aleem

The scenario is a bit more nuanced though and creeps into Internet freedom.

- Reminds me of CraigsList vs PadMapper[1]. In that scenario I side with CL -- it was right to block PM. PM or others should not be allowed to build a new UI on top of CL because CL was the one that put in years of effort of nurturing its listings, its network, building brand equity and taking associated risks and costs.

- As others have highlighted, the data is publicly accessibly and there is no agreement the scraper/crawler is bound by. The agreement is between the LinkedIn user and LinkedIn. The scraper is connected to the Internet pipe crawling the Internet freely as it wants. It's not reproducing the data anywhere so copyright should not be an issue.

- What if a scraper didn't scrape LinkedIn but just the Google or Archive.org cached versions and read those instead? It would not be pressuring LinkedIn server resources in this case.

- What if all of my employees allow me to scrape their LinkedIn data? Can I scrape all of their info? Can LinkedIn stop me from doing that (In the case of Facebook vs Power Ventures, the answer is that LinkedIn would be able to prevent this behaviour).

- Who owns the data? Medium.com doesn't own the posts. LinkedIn doesn't own the CVs.

  [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4286325

Consumers would prefer to get packages delivered to their doorsteps but the coordination of package delivery and consumer availability isn't always feasible. This is the solution to that problem and nothing more. And one of many available options (others being scheduled delivery, dropping off at the neighbours, leaving it at the doorstep, reattempting the delivery, pick up from the local depot, etc).

Since this is a multi-access digital mailbox this can handle more complex workflows a typical mailbox cannot. For example the code can be changed remotely so your access can be revoked (for cancelled orders maybe) or the delivery person re-open the box to pick up a package you dropped off in there for return.

This also opens up potential for further innovations here like RFID or bar-code scanners inside the hubs to mitigate wrong deliveries.

> Yeah, 150$ for some random thing my sister sent me unannounced was not a lot of fun.

That's unfortunate and maybe they ought to allow you to monitor and avoid charges using your app. However, whenever you have a shared and limited resources, charging for overages is not only inevitable but necessary. Otherwise someone who has a holiday home in London can order packages all year around and block the hub until his next visit.

Where Amazon seems to be going with this is improving the state of last mile mail logistics. The logistics are also sensible. Typically it will take a van at least an hour to cover a dozen drops at 5 minutes per drop. This is a real cost -- a cost that the consumer eventually bears. With a sharper focus on the hub model, a delivery van now needs to make a single drop for dozens of packages. These cost savings can be passed on to the consumer.

The industry at large and Apple in particular is coming at them from the other direction preferring premium, furthering ad blockers and offering better privacy defaults (iOS 11). Elon Musk has gone so far as to allude that Google is the only AI company that worries him[1].

And so it goes. Coupled with AI and the amount of data they are able to feed into the AI engines, I am guessing this won't regress their ad targeting.

They have also managed to supplant it with other avenues. Google Travel, Google Calendar and other apps have explicit permission to read your email, Google serves email images off their own servers which gives them a tracking beacon and behavioural data across cohorts. All this adds a level of indirection but still gives them access to behavioural data and user intent.

[1] http://www.androidauthority.com/elon-musk-on-ai-696198/

This came up via the HN story on "$80k/month App Store Scam"[0].

If the person is intelligent enough to get past the App store approval process and everything that's required to build and publish an app, it counters the slavish-copying hypothesis. Instead,

1. It acts as a sieve that filters in gullible persons. Someone like yourself wouldn't give it a second thought and move on. The $99/week subscription is only seen once the gullible person has downloaded the app and passed the gullibility-filter.

Interestingly HN's own terse commenting interface, lack of humour and strict voting policies serve to filter in only on-topic discussions and ends up setting a very different tone from say, r/programming. The sieve effect is very noticeable in the tone, the crowd and the commentary itself between the two communities.

2. Letting only gullible people in is not enough. This strategy also keeps the smart/adversarial users far at bay. If an intelligible user were to somehow get in the door, that wouldn't bode well for the $99/week subscription scam -- things would escalate. It would jeopardise the entire scam and that's just what happened with the medium.com post. The guy notices the $99/week subscription within the app requiring only a fingerprint scan to activate. His blog post will get the app shut down. It will provoke QA improvements within Apple and it will rally the community at large to highlight further problematic apps.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14526156

It's apparently a thing now.

