skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The checkout page you links deserves a notable place within Dark Patterns. (http://darkpatterns.org/)

But lets break down exactly why that page is designed to trick a significant number of customers into purchasing something that they did not intend to purchase:
* All the VIP information appears in a box that most shopping websites use for advertising or shipping FAQs. Many average readers (note that I do not say all), would fail to even glance at that box.
* The 'checkout as regular member' button is in a completely different flow of the page, and of a different size. On the one hand, it would probably be ok for one of those two things to be true, but to make them both true they know that some customers will simply think there is only one checkout option when they scan the page.
* By far the most scammy part of the page is the fact that the payment does not appear in the shopping cart or subtotal box! People reasonably expect that with online shopping, everything they will be paying for appears in the shopping cart.

Many of those things on their own would probably be ok. You could just claim that it is a page optimised for converting to the VIP program. However, the combination of all those things are designed not only to convert people legitimately interested in the VIP program, but to also convert a sizeable number of people that skim read the checkout page.
The days of guided aesthetics in touchscreens are at an end
iOS as a touchscreen operating system has come a long way from its roots. Today’s users already understand how touch interfaces work. Most, if not all, the user-education has already taken place and the days of guided aesthetics in touchscreens are at an end.

Taking our cues from the design of iOS 7, we bid farewell to textures and gradients; and with those out of the way, the focus lies squarely on the content and the task at hand.
Your grasp of history and political theory is lamentable. No matter how you'd like to see it.

The state has legitimacy granted to it by those who organize it and continue to live under its rule until such time as they decide to no longer recognize it, delegitimize its power, and establish a replacement state. But even when this occurs, another state is erected in its place.

Taxes have been around so much longer than Old Europe--by about 4000 years. Read some history.
Google's 15th year Doodle
I like using "Its the X for Y" but in a negative way. "This startup is the Google wave of Y".
Wow. I can't believe you are justifying that screenshot. This would have completely deceived many of my non-technical friends.

- When you buy shoes, you pay for shoes and not a monthly subscription. That's what people expect when they see 'Checkout'.

- Even after looking at the screen after reading this post, nowhere is it entirely obvious that I'm about to sign away $40 a month.

- reg $69, VIP $39. Looks just like a regular discount.

- I went through the checkout process, until the last payment screen. I don't notice anything saying that this is a recurring charge.

OP was being nice. This is dishonest and borderline fraud.

Edit: FRAUD.
That's different. For most software and movies, people not reading legalese isn't the core of your business. You make money on people buying your DVD, not on gotchas buried in license agreements. (Or, at least, I hope.)

JustFab is different. JustFab's viability depends on people not reading the fine print on the side. As I understand it, their "VIP Program" is their main differentiator.
The screenshot you provided is a prime example of a "dark pattern" where the process is designed to trick the user.

http://darkpatterns.org/
That seems true in the general case, but not in the specific. One can still obtain SSI if you never worked a day in your life, assuming you can shelter your income to pass the means test, and then return to live in the US. It's not a very likely scenario, because if you have the wherewithal to live abroad and shelter income, the paltry SSI isn't worth the effort.

Still, it begs the question if citizens have some obligation to pay some minimum level of taxes, albeit small, for the basic services and protections one would still expect as a citizen: the right to vote, the salaries of your representatives, courts and foreign service, etc.
I will tell you are right once there are no longer 10 results on the serp page....at any given point there are 10 sites that are listed in the search results

You do not know much about search engines. Maybe a Googler that optimizes Search to get more ad clicks can come in and explain it better, but if the "10 results" are buried deep, barely anyone will see /click them.
Also - good one!
Coincidently, I had a paper published in Science last week (coincidently using NASA facilities, but do note that I am not based in the US). Science allowed me to put a copy of the paper on the free-to-access preprint site, arxiv.org. This wasn't the final typeset and corrected version of the paper, but a version of the submitted proof.

These authors could have done something similar, though there are some differences in practices between the different scientific sub-communities. In some subjects, virtually every paper is posted to arxiv.org. Earth sciences appears to be one of those subjects where they don't do that.
Put it this way, from the evidence I've seen, and the checkout screen that is attached further down, This website is illegal in the UK

The Office of fair trading would shut this site in a heart beat. (if it were based in the UK)

the checkout proccess is deliberately misleading, it implies that clicking checkout will by the shoes and nothing else.
I find even that misleading because it doesn't mention the monthly fee. I'm pretty sure you could refuse to pay it and win in court.
"if we assume the investors in this business do perform due diligence, is there another possible explanation? "

Wrong. Investors decided that they can make money with a business with an obvious predatory business model.
It might be good money - at least in the short run, in the long run you run out of stupid people as I have seen with other types of such businesses - yet it is a company with a terrible business model.

Yes, I have looked at the picture you provided.

