gmisra

As pointed out elsewhere, npm also already supports scoped namespaces: https://docs.npmjs.com/misc/scope

...and has for almost a year:

> (As of 2015-04-19, the public npm registry does support scoped packages)

The right path forward probably involves encouraging major packages (e.g. https://www.npmjs.com/browse/depended) to move toward scoped package names, and then eventually deprecate non-scoped names.

It's worth noting that the official NPM dispute resolution policy makes the following very clear (https://docs.npmjs.com/misc/disputes)

> Some things are not allowed, and will be removed without discussion if they are brought to the attention of the npm registry admins, including but not limited to:

...

4. "Squatting" on a package name that you plan to use, but aren't actually using. Sorry, I don't care how great the name is, or how perfect a fit it is for the thing that someday might happen. If someone wants to use it today, and you're just taking up space with an empty tarball, you're going to be evicted.

5. Putting empty packages in the registry. Packages must have SOME functionality. It can be silly, but it can't be nothing. (See also: squatting.)

This looks very useful. For the commenters who think this is a trivial service, I'd like to know how you handle the publishing step for your current FAQ pages. Most of our FAQ content comes from the product team, and much of the rest from other not-very-technical members of our team. Publishing FAQ updates always impacts our dev team. Being able to just give full control of the FAQ to our PM is definitely worth the $84/year.

But, DNS mapping is a must have for us - for most of our users, being directed off-site is mildly confusing, which is a particularly bad UX for someone who is already in state of incomplete information. DNS mapping also needs to come with customizable css.

If you had those two features already, we would be considering your product today.

A couple of other suggestions:

- Your FAQ itself does not address the question about custom domains, it probably should.

- As others have mentioned, not having a clear link to a pricing page creates the risk of potential customers thinking you are hiding it on purpose.

- It is a dark pattern to list the price as $7/month if you don't offer a monthly payment plan. Please either list the minimum transaction (currently $84), or offer a monthly plan.

- Is the editor exposed anywhere in the demo? I could not find it (just a screenshot on the homepage). Our content creators aren't that technical, so previewing the editor is important. WYSIWYG would be great, but markdown+preview mode would be just fine.

- Do you also provide media hosting? Some of your demo questions feature embedded pictures - and if I don't have to manage the file hosting for those assets, that's very appealing.

- What is your cross-platform support? Searching your demo for the terms "responsive", "mobile", or "tablet" returns zero results.

- Is there a way for me to follow the evolution of your product, e.g. mailing list or twitter? The product seems like a good fit for us once DNS mapping is in place, but not yet, so I would like to keep up-to-date.

There is a great twitter feed, @AsteroidMisses, that tweets out based off a NASA monitoring dataset. Browsing it provides some perspective on just how many asteroids are whizzing around the Earth all the time.

https://twitter.com/asteroidmisses

This looks interesting for me, thanks for sharing!

Question: what is your end-of-life plan in the event of acquisition or business shut down?

From the proposal overview:

The Chairman’s proposal will create a framework for providing innovators, device manufacturers and app developers the information they need to develop new technologies. Consumers should be able to choose how they access the Multichannel Video Programming Distributor’s (MVPDs) – cable, satellite or telco companies – video services to which they subscribe. For example, consumers should be able to have the choice of accessing programming through the MVPD-provided interface on a pay-TV set-top box or app, or through devices such as a tablet or smart TV using a competitive app or software. MVPDs and competitors should be able to differentiate themselves and compete based on the experience they offer users, including the quality of the user interface and additional features like suggested content, integration with home entertainment systems, caller ID and future innovations.

Here's the full text of the proposal: https://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/201...

The "if you can make a robot" problem for this use-case is quickly becoming "when you can make a robot" that. See, e.g., these (mostly) roboticized lettuce farms: http://www.fastcoexist.com/3050750/this-robot-run-indoor-far...

