dealforager

I don't think this is true, I run an affiliate site that directs people to Smile, and my commissions have been the same whether I direct to Smile or not. I have heard that your conversions typically go down when you use Smile. However I think that might be because many customers have never signed up for Smile and are scared away. I decided to stick with Smile links because I thought that in the long term it would motivate people to continue using my site and I figured at worst I'd help charities a lot more than the income I'd lose so I'm a bit sad to learn about this.

Smile and affiliate commissions are separate. So in your example both the charity and the stale affiliate link would receive a cut that is independent of the other. Source: I run an affiliate site and my links always direct to Smile, and I keep getting commissions.

If you're discussing performance of SQL queries, showing the output of EXPLAIN ANALYZE is the bare minimum. There's too many variables that can affect performance and if you can't see what's happening under the hood it's not very useful.

This is true of every forum on the internet, including HN. The problem is 100x worse if there is money or power on the line, such as in Product Hunt.

The solution is real free markets. Constant government intervention in the housing market, the stock market, education, healthcare, and everything else under the sun has led us to where we are today. It always feels nice for a bit when the government bails you out, but the long term consequences are always much more severe. Prices are information and when all the information is polluted, it becomes very difficult to have a functioning economy. It's the same thing that happens in social media, trolls and bots pollute the information so it's impossible for most people to tell the truth apart from fiction. Unfortunately the regulatory capture is so deep and the problems have gotten so bad that I don't know how this can be solved without an extreme event.

I've worked at tech companies that despise helping the US military. Please understand that the world is complex and although all superpowers have done terrible things, helping the US is the only way our children will live in a peaceful world. This isn't about democrats or republicans, the future of humanity will be decided in the next decade.

I highly recommend the book "Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order" for helping see the big picture. I am also saddened by the state of the world, particularly in regards to inequality which I think is the source of many problems. After reading the book, I realized that social media (or the internet in general) is a technology like any other and the countries that can harness its power for good will likely lead the next century. For instance, a country that sets aside short term profits from anxiety inducing ads and instead focuses on inspiring its people will win in the long run. Same for crypto, it is just technology and it depends on people to put it to good or bad uses. We've been fortunate to live through extremely easy times, but that is the exception not the rule. Think about how people must have felt during WWII or the Great Depression or any of the other countless tragedies we've faced. They also probably though the world was ending, but at the end of the day most people figured out a way to work together to get through it. Finally, be careful when reading news because almost everything you read has an agenda behind it.

I just look at the new price and used price, so the data problem is on Amazon's end. I have no way to tell whether an item that is sold for $5000 is truly worth $5000 or not. I have tried implementing a check for this in the past using some statistics, but I decided it's better to leave some potential bad deals on than to remove them but also remove other really good deals. I've contacted Amazon's customer service about that particular item and they told me they would forward it to the right team, but I don't know if they have policies against ridiculous prices.

Sorry, for some reason I have to put the "www." before the URL and forgot to do that. I edited the comment and I'll look into fixing that.

Edit: saw replies, I'll just say it's Monday morning and leave it at that.

Same! So much so that I built a website specifically for this: https://www.dealforager.com

It's pretty bare bones, but the problem I was trying to fix was that it took me a long time to browse the Amazon Warehouse offers trying to find the best deals. Amazon doesn't make it easy since they don't show the new and used prices side by side if you search directly under the Amazon Warehouse category. There is also no way to sort by discount. I wasted many hours until one day I decided it was faster to spend a few weeks automating this process.

One thing that stood out in that story is how some people just thought he was depressed. I know someone who had sciatica and I think one of the hard parts is that it's not easy to see. On the outside you may look fine but you may be feeling the most excruciating pain of your life. This makes it hard for people to empathize with which further fuels the mental health decline. If you have back problems, I recommend the book "Back Mechanic". This book really helped the person I know.

$900M/year is <1% of Alphabet's yearly revenue. I know you mentioned profits, but the OP mentioned revenue so I want to keep the same units because they're very different things. It could very well be that if it was $20M/year in profits, then those projects would not be considered failures.

If something happened to their core business, it's unlikely that those tiny projects (<1% of revenues combined) would save them. The more likely thing is that many of those small projects fail over time and it becomes death by a thousand cuts.

What you said is mostly correct and is exactly what they are doing. The only problem is that at the scale of a trillion dollar company, they need 10, 20, even 30 business lines generating $XB - $XXB of revenue each.