Peter Thiel has purportedly invested millions in anti-aging. A company called Ambriosa in particular matches older people with younger people for blood routine blood transfusions.

While this study may or may not work with humans, the Ambriosa project does seem to have legs.

From one of the comments on the article

> Backing off will no more produce a creative genius than pushing your child. Neither strategy makes the slightest difference to what is essentially an autonomous process. Beethoven's father did not back off. And Lars von Trier's parents left him to his own devices. Both are geniuses and both hated their childhood.

> My guess is that most parents who follow Adam Grant's spurious advice (one rule or none is better than six) will end up with the rude obnoxious brats whom you can see bouncing off the waiting room walls of any upscale Manhattan pediatrician's office. Maybe one of a million such brats will spontaneously become a creative genius as an adult but so will one out of a million drones who win spelling bees and piano competitions.

> But guess what, a large proportion of the remaining brats will be all attitude and no skill while the drones will at least become doctors and corporate lawyers. By using creativity as the ultimate-and perhaps only-benchmark, Mr. Grant falls into the same trap as the Tiger Moms he so despises.

> Enjoying a thing does make it more likely that a child will own it. But sometimes the initial drudgery is necessary to make the breakthrough to find something worth enjoying.

> When it comes to raising children the golden rule is that there is no golden rule. The greatest scientific creative genius of recent memory, Richard Feynman realized this when he tried to teach his children and discovered that what worked for his son did not work for his daughter.

Is postman interceptor going away too?

The biggest sore-point for me is that I still can't copy-as-curl-request a POST request from Chrome debugger tools (or other browser) and import it into postman. Relevant issue:

https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-app-support/issues/26...

Worse still, Instagram is on a collision course with SnapChat [1].

> Mark Zuckerberg talked about the long-term strategy for Instagram’s growth, and the fact that in a few months, the company created a new product identical to Snapchat’s Stories that already has more than the 110 million users as Snapchat’s entire app is reported to have:

>> Over the next five years, we’re going to keep building ecosystems around our apps that a lot of people are already using. Growth and engagement on Instagram have been strong. We announced in December that Instagram now has over 600 million monthly actives and recently passed 400 million daily actives. Instagram Stories reached 150 million daily actives just five months after the launch, and we’ve added new features like Boomerang and Live into Stories and I’m excited to see that continue to grow.

While the numbers are impressive, it seems they may already have plateaued. Nothing wrong with that--if the addressable market is limited, it limits them too. However, the problem with a plateau is that everyone starts eating into your stagnant market share. Adding premium services results in higher churn. Adding advertising results in higher churn.

Remains to be seen if they can double down with the IPO capital injection but so far we haven't seen much beyond the gimmicky SnapChat Spectacles.

  [1] https://qz.com/901289/facebooks-fb-earnings-call-revealed-zuckerbergs-plan-for-taking-down-snapchat-before-its-ipo/

Why not open source itand accept PRs. You still get control and people can help keep it up to date?

Or you could just use

> Claudia Bot Builder helps developers create and deploy chat-bots for various platforms in minutes to AWS Lambda. It simplifies the messaging workflows, automatically sets up the correct web hooks, and guides you through configuration steps, so that you can focus on important business problems and not have to worry about infrastructure code.

https://github.com/claudiajs/claudia-bot-builder

Before clicking I was secretly wishing it illuminated a pixel for each visitor on the new mac Touchbar. This is pretty cool too.

It works remarkably well if you use a development toolchain (serverless and claudia are both good though I prefer the latter).

My only gripe is that API Gateway (APIG) charges $3.5 per million requests and there is no other way to invoke lambda functions over HTTP. Had to scale back my micro-service ambitions because of this.

> I would rather commit seppuku than fail -- Elon Musk on failure

Project Titan is not a failure but it has suffered major setbacks, the credit or blame for which lies with Tim Cook. It takes unrelenting passion and fanaticism to wield the fortunes in your favour. Jobs had this and Musk has it too.