(Source; I have been working on the next generation of auto insurance risk models for the United States)

Car (really, driving) insurance is heavily regulated by the government, each state has agency over what information insurers are allowed to include in their risk models, as well as actually auditing the risk models themselves. Insurance nomenclature will refer to these inputs as risk factors. You can get an overview of the rules in California from the Insurance Commissioner's office here [1], and you should be able to find similar overview for your state by googling "auto insurance risk factors <state>"

Usage-based insurance (UBI) is the most recent innovation to be approved for widespread use. It's actually been around for a few years (at least 2012), this article's relevance is mostly about the incorporation of UBI data-gathering sensors directly into new vehicles. The key risk factors UBI focuses on are miles driven, and extreme acceleration/deceleration events. These factors were chosen because they can be easily measured using existing data ports on older vehicles [2], amongst other reasons. The San Francisco-based start-up Metromile [3] is one of the industry leaders.

Ultimately, UBI is limited in that it focuses exclusively on factors specific to the vehicle. As many commenters have identified, "risky" driving behavior is a both a function of how you drive, and how the people around you are driving. The latter effect is much, much harder to capture, but the US Department of Transportation is already engaged in R&D to identify potential risk factors that could be used within the existing regulatory framework.

With the rise in "semi-professional" drivers via on demand ride-sharing services, changes in ownership models via car sharing services, and the rise of semi-autonomous and eventually autonomous vehicles, the mechanics of automotive insurance are going to change a lot in the next few years.

Happy to answer questions as best I can if people are curious.

[1] http://www.insurance.ca.gov/0400-news/0200-studies-reports/0...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-board_diagnostics

[3] https://www.metromile.com/

Taken in isolation, this is a laudable move. But shouldn't it be evaluated within the context of their own internet.org initiative?

For those unaware, internet.org does not support TLS/HTTPS for most connections. It is probably the single largest attempt in history to remove secure access from a population, just in the name of advertising instead of national security.

People seem to be conflating "tracking user behavior" with "tracking user behavior without consent or transparency". Yes, there are plenty of people opposed to the former, but that is a moot point with respect to Google.

The latter, however, is symptomatic of a much bigger issue: there is a pervasive belief amongst many of the silicon elite that users simply aren't capable of making effective decisions regarding tracking, and therefore it is best if they are not allowed to make those decisions. I have heard this directly from many people, and each time it leaves me surprised.

If Google were to provide real transparency into the information they track about me, that would be fantastic. I likely wouldn't even look at it, but I would know that organizations like the EFF and ACLU would serve as ombudspeople for the public. Furthermore, whichever of the big internet players does this first will likely generate a tremendous amount of brand loyalty and free marketing.

I suspect current behavior won't change without legal intervention, which will potentially be adversarial, which is a shame since there are people at these companies who are much more qualified than lawmakers to anticipate and plan for the future.

It's amazing that a company (and industry) that self-identifies so strongly with taking novel approaches to solving hard problems can get mired in such status quo bias.

IANAL, but this feels like a good thing, that these issues are being hammered out in the courts. I think most people would find the idea that simply viewing a single webpage constitutes a contract with obligations to be unreasonable (as opposed to subscribing to a gaming service).

If publishers want to be explicit about forcing me to read/tldr and acknowledge a terms & conditions document, and then provide me with full transparency into what information is collected, and full agency over where else that information is transmitted, then yes, let us definitely engage in a contract. But the former destroys pageviews (a poor proxy for engagement anyway), and the latter will erode the massive grey-market in user-data and targeted advertising. From where I'm sitting, I don't think it's in publishers' best interests to shine a bright light on the current publisher/reader relationship.

However, as history shows, entrenched institutions have plenty of influence (cash) to transform a beneficial-to-them status-quo into "the law", e.g. when DVRs came out and programmatic commercial skipping was deemed to be illegal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_skipping

Now might be a good time for some of us to donate to the EFF https://supporters.eff.org/donate

Aspirational is great, but I would suggest you update that page to clearly identify what is currently supported versus what is aspirational. There is probably limited overlap between your target user audience and your target collaborator audience.

To save everybody some time, here is a list of the runtimes and frameworks actually supported by nanobox:

  - ruby 1.9, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2 / jruby 1.6, 1.7, 9.0
  - node 0.8, 0.10, 0.12 / iojs 2.3
  - python 2.7, 3.4
  - php 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 5.6
      - wordpress (version unknown)
  - java openjdk 7, 8 / sunjdk 6, 7, 8 (no minor version information available)

The actual content on the "Engines" page is aspirational, to say the least. One of the first question I ask of a tech product is "is it usable today for any current projects?" - why make this question challenging for site visitors?