I understand the sentiment, but $20M/year really is a waste of time for a $200B/year business. I have a hard time thinking of a way it wouldn't be a loss given the added organizational complexity having those kinds of projects would bring.

I thought the entire purpose of "other bets" was to pursue ideas that have the potential to become $XXB/year revenue streams. So of course they want 'moonshot' companies.

Wow, just looked at their earnings reports and it doesn't look like they've ever turned a profit either. In fact, they are losing over a hundred million a year. No wonder this dude couldn't compete.

If I comment, I usually at least glance at the article to get a general idea. Most of the I can tell where it is going by skimming it for less than 30 seconds (there's only so much novel information). Many times authors use way too many words so it's rare to read it completely unless it's short or very information dense. However if I'm replying to a comment, I usually do not read the article.

I wanted to edit my post to add more details, but since I can't do that here are some more screenshots:

This is the (very consistent) traffic for my scraper that should probably not be on Cloud Run but it's too convenient for me to switch at the moment: https://imgur.com/RYLdp2t

This is the traffic for my web server, but since it's 30 days it's hard to see that within each day I get very large (relative) spikes in the middle of the day. I also had some huge spikes earlier due to some Reddit posts I made that are not shown in the graph. Being able to automatically scale to any load has been a life saver as I've tried to do marketing on social media. Otherwise I'd need to provision to handle as much as the maximum load I expect: https://imgur.com/RL534de

If you're a startup or need to handle random spikes from social media or other unpredictable sources, I think Cloud Run is worth a look. Another great use if for random jobs you might need to run every now and then. Web servers also seem like a good fit due to the fluctuations depending on the time of day.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned in the comments is how easy it is to quickly iterate on Cloud Run. I built a web app that uses Cloud Run for 90% of my server needs (Cloud Functions for the rest). One of my favorite features is that I can make some local changes, upload the container, and click a button to deploy the latest version or A/B test. Then if I notice anything weird I can just as easily revert the changes, which has saved me a few times. Admittedly, I haven't used VMs in years and it might be just as easy there these days with containerized VMs, but I don't know. Cloud Run was so trivial to set up that I didn't want to waste time on alternatives. Another really nice thing is that it integrates nicely with Firebase, which I use for hosting.

As my site matures, I might move some predictable parts to containerized VMs to save on costs. I have a crawler-type service that has extremely consistent traffic that probably shouldn't be on Cloud Run, but I did it anyway due to being able to iterate so quickly (see revisions here: https://imgur.com/fkFtIRM). Cloud Run also has a free tier which was enough when I was starting out and prototyping. It's also nice since my site gets very little traffic at night so at the moment the cost is not too bad. This is what my billing looks like: https://imgur.com/gIo3IGJ

If I was a big company or my site got super popular I might do things differently. But for a side project it has made me enjoy programming more than anything I've used before because I can focus 95% on code.

I use the "reddit is fun" app and filter nsfw content and images/video (by blocking a bunch of domains). It's alright like that, although it's still not a great use of time. I do find it annoying how much NSFW content gets close to the top of /r/all though. I don't want to be one of those "think of the kids" people, but I'm sure tons of very young kids use reddit and are introduced to extreme content (including gore) way earlier than they otherwise would have.

Well, it looks like they succeeded in their goal which was to funnel traffic to their site. It's now a top post on HN, with a top comment directly linking to their site, and I'm sure it will be shared in other places. This is partly why I'm not sure about blocking ads. I'd rather have ads be ads, and not have to read everything like it's a research paper to know if it's secretly an ad. Aside from personal blogs and forums, a lot of the internet is an ad in one way or another, although forums are also becoming more ad-y.

Their site uses Google Analytics, doesn't that seem a bit hypocritical? It erodes all trust in the article. The "wholly unrelated side project" is exactly the new marketing tactic that seems to be in fashion these days. Whenever I read an article online I ask myself what the incentives of the author are, and in this case it's pretty clear that their goal is to get people to their website.

The funny thing is that this is essentially a giant ad for this person's business, and their website uses GA (lol). I've noticed this is an increasingly popular tactic on Reddit and HN. You clickbait people to an article backed with no data that you know will tickle people's emotions. Then at the end you include a call to action to use their service because it will save the world.

I used to hate GA as well as ads in general when I had never tried to start my own business. I had the typical Reddit/HN anti-FB-and-Goog mindset. After trying to start one, I completely changed my mind. I couldn't find a reliable way to put my site in front of customers without ads. I guess if you're popular and have a huge social media reach that might be enough, but for someone with no social media presence it can be tough.

