skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is an old business practice that I remember from when I was a kid. There were a lot of second-rate publishers (books, in this case, but it worked for pretty much anything) which basically worked on a "buy a book now, and we'll send you a new one each month for <some really small price>". But you had to specifically opt out of this, which was done by ticking a very small box in the corner, in which case the prices for a single order would quadruple or something. Needless to say, refunds were out of the question.

I casually discarded those, blaming it on the new-found business astuteness of the society I lived in, but it seems this kind of scam is still around.

I'm calling it scam because, where I live, this type of business was actually considered a scam, and I think this went to the extent that they passed legislation to ensure their activity is regulated. They were required to clearly state the subscription model, in a separate box, delimited with clear colors and a bright background. Needless to say, they died out in less than a year.

The website obviously works, and is profitable, because it deliberately misinforms customers, and I think investing in this kind of business is very short-sighted. Not for you directly, since I presume it will bring you enough profit, but for the economy at large: this kind of activity adds no value whatsoever to anything, no one's life is substantially and essentially improved, all that happens is that some money change hands without producing any meaningful result. It's an economic plague.

I'm not casting judgement on yourself for investing in this business, particularly since I'm not willing to start a debate (on the Internet, of all things) about the "but everyone does it" argument. But defending this kind of shady practice is pretty low.

(Edited the rather rude words that were initially there instead of "pretty low")
Agreed. Only at the very end of the right column which most users will not read to is the mention of the charge. "Activating your VIP service" could easily be interpreted as being free given the purchase. Regardless of their numbers, it is definitely not obvious that there will be a monthly $40 charge. (The fact that they do give a credit for the charge makes things not 100% scummy I will say)
> Living inside the state, you wouldn't have those fruits if it weren't for the state

Nice theory but it's not even like you have a remote possibility to live outside of the State. Every country require you to BELONG to a State.

You'd rather look back in History how people were actually able to survive and thrive before advanced State powers even existed. The Human Race was not born with a State and Government to direct themselves. This is all a very recent creation in History. Let's not invert the logic and pretend that without State we would have nothing. This is what Socialism wants you to believe.
> We can argue over the fine details, but you can't convince me that this is not shady.

He's not trying to convince you, he's trying to convince himself.
If that is what the embassies and consulates are for than I wouldn't have a problem with that. At the moment I have to call a number to make an appointment and get shaked down by consulate security to get in to file an announcement of birth. I also have to pay a fee for that same announcement.

I think you are under the impression US embassies are a country club that expats just go to and have a cocktail from time to time.
Isn't that mostly a matter of adjusting IPD and other calibration?
Travis CI Multi Database Rails
A number of French citizens, including nearly a dozen billionaires, actually did renounce their French citizenship over the proposed tax scheme. Gerarad Depardieu is the most famous of them, but not the wealthiest.

One of the Facebook founders similarly renounced his U.S. citizenship prior to its IPO.
ASLR, yep.

But I think most stuff that runs off of soldered-on DDR3L and flash RAM (e.g., apps on phone and tablet OSes) may be better off sticking with 32 bit addresses for another generation.
Except your argument makes no sense if you DONT LIVE IN AMERICA. If you pay US Taxes but live elsewhere, you are in fact getting robbed. Your local and government services are not provided by America, you get almost no representation from America, and yet you pay full taxes.

Complete highway robbery.
> I would submit that, when you come to view the site under the lens of clicking on a discussion about a fraud, and then go to it to decide if it is a fraud, and you (probably) aren't a likely customer and don't think "damn, that's a hot pair of boots for $40", you end up with a different lens.

That's exactly the problem. We're aware that the website is trying to make us suscribe to a VIP program, and so we look for it on the screenshot you linked. A lambda user will never do it.

Frankly, I'm not a designer, but this screenshot is exactly what I would do if I wanted to make the block go unnoticed : did you notice that he is at the right, a place where usualy go ads?
I always wondered if I should memset() things after im done with them, maybe I'm not being completely paranoid on this one.

Scary and amazing.
In practice, the US has lots of bilateral income tax treaties [1] that prevent expats' getting doubly taxed. For example, I'm an American living in London but I don't pay US taxes for work done here because the tax rate is higher here and by treaty, the UK gets first crack at me. I know a few Americans in (low-tax) Singapore who have to pay Singapore taxes, then pay the on top of that to the US government up to the level they would have been taxed if living in the US.