If project Titan is not about building a car then it's just about components. Apple has historically owned the vertical and there is little exciting about being a component supplier. It's a losing bid. Google does mapping better than Apple. It does voice recognition and AI better than Apple. The car manufacturers desire a steely grip on their UX and design so Apple's strengths there won't come into play either. Ive's own ambitions seem to indicate the poor state of cars:

> “There are some shocking cars on the road,” Ive said. “One person’s car is another person’s scenery.” To his right was a silver sedan with a jutting lower lip. Ive said, quietly, “For example.” As the disgraced car fell behind, I asked Ive to critique its design: “It is baffling, isn’t it? It’s just nothing, isn’t it? It’s just insipid.” He declined to name the model, muttering, “I don’t know, I don’t want to offend.” (Toyota Echo.) [1]

I for one would have loved to see an Apple Car and disruption of the auto industry. Am hoping Apple hasn't conceded on the bigger vision but it does seem bleak at the moment.

   [1]: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/23/shape-things-come

HTTPStat https://github.com/davecheney/httpstat now uses the HTTP Tracing library to provide some pretty neat graphs, letting you visualise the HTTP Tracing output.

    $ httpstat https://news.ycombinator.com

    HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    Date: Wed, 05 Oct 2016 05:23:28 GMT
    Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
    Transfer-Encoding: chunked
    Connection: keep-alive
    Vary: Accept-Encoding
    Cache-Control: private
    X-Frame-Options: DENY
    Cache-Control: max-age=0
    Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=31556900; includeSubDomains
    Server: cloudflare-nginx
    CF-RAY: 2ece7111d9ba29c4-MCT



      DNS Lookup   TCP Connection   SSL Handshake   Server Processing   Content Transfer
    [     5ms    |      152ms     |     508ms     |      1285ms       |       226ms      ]
                 |                |               |                   |                  |
        namelookup:5ms            |               |                   |                  |
                            connect:157ms         |                   |                  |
                                        pretransfer:665ms             |                  |
                                                          starttransfer:1950ms           |
                                                                                     total:2176ms

There are many downsides when you don't control the standard. Microsoft is not in the meetings when Google PMs decide the roadmap nor will they have any clout in directing its future or adding its own features. It's merely a consumer.

The main thing about AMP is that it gives consent to the search engines which is why Microsoft is happy to use it. The consent allows search engines to display content without directing users to the publisher platform. And therein lies the rub.

Something like this had been on Google's wishlist for a long time. Google news stirred up the news industry way back and Rupert Murdoch took a big stake in fighting against it, rallying other publishers. Google also bought the wire licenses so it was free to display a lot of the breaking news directly but had to play a balancing act to avoid irking the publishers.

When FB moved to instant articles, Google moved to amp. It was the opening they had been waiting for, for a long time. AMP was an opportunistic play--a damn good one for Google.

It sucks for publishers but they are forced to play along because of you are always at the mercy of your dumbest competitor.

Users may win but this isn't something publishers want or desire. Building faster pages is easier now than ever. Not as fast as AMP or Facebook Instant but still.

Over time this will lead to commodification because of lack of standards. Bing and others will further lose their lead to AMP. Users will like the new UX. Publishers are confused.

Networking is one of the likliest reasons. A Clinton dinner at 10k per head will attract a certain kind of audience. The speech itself may not carry as much importance as the presence of other dignitaries, industrialists, upcomers, lobbyists and so forth.

I get that but permuting over typos, letter casing, lengths and combination of words would make the dataset huge.

Is there a massively collaborated rainbow table database that is constantly growing? Are there other heuristics that come into play such as guessing the password length or some such thing?

Any ideas on how they manage to crack these? I can't grok how they would achieve this via a dictionary attack, especially the likes of:

    MgihtyDutchmanMgihtyDutchmanMgihtyDutchman
    alapdanceissomuchbetterwhenthestripperiscrying
    <script>alert(document.cookie);</script>

Came here to say just that. AdBlock relies heavily on SEO to grow it's install base. If you search "ad blocking" they rank highest, because of their name alone. This story will probably win them a huge boost and am hoping uBlock or similar take the lead on this one.

At a publisher conference, I recently saw PageFair take stage and sell their solution as an anti-ad-blocking ad-serving network. Turns out they pay AdBlock to get unblocked and their entire budget seems to be spent on SEO and trade fairs. I found this on their FAQ very amusing:

> Q: I tested my installation by activating the uBlock Chrome extension and the PageFair script did not load

> A: The adblock community maintains a number of different "block lists" of domains and resources that should be blocked from loading. One particular list (Easylist) is used by the most popular extensions AdblockPlus and Adblock. This list does not block PageFair's analytics from loading. There is an additional list called EasyPrivacy which is not used by default in AdblockPlus or Adblock, but is used by default in uBlock. Our analytics (as well as most other analytics tools like Google Analytics) are blocked by the EasyPrivacy list.

