skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Every year I spend a couple of hours on it, and I do my taxes by hand at that. The hardest part is figuring out where to find a post office to mail the forms out. They seem to change each year (I could also drop it off at the embassy I guess, but that would require 15 or 20 more minutes to get in the front door).
> Like most redditors I was shocked when I couldn't use my karma to buy stake in imgur. After becoming depressed that imgur was not really a "gift", I quit reddit, and decided to found a startup. And now I'm here. So thank you for that imgur.

wat
> How about splitting a bill at dinner?

1. Divide food bill between number of attendees

2. Divide drinks bill between number of drinkers

3. Each individual adds 1 + 2 and ponies-up accordingly

Apologies if I have misunderstood.
Yes, great Business. Great ROI if your are into it ;-)
I wonder if there is a libertarian-minded ant somewhere wanting to rebel against their oppressive colony. States are not unique to human beings.
I'm only a GitHub user here, but I believe GitHub to be very transparent on copyright issues. They post the DMCA takedown notices they receive[1] (and the counter notices as well; in a Git repo, of course!) — this was on HN[2] back when Flat UI received a DMCA takedown notice[3]. There's also another page listing the policy itself[4]. As other users have noted however, the repo linked to in the article reads “Access to this repository has been disabled by GitHub staff due to excessive use of resources, in violation of our Terms of Service.”

Given the other posts, it seems there might just be some confusion that needs clearing up; for that, we'll have to see if our blogger posts anything more.

[1]: https://github.com/github/dmca

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5342360

[3]: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2013-03-06-LayerV...

[4]: https://help.github.com/articles/dmca-takedown
Is it possible to do the (somewhat) simpler (in concept, not process) task of making gif or png that is also a valid HTML file? It might be kind of tricky given they both have magic numbers at the head...but perhaps there is some way to trick a browser into ignoring the "garbagey" bits?
You shouldn't have been downvoted here, but the mob has been angered! I'd encourage you to ignore the insults and consider carefully the other feedback - there are some good points made here by people coming to the pages for the first time.

Re your point above, What they could do which is very simple is to change the button text to 'Subscribe'. If you'd be reluctant to do that, ask yourself why that is? Why can't you tell the truth here with the button text?

Is it because it would put people off? If so you (I'll use you for the site) need to explain to them what they're getting and make them want it, not try to hide what they're getting and make it seem like they're buying when really they're subscribing.

Someone thinking "damn, that's a hot pair of boots for $40", should also be aware that it's not really for $40, it's for $40 each month for x months, with the promise of more boots to come. If they want that, you should be able to tell them that right beside the Buy button.

Personally I'd give them a choice of high price to buy or lower price to subscribe, as I think that succinctly sums up your value proposition to customers, AND makes it clear what you are selling (you are not selling just a pair of boots). In fact I've just seen below in an image someone linked that is exactly what you do on the German site:

http://imgur.com/uIZ5JX3
This is also how Joe "Girls Gone Wild" Francis made his millions.
QuickMage: Magento as a Service
That's not the bug. The bug is that it says 'undefined'
Google Email Spying Ruled Unlawful
Ah, you did not mention the URL has to contain a query. I assumed that mydomain.com.samuru.com would either display all mydomain.com pages you have indexed, or otherwise indicate that I will be searching within mydomain.com.
Video playing is not handeled by JS. You only use JS to control the player (if you want). The playing itself is handeled by the browser somewhere. So no, you don't need JS for html5 video.
Are you really going to try to keep repeating yourself in an attempt to compare this shady business to amazon?

Amazon is in it for the very long run (they just turned a profit this year). Good luck trying to continue to dance this song to the tune of amazon. It won't last. It is likely a legal practice, and your background might blind you into believing that unintended actions by well-meaning consumers is a perfectly reasonable business model to profit from (at least it is more transparent in the beating industry). At least you know that you are in it against the house, in most cases.

