skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Check out the column this card is in:
https://trello.com/c/ylDBKS2F/1059-more-labels-tags
The problem is far bigger than just loss of control and privacy. We are paying so much more[1]:

1. The advertisers who pay for it all still get their money from us, but baked into prices of the things we buy from them. There is no free lunch.

2. The overhead cost of advertising is huge and we pay for that too. Ad systems and data collection systems, ad engineers and people like the author. Ad agencies. Creative agencies. Ad tracking. Marketing departments.

3. As the article points out, we pay the opportunity cost of a product that cannot put users first because they live or die by giving advertisers what they want. Costs include our lost privacy, content and services design that optimize for advertising revenue instead of its users, and our time and attention stolen by surreptitious ads. As has been said, we are more Google's products than we are their customers.

4. We pay the social costs. Democracy and the free market assume people make voting and purchasing decisions based on facts and reason. Advertising is predominantly about manipulation and deceit. To me this is the most expensive cost of all.

Added together, we are paying a lot more for "free" web content and services than if we could just straight up pay web sites for straight-up ad-free versions. But as in the prisoners dilemma, we individually make decisions that hurt us all collectively. Whatever you think of MaidSafe, the article is so right when it says,

"Do we have the Internet we deserve? There’s an argument to say that yes, we absolutely do. Given web users’ general reluctance to pay for content. We are of course, paying."

So, as you point out, the question is, "How do we get users to understand this?" Got any ideas?

-

[1] This is a condensed version of a more detailed case with reference links that I made here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773
I can't see it; that's my point.
"Getting ahead" means you're not following the whole point of this idea, which is to MINIMIZE the speed differential between the two lanes.

If you want to show people how it's done, you go the same speed as the cars next to you in the open lane, and zipper merge at the end.

GRRRRR.

Yes, THEY are doing it wrong, because they're early merging. (IDIOTS!) But you are ALSO doing it wrong.

I'm reminded of the George Carlin comment that everyone who drives slower than you is an idiot, and everyone who drives faster than you is an asshole.
2. The reason engineers tend to hate tactics like this is that it shifts responsibility for fuck-ups from you, the CEO, who should be managing and prioritizing features so you get the best bang for the buck, to them, the engineers, who are now on the hook for a feature that may or may not be able to be built in the time frame you promised. Things go wrong in engineering, and there are unexpected snags and slowdowns, and a well-managed business should be able to absorb them without losing customers. There are very real costs in added stress and loss of personal time for engineers - not to mention decreased trust from customers - that come from this tactic.

As the sibling comment mentioned, just say "The feature is not ready yet but we'll take your request under advisement and let you know as soon as it is." Then prioritize the features that lots of customers want. Maybe you'll lose the sale, or maybe they'll buy anyway because it was non-critical for them. Either way, you should be operating with enough of a financial cushion that one sale won't put you out of business (as PG says, "Deals fall through!"), and being able to aggregate requests lets you build a much better product instead of continually chasing after whatever the latest customer wanted.
Most of their customers don't care. They're either not price sensitive, expensing it or have some form of status with the hotel so the fee is waived.
I graft apple and pear trees in my back yard. One of my apple trees has 10+ varieties. The good thing is that once you have different varieties of apples on the same trees, the yield increases, because you have cross-pollinating varieties so proximately to each other. I learned how to do different grafts from various youtube videos.

There is also a group in SF that grafts edible grafts on decorative urban trees, such as on Japanese cherries: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/04/07/150142001/guerri...
Why would it be valued north of $1b?
Funny enough, that would require changes to laws first: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/07/19/california-couple-faces...

I would love it if I could just throw a bunch of gravel down around my house and never have to worry about mowing again...
The companies probably pay payroll taxes for these individuals on a higher "salary" number that is reasonable for their position.
Why do they say JSON is faster than MessagePack and then link to a comparison for only Javascript? Most servers are not running Javascript, and most data goes its entire lifetime untouched by Javascript.

There's some reason to believe that MessagePack is noticeably faster than JSON on every language but Javascript.

Edit: s/entirely/entire/
With 10 years experience in the real estate brokerage business I have witnessed the value of a good agent in the home buying/selling process.

The number of things that can and do go wrong on the eve of a sale, are often things that a good agent with good vendor/contractor/mortgage relationships can fix so the deal can close.

With tight lending standards post-2009 an agent with good mortgage broker relationships can get loans approved that would have otherwise fallen through. I have seen this a hundred times.

90% of agents are useless middlemen/women that want to collect a few commissions a year to supplement their income.

A full time, capable agent/broker is like having a good lawyer on your side.

Being a real estate agent/broker is not an easy job. It's extremely competitive, the margins on a brokerage are often very thin.

It's a demanding 7 day per week job, and putting in a lot of work to get no payment is an ordinary occurrence.