> You should be able to try out a different extension to verify this.

https://support.pagefair.com/support/solutions/articles/5000...

21 cents isn't the true cost but cool nonetheless. He's on the free tier available to new signups for up to a year. For that matter he could have run it on T2.micro and it would still have cost pennies. Still, a neat setup. (Edit: Lambda's free tier isn't time limited, as noted in other comments below)

Lambda requires a lot of boilerplate and configuration to get things setup. Even when you use Serverless/Apex/Gordon, there's quite a bit of configuration to do. I found ClaudiaJS (https://claudiajs.com/) is much quicker to get up and running and it sets up the API gateways for you based on your API signatures.

A 35mb jar deployment has gotta be painful (zip, upload, deploy). It helps to have a local dev and testing setup off the get go. Once you get past all that, working on your codebase can be fun again.

Could be that most customers are on the free tier and he has multi AZ deployments plus other AWS services (data, queues, etc).

Typically base costs are higher when you design for scale vs when you don't. And marginal costs are lower when you design for scale vs when you don't.

Thanks for your wonderful work.

> That's why I have been beefing up the DOM filtering code

Isn't it all done through CSS selectors? Could you share more?

How about leveraging other heuristics such as HTTP headers (response cookies for starters) or timing information?

I can't get it to work on OSX without the CPU staying at 100%. Still not fixed:

> There are several other threads on this topic already. Setups that docker build an image and rely on in-Docker storage work well; setups that rely heavily on bind-mounting host directories do not. A complex npm install in a bind-mounted directory breaks Docker entirely, according to at least one thread here.

https://forums.docker.com/t/just-switched-over-from-dlite-cp...

You would not get redundancy or scale and you would need to do offsite backups yourself which is why it's not recommended over cloud DBs.

Building stateless containers is good practice.

There will always be exceptions but it's good to know the tradeoffs before making those exceptions.

The razors-as-a-service model was the big win here. Microsoft moved office to subscriptions. Apple now sells iPhone via a hardware subscription. Amazon has product subscriptions and on-demand buttons you stick on your washing machine that you can press once for a refill.

Gillette doesn't do direct sales so it misses out on subs. It must rely on retailers to execute subs. If Gillette did subs for $10 they could greatly impact their "base" dynamics, essentially: low churn, consumer inertia, recurring and predictable revenues, direct channel to consumer for marketing and cross/up sells, streamlined billing, etc.

Second that. There's ELB + EC2 which can give you auto-scale but data persistence needs to be handled separately. There's AWS ECS which is/was quite unwieldy but I am hopeful for GAE's Flexible Environments (beta) built on Docker containers, putting it midway between Docker and Lambda with some interesting features https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/flexible/

Some UI issues and recommendations.

1. The up/down arrows after a vote leave behind a clickable void. That means you can still click that void after you have voted. If you changed the visibility on .votelinks instead of the buttons this would get fixed. Though even better UX would be to have togglable up/down buttons ala stackoverflow and others.

2. Why not provide the favourite link directly on the comment instead of forcing an extra click and page load. If it's a UI clutter issue maybe consider adding star and flag UNICODE characters. Again, having togglable icons for the same would be nice.

3. The collapse icon would be better off on the left for improved UI consistency.

EDIT: UNICODE characters don't show in comment. Is this a bug? They show in the textarea while composing the comment.

EDIT2: Add the following User CSS using your preferred browser addon for a bit of cleanup.

    .togg {
      float: left;
      margin-right: 5px;
    }

    .votearrow {
      margin-bottom: 10px;
    }

Coming from HN Enhancement Suite add-on I too found this annoying.

A few chrome extensions no Chrome should be without. uBlock and/or Ghostery, needs no introduction.

FlashControl disables flash and allows selective enabling on components, pages or domains. Quick Javascript Switcher let's you selectively disable JS on individual pages, handy sometimes for badly behaving pages. Tab Suspender suspends unused tabs, useful if you have dozens of open tabs not otherwise.