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patd

883 karma · joined August 16, 2010

Software engineer, based in Brussels, Belgium.

I'm building http://shoptimate.com, http://exactsameroom.com and http://datafeedapi.com

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/patdbe; my proof: https://keybase.io/patdbe/sigs/TLCP0dWwmzpIP5b4uc7PYz63o3sH6I8X4AMcOvuI2rY ]

submissionscomments
patd··on PayPal to acquire shopping and rewards platform Honey for $4B
In theory, yes. But that's not my personal experience (I'm mostly active in Europe).
patd··on PayPal to acquire shopping and rewards platform Honey for $4B
90% of affiliates are very small players that don't have any bargaining power. In most modern platforms, all the referrers are tracked.

I'm pretty sure that big players do complain and they'll get a "first cookie" or at least partial attribution for the sales they make.

patd··on PayPal to acquire shopping and rewards platform Honey for $4B
Coupons affiliates typically get a lower rev share than others. It may be cheaper for retailers to have them if they don’t care about pissing off their others affiliates (most are too small to get their voice heard)
patd··on PayPal to acquire shopping and rewards platform Honey for $4B
AFAIK, Honey doesn’t make you got to a specific seller.

They insert themselves on the cart page which is the final step of the purchase funnel when the product, the seller and the purchase has already been decided.

patd··on YouTube autoplay gave a lost Japanese classic new life (2017)
I’ve removed my YouTube history just to avoid getting the same video suggestions over and over again. So it has to take guesses from other people’s history instead of mine.

For now, it seems better.

patd··on Disney: Bob Iger bets the company (and Hollywood's future) on streaming
Loads of young people wouldn't care about Star Wars, Marvel, ... if they didn't release high budget movies regularly. How many kids under 20 care about the biggest franchises from the 80s like Indiana Jones, Beverly Hills Cop, Back to the Future, Ghostbusters or ET ? How many adults would still rewatch them ?

I think old content is overrated. People subscribe for the new stuff. If they watch old stuff, it's mostly to fill the time before a new show comes out.

patd··on Yahoo Groups to remove all content December 14
Yahoo Finance is quite good.
patd··on Amazon stops charitable donations via Amazon Smile if you turn off notifications
And it’s probably tax deductible
patd··on Taboola and Outbrain are merging to create a clickbait giant
They probably don't care or see it as a way to keep newspapers in business.

I'm running an adtech platform for newspapers (I do price comparison and I believe that I add value to the product review articles) and newspapers need to generate revenue. They usually have loads of staff from decades ago when people were still buying paper journals and magazines.

patd··on Schwab Removes U.S. Stock, ETF and Options Commissions
If you're looking for cheap transactions, Degiro (EU based) or InteractiveBrokers (US based) are probably the best options.

With Degiro you can get 20€ of free commission when you sign up with a referral

patd··on Leaked Zuckerberg audio: 'You go to the mat and you fight'
I don't think there anything in there that is unexpected.

The most interesting part is probably how Facebook will compete with TikTok in the coming months and years.

patd··on Airbnb Announces Intention to Become a Publicly-Traded Company During 2020
VRBO sometimes lists the same places as AirBnB but cheaper. I suppose that their fees are lower.
patd··on I just don’t want to be a software developer anymore (2017)
But in most restaurants, the chef will chose which item to put on the menu, no ? They may repeat themselves every day but they get to change the menu from time to time.
patd··on How Does Esperanto Sound?
You could argue that at one point French used to be the international language but lost its dominance over time so English might lose it too in the future.

However I don’t think Esperanto has a shot at becoming a major language.

patd··on ‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list
Fixed it
patd··on ‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list
I did run into the same issue as mentioned in the article and the Easylist forum is full of publishers having complaining that their site doesn't work anymore.

I started working on http://blockedby.com , a monitoring tool to warn you when a rule would impact your website.

But after contacting a few websites that did have the issue on the forum, I couldn't find any that actually wanted to prevent this. A few discussions with publishers told me that they're more interested in convincing their users to give up on ad blockers rather than face the fact that people are not going to abandon ad blockers.

patd··on France to tax flights from its airports, airline shares fall
Doesn’t it only cover fuel that is already on board when the plane lands ?

And the Chicago Convention seems to have been revised 8 times already (according to Wikipedia) so it’s not set in stone.

patd··on Lithium-ion batteries from Amazon are exploding
Maker of Shoptimate here. As said by others, the business model is simply affiliate links.

The gathering of browser data in the privacy policy is to cover things taken by my Apache logs or click statistics (which I sometimes need to charge stores that pay me per click). But I don't monetize this in any shape or form.

patd··on Learn about Stellar Lumens
Stripe has bought early in Stellar Lumens (they own 2% of the supply). But did Coinbase do something similar ?
patd··on Tell HN: Google removing Gmail access from IFTTT
I sure hope they can afford it. When I asked them how I could integrate my side project with them, they quoted me $10k per year.
patd··on Do not donate to me (2013)
This loss concept is just a myth: the new tax rate only applies to the amount above X.

If you're at the edge of the 45% rate, the extra 100€ will be taxed at 50%, but the amount you earned previously will not be impacted and still be taxed as before.

patd··on Show HN: We Got Sick of Giving Out 'Ballpark Estimates' So We Built This
I entered data matching a barebones web app I’m currently building on nights and weekends and it also said 6-9 months and $48k.

I’m wondering if the minimum isn’t just 6-9 months.

patd··on Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia
Aren't you asking a bit too much info for a simple SEPA transfer ? The IBAN should be all you really need, the rest are nice to have.
patd··on Three European Countries Block Tax on Tech Giants
I think his argument was that, as you said, it would be highly gameable. But it's also the case for companies and they're (ab)using it to the point of paying little to no taxes in some countries.
patd··on Adblock filter rule list modified politically in Finland
The goal of the service is not to be an anti adblock tool. It's futile and publishers I've discussed with start to realize this more and more.

The goal is to let you know if you're about to be impacted by a false positive. I've been there and it sucks as your users leave your site or contact your support team.

patd··on Adblock filter rule list modified politically in Finland
The target audience is website owners.

If my users are all using list based blockers (adblock, uBlock, mobiles, proxies, ...) and those lists block my content, I'd like to know quickly so I can appeal to the list maintainers.

patd··on Adblock filter rule list modified politically in Finland
Shameless plug: I'm building BlockedBy.com, a tool to monitor adblock rules that start blocking your content. Adding them is very quick but removing them isn't and you start getting a lot of complains from your users.

I've had the issue at one of my projects where an overly broad rule blocked all my images.

patd··on The City of Seattle Accidentally Gave Me 32M Emails for $40
For the ballpark estimate, I think they just wanted for the request to go away by quoting an insanely high price.
patd··on Freedom to fail – or managing to succeed?
I don't understand why he phoned the client to say they were late instead of letting the appointed chief executive do it.
patd··on Portal from Facebook: Voice Enabled Hands-Free Video Calling
It has Alexa built-in. Does that mean that Facebook isn't going to try to compete with Siri/Alexa/Cortana/Google ?

Or that Alexa has won the home automation already ?

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