I get extra pain when I go on business trips to the states, which the US doesn't count as being foreign work. So every year I have to fill in a spreadsheet of all the days I worked in each country, and subtract the US days from my tax treaty credits. I have to do the same thing in reverse for the HMRC in the UK. My least favorite part of being an expat :)

[1] http://www.rumbaklaw.com/resources-and-tools/us-federal-tax-...
Because it's not technically illegal what they are doing and they're doing it successfully. If there are people who think it's ethically ok to run a website that way, then there are probably people who will invest in it.

To me, it seems borderline.
> It really was a scratch your own itch kind of thing.

I agree. They make it look lucky because they executed so well. Good entrepreneurs have a habit of making it look easy to outsiders (Zuck was lucky because he was at Harvard and had the right connections, etc.)

There is a new problem of this type at reddit and other sites if somebody wants a project idea to work on. The problem is animated GIF's. At the moment most animated GIF's are too large, not optimized and the sites are slow.

This has been a constant long-term complain on some of the sports subs that I frequent that post highlights from games. You press the button to display the animated GIF inline and it loads a couple of frames a second and takes 10-30x the GIF length to load. There are two factors here:

1. A lot of people don't know how to optimize animated GIF's. You don't need 24 or 30 frames per second where 8 will suffice, and you don't need full image quality on mobiles or tablets, or even on desktops. You can cut down the frame rate automatically and scale up the compression for some clients to load faster.

2. A lot of the regular hosts are overloaded and slow.

A service idea for animated GIF's would be to specify a video to cut from then have the service automatically create and load desktop, mobile and tablet versions with low frame rates and hosted from a decent CDN. The regular posters are now using Google+ since it loads, but they haven't solved the optimization part.

You don't have to spend a lot of time online to see and identify these pain points, you just have to be in the right mindset where you notice them and can identify the opportunity.

edit: If anybody wants to do this, email me (in profile) and i'll send you my notes. It is something that I considered putting together but I don't have the time. I did do some research though (i'm a mod at some sports subs). If you serve optimized versions for different devices then that would be a good reason to get submissions linking to an HTML page rather than hot-linking to an image.

Pipeline would be:

upload video -> convert to 3 optimized version -> visitor lands on your HTML page -> serve version based on UA

running these services isn't as expensive as what it used to be, CND's are now cheap. imgur is profitable with 12 staff and running on AWS, with no ads.
Second that. Smallest font on the page, light grey while everything else is black, pushed to the bottom of the side column - certainly looks like fine print to me.

There's no option to opt out of VIP membership - if I haven't said I want it, and was not asked whether I want it, I shouldn't be paying for it, should I?

I think OP has a case here.

Do they ever try to remind customer about the upcoming charge?
Paying one's taxes as a citizen is not "coerced surrender of the fruits of one's labor", nor does paying one's taxes as a citizen who receives the benefits of one's government in any way share similar characteristics with indentured servitude or slavery.

Slavery was so much more than the "coerced surrender of the fruits of one's labor". And indentured servitude is a far different thing--it was a practice to enslave someone for a set term after obligating them to a debt as a means to gain free labor.

Neither of these things are in any way analogous to paying taxes. You do history, and those who suffered under these systems, a great injury by misappropriating them for ridiculous political statements.
> Christianity, in its purest form, is not compatible with evolution.

I don't think this is true at all.

> The Bible says the world and everything in it was created in 6 days and so is incompatible with evolution.

I think this is just a symptom of reading too much into the wrong thing - the creation narrative in Genesis 1 is not written as an exact historical account - the writing style is very different to the parts in Genesis that are supposed to be historical. And if it were meant to be about the literal ordering and times of creation, then why is there a creation narrative with a different ordering of creation in the very next chapter?

The point of the narrative is more theological - about the nature of God and humans. It's not making claims about cosmological mechanisms...

I think this article was fairly good on the subject but I read it months ago so I don't exactly remember - http://biologos.org/uploads/projects/Keller_white_paper.pdf
If you felt that your ISP didn't give you the proclaimed service, you could always cancel your subscription and sign with another ISP.

I do agree that the idea of taxation is not theft, but at what point does it become so? If you look at all those aspects that you point out, would you say that the taxes are well spent? The other issue here is that the people in question don't even live in the US, and thus don't make use of those services (and probably don't want their money to be used on foreign wars, as well. Just an educated guess).
Also, Science is run by, um, the AAAS, which is "an international non-profit organization dedicated to advancing science around the world by serving as an educator, leader, spokesperson and professional association"

Couldn't the membership just have a vote to make Science go open access already?
And hence why more people are renouncing their citizenship. The services are unwanted, the fee ridiculous.
The same can be said for every western nation. They don't require taxation of non-residents though.
Wait a minute, if they are leeching so much money (even if some are supposed 'credit for future') from (mostly) unsuspecting Customers - WHY did they need so many millions from Investors also, in series B and series C also?

