matnewton85's comments

The Australian government does the same thing; and also permits BNPL.

BNPL has been thoroughly, thoroughly investigated by the Australian government because people have the same conclusion as the HNers here - 'they must be doing something wrong'

But if anyone does what I do, which is to look more deeply into the topic, they'll discover that this is actually the least predatory form of consumer debt (if not the least, close to it), and for this reason governments are content to continue with it.

I'll quote my comment elsewhere:

"BNPL providers are held to far higher standards than Credit Card, Personal Loan, or Payday Loan companies. I'm not sure I understand the HN addiction to attacking them.

Unlike all the examples above, Afterpay doesn't charge interest, has capped late payment fees, and has a very low debt ceiling. It's the perfect way for younger people to learn how to manage debt."

I should have mentioned that their late payment fees are (very) low.

If you want to get rid of BNPL, you'd have to get rid of literally all forms of debt - BNPL is far and away the most consumer-friendly form of debt that I know of.

BNPL providers are held to far higher standards than Credit Card, Personal Loan, or Payday Loan companies. I'm not sure I understand the HN addiction to attacking them.

Unlike all the examples above, Afterpay doesn't charge interest, has capped late payment fees, and has a very low debt ceiling. It's the perfect way for younger people to learn how to manage debt.

I’m down nearly 30lbs in 3 months through intermittent fasting.

Here’s my M-F routine :

7am: weigh myself, text results to my father

Breakfast: Nothing, but I drink a flat white just because I want to.

Midday: large bowl of plain unsweetened Greek yoghurt (no additions, which is key - the addition of fruit or other things is what sets off my sugar-loving monkey brain to go seek more). This is low carb yet filling and satiating. I tried out every single one available in my area until I found the one I could settle with. Sometimes I eat a low carb chocolate, ive found a bunch in my local area which I like.

Afternoon: sometimes go for coffee again and add a snack to that

Dinner: whatever I want, which is nice, but generally it doesn’t involve anything deep-fried and is mostly home made. Sometimes it’s a rice dish, sometimes pasta, sometimes meat with veg.

After this meal I’m free to eat whatever I want. If I want to eat dessert, I can, but just need to remember ... I’m texting my weight to my dad tomorrow.

Weekends I can eat anything at any time but also need to remember that Monday is coming and I will be weighing myself. So, I indulge a bit but not TOO much.

There’s no real exercise component here, just the occasional run every week or two.

I’ve also learned not to self-shame. If you fall off the horse, don’t whip yourself into a lather. Just say ‘ok, it happened, tomorrow is another day. Let’s keep going.’

At first, I really struggled at around 3-4pm and was constantly snacking bad things. The thing that’s has helped has been to focus on redirecting my behaviour instead of stopping it. Which is why I now know every single place within a 5 mile radius that sells low carb snacks, the price of each one, and which is my favourite. I also started drinking kombucha for when I have that urge to drink something. One small snack (always less than 10g carbs) is generally enough.

The BEST thing about this above routine is how little mental energy it takes. I don’t track carbs besides paying attention to labels in the act of purchasing, I don’t have to think about lunch, don’t have to whip myself into exercising.

Each week has gradually become easier in terms of maintaining habits. I now know I’ll keep the no-breakfast plus plain yoghurt for lunch routine, but at some point I’ll need to stop losing weight .. so..

Less powerful than you’d think. If you’re familiar with the zones of popularity of his main newspapers, you’d see that they correlate very nicely with Labor-held electorates.

(Just think about your own personal experiences: in a typical Liberal electorate, which paper is the most read? In a typical Labor electorate, which paper is the most read?)

You might call it the Murdoch Paradox.

correction, I'm a whitehat SEO who fights blackhat SEOs.

Ever tried it? Trust me, it doesn't work.

Hey Jacques

Sorry for the delay, I don't come to HN very often.

I sleep quite easily at night. Google is very bad at what they do when it comes to spam. They deliberately under-resource their spam team and have maintained a fairly incompetent hack managing said team for a long time now. Their motivations? Anyone's guess, but that's the fact of the matter.

Search for payday loans and this result comes up on page 2:

http://www.suryavanshi.org/disadvantages-of-payday-loans.php

This page is spam, pure and simple and falls foul of Google's own guidelines.

> Who are you to determine what a low quality website is?

Google puts out these guidelines so people can determine the quality of websites. Pure and simple.

Unfortunately, their own algorithm isn't good at recognising these bad actors.

This is where Negative SEO comes in. As stated elsewhere, nSEO is only genuinely possible where a site is sitting on the edge (as above) OR, unfortunately, to attack small businesses.

I'm NEVER going to attack a legitimate business. I AM going to attack spammers, and YES my clients do benefit.

I don't like spammers, you don't like spammers, and it just so turns out that Google is not so great at dealing with them, mostly because they don't care that much.

Quite frankly, I'm not going to sit around and wait for them to haul their asses into gear 18 months later to fix it.

I don't just do nSEO, I also report spam listings to TripAdvisor and any other site who listens to my spam notifications. Of course my competitors benefit when I remove spam to their advantage. Why shouldn't they?

Go for it dude, not trying to rank it for anything.

Why are you even arguing with this? Do you have any experience with SEO?

I use negative SEO regularly to drop sites out of the top 10 in Google. I only target low quality sites that shouldn't be in there anyway, but Google in all their algorithmic wisdom has ranked them, so... I knock them out.

Low quality 5 page Adsense sites shouldn't outrank actual, legitimate businesses so it's just a case of click click, BOOM. I never target the actual competitors of my clients.

Negative SEO is part of the toolkit of any competent SEO professional nowadays. It just has to be.

This article expresses perfectly why:

a) I'm very cautious about working with American companies b) Why my contractors nearly all bitch about working with American companies (I use a lot of contractors on oDesk and they tell me the same thing).

America's great but the lack of trust in business is the one thing that really grates on me.

"Companies like Verizon don't casually threaten legal action, this is really getting to them."

Are you sure? As someone who has dealt with more than 40 different threats of legal action from major companies, I would have guessed that this is more or less their default response.

Great point.

Ok, I think this is just a perspective thing.

You're (most likely) coming from a CS background, I come from a user testing background.

If someone sits me down and says "use my site, have a conversation with a 13 year old Ukrainian".. I start having a conversation with a 13 year old Ukrainian.

Someone sits a CS major down with Eugene, the 13 year old Ukrainian, he'll drop references to AI reserch from the 60s. Something that probably one or two Ukrainian kids could ever answer.

I had an actual conversation with Eugene Goostman as if I was meeting a 13 year old from the Ukraine.

And Eugene nailed it. He introduced himself, ask me polite questions, I asked him polite questions, and we developed a slightly broken conversation, but yes, a conversation.

The idea of this is not "try to break the robot", the idea is "if you ran into this robot in real life and it was masquerading as a human, would you be tricked?"

That's the REAL question.

Wanna quote the second line of his post?

>Yes and they get a salary for this like they would at any other company.

> If they take on a below market salary and or additional risk exposure in join a startup they should negotiate a package (be it options or otherwise) that adjusts for that.

to me, it just sounds like an S. The monthly business model isn't appropriate in ALL niches...

This is easily done with Zapier, too.

Love my Zapier.

That's Yuan very high price...

Agreed. One of my sites is ranked 490,000 or so in Alexa. The worst month in the last year was 165,000 visits.