4,605 karma · joined December 10, 2015
What if you had one-day retention of IP addresses for per-day unique views? Seems like too important of a metric to eliminate completely, and one-day retention seems like a decent trade-off at the expense of being able to do unique analysis over longer time periods.
> It's funny how often that comment—which I made as a 22-year-old undergrad—resurfaces. Someone even reached out to me 2 weeks ago because they wanted to use it in an article as an example of "the disconnect between the way users and engineers see software"!
> I like to think that I've gained a lot of perspective over the last 11 years; it's pretty clear to me that point #1 was short-sighted and exhibited a lot of tunnel vision. Looking back, though, I still think that thread was a reasonable exchange. My 2nd and 3rd points were fair, and I conceded much of point 1 to you after your reply (which was very high quality).
> Obviously, we have the benefit of hindsight now in seeing how well you were able to execute. Kudos on that!
The other week I walked around my neighborhood in Guadalajara to do some errands. I got my knives sharpened, picked up my repaired shoes from the cobbler, some fried pumpkin seeds from the seed guy, some meat from the butcher, and then some tacos of course. All within two blocks.
Meanwhile my forum now costs more money than it brings in. It's been giving teens a place to write collaborative fiction for over 10 years now.
Seems a bit sad that we'll eventually just be left with the sites big enough to live without ads. We're in the middle of a great centralization which you'd think most of HN would be wary of.
Instead I see the opposite, people basically welcoming it with a bloodlust in their eyes. What they don't realize is that their favorite examples of ad-dependent websites cast around HN like The Verge will be the last to die.
I only hear good things about the former.
It's like every time you defensively throw in a nil-guard just in case: everyone now has to go "wait, can nils really get this far into the system?"
You just start wasting the time of the people experienced enough to identify it as a potential problem.
Remembering your contributions to the "Cycling is key to healthier cities" submission, you are clearly capable of decent discussion. But let's try to exercise some maturity across all topics.
To walk a dog for money in Vancouver, you are required to have a $2 million insurance policy.
https://i.imgur.com/ZEVBBuD.png
Saner cities covered this liability with the $10 dog muzzle.
People use this same logic when others suggest eating healthy and exercising.
"And if someone works three jobs and has ten kids? Hmmmm? Then what?? Gotcha!"
Begins to reek of someone using the condition of others to rationalize why they themselves can't be bothered to do something. Not to mention the fact that you're more privileged in a car than on a bicycle.
Cycling really does attract the same nonsensical aggressive reactions as eating healthy and exercising.
Nothing clarifies the difference between purchase and rental when you try booting Steam up on a laptop for a 12 hour bus ride across Mexico and you can't play a single game.
You just have this "meh, hasn't affected me" mindset.
Reminds me of when I briefly accepted donations from users of my forum. Suddenly it was like my life was beholden to people that had once given me $5. At least when they'd given me $0, it was pretty straightforward to dismiss their complaints and they'd looked silly when they'd demanded more of my free time. But once they gave >$0, the water got murky.
I ended up refunding everyone a few months later and I generally roll my eyes when I see posts like "um why not just take donations?" on HN.
It's just not no-strings-attached money like people seem to think it is. It's more akin to selling a service for peanuts, it rears the same issues.
I have no clue what you expect to do with police phone number to prevent train suicide. People don't just camp out on the track for an hour before the train comes. It's a last second ordeal.
Otherwise, tests have a cost just like any other code. You can see this by looking at both extremes: perfect tests (described above) and useless tests. For example, tests that make your codebase too brittle, tests that don't actually test anything useful, spending too much time writing tests, spending a lot of time writing tests for precisely the code with high disposability, tests that are too coupled with the code, stupid tests that should be removed but won't be because tests tend to be append-only, etc.
Testing is an advanced topic where every +1 unit you spend on testing doesn't mean your application is now +1 unit more robust. +1 unit of time spent in tests can even mean your application is -2 units worse because testing is a trade-off.
So tests are more than capable of hamstringing your unlaunched MVP. They're also capable of being the reason you launched your MVP sooner than later. But the costs of testing are no illusion.
Hiding it just seems like a trivial UI matter that makes things slightly more obnoxious when you do care.
I'd be surprised if only showing the domain vs domain+path made any difference on phishing results.
I don't think these little tricks do much for the user. For example, browsers now highlight https websites with green in the url bar and show a little lock icon. But how is that actionable information for the user? To what extent does that mean you can trust that website, and how does the average person interpret it? Phishing websites use https, too.
I would avoid stealing any pages from Safari's UI. That browser doesn't even show favicons on browser tabs to let you quickly distinguish them.
The parent post seemed to dismiss things as controversial, so I suggest that you can indeed take action on controversy: avoid buying those supplements.
If there is controversy here, then people would likely err better by not buying extra health supplements like probiotics that may be causing harm.
Same with coconut oil. I go out of my way to use it because I heard it was healthy despite it infusing everything I cook with a cheap coconut taste. If there is controversy, then I would just use other oil products.
It's not like it's a debate on which way to spool your toilet roll where inaction is inconsequential.
I went to my girlfriend's computer to see if she was syncing with Dropbox or something. Nope. She quit all of her applications just to be sure. Except for a single browser tab opened to a recipe for pita bread.
Yep, turned out that a recipe for pita bread was saturating our router because what looked to be buggy error-handling for ad-related network code. I think her ad-blocker only partially maimed it, so it went apeshit.
Seems like the opposite of a good time to release 1.0.
Of course, this means most people won't have an appetite for unstable Elm, but that's nothing new. Complaining that something is still 0.x unstable seems odd to me beyond the selfish "I wish I had it sooner."
A lot of HN's comments around Elm remind me of when I was a kid absolutely livid at Bungie for not releasing Halo 2 sooner. Doesn't Bungie know my summer just started? I don't want a fucking beta, Bungie! Me want game now! Bungie must be incompetent because everyone on my gaming forum wants it now as well!
Yes, two seconds and more can absolutely be network latency. If you don't think this is possible nor a regular occurrence for many people, you have been living in a bubble.
Can't imagine the horror of trekking through the wilderness, your family waiting in the car, to find help.
If you think something like this is easy much less "you standardize it once and you're done", then you are only cheating yourself out of an essential life lesson.
Clojure's simplicity tends to package things up nicer than most other languages, especially a readme, but it's not particularly different from what people are already doing.
The level of in-character roleplaying I saw was so convincing and thorough (and intimidating), like when someone gave me a tour of the Fighters' Guild (iirc), that I thought I was on an on-rails scripted experience. They would take me into a room, and the regulars who were hanging out would exchange some banter with my tour guide. Was way too impressive to not be scripted.
So I made some snarky in-character comments to amuse myself since I was, after all, just listening to a script. And then I felt like a goof once everyone responded to me, clearly unscripted.
It's pretty magical to experience a world where the roleplaying is that seamless.