Also - Aren't you worried that Credit Card processors (Visa, MC, Amex) will decide to just Cut Them Off permanently, due to excessive complaints? That has happened before to other "legit" recurring payments establishments. This is especially true if they Charge for "future" products, that is collect fee and don't Ship any product.
Having to go through the form hell of filing US taxes seems like a tax in itself.
Generally, government retirement programs aren't really tied to citizenship. You have to have contributed to social security for a number of years to receive benefits. I'm a US citizen, but my income is German, so I will ultimately receive German retirement benefits.

Living abroad, there are few benefits I'm actually entitled to. In some third world nations, if I'm arrested, then I could receive help at the embassy's expense. But I live in a first world country. I receive zero benefits from the US government. I can't think of a single service the US government provides me. In fact, they hold a monopoly on many of the services I need. If I simply want to notarize a form, I have to get to a consulate and then pay $50 (something I get for free in the US). And yet I have to file taxes and sometimes PAY taxes.

And here's an even worse bit: I get exempted from paying on the first ~$90k of foreign earned income, great. But in order to get that benefit, I'm not allowed to spend more than 30 days in any year in the US. That just means I'm not going to visit my home country at all, because if I visit family for 29 days, and later in the year I need to come back home for a funeral or other emergency, well, that would be a trip that could cost upwards of $20k in US taxes.
I'm not 100% sure but I think this site would not be allowed in Germany because of consumer protection laws. In that regard it's very telling that justfab.de has a very different checkout:

http://imgur.com/uIZ5JX3
JPMorgan chief tries to make deal to end investigation, criminal charges
So because other countries take an arm and a leg in taxes, but the USA only takes an arm, we should shut up and be happy?

/FlawedLogic.
It's easy. The price for that pair of boots is displayed very prominently, as you'd expect from a shopping cart page. So why is the price for the recurring monthly subscription only mentioned in the longest paragraph of text on that page and not highlighted in a similar way as the shopping cart price?
The other commenters are being too nice in their replies.

You're full of shit. JustFab is a shoe of the month club masquerading as a normal online shoe store. The VIP Membership Program is the essence of JustFab's business model and yet it's missing entirely from the home page of their site. It looks like any other shoe store. And yet you think it's clear that the user is being signed up for a shoe of the month membership when they originally clicked through to buy a single pair of shoes.

The entire checkout process is engineered to get people to sign up for the "VIP Membership Program" without realizing what it is. If they wanted to be up front about it, they'd explain it on the home page. They'd include it in the list of items that you're purchasing. They'd include the relevant terms (not just a link to them) on the page where you enter your credit card information. They'd put the terms higher on the page so that you're more likely to read them. They'd put the "Checkout as a regular member" link next to the "normal" checkout button and they'd make it just as big. And they'd make it a button. They don't do any of these things.

When a user goes to checkout of any online store, they're not going to read everything on every page. It's a process they're very familiar with so they're going to skim and click through quickly. I know this, you know this, and JustFab knows this. That's why the program details are listed on the first page of the checkout process and not the last. That's why they're listed on a page where the user has but one action to take. Click the big pink button and get on with the checkout process.

JustFab is not an awesome company as you claim. It is a scam and you are a horrible investor for investing in them.
Kim Dotcom: I'll fund Team NZ's next America's Cup bid
Are you kidding? Even though I knew what I was looking for in that image, it took me a long time to find the information that there will be a charge every month. It is at the very bottom of the page, in the fine print.

I believe you that you believe in the honesty of the company, and that you have the best intentions. Clearly this semi-scam works for you, but if you really want to feel good about yourself, I recommend stepping on that companies toes and make them present the information in an obvious way.

Also wondering about the law - I am pretty sure that here in Germany that kind of thing wouldn't fly, meaning customers wouldn't be obliged to pay up (although some probably would because they don't know that). Are there no customer protection laws in the US?
Windows version is not ready yet. Thanks
My Pebble Faces - Pebble's First App Store
EBR-1 was really cool
>>Apple was not paid by a third party to include it's own software features.

I'll point you to the Apple weather app with the prominent Yahoo! link at the bottom left. This would be more tolerable if the app itself wasn't terrible. I really wish I could delete Apple's apps, why not come with them installed and let you remove and re-add, say like podcasts.
So 800k out of 1m (according to your numbers) manage to avoid the subscription fee.

Remaining users: 200K * $39 / month in revenue.

