ignostic

I disagree. I never saw an ad for gmail. The initial exclusivity was a gimmick, but it was dropped pretty quickly. As I recall any user could invite 10 people, including their own email accounts. Also I got like 25 more invites for reasons I can't remember after 3 people signed up with my codes. If you couldn't find someone with an invite code, you weren't asking the right people.

I remember having to actively manage my storage space on Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. Some email clients would delete your email unless yous said otherwise or paid after like 60 days. Google gave way more for free. And the promise of "more storage" has continued, because I've only had to manage my email space once in a decade, mostly deleting daily reports that included big attachments. Also I'd have to sort through spam emails, which I don't think I even have the time for today. And then there were no annoying banner ads.

That's similar to the whole reason Google search caught on. They had a clean interface, fewer ads, and slightly better results. They did next to 0 advertising back then, unlike Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, and Alta Vista. They just released a marginally better and significantly less annoying product.

The few products Google hasn't killed succeeded because they were legitimate improvements before their time or at least "good enough" alternatives back when people trusted Google more than Microsoft or other companies.

Hotmail and Yahoo mail were the primary contenders at the time. Both featured banner ads at the top. Because CSS and HTML were in their infancy, the height was generally fixed, and on smaller monitors it could take up 1/3 of the screen or more.

As I recall, Google had no ads. A small text ad, maybe, but I think that was added later. They also did a much better job of removing spam from my inbox. In addition they offered a lot more storage for free, which was actually a concern at the time. I'd have to go through and purge my email because simple emails with images were forcing me to manage my old emails. This became a problem over time with Hotmail, which I used, because I wanted to save some emails for their historical value or value to me.

Gmail jumped right on common features like folders and tags, and continued to expand further than other free email clients with better search functionality, easier multi-account SMTP and POP management through a single account, which I use for my 15 email accounts to this day, and automated filters that allowed me to make sure I saw certain emails or didn't see others unless I wanted to.

I think for most people it was just a clean interface, more storage, and better spam. But it also had features for more advanced users that made both tech amatuers and pros prefer it.

Not leaving Twitter, just not reading or posting and using alternative platforms.

Not to play word police, but I think that's what people meant when they said 'leaving'. But if you mean that it's not necessarily forever, I understand what you're saying.

of which the PI even calls for reproducibility

You mean like every study I've ever read? I can't recall the last time the conclusion didn't say something like, "In our study X appears to be associated with Y, but more research is needed to understand the relationship."

You're right, though, that this article leaves many questions unasked. We know that people who are schizophrenic are far more likely to smoke cigarettes, but there is evidence to suggest they're more likely to smoke before their first episode as well. So is tobacco causal? Probably not. Instead, there are probably precursor symptoms to diagnosable schizophrenia that drive tobacco use: anxiety being the main one. Anxiety and marijuana has already been studied with conflicting results, probably because it's hard to determine out whether people with anxiety are drawn to marijuana (or heavier usage) or whether heavy usage causes anxiety.

There are reasons to think marijuana use can cause schizophrenic episodes - sometimes a first episode - but that use may not increase the risk of developing the disorder when viewed in a 20-year window. In other words, it happens sooner. So according to the article the number of schizophrenia cases linked to cannabis use disorder increased by 4x. I'd like to know whether schizophrenia diagnoses overall changed significantly.

I am not saying there are no risks. But I am agreeing that the article does a bad job of analyzing the science.

If the state law and city law conflict, shouldn't state law take precedence?

I'm actually not too upset about what the sheriff did. How many people do you think would do differently if they had to take out a $150k loan to cover their predecessor's obligations and then had the chance to feed inmates for less?

My takeaway is the state law clearly needs further modernization. First, it doesn't matter if it costs more. A direct personal incentive to feed people as cheaply as possible directly incentivizes low food quality. There should be some standard of food quality in a developed country. Second, if up to $750k (maybe more) is up for grabs, the sheriff's position because too valuable, which entices corruption. Not that they can't and aren't already be crooked, but they don't need further incentives.