If they're targeting novice web developers who should follow best practices, no rails support and out-of-date node support seems like a bad place to start.

Key points:

1. The 15M number is massively inflated for unique viewers, as the game was auto-playing on the Yahoo! and tumblr homepages. More detailed breakdown of the numbers here: http://deadspin.com/not-nearly-as-many-people-watched-bills-...

2. The NFL will not be rolling out a la carte streaming packages any time soon, as they have a preference to selling exclusive rights at a premium, e.g. - DirecTV has exclusive rights to broadcast all games, and stream all games digitally through 2022 (http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/11624442/nfl-extends-sunda...) - Verizon has exclusive rights to broadcast all games on smartphones through 2022 (https://www.verizonwireless.com/news/article/2015/09/live-st...)

3. For comparison, both MLB and NBA offer streaming plans for all of their games, for reasonable prices ($130 for MLB, $200 for NBA). These plans are only limited in not showing local market games. They also have great app support (iOS, Android, Roku, "Smart" TVs, etc)

Does anybody else get the feeling that the primary goal of large scale venture capital these days is to pump-and-dump IPOs, regardless of the actual stability/validity of the underlying business?

This article from last week suggests that the patent may not be that important. A team has recently discovered a second protein that can be used to power the crispr process, and they believe that more such proteins may exist [1].

...but patenting proteins still feels ridiculous. This is information that all of humanity has, basically, equal access to. Finding something in this pile "first" and planting a flag in the ground seems like a pretty terrible way to share knowledge. There is a somewhat forced analogy here between genetic exploration and global exploration in the colonial period, but I think most historians would agree that the "I got here first" model of "rights" ended up exacerbating existing gaps between haves and have-nots.

[1] http://www.wired.com/2015/09/war-genome-editing-just-got-lot...

One of the most beautiful things about the internet is that it enables platforms for individuals to create value and then receive no share of that value.

We see much lamenting about lack of innovation in "business plans" around here, and yet we have an historic opportunity to examine the relationship between value creation and compensation. Why is the Etsy IPO plan so exceptional? Why do so menu community members of instagram, reddit, etc end-up feeling betrayed by the services they helped create?

This is incorrect, after every ride you have the opportunity to rate your experience on the same low information 1-5 star scale as Uber.

It's more expensive because the cost is not subsidized by VC capital, and the rates are regulated in order to provide wage floors for the drivers (amongst other things). Not everybody values minimum wages, but it's worth knowing why the cost is higher.

In many places, you now can. And it is worth noting that Uber/Lyft put significant pressure on taxi companies to modernize into smartphone friendly businesses (pre-Uber apps, like TaxiMagic v1, were awful).

ps - are you aware that in American English, your username is a rather offensive racial epithet?

The right answer is that the "on demand economy" does not fit into existing labor structures, and trying to shoehorn these new jobs into current legal frameworks is probably doomed to confusion. This is especially complicated because, in the United States, too much of the social safety net is explicitly tied to employer-employee relationships (workers comp, unemployment, healthcare, etc).

What I want is confidence that somebody providing a service to me is provided these benefits - if you work 40 hours/week in "on demand" jobs, you should receive commensurate coverage from the safety net, and you should receive at least the mandated minimum wage. If you work 10 hours in a week, you should receive the pro-rated equivalents of those services. This is, of course, complicated - how do you account for people working two services at the same time, or the "uber on the couch" issue, or who pays for vehicles and other capital goods. But pretending that existing labor laws will cover the changing workforce is silly.

We hear all the time about how the nature of work, especially service work is changing. It seems like a logical consequence that the nature of how society classifies, supports, and regulates work should also change. Uber, et al, and their VC comrades have a huge opportunity to shape the future of how people work, and how the social safety net works - to effect real disruption.

Based on their actions, however, it is hard to conclude that Uber, et al are actually interested in this discussion, beyond the marketing rhetoric it enables. As far as I can tell, they view the friction between existing laws and their business model as a profit opportunity and not a leadership opportunity. And so the inefficient behemoth of government regulation will inevitably step in.

