usable.

- Web traffic, shockingly, has remained completely constant even after spending half of our annual marketing budget on a web site.

- My team is brought in when the agency becomes too slow because the entire team over there has turned over since the project inception.

- We eventually migrate everything over to squarespace or weebly or similar so that the marketing team can just edit things on their own.

- Every lesson above is forgotten in the ensuing 12-18 months.

We are an early stage startup. We've burned through almost 20% of the revenue we've ever brought in on this cycle. Thankfully, finally, we've grown enough to bring on a marketing manager who will I hope put an end to this madness.
> Also, what is up with people here completely ignoring the question so they can say something different?

Here's my guess: It's somewhat common knowledge that it's almost impossible to get real human intervention when YouTube's or Google's systems sanction someone.

So people are moving on to the next question, "Okay, so what can I do in this situation?"
As a small business owner myself, this resonates. I would love to be in a position to be able to confidently pay money to other professionals to make problems go away.

Unfortunately, my overall experience has been that hiring any “expert” in a field that I am not also an expert in has a 50% chance of working, and a 50% chance of blowing up in my face and creating more problems.

I recently attempted to get a new accountant to help me handle some business growth. It was a person from a well regarded local firm, initial meetings were good, and then they proceeded to deliver none of the agreed-upon work, take 2-3 weeks to respond to emails (multiple times, I had to call their office and schedule an in-person meeting just to get a response), and then de-prioritize my business relative to other clients so badly that I wasn’t able to submit my taxes until June.

If anyone can successfully build a service that lets me reliably pick professional-services providers with the same level of confidence that I pick an AirBnb (not 100%, but pretty good, with an expectation for reasonable mediation and fallback coverage if the offering is radically different than what’s described), I would happily pay a 20% premium on those services versus the existing “ask friends for referrals and cross your fingers” status quo.
Thanks mate, that is a nice compilation in this repo!
Sorry, LB.

18 months is about half as long as it has been owned by private equity, and unfortunately the product was being under-invested in when I was last working on it 3 years ago.

It’s sad to see it languish, since I and many of my friends spent so long working on it.
My point is that getting a new job may actually be easy (given the current unemployment rate), so it could still be worth unionizing even if you know they will close the location.
Having worked for an ad agency (and for a consulting firm) AVOID THEM UNLESS YOU ARE A LARGE ORGANIZATION WITH A BIG BUDGET.

They are not going to watch costs for you. They are not going to have their "best people on it" (unless, maybe, you are their biggest client). And everyone working on the project is looking to get their billable hours in. The entire motivation of the organization is to bill as many hours as they think the customer can pay for.

I met a lot of great people in those companies, but I do not miss my time working in them.
Paul Graham wrote this[0] back in the day about tech stacks. I think this is still kind of true, but there's many more people across many stacks today that can work around some of the shortcomings. I guess it would still be important-ish at a small startup, but you still have to hire for it. There's much more JS/python/java/etc these days, so you have to fight that tide while you grow.

Profitability also may correlate differently; smaller places usually focus on growth instead, right?

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
Facebook Changes Users' Feeds to Look More Like TikTok
Thanks for sharing your experience. The new site looks great btw! I see many negative comments here, but hey, live and learn!
You don't need population density for public transit
Actors don't have to go door to door knocking at film studios' doors asking for a job. They pay an agency, get a call once in a while to star in some crappy movie, or, if they're lucky, a blockbuster. In exchange, the agency gets 20% of their million dollar salary and a place in the credits.

I don't get why freelance software engineering can't be the same. I would pay a recruiter handsomely to do that exact service. I mean, we're not actors, but this is a rich sector, there's a ton of demand, it's a worldwide market, so where the heck are they?

I want to act^H^H^Hwrite code for a living, not getting real good at job hunting.
Video for people who cba digging: https://github.com/abe-101/tube-cast#demo

My guess would be because you're giving people a way to rip off YouTube content but more specifically because you do so in the video at approx 2:05. They're not massive fans of youtube-dl either which wont help, looks like you're using that to rip the vids under the hood.

Best guess, no actual clue.
https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/technology/amazon-jpmorgan-...
As they rightly should. That’s what most people intuitively think of as a recession.
I'm frequently critical of Microsoft, and I can always count on what strongly feels like a 4 or 5 downvote overreach regardless of the criticism.
What do ZKPs add to this? You're just talking about a database that companies can't interfere with, right?
That isn't true. The advice to buy is based on a belief in a high probability that, for the next 20-50 years, depending on your retirement horizon, a broadly diversified portfolio of highly liquid asset classes will appreciate relative to whatever legal tender currency you'd otherwise hold.

Infinite growth in perpetuity is not required at all.

As far as I know, if this proved to not be true, it would represent the first time ever since publicly-tradeable equity shares in private companies were invented. You're effectively saying you think the remainder of the 21st century will be worse for the industrialized west than all recent history, including a period of two world wars, the Spanish Flu epidemic, and the Great Depression all happening back to back to back to back. That is a fairly extraordinary claim that doesn't seem to be helped much by the fact that Earth will at some point hit a carrying capacity, which has always been true.
> The Air Force has even opened its own venture capital arm and is actively investing in small businesses.

