samsonasu's comments

Public libraries pay a different, greater license fee for ebooks they can lend vs physical books . The licenses also come with restrictions about number of lends, time limits, etc.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenduffer/2019/01/30/librarie...

I dont think average folks care about transparency, they mostly care about the bottom line. I would bet that if you offered a black-box $50/month with no explanation and a transparent, easily understood $60/month people would choose the cheaper option 9 times out of 9.

I agree. There's probably a line somewhere but let's get a little closer to it than literal Nazis celebrating a murder before the hand-wringing starts.

I'm pretty sure the "no harm no foul" defense doesn't hold water in a fraud case. A Ponzi scheme is illegal the entire time (because it's fraudulent) even though the early investors receive returns.

What would be so bad about at&t offering a service that banned fraudsters from calling you? Or if the USPS refused to deliver mail that said "URGENT TIME SENSITIVE" on the envelope unless the sender could prove it really was urgent?

As someone with elderly relatives who've fallen for scams over email (which major email providers already do block, automatically), I would celebrate both of those outcomes.

Id love to agree with this but my experience differs on modern stacks. We so often mock or stub APIs, use a web driver that's pinned to a certain version of WebKit, test against virtual dom, etc that it's hard to get real reliable test results that don't break all the time.

But I suppose that's the problem; we don't have the time to fix bugs related to the environment that crop up when no code changes so we insulate our tests from the environment by design.

This reminds me of when Urban Airship shut down their free transactional push notification service a while back. It turns out theres so much more money in the marketing side than the transactional side (profit center vs cost center), and if you're going to run a marketing company it doesn't make sense to give away a service to people who will never become the type of customer you want.

We've been referring clients to mandrill for a long time on many different project and although a few have had enough success to hit the level where they start paying, for the most part it's been just a giveaway. It doesn't make it any less painful for those clients that we now need to switch (especially the few that are using the inbound features - ugh) but I can see where they're coming from in this change.

Firing people is risky for the person potentially being fired, not for the owners of the firm. Growing and shrinking over time is part and parcel of running a consultancy. That's why you see it all the time, and I'll bet if you look closer at the ownership during layoffs you'll find that they very rarely miss a paycheck and usually escape unharmed.

The fact that it's an unpleasant reality doesn't make it any more risky than e.g. having to pay taxes.

The problem is that while they charge a flat rate monthly, that doesn't include repairs and one-off charges which get passed on to the landlord. Maybe doing a combination of property management and home warranty would be valuable, but neither industry has the best reputation IMO.

I think we as a group tend to underrate the power of marketing because it doesn't make s lot of analytical sense, but marketing is hugely important as anyone who had founded a business learns very, very quickly. This is just more anecdotal evidence, but the effect the hunger games movie/books have had on female enrollment in archery clubs is staggering: http://www.npr.org/2013/11/27/247379498/more-girls-target-ar...

Here's another article that purports the rise (and now domination) of women in forensic biology to be predicated on the media's portrayal of the career and the large number of female role models in the field.

There is nothing special or innately "male" about video games, and I think the real thesis of the article is that player demographics are much more evenly split than we think; we just assume video games are for boys because the video games that girls play (candy crush, the Sims, etc) aren't marketed as being "video games" at all

I love Coworking and even I help run a space here in Madison. I should've mentioned that as one of the major things that keeps me sane.

I've been objectively successful as a single founder over the past few years, so its definitely possible. I've hired, fired, pivoted, and made more money than I made mistakes but I always felt the lack of a cofounder has been holding me back.

There is only so much emotional weight I can offload onto my amazing wife, and although some of the people I've worked with (contractors, clients) have made amazing contributions - technical, business, ideas, and emotional - at the end of the day I can't shake the fact that I'm alone. I bear all the responsibly for my mistakes and all the rewards of my successes, and even though I've been lucky to have more of the latter the emotional toll of the rollercoaster has been tremendous. When your wife or parent tells you you're doing great or that everything will be OK it helps, but the impact is diminished because of course they are going to support you.

My most successful (although not my most profitable) projects have been collaborations with other talented people both technical and nontechnical, and while the author is certainly correct that a cofounder isn't necessary, I would think long and hard doing anything alone.

Their data /is/ open to snooping. We'll see if their user bases plummet. For some reason I doubt it.

No. Don't downplay people concerned with privacy who noticed a series of obvious, blatant actions over a period of literally decades as cynics or conspiracy nuts.

You are picking on people; we really did know, not "know." It was obvious, it remains obvious, and the fact is that its going to continue and get worse despite the revelations of this week, unless we do something.

Painting rational people who notice and complain about government overreach as paranoid is precisely what enables the expansion of these policies. You should be asking what you can do now to help rather than setting us up to be further discredited or ignored by implying our years of complaining weren't substantiated until just now.

I haven't seen a way to edit CSS on the before and after pseudo elements in the web inspector. If I'm missing something I'd love to know about it.

Cool demo, made even cooler because they stuck "contenteditable" on the style tags so you can play around with the shapes to see how they work right in the browser.

Good story. Reminds of when I fixed a PlayStation 2 that wouldn't turn on by replacing a blown diode in its power supply. I wonder how many complex electronics are out there Sitting in landfills just a single diode away from working perfectly.

SEEKING WORK: Phoenix AZ area or remote

Android/Rails programmer by preference, but I have experience almost everywhere. I'm looking to help out small to medium size companies on a project basis. I like to work with your team to improve the code, fix the tough bugs, and help your programmers improve, but I can also take over the project as a whole if necessary.

Contact info in my profile

This sounds like a terrible idea. I don't know why people decided to start deploying "PDF Applications" but it's a terrible idea. Go look at UPS's api documentation. It's a pdf "app" that requires you to install the most recent version of adobe reader to "run," and then it is slow and much harder to use than just a regular pdf or heaven forbid, html.

If anyone can tell me why anyone would ever use this technology over html, please, I'd love to hear it.

The last time you paid a service charge was the last time you gave your bank $12.

Even if you got dinged $2 per ATM withdrawal you could take money out once a week and pay less in fees. Your situation sounds like highway robbery to me.