The MLS and the mandatory broker councils that one must belong to are another story. I have found them to be petty dictatorships at least 10 years behind technology wise.

One MLS I have worked with has for over ten years had an internet explorer only web interface. The MLS API is a giant XML beast that is the most confusing API I have ever worked with.

The MLS has great value, and the freshness and integrity of the data come at a large cost. I am not surprised that brokers and associations protect it the way that they do.
A little-noticed change in iOS 8 will make HTML5 apps more viable
Heh. Well, although the lead is probably several degrees removed from the StarCraft gaming world, the Korean meaning of the word did play a part. But, honestly, there are only so many 4 or 5 letter words that start with G and also have an S.
Same experience. I can't believe that such high quality hotels have such low standards for internauts.

Every time my company schedules a stay in such hotels, I happily downgrade my stay to somewhere else.
So 2,200 signups turned into 9 active users. If those were paying customers, than that is a .5% lead to customer ratio. There are companies that have built large businesses with a ratio like that. I'm not saying that OP should continue the business, his other reasons for giving it up may be valid. But a .5% conversion ratio is really not that bad for a brand new product. Very few products are instant hits.
Hey colanderman, you can't see my post or you can't see Kobra.io?
I live in a small town in the South West US. Well over 50% of the town is Latino. There was one BK in town and it closed. For several years there was no BK. Then, a new one was opened around 2 years ago and it was quite the event. For weeks the line stretched for hundreds of feet through the parking lot (they actually had to put up cones to snake it around) and you couldn't get a seat.

I personally don't care for BK at all and scratched my head about this. Their food is abominable in my opinion... not to be negative but it just is what it is. It frankly tastes like they put sugar in their hamburger and they probably single handedly use 30% of the mayo consumed in the US. But maybe they have something that appeals to a certain group of people. Apparently they do. The restaurant is still consistently pretty busy. I went once just to find out if they were as awful as I remember and determined they were worse. But in certain demographics they appear to remain popular. No point... I just found all this interesting.
FTFY Get Emacs pinky in one year
I don't think that's what he/she meant, I don't even think the 'kanban' was about Trello. It's about taking something relatively simple, then honing it to perfection. That is how you make great stuff - not by building something huge that only works most of the time, and even then only satisfactory. Kanban is about small improvements every day, for many days, applying the power of compounded improvement so to say.
Mike Bostock and D3!
So it turns out that plants swap genetic material when grafted. It would be really interesting to plant the seeds and see what the next generation looks like from each of the 40 branches. Could be a very intriguing genetics experiment. http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2009/05/01/unintent...
Does the American system have any provision for payroll companies that fail to fulfill their obligations?

(segregated accounts per client, accounts only usable for remittance of the salaries or taxes with the payroll company then taking out its slice when everything else has been done?)

I remember the Accupay affair and that took a lot of employers by surprise, and even though 'best common practice in the US' may be that payroll firms are the norm, at least in that particular case the culprit was definitely the payroll company and not any one of their multitude of clients. And there were strong indications that Accupay was not the only company that pulled that particular stunt.

All of the companies affected were held liable and had to pay (again).
If the idea were a painless "clean looking" death, then a tank of nitrogen, a rubber tube, and a mask are all that you would need. Painless, cheap, effective, and could be administered by anybody so you don't need a nurse to insert the needle. You could pull the nitrogen straight from the air at the facility so you wouldn't even have chemical supply issues (not that local welding gas supply companies would face international pressure to refuse shipments anyway...)

That executions are not done that way is all the proof that I need to say that executions are not currently designed to be painless. They are designed to appear clean, but specifically designed to torture.
The idea looks really awesome (already seen it elsewhere but not with Google behind). Google supports may help this to reach the critical mass and be done with the correct software stack.

It's always better than being force-fed with Google+.
Another dynamic library in Scala: https://github.com/pathikrit/dijon
Ambiguous Asynchronous Chaining With Promises
By not learning Emacs, you're missing out on the joys of RSI.
This is just splitting hairs over definitions.

The APA are not the ultimate arbiters of what is and is not a sexual orientation, and if anything, the fact DSM-5 referred to it as a sexual orientation lends credence to the view that it is as such.

Sexual orientations and psychiatric disorders are not mutually exclusive.

Bear in mind for much of history society treated homosexuality akin to a psychiatric disorder (Edit: It was in fact classified as a mental illness in both the first and second editions of the DSM, released in 1952 and 1968, so let's not treat the DSM as gospel)
Yes comparisons to JSON-LD has come up a few times and semantic web & HATEOAS are the reasons why the Transit spec includes the link type. JSON-LD looks interesting but it does not seem to address the basic performance concerns that Transit does.
That's too technical of an argument and takes away from the idea that Tactic is trying to convey. Most people don't find that apple-picking from a forest is stealing.