Shame on you.
Independent, not with a view from nowhere. [to use Jay Rosen's[0] phrase]

[0] http://archive.pressthink.org/2003/09/18/jennings.html
Kinetic Sand - a non-Newtonian fluid
You've just demonstrated exactly what a classic scam looks like online.

"It's in plain English" doesn't compensate for the fact that it's a small print sidebar and everything else looks and feels exactly like a regular shop.

Tricking people into getting a subscription via the small print is one of the oldest dubious business models around. Companies like JustFab disgust me.

I will make an effort to avoid you and Matrix Partners. I don't want to be near investors that justify such unethical tactics.

Yes, I'm sure you've done plenty of due diligence. You just lack ethics.
Upsides are all great... If you start, though, stick with it. It becomes a marketing deliverable just as important as anything else, since it is public-facing. If you choose to abandon the project, you just wind down the blog. Just remain consistent about content delivery - if you promise to blog once a month, make sure it gets done. Make the blog easy to find and connected to the rest of your project's public website. Transparency for users has nothing but upside, provided you respect their attention and commitment to your project.
There should probably be a wiki somewhere, where bugs like those are documented, so various developers don't have to rediscover them all the time.
On the checkout page, they are applying the type of behavior design/economics research done by Dan Ariely at MIT ("Predictably Irrational" http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_o...) and the Stanford Persuasive Tech Lab (http://captology.stanford.edu/).
I'm curious if, during due diligence, jdh and the other investors were given access to Justfab's chargeback rate on the subscription fees, and whether/how many merchant accounts maintained by the company have been shutdown. Having just looked at the site, I would definitely be misled by this, but that doesn't necessarily mean their core customers are.

Math doesn't lie: if chargeback rates are higher than e-commerce norms, then this continuity program is misleading. If they are not, then the program isn't misleading. I cannot possibly see how chargeback rates wouldn't be astronomically higher than the e-commerce average, but maybe I'm just not their target customer.

I would love to see a response to this comment with their chargeback rates for the subscription charges but I doubt I will get it.
Good suggestion, I'll do that.
Yes, I missed that point.
Well, in any case, I need some steps to reproduce if I hope to fix it.
Hehe. To that site's credit, its business model is just as scummy as JustFab's.
People scan web pages - they don't read them. Especially in a typical scenario like this, you just check that you've ordered what you thought and look at the price and move on the the wizard.

I looked at the picture you linked to, and even when I knew what I was looking for, I spent at least 5 seconds before I noticed the VIP membership. 5 seconds is more than I'll use on a step like this when purchasing something.

In my mind this is a scam and I will not recommend anyone to use this site. Don't get me wrong - I like the business idea in general, but there should be an option during checkout where you have to actively choose if you want to be a member or not. Anything which cost you money (especially recurring fees) should always require an active action from the customer!
Bill Gates: Control-Alt-Delete was a mistake
You sir a full of shit (and clearly unbiased). JustFab has become fairly well known in the UK for pulling this cheap trick on unsuspecting customers, I've even seen it reported on TV news.

Due dilligence my ass:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=justfab&oq=justfab&aqs=chr...

http://www.consumeraffairs.com/online/justfab.html
xkcd is usually funny and spot on, but this time exceptionally so - especially the hover.
The irony is that the rebel ant needs the colony in order to be a rebel.
Dont you see? It's a robot for growing organic weed! Maybe some lettuce on the side.

Here is an idea for a startup: Shipping container weed farm. Order one online, plug in, insert seeds, press button.
As someone who spent a lot of time optimizing conversions, it painfully obvious that they are optimizing to not be clear. If the subscription was so valuable, they'd message it as a top level value prop. But you're not dumb, their not dumb, so I don't have to tell you that.

I honestly can't believe they get away with, nor have the balls to even do it in the first place.

I actually wrote the ATD reporter who held their feet to the fire a little bit last week. He should've done far more.

While we're at it, let's take a look at above the fold of the how it works page on A BIG Apple monitor. http://d.pr/i/tCVH

So obvious it's a subscription there right?

How about the homepage? http://d.pr/i/1BVn

Clear as day right?!

