calbear81

I generally agree with the statements here but the example of the baby thermometers seems to be a false equivalence since there is no variation of pricing of the products but instead it's a personalized search results page that takes into account what they think this person might want. It actually would seem silly that a newborn parent would NOT want a baby thermometer and it just so happens that baby thermometers tend to be pricier. I know the stance from the EFF is likely that everyone should see the same search results and only allow a direct ly expressed query to influence the sorting/ranking.

Agreed I was going to buy a set of robotic cat ears for my partner.

I'm not convinced that the Feedly option is as much of a dark pattern as you might think. There are a few ways this could be addressed which would come with their own tradeoffs: 1) Remove the "x" close button since you're not a Pro user therefore setting clear expectations that you have no ability to dismiss an ad. This is clean but then the user wouldn't have known that they COULD pay to close the ad. 2) Change the "x" close button to something like "How do I remove ads?" or "Upgrade to Pro to close" - this would set expectations clearly upfront but for many users who don't mind seeing the ads this is additional information/noise.

The current experience optimizes for delivering information only when there's strong intent. The intent is derived when the behavior has been expressed by the user in the form of "I dont' want to see this ad" and then the information is delivered to explain "Here's how you can complete this action".

MSFT just announced custom Azure chips too which likely also played into the "synergy" with Sam's desire to reduce reliance on Nvidia as computing capacity and demand scales with AI advancement.

I think they’re referring to China doing rain seeding (https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/08/17/asia/china-heat-drought-c...)

I’ve been lucky to have caught a flight back to SF after cancellations and can wait at home while figuring out how to get to my original destination.

What I don’t understand is how come SW couldn’t enlist help to get customers rebooked on other airlines - their phone lines were slammed (I waited 3 hours) just to get a refund since their app wouldn’t allow me to choose to rebook/cancel.

If I was as customer focused as they say they are - I would’ve contacted AMEX global travel and gotten their entire network of booking agents to backfill and rebook customers on other flights.

I’ll believe it when I see it, I am out of pocket $500 so far in chaining my own flights on other airlines to get to my destination after my SW flight on Christmas Eve was cancelled. They offered a rebooking only on their own routes on the 27th which would have been cancelled again in hindsight. I am finally headed to my final destination today 4 days later on another airline as I didn’t expect SW to pay for any of the extra costs.

Nope it was moist and delicious! Separated the skin from the meat and rubbed with salt and sugar. 450 for an hour then 325 until the internal temp was at 157+. Breast was foiled to prevent overcooking.

I think we should explain this more clearly to the original author; it’s probably true that maybe 5% work on ads but that is literally the ads system like Adwords and Adsense. The only reason those are valuable is that Google has tons of traffic and that traffic is driven by the work of the other 95% working on sub-verticals, core search, Youtube, etc.

If you take away the people working on those these services would stagnate and people will start going to another search engine and then you lose revenue.

If anyone is going to build this, that would be an awesome DIY project but hopefully you have a printer that works w/o buying one.

What about a physical front page that gets printed daily using something like an HP Designjet T210?

You can mount it (it's wireless) and it can print 2' wide from a roll of paper. You feed the paper into a custom frame (add margins to the PDF -> JPG script) and then add a slightly sharp cutting edge at the bottom of the frame so that every day the previous day's frontpage will come out from the bottom of the frame and you can tear it off (reuse as needed).

You would need to pay for something like a 700' roll of 24" butcher paper for $18 and ink (yes I know HP is a terrible company on ink) but it might be even more realistic!

I think Rhinehart’s perspective may be that a generation of people are focused on solving the wrong problems (ones that don’t have real impact on human lives) and we (collective) are fetishsizing that singular focus on making the best of something that is largely inconsequential in the real of real problems. For example, should anyone be making the best flatware and why do we care about buying the best flatware when there’s plenty of good enough.

There’s so many points in his article that it’s hard to start in one place but I got the sense that his overarching thesis is this:

There’s a bunch of real human problems today (hunger, climate change, disease etc) and people can either be working on 1) solving these problems or 2) distracting people from thinking about their own mortality and these crises. In the bucket of the distraction-economy is probably anything entertainment related, social networking, consumerism, etc which is not innovative. There are people who are trying to change the system because it’s broken not just simply extract more value from it.

At least that was my takeaway.

There’s a range of flexibility offered including many homes that have free cancellation until 5 or 1 day before check-in. Some are on Stricter policies that are more strict than what you would find with hotels but homeowners also have different risk profiles and the policies help balance that risk out.