So $8 million / month of recurring revenue through this programme. I wonder how the margin on that compares to the rest of the business ;)
C9 Lectures - Functional Programming Fundamentals (Haskell)
If any is interested, you can buy thin plastic prism to put over your glasses to bend the light to compensate for a lazy eye. Unfortunately they affect the quality of the image so are of limit benefit.

I've only seen 3D three times in my life; parts of Avatar, parts of a 3D demo and once when working on a telerobitcs project a accidentally bumped one of the robots cameras out of position.

Loving every comment here in HN. Maybe we should start a Reddit for 3D vision hacking?
My physics is rusty, but I don't think any chemical reaction can approach the energy yield of fission or fusion.
A fair question to ask would be how much revenue is coming from the subscriptions vs sales of the product, and how many credits per user are unredeemed?
Recently watched this lecture series all the way through (though he lost me a little @ monads -- I still kinda THINK I get them), and I liked the series
I'm not sure what I'm more upset by, the fact that JustFab is clearly a scam or that you find ways in which you twist this to justify it (to yourself, maybe?).

That image you link contains the text 'if you don't take action between the 1st and the 5th of the month, you will be charged', how about 'unless you wish to buy another product you won't be charged' instead?

The whole flow of the page is set up in such a way to make it seem like this is a one-time purchase, if you wanted to play nice you'd make the payment button read 'continue to subscribe' instead of 'continue to checkout'.

Disgusting.
Oh, come on. The page shown in that image is totally designed to obfuscate the subscription info. I was looking for it and it still took me a minute or two to figure out where it was.
> Just because something has the backing of a government doesn't change the definition of words.

For some words, the government defines what they mean. This includes legal terms, such as murder or rape or theft -- all or which mean what the laws (written by the government) say what they mean.
Oh please. Spare us the shitty history lesson. The state has existed in human history for more than 10,000 years.

The survival and thriving of the human race prior to the establishment of states is incomparable to the last 10,000 years--except to say that they evolved, survived, and propagated the species. They did not thrive.

The human race was hardly shit before it began establishing states in order to organize, centralize, protect, expand, and make its way in the world. Before that? Humans were nothing.

Ten thousand years of history does not qualify as a "recent creation in history" unless you're being really particular about establishing recent on a universal and geological time scale.

Without the creation of states, humanity had and left little to nothing behind. It merely existed. You would not be here if it weren't for the creation of the state.

This is not in any way, shape, or form what socialism would have anyone believe.
As I understand it, the only way the USG can enforce those orders is if the financial institution has a branch/subsidiary in the US. If they don't, I think they are free to ignore the requirement.
Google's Certificate Transparency Project: Fixing Flaws in SSL Cert System
If you seem like you'd describe your customers as "suckers", I don't want anything to do with you or your business.
Microsoft talks up single app store at company meeting
Families are states. Anarchy is fascism. Violence is government. Law is force. Peace is control.
The talk is getting interesting at 11 minutes in. But I can't find the slides anywhere and the video was edited by someone who likes to show the slide for 5 seconds and the person pointing at it for 2 minutes.
Those people might be less skilled than you in, say, programming. That doesn't mean they are less skilled at making money.
How come Google can do it?

Why cant Netflix?
You are funding one of the oldest scams in the book. This has been done for ages in various forms with various products as door-to-door and direct phone marketing. Currently where I live they are doing it with socks and underwear. You are lured in with "too good to be true" type deal, and hustled to sign into a continuous contract that is hard to get out of. I'm not sure about the current legal status, but I wouldn't be surprised if this business practice wasn't outlawed around here soon since it's been in the news quite a regularly.
Molding would be more suitable here. The time to 3D print a piece is a cubic function of volume, making it suboptimal for larger structures.
In case anyone is wondering; this guide does wonders with GIF size reduction: http://blog.room208.org/post/48793543478

It helped me to go from 6 MB to 100 KB for my specific type of video to animated GIF conversion.
Almost all commercial software, movies and pretty much the entire licensing business model are scams then. Nobody reads the EULAs or equivalent thereof. And if people did read them, and consider thoroughly their implications, then you might see significant drop offs in purchases. Then again this is HN so that sentiment may actually garner a lot of support.
Google 15th Birthday
Photonic Molecules Like A Light Saber: Never-Before-Seen Form Of Matter Created
Finnish Tax Administration: Instructions on Bitcoin income tax
Give meditation a try for falling asleep. But if you decide to look into it, try guided meditation first (i.e. a recording). Otherwise, you'll just sit there, with your eyes closed, thinking about work.
Social Security is not a savings account. Even if you paid in for 10 years, you can easily draw more than you put in.

Or you can die while the first check is still in the mail. That's the system the Fed set up