I mean your rewards page makes it sound like you're telling a friend about personalized recommendations. Might as well be messaging those units at the end of an article "Selections recommended for you...."http://d.pr/i/YmIT

I can't even tell if your gift card page is signing up the person buying a gift card for a subscription or what is going on there.

And btw, might want to have legal look at this language at the bottom of your gift card page because I'm pretty sure it's a violation of California's gift card/certificate laws. http://d.pr/i/SDS

It's also funny that the phrasing "no obligation to buy" is all over the place.

When in fact obligation is legally defined in the civil sense as a contractual compelling promise for a course of action.

And that the word buy is also defined as the exchange of property from one part to another by way of an agreement.

And I'll talk slowly, property in that sense doesn't have to mean goods.....property can be money too.

So by purchasing on JustFab you are most certainly signing an agreement that compels you to exchange property with another party unless you cancel the agreement thereby removing your obligation.

So really, during a 5 day window at the beginning of every month you have no obligation to buy.

Miss that window and you don't even have a say in the matter!

It's also very telling that the FAQ section contains no section on "how do I cancel my VIP membership and stop getting billed every month?"
This is the reason in India the central bank does not allow companies to store credit card information. In such a case, the consumer has to authorize every transaction, so scammers cannot get away by taking the credit card details once.
I'm old enough to remember those.

I also know that those dubious tactics were used to draw people in, but in the end there had to be explicit consent to the subscription model, hence they always emphasized the "you can cancel anytime" part.

JustFab doesn't do that. It crosses the line from "scuzzy" into "scam" by totally obscuring the fact that they are a subscription based service.
Exactly - it's a scam and if it gets enough traction hopefully it will be explicitly illegal soon (v.s. just arguably illegal via general anti fraud statutes).

See the <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6455718">comment</a> from "Semaphor" below; this type of scam is already explicitly illegal in Germany.
A lot of people got all excited when sites like YouTube and Vimeo added support for HTML5 video, believing the <video> element was The Future Of Special Sites You Visit To Watch Videos. Given that YouTube still uses Flash exclusively for a whole lot of content, I'm not sure that's going to work out.

On the other hand, I believe the <video> element could be The Animated GIF Killer. GIF compression is terrible especially for video, and I'm sure with some tweaking of compression options you could make a .mp4 video with higher quality and a fraction of the size of the equivalent .gif. If there were some site like Imgur that let you upload some small video fragment, let you do the appropriate timeline snips, and automatically created a nice small .mp4 and a fallback .gif, that would be truly excellent.

Give it a maximum video length of 10 or 20 seconds and pre-load the site with a bunch of the more popular reaction GIFs like the Picard Facepalm and Orson Wells clapping, and you should be good to go.

EDIT: Looks like https://mediacru.sh/ does at least the GIF->MP4 encoding, although it misses imgur's handy "here's how to use this on your site" examples.
Also with you on this. The checkout flow is deliberately misleading. Sorry Mr. VC, you DID do your homework and the fact that you still invested is telling.

First off, what is the "happy path" on this checkout page? Right, totals + shipping costs + grand totals + checkout button. What else is hiding in this element? "Promo Code: 50% off your FIRST item", emphasis mine. What this is telling the consumer, is NOT that you are signing up to the VIP program and getting a discount because of it, it's saying "hey, since you're new, we are giving you a discount".

Would a consumer walk away from the happy path with the assumption that they had signed up to a subscription in exchange for the 50% off for their first item? No.

Yes Mr. VC, the subscription info is here on the page, but the location is not an anchor. The way the page is designed is to funnel the users attention down to the continue checkout button. The product designers knew this. At least GoDaddy puts their useless up-sells in the middle of the page, but they clearly give users an ability to opt out. They don't try to fool users by hiding them on parts of the page where they know they won't look.

