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I'd say that the author missed the chance to add sales copy and/or message the trial users with "Our prices are going up on [date], act now to lock in this rate!"

It seems like you could squeeze at least a temporary bump in conversions out of that.

The 400 ms threshold cited for the Doherty threshold is from a 1982 research paper. I imagine that in 1982, 400 ms response times felt pretty darn good.

Also, the nature of the tasks that users performed in 1982 may have meant that there was no benefit to <400ms response times. (If it takes twenty seconds to read and understand the output, and another ten to key in your next command, then a 400 ms delay is not a meaningful productivity drag.)

Today, I would guess that the threshold is closer to 50 ms.

(Also, "time spent by the computer waiting for the user" makes sense in the context of a 1982 research paper. That has changed in the last 28 years, to say the least.)

All of this is a long way off saying that if you are making UX decisions based on 28 year old research, you are on shaky ground!

For anyone not on top of internet culture, or not a native English speaker:

I'm pretty certain that Musk was being sarcastic. I've never seen "obv" as a shorthand for obvious used at the end of a sentence in a serious context.

So, there federal government will not be allowed to use TikTok? That's not much of a "ban".

Seems like you're asking for a CMS. Drupal or Joomla would probably meet your needs.

I can't actually argue numbers with you, but an awful lot of owner-operated small businesses use Gmail. (And Yahoo email, for that matter!)

One of the arguments for thorium-based nuclear power is that we're already digging up tons of thorium as a byproduct of rare earth mining. This is radioactive material that currently we're just dumping.

Any word on whether the equivalent update on Debian has similar issues?

I don't care whether my peers feel any stigma. I care about what the hiring manager feels.

I'm convinced that the mid/upper management at the B2B companies I've worked at (and the one defense contractor I've worked at) would not be pleased. OTOH, Google, Facebook, and Amazon probably wouldn't care.

Of course, I've never worked for an adult entertainment network, so I don't actually know.

I imagine that it has rangefinding capability, and throttles the output based on distance to the target.

It probably doesn't know and doesn't need to know whether the target is human.

Obligatory: https://blog.xkcd.com/2007/08/14/mirrorboard-a-one-handed-ke...

Most projects that get serious traction are written by employees of companies who treat OSS as a strategic asset.

That doesn't say anything about the number of people who write OSS.

Not that this addresses your core complaints, but both GitHub and GitLab offer free website hosting through the Pages feature.

If the attacker can write to the DB, then they can add entries to every table with the string "Hey your database is unsecured!"

This seems to be a common and expected way of getting promoted within Google: Their performance review system allows engineers to provide feedback on people from unrelated teams.

I don't know if any other company where this strategy is likely to get you ahead.

That means a desktop platform, not a desktop form factor.

OS X is considered a desktop operating system in this context. (As opposed to a mobile platform like iOS or Android.)

I've thought for a while that if I was a decision maker at a major studio, I'd set up a unit where up-and-coming directors are given pretty free reign to crank out five minute short films. The only real requirement would be for each short to set up a potential franchise.

Then, have a free streaming service that distributes the shorts. Try to monetize them via ads, but most importantly, monitor the hell out of viewer engagement. Collect every metric possible. Make then easy to share on social media, and see what goes viral.

Whenever there's room in the lineup for a new movie outside the existing available franchises, pull the most promising short and crank out a feature film based on it. Lather, rinse, repeat.

How does it stack up to Wings3D?

> Lecture delivery is not anywhere close to 100% of teaching a university class.

Absolutely true.

> Lectures have to change over time, both because you can do better with practice and because the material and real world change.

This is obviously going to be true for vocation-focused classes, but am I wrong in thinking that this is going to vary from field to field? Once you nail down your Math 101 lectures, do you really need to change them?

Also, this is not a real argument, but I have seen universities where lectures were given by a professor, and Q&A office hours were provided by a TA. I imagine that some universities are thinking that they can have a professor write a lesson plan and record lectures, and then the class can be run in perpetuity by a team of grad students. (Cue laugh track.)

Yeah, my first thought was that retaining someone qualified to fly one of these things is going to be significantly harder than affording the vehicle itself.

There's such a thing as weekend airplane pilots, but no such thing as weekend helicopter pilots. Developing the skills to fly a helicopter takes a very serious time investment. (And that's before you have a family of vacationers shoving stuff willy-nilly into the helicopter!)

That will be interesting to see.

I could see kids being cooped up and bouncing off the walls generating additional demand that could offset some of the overall economic slowdown. There's also reduced competition from secondhand toys with parents avoiding garage sales.

My prediction: board game companies will do ok. All-ages board games tend to be cheap, and they give the whole family something to do for a few hours.

I'm going to say that the business of selling card games is very different from the business of selling injection-molded plastic toys. A mold can cost thousands of dollars, and is useless once you have to make something different for next year's toy line.

The "Lego sets are worse now" meme seems to be a combination of people having overly rosey memories of how good Lego used to be (80s Lego was not as amazing as people make it out to be) and people checking in during one of Lego's slumps (they've had a few) and never checking again.

I'm pretty happy with where Lego is today.

For certain categories, the adult is definitely the customer. For toys aimed at children under three, the ads regularly talk about training hand-eye coordination and other basic skills.

For other categories, you could argue that the toy companies are selling a service: Make the kids stop complaining for a few hours. Naturally, an easy way to do this is to be the reason that the kids are complaining in the first place.

I thought that the article argued that Lego is an exception to the rule in that it does inspire brand loyalty.

Also, what investors mean by brand loyalty is fairly specific: A customer who buys into one brand continues to buy it for years or decades.

Kids are fanatical about the "in" brand of the month, but will drop it without a thought as soon as a new trend is "in".

How many kids are tripping over themselves to get the latest Spin Master toys? Most probably wouldn't even recognize the name. Just a couple years ago, stores couldn't keep their Hatchimals line on the shelves. None of that excitement carried over to their other products.

I imagine it was downvoted because it came across as a jab at the HN moderators.

Looking at the bigger picture, yeah, I have to agree. I have seen a virtual coup d'etat on a subreddit dedicated to fast food. (One moderator got kicked out. He responded by creating his own subreddit. He actually got 90% of the posters to come with him, leaving behind an empty husk of a subreddit.)

I'm not aware of any US law that allows the federal government to order a corporation to cease publication of an app. In fact, that would probably be a First Amendment violation.

I'm having a hard time imagining what a ban on an app would look like.

Would they impose sanctions on the corporation, and go after any US-based app storefronts that carry the app for breaking a trade embargo? Maybe do the same for any US-based advertising networks that TikTok uses?

Or is a "ban" going to look like an order for government employees to stay off TikTok?

The hacker community has a tradition of pet projects that take an arbitrary requirement to the logical extreme just to see what's possible.

I don't really see this as any different from the people trying to browse the web from a Commodore 64, or implement a web server entirely in Bash.

You know, someone needs to make an Iron Chef styled reality TV show where teams of web developers are each handed a random recently-expired domain name and challenged to make a viable service that fits that domain.