My take on Tactic's explanation of stealing is that the guilt you should feel from stealing should also be from having taken something that isn't yours from someone, instead of just the guilt of depriving someone from the thing you stole. Although both perspectives are good to have, taking something that isn't yours is a better framework to think in so you can avoid the grey areas of stealing.
Introduce a new powerful OnMetal cloud provider: runAbove
I agree that telling anyone to do anything doesn't mean they will do it (change their habits).

However, educating people does allow them to make better decisions.

Rules themselves aren't always the best/optimal/safest solution either and being loose may be the best solution.

For example, in one country in Asia if you are "in-front" of someone you have the right to merge/enter a roadway/get on a free way/change lanes over the person already in the lane. This is just cultural and is so much better than what we have in the west (like the USA). If someone changes lanes and "hits you", it is your fault (unless you were in-front of them).

Makes it so much easier to get on the free way, change lanes, etc. as you only have to worry about what is in front of you. Not what is in front of you, behind you, next to you, etc. There are no "blind spots" etc.
That is because we tend to have good UMTS/HSDPA connections in most cities.
Speaking about educating drivers, I wish we could just kill that mentality once and for all. It drives me crazy when someone obviously beats me to a stop sign, then waves me through as though they're doing me a favor. No my friend, you're just making it slower for both of us by not following the established rules of the road.

Thankfully my city is replacing as many stop signs as possible with traffic circles, where you'd have to be a complete idiot to yield to someone who got there after you.
Everything that guy touches is visualization gold. I wish I had half as much talent.
> They shared a piece of their humanity with you to help you in your dream.

... and got paid for it. Your company is not your family.
I have used ADP for quite a while and it is not expensive and they don't forget anything.
Really? I've been using it in FF on GNU/Linux since it was announced 2013-04 without any issue (other than switching to a different tab seems to throttle connections). I've got the latest FF 31. What version/OS/graphics do you have?
You can use shape-outside: <image> in recent builds of Chrome and WebKit to wrap around an image's alpha channel. It only applies to left and right floats - affecting multiple columns is a bit further in the future

http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-shapes/#shapes-from-image
I don't understand why any form of execution -- lethal injection, firing squad, guillotine, or any other -- isn't preceded by a hearty dose of morphine.
I can't see any body text on any page on mattkremer.com. The header and footer show, space for the body text shows, I can highlight & copy white boxes that, upon pasting, turn out to be text, but I cannot see any characters on the pages themselves.
I think the lack of wider scale meshnets is just that the people willing to set one up or join one are either geographically isolated or aren't aware of others in a similar position. You need a high density of willing participants for something like it to work. Yes there's issues with authentication and flood control, but I'm not sure meshnets have ever become a big or important enough thing for that to be an issue (I'd love to be corrected on that).
Technically P=NP is just about Turing machines (and thus all Turing complete systems, which includes all the computers humans have produced). As far as I know there is no evidence of real super-Turing systems, but the concept has been theorized.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercomputation
3 weeks is indeed really quick to jump to conclusions in my opinion, and a lot of people just give up too quickly. In my case, it took around 10 /months/ to experiment and understand how to properly sell my Saas [1], and now we are starting to see a nice increase in sales.

Rob Walling cut a normal SaaS growth in 3 phases: build, learn and scale. The learning phase is about learning how to properly convey the value, tune your message, and find the right channels to sell your product - and it can take quite a bit of time.

Too bad a lot of technical people just stop too early (not assuming carrying on in that specific project would have been a good idea :-)

[1] https://www.wisecashhq.com
People used to zipper merge where I live... in the 80s. But the metro region I live in is much more dense than it used to be, and combined with the fact that the police don't spend a lot of time enforcing traffic laws, and that the public transportation system has poor coverage, traffic problems have skyrocketed.

One of the reasons why people early merge here is that many people don't let mergers in. And one of the reasons why people don't let mergers in is that they regularly get cut off by a second car after letting a merger in. It's a vicious circle.

Back in "the day", zipper merging wasn't even an issue. A lot of people early merge here because they'd rather be the one letting people in than hoping to be let in.
5 things to ask when you’re choosing a task manager app
If I had to guess, the same reason New Relic was able to get him quickly and easily suspended from Twitter without any contact from Twitter to him (which is standard) -- Bay Area tech friends.
Out of curiosity, how do you arrive at this valuation?
Wouldn't LucasFilm count?
“Magic Helmet” for F-35 ready for delivery
That would be both terrible and dramatically different from what I was talking about. The context here is private websites filtering comments. If you are in a private restaurant expressing some horribly offensive opinion it is appropriate for the owner to ask you to leave. It would not be appropriate for the police to come in and gag you.
I would much rather choose a hotel on the basis of their A/C and air quality.
The only problem with the 'solution' of abolishing the death penalty is that it makes the real issue (false conviction) easier to ignore, while there will still be innocent people who have to suffer a horrible fate, (life imprisonment not substantially better than death,) for a crime they did not commit.
No one is saying MessagePack is slower than JSON across the board. In fact for languages that have fast MessagePack implementations, server programs can speak to each other using the Transit MessagePack encoding. But having a good story to and from JavaScript was a big design constraint and Transit delivers this as well.
It is faster for most languages, and could be made faster in server-side JS. However, this article is talking about performance for browser JS, where lack of robust string decoding destroys msgpack performance.
That is really strange, I'll look into it! Thanks for letting me know.

