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Eszikon Ask HN: What is the most expensive startup failure?

This idea of an "infomediary"--a company that collects and aggregates information from a lot of users--has long been popular among Net gurus. AllAdvantage was supposed to finance the whole deal by selling advertisers information about its members' surfing habits. But that hasn't happened. It took in a meager $9 million in the first quarter of 2000. The prospect of "highly targeted" banner ads is still hypothetical; the information is all there, stored in AllAdvantage's data banks, but only a tiny fraction of it is currently useful to advertisers.

Pretty funny to read this two decades later, where advertising giants built on top of users' data are some of the biggest companies in the world. Although they obviously offer a service that economically scales a little better than "pay each of your users"

Eszikon Being Ridiculed for My Open Source Project (2013)

What a pathetic comment.

My gut reaction to "I started sobbing" was "man, that's rough, I feel bad for them". No further assumption about their gender.

Seems to me that you're projecting your thoughts on gender on her.

Eszikon Why Infer Types?

Somewhat unrelated to the article, but I always find the foo/bar style of code examples difficult to read. It's especially egregious here ; one of the points of the article is that types are often easy to guess from variable names, but it's very much not the case when the code is

  doSomethingWithFoo(foo)

I feel like simple but more realistic snippets are much better teaching tools.

Eszikon Five things we still don’t know about water

I think GP was referring to Montagnier's support of the water memory theory (a fraudulent theory made up to support homeopathy), rather than his comments on covid 19.

Eszikon Afghans Delete Social Media as Taliban Seizes US Surveillance Equipment

FWIW, this is the policy on HN. But I agree it's irresponsible.

Eszikon Ask HN: Mobile phone addiction help?

I think that generally, you "get" more out of playing videogames than doomscrolling on Twitter, or mindlessly watching your YouTube recommendations. Can depend on the game for sure, but video games usually have some artistic merit and require your actual focus and attention, rather than allowing to be completely braindead. They might not be a "productive" use of your time, but at least it's more intellectually stimulating than some of the stuff we do online.

Although, if you're spending most of your time actually interacting with people, especially friends, then I think it's much less of a waste of your time.

Eszikon Perfect Motherfucking Website

I mean, it might not offer any improvement for you, but it certainly does for someone who uses a screen reader that doesn't default to English.

Eszikon Hit songwriters ask pop stars to stop taking credit for songs they didn't write

Have you read the article? "Credit" here is not meant as recognition, it's meant as retribution. Performers put their name down as writers/producers despite being no part of the songwriting process, taking a cut from the writer's revenue, and additionally get revenue for their performance + merch, concert tickets, etc.

Eszikon UK to depart from GDPR

> 73% of 18-24 year olds say they voted remain, but did they actually show up?

I haven't done the math, so I won't make assumptions, but I would bet the percentages from the polls roughly match up with the actual results from the referendum

> Also did they vote remain because it's cool or did they actually have some other reason?

That's an entirely different point, you're just moving the goalposts now. The question isn't whether young people were justified in voting remain, the question is did they vote remain.

Eszikon UK to depart from GDPR

I mean, 73% of the 18-24 and 62% of the 25-34 voted remain, whereas 60% of the 55+ voted leave. Statistically, it's a pretty valid point.

Eszikon Commenting vs. Making

I agree with your general sentiment but please don't you use "gaslighting" when you just mean "exaggarating". Gaslighting is a very specific process of denying reality to abuse someone, it's not just any bad faith argument