Shame on you.
I know that he doesn´t get sensation, but if they are able to detect nerves firing to move the leg, they may do the same to make a quadriplegic walk. Of course it will be orders of magnitude more difficult due to the huge quantity of nerves.
Maybe it´ll be easier to learn how to reconnect the nerves themselves..
So tell me, what claim needs to be supported? I am not going to sit here and write 1000 words for each word I used to try to convince you.
At first, I disagreed with your tone and profanity. But now, after trying to checkout on that site myself, I realize that it's fair to treat people who knowingly aid scammers, this way. Especially when they are the ones who fund them. It's not like they are innocent little babies, right? They (the company and the investors) know obviously why the conversion rates are so high - Because they are very subtle-y scamming people. We must not encourage this type of shit. It will get back to us at some point. I am with you on this one.
Agreed, complete scam. From that image it looks like you are making a standard purchase for a pair of shoes, and possibly just signing up to their site. Its only if you read in detail everything on that page and get down to 3 in the bottom right that it finally says you will be charged a monthly fee.
Ange was at 44CON[1] this month and did a great talk about Windows PE binary formats. He also ran a workshop on the PE binary format. Awesome guy to talk to, just make sure you don't have any fez's lying around ;)

[1] - http://www.44con.com/
Came to say this. I can smell class action against JustFab.
It was a need that people had, but there was no chance of making a profit without the good will of Reddit users trying to help them get ad views and bury submissions from other image dumps.

The founder also made a thread claiming it was a "gift" to Reddit while also saying the same thing to Digg.
Just a reminder folks, don't downvote just because you don't agree with what's being said.

Do downvote meaningless comments and clear spam.
Ractive creator here - yes, Ractive runs in Node. You create an instance similarly to on the client (ractive = new Ractive({ template: myTemplate, data: myData }) - obviously you don't specify a container element), then use ractive.renderHTML() to get the result.
By optimizing you talk about misleading a small part of the users so that they pay the VIP fee without even noticing they are charged? Answer this simple question : do people receive an email to remind them they will be charged $39 this month so they should hurry picking a pair of shoes?

No wonder why you get a very high customer retention rate if ppl are not even aware they are customers.
So WTF did you read this one, much less comment on it?
BTW, if you're interested, Ange also built a really awesome pair of posters on the Windows PE binary format for you to print out:

https://code.google.com/p/corkami/wiki/PE101

https://code.google.com/p/corkami/wiki/PE102
> they'll fail to fill that role.

while this is true (mostly), the assumption is that there is competition, which isn't always the case. Civilized society should set some decent standards to which employers must adhere to, because the invisible hand of the free-market doesn't take into consideration human conditions when it optimizes for profit.
Looks nice enough, thanks! One thing, though - I was looking for a way to get to a file upload dialog, and I missed "click to browse", because I thought at first it will take me to a page where I can browse already uploaded images.

Perhaps "click to upload" or something like that would be better.

Good luck!
"credits never expire. If you have 8 credits in your account, you can go get 8 pairs of shoes."

It is called breakage. If they do not expire now, they will start to expire soon. What good is it to accumulate some revenue, if you cannot claim it has no cost associated to it? Either you do not know what it represents, or you are playing a good card. Sorry for the sarcasm to start this, but it sounds fishy.

I have no ethical problem with sites that make it easier for customers to get an on-going service (a subscription), when it is more convenient to have it than the opposite. (cellphones, gas, electricity) In this cases, it is much more cool not to have to deal with $39 or whatever amount it is decided that the store wants to discount to call you upon that private VIP club. It is dirty pricing.

And yes, I did go to the link you provided, and I did noticed that it is not necessary to read 2,500 words to figure out that the company is walking a fine line in between ethics and law. Bravo, for the tack-team, probably composed of some 5th av creative minds and some hard knock lawyers.

But this does not exclude the fact that IF the site wants to be ethical, and IF it gets at least a very little percentage of its revenue due to this, it should try hard, very hard; to tell people that visit their site for their first time, that a little fuck you contract might fall in their lap that very day if they are not fully aware of what they are doing.

In fact, it it happened once, and you realize, it may be possible that it has been misleading, you should change it.

I really hope a more transparent player comes along and have you guys think about this very concerning issue deeply.

Sleep tight.
It looks like a class action lawsuit was filed against JustFab. The complaint starts like this:

"Plaintiff Edna Betances-Harold, on behalf of herself and others similarly situated,
brings this class action complaint against Defendant Just Fabulous, Inc, based on
its practice of deceptively marketing and billing consumers for unauthorized
charges relating to its retail website."

Does anyone know how that class action went, or how to find out?