My only Windows machine is at home though, so won't be able to check right away.
I've never read any explanation of the Universe-as-a-simulation concept that I have understood. If the Universe isn't a simulation, then what is it?
Amazon Shares Tumble as It Reports Strong Sales, and a Big Loss
You're overlooking the situation where people merge out of the lane in a line without letting people who are already in the lane go through.
Business travelers expense it and really don't care about the price.
Shutterstock didn't take any funding for I believe 8 years (and when they did it was at a huge valuation) and then this year they IPO'd for >$1B. Jon Oringer, the CEO of Shutterstock, is a big fan of bootstrapping.

http://www.inc.com/christine-lagorio/bootstrappers-bible-shu...
Exactly - after being featured on HN, my SaaS got around 1k email signups, and out of my head only 15 to 20 translated into paid customers. There is a lot of work to be done to improve that, and it does not mean the product isn't good.
Wow, this comment really stopped and made me think. I honestly used to think "startup" was used for any new business with an unusual, efficient way of doing business.

Now that I know how HN people define it, I guess my inclinations are way more towards small business than startup.
That's not failing and its not failing hard. People have a very strange idea of what success or failure is and I think that it is mostly apparently based on watching The Social Network or something.

So a lot of people have incredibly unrealistic expectations.

It seems like literally 1 in 4 or 1 in 3 programmers have startups today. In that context getting 2200 signups is not failing hard. Getting people to log in is not failing hard. Getting 9 people to actually use your product is not failing hard.

In reality, that is a story of mild success and I would take it as a solid motivation to keep working on it.

I mean, to be honest, after putting everything into my own startup, if I can't ever get more than a few people to really use it then I am going to be devastated.

But everything that I read about business suggests that getting customers to actually use your product is very hard and requires a long-term effort. Those stories also almost always say that there was an evolution of the product before it gained traction.

You are saying you only worked on it for a month or so. I have been working on different variations of my idea for more like 8 months. I have not 'launched' anything yet. So I have 0 signups.

You are way ahead of the curve man and just need to keep your expectations a bit more realistic and keep going.
I'm willing to bet that this will happen before the end of the decade (i'm guessing 2017)
Job postings are done once a month on the first of the month. Watch for the post by the user 'whoishiring'.

Outside of that, job postings are discouraged and flagged.
Yammer is also part of Microsoft: https://github.com/yammer/
I'm really impressed by test_unit hitting #2. Most people who wander off into ruby bring back their TDD enthusiasm to the other languages they use. That's quite an impact for the entire industry when you think about it. Kudos to all involved for that :)
Yes, I was wondering why the guillotine isn't acceptable.
The Stone Man Syndrome
Quizlet isn't quite worth a billion yet (I think they're somewhere between $100 - $500 million) But they haven't taken a penny of investment money.
There is no difference whatsoever. All your censored communications would be attempted -- and rejected -- through private websites, too.

So how would you feel about it? How would you feel about the oppression you're looking to subject others to, being applied to you?
There are precisely steerable parawings.
They looked at recovering Saturn stages by glidinng back to Florida with a Rogallo wing.
To quote from your link:

> According to the DSM-5, pedophilia “refers to a sexual orientation or profession of sexual preference devoid of consummation, whereas pedophilic disorder is defined as a compulsion and is used in reference to individuals who act on their sexuality,” NeonTommy wrote.

Basically, the term that they use in the DSM is "pedophilic disorder" (changed from "Pedophilia"), which is a classified disorder.
Almost every guide for people wanting to build a product begins with one advice - find customers before you even have a product. I wonder how would you confront it with this story - more than 2k pre-signups and after launch almost no one is using it. Yes, he already built the product, but lets assume he didn't - having 2k pre-signups would convince anyone that the idea is good and worth investing time and money. Stories like this just proves my theory that the startup world is one big unknown. You can build a product without any research or marketing, some popular website or even a single person writes about it and suddenly your product is the next hot thing. You can also make a big research, advertise everywhere, collect thousands of potential customers who said "Sure, I would use it", but when you finally build and launch the product - no one is longer interested.