Wow, I just said a startup is worse than GoDaddy. Getting frosty in hell no?
I'd expect Amex to charge back the full amount (including the cost of the shoes, actually). If it didn't, I'd be inclined to go for small claims court action against the company, as it's unlikely they'd send an employee to defend $39.95.
JustFab "generate about $100 million this year" in sales

funny that 8 * 12 = 96 which is close enough.
Collection takes place through our payment service provider, not IAP. There is no 30% cut.
If purchase entails buying into "VIP membership", why doesn't that show up in the shopping cart, where people are actually looking?

If purchase commits the buyer to additional monthly payments, albeit under some conditions, why isn't the user alerted to this in the shopping cart, where they are looking?

At what point does a UI disaster become a scam? As an uninvolved observer, somewhere around here I'd have thought.
"writing a function"

:help
(scroll a bit)
(find "usr_41.txt Write a Vim script")
<C-]>
(read)

"learn about |"

:h :|

"split an array in vimscript" (what does that mean? "splitting a string into an array" or… something else?)

:h split() or if that's not what you want,
:h list-functions

:h i_ctrl-w is not intuitive when you start Vim for the first time but:

1. it is easy to understand how it works and apply that to subsequent searches,

2. it is indicated in the first screen of :help.

So yeah, after using that search query once, it is very intuitive. Schizophrenia != intelligence + curiosity.

"Let's say on entering a ruby file we want to press enter"

:h autocmd
(reading)
autocmd BufEnter *.rb <CR>
(doesn't work)
(thinking)
(oh! <CR> should be a normal mode command of course!)
autocmd BufEnter *.rb normal <CR>
(doesn't work)
(oh! I remember, :normal only accepts ^M!)
autocmd BufEnter *.rb normal ^M

"change the background color"

(look at how it's done in a random colorscheme)
:hi Normal guibg=#0066ff

"how to set guicursor"

:h guicursor

What do you want to do with your guicursor if not setting its color and/or shape and/or blinking behavior? Everything is right there.

Vim has a large documentation that you learn to use little by little, query after query but all your examples assume no prior experience with Vim's :help

Impatience leads nowhere.

---

By the way I never downvote anything: I upvote to express my agreement and I answer to express my disagreement. That, and I don't have downward triangles anyway, a consequence of my presumably low "karma", maybe?
... and is just as unprofitable ?

Not that profit is everything but are they losing money daily?
it's not a PE, it's a (headerless) COM.

PE, ELF, and Mach-O all enforce a different signature at offset 0. Thus it's impossible to combine them - otherwise, I'd have done it already ;)
What worries me is that the what is probably one of the major credit check agencies in the UK and some other countries is also running business the same way. Experian offers a service where you can check your own credit score online for around £6, but actually also signs you up for a £13/month service after that which is also easy to miss in the small print. You also can't cancel this online, you have to phone them. The whole phone call covers two things, one is that it's another method to retain you by letting you update your personal information and then letting you check within a day or two if the updates brought you more information about your credit score. The other is that the personal information helps them have better information about you to give to their customers who use them for credit checks.
This website should definitely be part of the Dark Patterns UX Library. It's sad how people compose UX (and investors invest in) shady user experiences designed to trick people.

http://darkpatterns.org/
Slo-mo mojo: How animals perceive time
I also did the same with PE or ELF instead of Mach-O.

I recommend also checking my latest slides @ https://corkami.googlecode.com/files/44CON2013-Messing%20wit... where the 'inception' slides contain the PDF slides and the actual PDF viewer Sumatra, and an alternate PDF to be viewed under Chrome ;)
The article states they've been in profit since a year after operations began.
I like it. imgur breaks with click-to-play plugins (you have to activate a hidden object manually) and the commenting functionality and association with reddit put me off from using it.
This is bait and switch. You liken it to h&m or Zara - but they offer continuity services - they do not trick their customers. I may let them know (as I know C-levels at each) that you are attempting to trade off their good names. I am surprised you have not yet been fined under the distance selling regulations.

You can self-justify all you want, but you just smelt green and wanted in on the dodgy action.

Can you say "Columbia house record club?"

You exploit people. Be ashamed.