In-Q-Tel is the VC arm of the CIA. I've never directly done a deal with them but the employees I've met seem really nice and helpful
I've worked at an agency my entire career (nine years so far)

Looks like there was poor project management and internal communication on their part, at the minimum their time tracking reports for tiny projects like yourself should be automated.

For small projects like this, we would keep the team to a minimum (lets say one PM, dev, and designer) and the web work wouldn't be started until everything design wise was completed (we do branding first before touching any UI type stuff to make sure the UI is on the same train of thought).

But yea, I wouldn't recommend hiring an agency unless you want to be hands off or having x amount of budget
You didnt hire people. You hired a company. That abused your good faith.

Also, 'If they can't use their time effectively, I terminate the hire', appearantly not? They clearly where not using their time, your money, effectively.
The idea that the ECB is apolitical is similar to the idea that economics is apolitical, a fantasy created to avoid answer to the public.

There are little things more political than economics and money.
It looks like this project happened at the early days of COVID.

There could be dozens of reasons for the ways this played out on the agency side of things.

You could very well have kicked this off a year earlier or a year later and gotten different results.
Yet Samsung manages to release a new phone every 6 months.
> Why is this on the front page of HN?

HN's front page is (partially?) governed by upvotes on the submissions.

> This one isn't even interesting.

Apparently some users disagree.
I revised / extended the description of OverSeer, the program I wrote/maintained/supported.
Google is reinstating app permissions list on Play Store
As per the wikipedia page of PIGS : "The term is widely considered derogatory and its use was curbed during the period of the European crisis by the Financial Times and Barclays Capital in 2010". So it's not a 100% malice on part of the OP, but it surely is in general.
Is it just me who finds the old website design much better than the redesign? The new redesigned website seems to lack character that the old website had.
Most likely this - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/10/26/evidence-based-sch...

The approach sounds lovely on paper, in practice most software development environments range from absolutely terrible to terrible - that level of organisation isn't something I can see more teams doing even if the tool does help.
Working link https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jul/21/facebook-...
I can't draw a dolphin as cute as that one, though.
>There are cryptocurrency systems like Nano or GNU Taler

Nano has the same ponzi-like economics as the rest of the cryptocurrencies so that's a no-go. GNU Taler is explicitly not a cryptocurrency, in particular it should not be used in a fully peer-to-peer manner, there needs to be a centralized operator that's legally required to hold the funds backing the tokens. That thing that stablecoins were supposed to do, but didn't because crypto companies don't care about actually being honest or responsible with customers' money.

>that doesn't involve Fiat.

By definition, all cryptocurrency involves fiat because all cryptocurrencies are technically also fiat money. Tokens in a ledger don't have any inherent value or consuming demand, they're backed by nothing but empty promises.

>There is a reasonable use-case for giving the average person the same privacy they expect from cash, but with the ability to make transfers over the internet (that are signed in a secure way!).

This has nothing to do with cryptocurrency. You don't need to invent a new currency to have a privately signed transaction. Innovation should keep happening in payment systems (with the full involvement of regulators) but it's hard to do that when these fraudulent crypto companies are hogging up all the mindshare and promoting the (false) idea that blockchains are the one true way to accomplish this. They aren't even a good way to accomplish it!

>the system will continue to develop as long as there is financial interest in DN infrastructure

I certainly hope not. All the more reason to make it illegal ASAP.
This can already be done, there are several apps that do more or less this. Now, a GUI to manually block or allow specific hosts without having to go trough a pseudo-vpn would be cool.
I find that terseness has a real downside when debugging code. If you need to get down to the level of what is actually executing, having to unpack all that compact code involves many more things than I can keep in my short-term memory.

Compactness is great for things that are true and work, but when there's a bug in there somewhere, terse code requires a lot of scribbling on paper.
Funny how that happens after a pandemic.
Entrepreneur Raised $54M to Allow Anyone to Access Data Without Engineering
> At scale?

Yes, of course, all lifeforms reproduce exponentially.

Literally the biosphere would (re-)vivify the Earth automatically if we just stop destroying it. It's been doing it for four billion years.

> Can this be implemented globally in a few decades?

That I cannot say, but I believe the limiting factors are social/political rather than biological or physical. In other words, yes, if we have the will we could probably turn things around, go from destruction to regeneration, within three decades. It would be unprecedented but I don't see any intrinsic physical reasons that we couldn't do it.

The revitalization of the Loess Plateau took less than three decades, and as a side-effect it now produces all the material needed to repeat the process in a new place.

> What about making it work in places going dry?

Yes. Not only can we do this in places going dry, we can convert desert to (productive food) forest where ever we need it. E.g. "Greening the Desert" https://www.greeningthedesertproject.org/ project in Jordan. People are using ecological principles all over the world to regenerate large areas.