Once you start spending in ads as a small business, it's useful to have some data to understand what the hell is happening to all that money. I spent thousands on FB, Google, and Reddit ads and it's extremely difficult to find out what is happening and which ones are working. How do you know which people are coming from which ad? Which ones are real people vs bots?

I strongly recommend people try to make a website/app without being popular on social media and try to get people to use it without using ads. Places like Reddit are generally against self-promotion. If you Tweet/post into the ether of Twitter/FB no one is going to randomly see your post. After using ads, I've started to pay closer attention to ads instead of instantly ignoring them. It turns out that they are frequently useful. For example the other day I was searching for services for hiring a remote contractor and the ads were more relevant than the search results.

As for this article, I don't really follow the logic. A lot of it seems to be backed by the knee-jerk emotional hate people have for powerful companies. For instance, when talking about how Google uses GA:

> we don’t even need to speculate. It seems pretty obvious to me that they’re using it to guzzle up even more data and to crap out ever more gold ingots.

Every time I see the word obvious, that is a sign that a big leap of non-obvious logic has been taken. It is not obvious that GA is being used for bad things, maybe Google just makes a ton of money because their products are useful. The rest of it also seems mostly backed by emotion. I guess these type of emotional anti-big-tech articles are quite popular here though. It seems like every day there is a new one.

I think judging the decline of a rapidly evolving field by literally one of the biggest breakthroughs in its entire history is not good. I also don't like clickbait and I think the audience here generally doesn't either, even if you justify it at the end.

Yes, I stopped reading when it mentioned the last good paper was from 2017. This is simply not true. I don't have time to go through all of their papers right now, but as someone else mentioned the protein folding one was a real breakthrough. They also have lots of great stuff in the NLP space (something similar to gpt-3 like 2 years earlier). Also tons of stuff on the actual training architecture/methods.

Edit: I want to add that saying the title has nothing to do with the article is not helping the case. I finished reading the article in case I was being unfair, but I still stand with my original comment.

No. Every time someone makes a big stink about someone getting fired at one of the top tech companies, it is promptly followed by an article like this. A trillion dollar company that hires thousands of researchers and consistently produces some of the highest quality research with real results is not going to implode from one person being gone. Another pattern I've seen is someone leaving a company, followed by writing an article about how the company is doomed. Of course, the doom never arrives and the companies do even better. All of us are replaceable, from Bill Gates to Jeff Bezos to this researcher. This doesn't mean I agree with the firing, just saying that there is no implosion incoming.

Looks cool, but I do think there are ethical concerns with "scraping" reviews other people write and then not giving them credit. It reminds me of a talk I watched where a guy was saying how AI is essentially just taking work from others and taking the profits. For example, no one cares about the thousands of translators that lost their jobs due to AI translation, but those services were built on their work.

I'm not sure but what I've read is that they keep part of the fee that usually goes toward rewards or points in other cards. I don't mind this at all because I think they are providing an amazing and much needed service that I've been wanting for years. Their apps and web extensions are also great. Last time I had to cancel a card because some website got hacked it took me weeks to resolve and change it everywhere I needed. I would happily pay let them have all of the rewards to not go through that again. Sorry if I sound like a shill, I swear I have no relationship with them. I just really like the service.

They could also integrate it with Youtube and add some fancy AI stuff that assists artists in creating content. I've always wanted something that makes making animated videos more approachable. If they did that I'm sure it would usher a huge wave of content creators.

I use Privacy.com for this reason and to not worry about my cards getting leaked. I create a card per-subscription and set the monthly limit to exactly the cost of the subscription. When I want to cancel, if it's not easy I just destroy the virtual card.

I agree that there are people who will not transcend to become ultra productive members of society. However, I see everything you said as an argument in favor of UBI, not against. No one would have to fake disabilities, throw money away at a BMW, or have kids they don't want. Also many times the impact of a stable source of income isn't realized until much later when people realize that they are free to do other things than worry about money all day. I don't see what's wrong with making people less miserable, I don't care if they spend the money on alcohol or whatever thing society deems immoral. Life is hard and it's getting harder, this is just a cushion.

I think the "everything should be free and no one should make money" mentality that is popular on the internet is very harmful in the long term. Moderators should be paid for doing a good job and content creators should be paid for good content. Making ads the only way to do this ends up forcing content to essentially become an ad. This is happening everywhere on the internet.