What’s nuts about the cancellation policies? Genuinely curious as I lead that team.

What about Draper University in San Mateo?

Yes, it's most likely that the ad that's matching is the generic one for "Lansing, MI BBQ" or something to that effect and therefore it's not pointing to a specific landing page. It may also be that Doordash has found that individual restaurant keywords that point to specific restaurant pages are just not profitable.

This is either dynamic keyword insertion in the ad copy or they did target a specific restaurant name but decided to use a more generic landing page. In my previous life doing more marketing oriented activities in the travel space, we found that even if someone was looking for a very specific hotel, if you dropped them on that page, it converted at a lower rate than dropping them into a search page for hotels in that location and "pinning" that hotel to the top of the page. The reason is that people may be more open to other similar options than you think. So in the case of Doordash, perhaps they have found a similar thing which is that you might have said McDonald's but net net more people will buy if you show them McDonalds, Wendy's, Burger King, Jack-in-Box, etc.

Also, showing all of the options may actually create more net value for Doordash since you're letting the customer know you have a wide breadth of options and this may create more long term loyalty.

I was wondering if there was a way to increase the transparency in this process and find a way for donors to support but also get something in return:

1) Can businesses be open about operating expenses and costs? How much do they need to survive the next 1/3/6 months? 2) Can businesses sell futures or pre-sell services? For example, in the examples you provided, could I pre-buy yoga classes for the future or let's say 10 garments for dry cleaning?

I would've said yes to Florida at some point in my life. Florida is my backup state.

I’m sure someone has suggested this at some point but why not physical keys with an lcd underneath each key? This would allow those keys to be fully customizable and be worthy of the “Pro” designation.

Their 1st gen service offered quite a bit of luggage and equipment transport for free (bike or surfboard) so it was super interesting to me. You could get on Friday night and go to sleep wake up refreshed in Santa Monica, surf, get a hotel or what not. Party until Sunday night and then sleep and be in the office by 8am. No Uber rides needed necessarily and less wasted time getting to the airport on time etc.

I was being facetious. It definitely is extremely misleading based on any common understanding of what a “pick” implies in terms of quality or attributes of a product.

I guess that isn't wrong, your boss is part of the staff and they have "picked" the poorly selling wines to highlight. It didn't say "Staff Recommended" or "Staff Favorites"

Burger King actually flame grills their burger patties - are you saying they are overly tough or overly burnt?

When the hotel participates with an OTA like Expedia or others, they are not paying for the facilitation of the booking, they are paying for the demand that Expedia has generated for the hotel. An unsold room is perishable every night and the cost of not participating on Expedia is that the room is empty instead of being filled at a $20 lower profit margin.

Here's a crazy idea, why not only let children comment on children videos? This way, kids that want to still express themselves and connect to their peers can do so on YT.

Memory is a two way street, I think the brain has a way to protect itself from painful memories as a way to keep us functional and sane.

Do we consider self-driving cars "parked" or "loading" if it's parked in a yellow or white zone? The definition today seems to be if you have a human behind the wheel, you can generally squat for a bit as you're assumed to be loading but what about a self-driving car? How do we know it's not waiting to pick someone up vs. someone just double parked it there?

I've used buyers agents (1 traditional, 1 Redfin) when I've bought homes since they are being paid from the Seller's Fees and in most states I believe they are legally bound to act in your best interest. I've had a new construction seller try to convince me to not get an agent and would give a discount instead but felt that the risk wasn't worth it especially since most buyers agents I've engaged with have been open to refunding some of the fee if you're doing most of the legwork to find homes, tour them, etc.

I agree with the general point of the article that taking VC money leads to a "get rich or die trying" binary mindset which may not be right for all startups. For many startups, it's not necessarily to become a unicorn to be successful, bring riches to their employees, and in general build a better world.

However, there are some points that I don't agree with especially this: "Would Facebook’s leadership have ignored warning signs of Russian election meddling or allowed its platform to incite racial violence if it hadn’t, in its early days, prized moving fast and breaking things? Would Uber have engaged in dubious regulatory and legal strategies if it hadn’t prioritized expansion over all else? "

Of course, this is subject to survivorship bias but I think it's generally agreed that part of the reason Facebook was able to grow so quickly and Uber was able to capture markets and be the market leader were exactly those things: Moving Fast, Breaking Things, and focused on growth above all else. In hindsight, if they hadn't done that, it's possible that we wouldn't care at all what they did because they wouldn't be the giants they are. There are tradeoffs with every strategy and these two unicorns chose the ones that led to their dominance even if it came with some headaches later on.