> Desalination plants and wastewater treatment plants have existed for decades, but are expensive. Today, many people don't have access to clean water because of this.

It's a huge problem, it's true. But progress is being made. E.g. check out the projects described in "India's Water Revolution" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8nqnOcoLqE

We can transform the deserts into paradise. The rains will fall. (I'm going to stop now before I start quoting passages from "Dune") ;)

> Rifles and ammunition are cheaper than new water infrastructure so war over water will take place everywhere before water conservation technology is deployed.

Water projects are far cheaper and easier than making bullets. Check out the video I linked above.
For summer vacation, I’ve been reading some histories of modern computing (electronic, digital, programmable). One of the ENIAC’s first tasks was to run Monte Carlo simulations to help design the H bomb. The first Cray jobs also used Monte Carlo simulation for weather modeling (important Cold War knowledge; you need to know where your fallout is likely to spread) and weapons design.

This technique is also how Evidence-Based Scheduling works.
End of quote. Repeat the line.
I've worked at a few agencies.

One being a low budget fixed costs agency: Here it was literally all about how quickly can you get it done. The code they outputted was terrible and often done by people who had very little knowledge of best practices. On a technical level this company had the lowest skilled people I worked with, once even asked me how to do an else if, I answered, "Oh you just do else and then put an if like you would normally do with an if." This was not clear enough for them.

One being a high cost enterprise level counsultancy agency: Here I probably did the best technical work but lowest product quality. The Agency prided itself on doing good technical work and doing BDD so they only did what brough value. Mostly I was bored, the work was slow paced as the company and clients cared that deadline and estimates were kept so things were overestiamted to give a solid buffer and then client charged for the hours used to develop it. Which often meant by the end of the sprint it was a case of sitting around doing nothing.

Overall, both cared about one thing. Time.

Personally, I much rather be an inhouse dev at a small company. Get to work without caring about time so much and care about the product.
Two major factors:

1. There is a funnel in hardware (or really any product) development, where we research and investigate a pretty broad range of new features, modules, and even products, of which only a few make it out the other end as a mass produced item. Even relatively late in the development process, compliance, reliability, functionality, supplier, and cost issues can mean scope or schedule changes to something or even shutting it down entirely. Because of that, we don't announce hardware until we have 100% confidence both that we can ship it and 95% confidence in the price and launch date for it.

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect - We don't deliberately hold announcements for this reason, but it compounds with reason #1. We don't want to have someone wait for something that may or may not ever appear. Because our products are upgradeable, we want people to evaluate them based on what currently exists, but still be able to benefit from improvements we make in the future.
> indeed it is hard to think of a competitor in all of history more dominant over his sport or game than Tinsley.

Not a "he", but Heather McKay won 16 consecutive British Open squash titles. Squash got a World Open only in 1976, and she won the first two editions. In a career spanning 1960-1981, she was only defeated twice and both times were early in her career.
> The underlying problem is corporate overreach and cultural creep into dare I say, fascistic practices against workers. Workers in America are constantly trodden on.

In New Zealand too, right? The company doing the suing is in New Zealand, not America, and the worker probably is too.
Google Wallet now available in 39 countries
No shit. Wow.
A little box opens when I mark text. I don‘t like that.

medium.com is an overengineered, harmful mess
Passing a tax or further increasing the tax would not have been gone over easily.

Famine?
if there is it's not because of some local u.s. oil policy. Have you seen what's happening in the wider world?
This seems like having your cake and eating it too. Because of our unprecedented bubble caused by low interest rates, what happened was our markets got even more sensitive to rate rises.

You can already see the impact of this in the real estate market. Its not pretty and i believe they will play hot potatoes until the next administration can take the blame. Don't know how it is in EU but probably similar dynamics.

Nobody wants to be that guy who takes the fall for the next recession. It's going to last a long time and lot of people seem like they are poised to buy the dip again like they have before.

Remember that markets falling to 40% isn't an outright meltdown but we've had it fall far past 50%, 80% was the biggest fall and that is the more likely scenario.
But why not a trolley-bus instead?
? It's literally happening now. "Anti-work" et al. Just more of that. Stronger pro-labor laws. Fight for fridays off as well. That sort of thing.
the white and green (button) --- does that meet a11y contrast guidelines?

I would say for a b2b company design probably doesn't matter too much. I think minor things like font choice probably affect a consumer discretionary brand much more than you...
The decision to anonymize the agency is understandable, but I wonder about the systemic effects. Right now the reputation cost is born by all agencies, leading to a tragedy of the commons for shoddy delivery.

But encouraging authors to name names would drag them into a public dispute they don’t need, and disincentivize the many valuable lessons that are in here. (THANK YOU! 90% of people wouldn’t have pushed through the discomfort to share their learning).

What is a system of public discourse that threads that needle? I’m sure “Isaac” feels a little bad, but has ”don’t pitch clients we can’t service” shot to the top of his priority list? But again, I don’t want to put more onus on the author who’s already gifted me a lot of hard earned knowledge.