Edit: I see from your profile you founded betfair. This all makes rather more sense, given the cloud that has perpetually hovered around that business, due to them, y'know, not paying out when people win "too much". Also repeatedly fined by the Advertising Standards Agency, IIRC.

You like your dodgy businesses. It's your call as to what you do, but a business that provides mutual benefit, rather than being parasitic, will survive in the long term. If you bleed your customers dry and rip them off, they will go elsewhere. You talk about retention, but you are not retaining - you are duping and imprisoning. I dare say you do not care, however, so long as the money keeps rolling in, and will simply move onto the next scam when this one gets too hot.
3D-print a Norwegian fjord from your browser
I tried out the site, and shopped for shoes as if I were a girl looking for shoes. With the way the shop and the navigation is set up, it really feels like an online store. It's not until you get to the checkout that you're presented with the VIP pricing.

Most of my time spent clicking around was looking at shoes and bags, and then taking a personalized style quiz. It's not at all obvious that it's a subscription based site, unless you carefully read the sidebar during checkout, and the "how it works tab". Not only that, the "how it works" tab disappears after you log in, so you'd never see it again, once you take the personalized quiz and sign up for the service.

Most web users are pretty single-minded in what they want to do, and they don't read. And the site just navigates and feels like a shopping site. Not a subscription site.

I can see how the OP's girlfriend got mislead. As for jdh defending it--well, either you've just looked at the numbers and not tried the actual shopping experience through new eyes, or you're just being completely disingenuous.
Here's the above the fold of their How it Works page as seen on an apple LCD.

http://d.pr/i/ltch

Is how it works clear or am I missing something?

Here is their FAQ

http://d.pr/i/beRt

It takes over 2800 characters and 507 words before a single mention of a membership charge with no mention of recurring until the following paragraph.

Is that clear?
imgur succeeded because you could press arrow-keys and browse through their most-viral dumps.
Angry Birds game fires into the classroom
COM doesn't have the MZ magic number.
> I just went to the site -- you can do this -- picked a random pair of boots and put them in my shopping cart. I then clicked checkout, and here is what that page looked like:

http://imagesup.net/?di=15138026329215

You must realise that people are just going to follow their eye down the screen to the checkout button and assume that it's going to work like every other site. Putting something off to the side in the same font as everything else is what's misleading - it's likely that some significant number of people are going to click through without realising what they're signing up for. If there were a confirmation screen that just said 'Hey, this is a subscription!' Or something like that, then it would be less shady. As is it seems dishonest to claim that it was 'clear'.
> How do you create and use macros, and in what situations are they the appropriate solution over other forms?

I would say to follow a Lisp rule, I like to follow in all languages that have macro support, "only implement a macro if it cannot be done with a function".
> founder made it seem like he made the site just to solve Reddit's image hosting problems for free

I can't find the reference, but IIRC he (the founder of Imgur) didn't make any money for the first couple of years, as the bandwidth costs were crazy high. But he was happy to do so, because it helped the community there.

> Without this support and the growth of unlimited bandwidth servers

Without the support of his community he wouldn't have made it. I also remember him saying something along the lines of "I make no money to pay for bandwidth if you reference the .jpg file itself, but I still allow it. So I simply just ask the community to use the Imgur URL". It became part of Reddit culture to do the latter, because the users valued the service.

TL;DR - Provide a valuable service, don't piss of your users, and you can actually make some money.
Getting around the offset 0 is always the hardest part in all hybrid format hacks.

I tried .vbs+.bat hybrid and .bat+.com hybrid.
It's definitely possible with JavaScript in GIF and BMP, as I did in my PoCs @ https://corkami.googlecode.com/files/jspics.zip
Wouldn't web frameworks be using something like fastcgi rather than raw http?
It's not clear at all, it's a blatant attempt to trick users in to at least one extra payment of 39.95 before they cotton on and cancel on their CC.

Business models of this nature are slimy, seedy and morally grey at best.

If your product is so great then why the need to try and act this way and why feel the need to defend it on HN?