Source: http://www.scambook.com/blog/2011/10/justfab-com-justfabulou...
ELF and PE hybrid

http://stackoverflow.com/a/2083161/41948

Now someone could just add Mach-O to it...
The rule in my book is pretty simple: opt-in is perfectly fine, opt-out is shady at best, and morally wrong. This applies to every service and/or subscription, from mailing lists to purchases.

This case is a clear "opt-out" case. If their offer is good enough, they could just explain why properly and people would opt-in. If they need to resort to this kind of tricks to get people enrolled, their offer is not so good and they are feeding on tricking the customers.

In any case, you should never trust a business resorting to these practices. These people won't have a problem selling your personal data whenever they (legally) have the opportunity, or doing anything even when its harmful for you (so long as it's legal). The parentheses are the differentiating point between "shady" and "scam" businesses.

This doesn't necessarily mean that you shouldn't buy from them occasionally (hello ryanair), but you should take every measure at your hand to avoid it and/or protect yourself from them. This includes using throwaway email addresses, refillable debit cards, etc.

If I happened to be an investor in that company, I would first push for good practices before it's too late. If that fails, I would do anything possible to get my money out of there. Apparently you and others like you do not think the same way, so "shady" business practices won't die. I just hope that your grandma doesn't ever get tricked into losing much because of that, or you will feel really really bad that day.
I wish OP would have learned something about sail racing before writing his screed.

Boat trim is an integral part of racing, even in many strictly regulated one-design classes. An eighth-grader racing an Optimist dinghy at their local club will spend a large part of their day tuning their rig, carefully adjusting the shape of their sail to eke out every last ounce of power.

Criticising a race crew for making their boat go faster is preposterous, because that's what most of the crew are there to do. If Oracle did a better job of that, then they won fair and square. Money certainly helps, but it can't win races if you don't have the skill and expertise to turn that money into speed.

An equivalent article would be to write an outraged expose of Formula 1 motor racing, complaining that the top teams "cheat" by having a huge team of engineers, aerodynamicists and strategists to make the car go faster. All that stuff is an integral part of the sport and nobody has ever pretended otherwise.
When I pull an all-nighter, I build momentum like a freight train. In one 16- to 20-hour session, I can get a solid week's worth of work done.

...And then I'm so exhausted that I'm useless for a week afterward. So it's not really all that useful unless I'm up against an absolutely immobile deadline.
Oh come on man. This is some serious fucking mental gymnastics.

At the very least there needs to be a checkbox a la "I would like to receive spam" or "I would like to give you $480 per year in addition to the $40 for this pair of boots I want." Maybe even include the monthly price in the cost lineup there, since it's, you know, a major cost?

I don't often wish ill on companies, but I seriously hope that this company gets pummeled into the ground in a massive class action lawsuit, and that every investor that knowingly accepted and rationalized this fraud to themselves loses their investment. This is completely unacceptable behavior.
Data sets released by Google
Give me a good example of a developed country with generally happy citizens who pay less taxes than we do, then we can use that country as an example of how a low tax society could work without failing spectacularly. Barring that, it might be possible that the libercrazian no/low-tax country might still work; we just have no evidence and/or experience that it does.

Whenever I hear Americans complain about taxes, I play a sad song on a very tiny (invisible) violin in my hand.
Ask HN: Public development diary a good idea?
When starting a development project would it be a good idea to have a development diary on the side? The problem I am facing is that it would be interesting (for improving writing, getting awareness, input from others) but could also be a massive backfire when you do not have time to write entries or abandon the project.
Hi Josh,

it's good of you to step up and have this discussion. It seems that justfab is using a Conversion Rate Optimisation trick that you're either not aware of or that you're deliberately downplaying.
Put simply, the UI is set to have VIP membership activation default to ON. Those people who are not paying attention will not read the information in the right hand side bar, will check out and will mistakenly purchase the membership.

The simple way to fix this is to have NO DEFAULT. When a user clicks check out, you should show them a page with both options equally balanced. For example, you could have two radio buttons with neither option preselected. That way the user has to make an explicit decision to choose to become a member or not.

This is your opportunity to put your money where your mouth is. Get the justfab team to redesign it. Make it impossible for users to opt in by mistake. Rely entirely on users making an explicit choice. After all, if you genuinely believe that all of your valued customers opt in to the VIP membership by choice, then this redesign will not have any effect on your revenue.

Ball's in your court. We're all interested to know how you will play this.
No idea if it's technically possible, although it really feels like it should be, but for me the biggest single improvement a site could do to animated gifs would be to allow at least basic video controls - particularly pause or step backwards.

I hate watching a 30 second animated gif where the fancy skill or whatever that it's trying to show is about 2 seconds long and I have to keep looping round and round again to try to catch the critical moment.

Maybe it's already out there somewhere, but I've not seen it.
Tom Litton, for example, still keeps four storage units himself, at two facilities, all of them 10-by-30 units. I asked what’s inside... “I’ve got some of my old clothes that I probably wouldn’t wear anyway,” he continued, and some trophies from college. “I also have some old cassette tapes that I produced.”

