rvkennedy

> "Downvoting has always been used to express disagreement." -- pg [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392347].

As I can find no reference to this in the guidelines, I guess this unofficial statement is the best we will get. Not a good policy - it's non-standard, and encourages the wrong kind of behaviour, but in the case of HN I will concede the point.

> that you were happy to interpret that law however you wanted

I am not interpreting any law. What someone does with their own mail client is between them and their provider - and that's in the cases where marking as spam is even sent to the provider, which is not the standard behaviour.

> if you decide "spam filters should be used to determine whether people are in compliance with the CAN SPAM Act", the law states you are actually allowed to have interfaces that include "menus" as part of the opt-out to determine what should be opted out of (as you may want to continue receiving some e-mail, but not things like that).

You seem to imagine that "spam" is purely a legal definition because there exists an act of congress that seeks to limit it. The term long predates the act, and the capabilities we have developed to fight it do not depend on the specifics of US law. Do I, or any regular mail user, care that the law allows menus? No, make us jump through hoops and we get mad. Or "gleefully vindictive", if you're feeling fragile.

> the law actually states you can continue to receive mail for 30 days after you initiate the opt-out.

Which is why we do not rely on that particular law in the fight against spam.

But in fact, for most mail users actual spam is not a big problem. Gmail has great filters for example, and very rarely do most power users need to trawl through their spam folder for mis-filed messages. For most users, spammy behaviour by "legitimate" senders is much more pressing. If people really love your content, one-click unsubscribe is not going to keep them from it. If you put obstacles in the way of unsubscription, if you make it easier for them to mark you as spam (or filter you out, whatever), they will do so. My time, and the time spent by millions of mail users, is worth something, and is not to be wasted by mass-mailers' borderline behaviour.

So if you are one of these, I suggest you to give serious consideration to the hard-pressed user's experience of email.

Yes. Create your solution, if it's better than what exists. But if the existing solution is mature, yours must not only have better ideas, but it must also be mature and functional if you hope for others to use it. To create a product, not just an experiment, takes complete commitment. But almost every product you can think of is a better version of something that already existed, or a version better suited to a particular use.

It improves their behaviour. I have lost count of the number of mailing lists I have had to unsubscribe because I simply used their product, without explicitly asking to be put on the list. That's spam, whether they bought my email, or just took it from some other list that they legitimately had.

MailChimp etc are for messages you explicitly sign up for.

Have I "abused" your internal mental rules of email behaviour? I don't care. Perhaps it's analogous the way that you have abused the downvote feature on HN to express your disagreement with my point, but I think I have more justification.

Actually, spammy behaviour by "legitimate" senders should be punished, and they will get the message. Unsubscribe should be one-click - email users have enough on their plates already, and if I have done something, however small, to improve the behaviour of mailers, I feel great about that.

Energy backed currencies? Energy is in a constant state of flux from low to high-entropy states. And 50-100 years from now, energy will be the one thing that isn't in short supply, given that the sun sends more of it our way per year than we've used in human history: see http://www.sandia.gov/~jytsao/Solar%20FAQs.pdf - page 10: 480 exajoules (EJ) strikes the Earth per 90 minutes. Convert that to the yearly number, and compare to worldwide energy consumption in the year 2001 of 430 EJ, bearing in mind that we didn't use much before the 19th century.

When I click "unsubscribe", I expect to be unsubscribed. If I just get a page that invites me to enter my email, which the page should know already, I find it's easier, and vastly more satisfying, just to mark the mail as spam.

And a big HN welcome to the Pets.com of the second internet bubble!

I have to say I've been wondering for a while what happened to LinkedIn - what used to be a great service has lately taken to a great deal of UI misbehaviour and dysfunction - to the extent that I'm now relucant to go near it for fear of its hangs, jumping menus, and repeated reloads. Perhaps this has been teething trouble switching frameworks?

It is by no means clear that this is the accepted view of the mainstream of climate scientists - the linked papers seem to be the work of a couple of groups banging the drum against the Gulf Stream. I'd wait a while before accepting this as the new orthodoxy.

Actually it's because so many cyclists break the rules that do apply to them: running red lights, cycling on the pavement (sidewalk), and so on. And this is why pedestrians often feel the same animosity towards cyclists that drivers do.

I also attended some HN meetups in Munich and those worked very well. You show up, you talk to people. The organizers set aside a short time for anyone who wanted to talk about their project to do so, apart from that it was just a meetup, focused on the attendees rather than pre-prepared content.