Interestingly, Cuba has developed an alternative network for the distribution of many types of digital content: people with access to content download it and distribute it using portable hard drives and usb sticks. A friend of mine recently visited Cuba, and according to him, these "paquete shops" are everywhere. There are standard bundles of content (tv shows, movies, viral videos, news, music, etc), and a la carte service. According to him, the content is consistently up-to-date (the latest Game of Thrones episode is available within 2-3 days). The shops themselves have developed brands, part of the value they provide is curatorial, as each bundle is different. Some of them have even branched out into adding their own bundled content, including neighborhood classifieds (craigslist, anyone?).

Information really only travels in one direction, so it is not even close to the real internet, but we could image an enterprising paquete shop bundling in some encryption software and forum software to enable two-way communication.

More here: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/23/cuba-offline-in...

Julian Assange believes that "Google Ideas" is, amongst other things, a channel for Google to get involved in geopolitics while maintaing political cover and distance - and Google Ideas often engages in surreptitious actions in concert with the US government. http://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-279...

IMO, anything Assange say needs to be taken with a grain of salt. But then again, the same holds for Google PR.

For those of you who, like me, don't know much about the background and context, Bloomberg Business recently did an in-depth piece on Blatter and his ascension: http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-sepp-blatter-fifa/

Honest question: how/why is it legal for Apple to ban any other "app store" from existing? I understand the motivation to require the presence of an intermediary to combat malicious software, but it seems blatantly anti-competitive to forbid competition within the domain of providing this intermediation service.

Similarly, why haven't any major app companies challenged Apple on the 30% app store charge, and how it is inconsistently enforced? For example, rdio charges a premium if you purchase a subscription through the app store, but MLB radio does not.

I don't know much about these things, but as a user I think it's fair to conclude that Apple has not done a very good job of app store stewardship, and I personally would welcome potential new overlords.

Some more background and recent history: http://grist.org/article/food-from-motown-to-growtown-the-gr... https://www.guernicamag.com/features/food_among_the_ruins/

This looks great, and I would like to use it, but the pricing structure is frustrating. I help maintain a couple of static websites for small businesses run by friends. Since these are real businesses, the co-branding of the free tier is not viable, and $100/year is 3-4x more than we're paying for an S3 site. Low volume, I know, but if you are interested in that slice of business, there is likely a niche of people willing to pay for free tier infrastructure + no branding, and in my case also willing to make year-long commitments.

It's disappointing to see that the biggest "disruption" in the logistics space involves shifting risk further down the economic hierarchy. The most difficult part of last-mile logistics has been capacity planning, both human and infrastructure. And yet, much of this risk is now being pushed down to the entities least capable of absorbing it - what is the opportunity cost of being "available" as a DoorDash driver for a given shift with non-guaranteed compensation?

The message that is emerging loudly from the SV VC community is that they believe this model is one that should be pursued, aggressively. Let's be clear that in terms of labor and risk management, this is not innovation, it is a return to the status quo of a century ago - one that we as a society fought hard to change.

I fear that the plan is to just fight the legal and PR battles, and hope that the robots arrive fast enough and make the situation moot (aka the Foxconn gambit).

My first thought was "I wonder what it looks like". It looks like this: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/multimedia/tapestr...

Do you know what would really be magical? An on-demand service that provided a guarantee that all of the humans involved were beneficiaries of living wages, unemployment and workers comp protection, health insurance etc. I really enjoy the convenience these services provide, but ultimately that's all it is - convenience. To me, no convenience is worth watching an entire class of people get 1099-ed into poverty, at the expense of the social safety net that so many people struggled to establish.

When I discuss these issues with my peers (I live in the SF Bay Area), I find that many of them share my concerns, to varying degrees. Does anybody know if such a service exists?

This seems like a perfect opportunity to share some more reflections on death from those who are often closest to it, doctors themselves. It appears that many (most?) doctors choose to spend their final days differently than most of their patients.

http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2011/11/30/how-doctors-die...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/20/your-money/how-doctors-die...