The cassettes are like audiobooks, he explained — tutorials on how to get into the storage industry and succeed. He made them before the storage-facility building boom ended a couple of years ago. “They didn’t sell,” Litton said, “so they’re all in storage now.”
Top Mistakes when Performing a Web Vulnerability Assessment
@jdh - how long it will take you to realize, that the biggest scam they pulled off were those financing rounds? EDIT: Just noticed that you were a round A investor. Good for you then.
not founders in particular, but just some people in general.

unfortunately, in a society where relationship debt is replaced with financial debt, this is inevitable - i.e., tribal societies sees less sociopaths because you cannot be "anonymous" and suffer no punishment for sociopathic behaviour, while in modern society, the externalization of costs and harm means there isn't anyone to "blame" when shit hits the fan, so sociopaths can take advantage of this and insert themselves into a position to take advantage of others without repercussion.

And the sad part is, a sociopathic strategy is successful (where success == money earned), because we don't measure things like ethics ("everything is ethical as long as it is legal").
$100MM+, you should at least expect a proof read page?
"with this purchase your are activating your VIP Membership"

(I am just going by the text on the image you have supplied)
jdh - is this a scam? http://i.imgur.com/s9bsLzK.png
While it might seem pretty clear to you, it isn't clear to most users. There is very little indication that you are getting the boots for $39.95 as a VIP member. In addition there is a SINGLE large action item; "continue checkout." There is a WALL of text to the right, with no real indication you need to read it (the whole "same font size") In addition there is an action item "No thanks" which doesn't even look like something that is actionable.
You claim that it is in plain English, but it actually isn't. The plain English says "Continue Checkout." Not "Continue Checkout as a new VIP member" There is an indication you are activating your VIP membership. But this wording is placed as far from the "continue checkout" button as possible. There was a recent article on HN about Dark Patterns http://darkpatterns.org/ and this page uses some of those dark patterns.
Well this doesn't look like a piece by a guardian reporter. Instead it is a guest post by the former head of the GCHQ. I feel like when they present a guest piece by a new individual with a very obvious conflict of interest, then they should say so in big bold letters at the top of the article. Most people simply gloss over the postscript in light italics giving a brief bio of the author.

TBH, I thought it was a really shit piece of writing. Not knowing who the author was I read it thinking "If the HN community upvoted this then there must be some merit to its contents.". However when I got the end and was disappointed, I read the byline because I was curious since the writing was so bad and the arguments so unconvincing.
Addressing Big Data Challenges For Real time Personalized Medicine - Video
The Facetime camera doesn't work with 32-bit apps?

Facepalm
But I am. It is illegal, to automatically opt-in for such a service during check-out.
> The U.S. Embassy system offers world-class services to U.S. citizens with ...

The embassy explicitly states that they do not offer these services.

> They will negotiate your release if you are arrested for foreign crimes.

Ha ha! You are joking right?

> They will help you reorder credit cards if you are robbed and even provide you with cash advances or a place to stay.

They MIGHT call home for you so you can get some cash. But otherwise, don't expect much from the US Embassy beyond expected services, unless your case is exceptional somehow (or maybe if you know Gary Locke personally).

The US does offer other services for our taxes; e.g. I got my PhD via NSF grants, basically, so I don't mind paying for that. And keeping the world safe via military (if you think that's a service), or even foreign aid. But its a myth that I pay any US taxes at all, because I don't, I just have to fill out that damn 1040 every year.
This would not fundamentally solve the issue, just reduce the attack surface, since the RAM needs only to be in state before memset() for attack to success. A better approach would be to encrypt at least the sensitive area even in RAM and never store plain-text value of a key.

On the side note Mac Books unexpectedly turned out to be partly resistant to this attack because of integrated nature of elements.
i'd be worried about occupational health and safety in an environment like that. In fact, you can sue the employer for such an environment as unsafe. and if it turns out that they didn't do their due diligence to provide a good env, they might even have to cough up compensation. Food for thought!
FYI: the author of the linked article is the former director of GCHQ, the British communications intelligence and surveillance organization, not a bleeding reporter.
I wonder if that means it belongs on the list of nomics [0] maintained on Wikipedia.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic
It may have, but it didn't return anything either ;)

We eventually settled on

int i = 0;
while (1) {*i++ = 0;}
Unfortunately, not to use Yelp as a business is not an option according to https://biz.yelp.com/support/common_questions:

I'm a business owner and don't want my business to be listed on Yelp — can I have it removed from Yelp?

Consumers have the right to talk about what they like (and don't like) about a meal they ate, a plumber they hired, or a car wash they visited. We don't remove business listings, so your best bet is to engage with your fans and critics alike, and hear what they have to say.