I enjoyed the last one of these I went to, but it's not much of a networking event. You can get a bit of meet-and-greet in between the speaker talks, but everyone pretty much left after the last one, as the venue closed down. Anyone who wanted to network had to move on to a nearby pub, and few people made the effort, or knew where to go.

For 18.5 billion, I'd be surprised if they had anything left.

It's a pity that the then Micro-soft did not have copy protection technology - if they had, they might never have established such a strong foothold in the market, and the history of computing would have been quite different.

The clue is in the name: the person who owns the "copyright" is the one who has the right to copy it. This has been the case since the Licensing of the Press Act of 1662, so we shouldn't be shocked by it.

You can't transfer ownership of the IP to the Avengers Movie, because only one person or entity at a time can own it. That's why for example, we license software as developers, instead of selling it to the end user.

How about:

no headphones, I can talk to you.

1 headphone, take it off: I require your full attention.

2 headphones, you're fired.

And yet, they're both selling dubious solutions to problems they've invented. What are the odds?

I think it's called a ticket because having the ticket is what lets you travel. Stealing tickets is illegal because if you have the ticket, you can travel. If you have to be the person who bought the ticket in order to travel, you don't need a ticket, because you can prove that you're the person who bought it.

The two images represent the same doorway- one taken in 2007, the other in World War II, when Amsterdam was under German occupation.

Whoa there: Church and State!

I'd feel happier going along with this is the commercial relationship between hackdesign.org and the makers of the Objectified documentary was upfront and clear before sign-up for a putatively free course. There's nothing wrong with making money this way (if they are, I can't tell). But tell us, before asking for email addresses: what it actually costs, and whether (in your country) you can even get the required content.

At the risk of engaging in humour on HN, when my computer starts to tell me "It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again", I will worry.

- as are c and c++. What gives?

You know why this is? Because there is no correct pronunciation in English for two consecutive consonants. Similarly, SQL is not pronounced "sequel", because it contains no vowels. TeX is not pronounced "teck" because there no letter chi in the Roman alphabet.

All these cutesy insider pronunciations only serve to confuse and alienate the uninitiated, it's elitist nonsense.

I think "visiting a single page" means precisely one-click.

Because once click takes you to the page. Any further action, even while you're on that same page, is an additional requirement, which is disallowed.

I think you underestimate the influence of Hayek, Friedman et al, whose moralistic market fetish has become the dominant ideology of Washington, London et al.

For a more evidence-based approach, I'll go with Keynes' General Theory, which works, but has few adherents among the major parties in the West.

While this is valuable information, it is all anecdotal: you're assuming that the incidents you experienced were due to electronic devices, but the FAA has never tested this, so it's a single datapoint where we don't even know how many (if any) passengers had active devices.

If the FAA were serious about flight safety, surely they would be testing this to a scientifically acceptable standard. Then, once we have the data, and assuming that there is a problem, phone makers could introduce some kind of "do-not-send" code that planes can broadcast so that phones stay quiet during flight.

Spectroscopy can certainly help - but for me would bring to mind the various times putative signs of extraterrestrial life have been found - the Martian meteorites of 1996, or the current Mars rover "organic materials" findings - leading only to controversy and uncertainty. But hey, c'est la science.

This is about a month old, and completely passed me by, though the oldest image is actually from 2004. Growing up, this is something I was told we would never, never see - planets are simply too small, too dim, and too far away. We were told we'll never really know if they're even there.

So now we have pictures. Perhaps some day, if telescopes can be positioned sufficiently far apart in the Solar System, we can build an array that could image nearby exoplanets in fine detail. As for signs of life - that may be more tricky than a visual inspection - unless we see the glow of cities...

There's no need to trust a comment, it simply tells you what the author was thinking, as best as s/he could express it. It's less imprecise than no comment at all. Suppose you have a very simple function that does something clear - reading the code you can tell what it does and how. And suppose that function is called from several hundred different contexts in the codebase, but one of those contexts causes an exception in your simple function.

You could "fix" it, with a code change. But what if your fix goes against the assumptions of some other context where the same function is called? A comment that describes what the function "should" do allows you to decide whether changing the function, or its caller, will be more in line with the design of the overall codebase. This is particularly true with mature codebases where thousands of tiny fixes and tweaks have accumulated over time. There's a corpus of learning about why the code ended up that way that even in-depth reading of individual functions might miss.

Tests are good, and to be encouraged. But using tests in place of comments is rather like answering a question with a question. Tests provide confidence, they do not provide understanding.

Of course, you could do an in-depth analysis of every function, in every context it's used, and how it interacts with its callers and callees. While you're doing that, the guys who commented their code will be moving onto the next challenge.