These incentives aren't theoretical. There was a sheriff arrested for essentially starving inmates while pocketing $220k. Of course he only spent a night there.

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/09/us/09sheriff.html

There are many allegations about the same thing, but generally judges aren't looking for a fight with the police or the sheriff.

Only on HN would you find people seriously arguing that focusing on product development is a good reason to remove analytics from a site. I've worked almost exclusively at companies where the product is the website, and initially this idea struck me as laughably naive. But let me be fair and think through this.

Tech startups do definitely have this problem of focusing on website analytics where the product is NOT a website or app. If we're generous we can assume many people here develop for these kinds of companies. Some waste a lot of time looking for up-and-to-the-right arrows for investors or trying to be data-focused when data about the website isn't actually all that important. Many of these companies might actually be better off with no analytics to waste time on. I'd still argue it's better to check in every once in a while to look for problems and ask yourself some questions.

The idea of removing analytics where the product is an app or a website is silly. This would be like arguing a grocery store shouldn't track what people are buying from their stores, and instead just source good products. You need to do both. What are you going to do when I ask what is or is not working? Tell me your feelings? Shake an 8-ball? Aside from detecting problems, analytics can be a jumping off point for innovation if you're smart about it. What can we do that's more like what's working? How can we improve this page type?

There are for sure people who over-focus on analytics (often on the wrong data points) instead of creativity, but these are not mutually exclusive. If I were to list the millions of dollars I've earned and saved via analytics this would be a very long post. Sadly, most of those millions were for other people, but it's a very valuable tool for optimizing and creating if you use it correctly.

Long story short, Google is using its search dominance to provide unfair advantage to other Google and Alphabet products. This is primarily done through features or "snippets" competitors cannot earn or even pay for.

Many of the details are not yet public. The individual investigations (some being conducted by states) are said to focus on multiple issues, but the one with the most discussion and evidence centers on the issue I described.

For example, google a flight you may take regularly, or just "LAX to JFK". Your first result after ads will probably be a Google widget. Can sites like Kayak or Expedia get that widget? No. Can they compete with Google showing real-time prices right in the SERP? No. It's the definition of anti-competitive behavior.

Google originally argued they don't advantage their own products. They've since admitted they do. Meanwhile they company is moving into more and more verticles and squeezing others out using its search engine as the weapon.

The vast majority of qualified traffic comes from search engines, and for my sites it's more like 95-97% Google. Many have argued the 90% market share figure is too low, because Yahoo and Microsoft include their internal searches to sound better. If Google decides to create a search widget competing with some function of my site, even if Google's version is really shitty, my business suffers badly. This isn't theoretical. Go Google "speed test." Your first result is a Google widget they added to search results. Ookla IMO has a much better product. But Google's widget is first for basically everyone who searches for a speed test. The M-Lab/Google test caps out for me well short of my real bandwidth. But I guarantee Ookla's traffic took a beating when Google decided to insert their own product at the top.

Unfortunately, Google has a lot of lawyers, and it's also reported that Barr is trying to rush this thing forward to provide a win for Trump. The actual career lawyers are arguing they can build a solid case, but they need more time. My fear is we'll see this thing rushed through and the changes will be cosmetic. And I do think Google's actions are a real problem. The most recent testimony before congress was pretty shocking. Facebook and Alphabet execs were basically admitting to anti-competitive behavior.

I think you're confusing internet marketing with the people who talk about internet marketing.

Marketing done right is basically the 'what people want' in 'build things people want' with a focus on what they're actually willing to pay for. I routinely kill ideas because the market is too small or profitability is too hard to achieve. Understanding your audience then building content and product around it is harder and more valuable than HN seems to believe. I've been very successful by developing this skill and learning how to build things. Good marketers have domain and industry specific knowledge that doesn't go viral in marketing circles because it's too specialized. I'm also not about to get on a public forum and tell my competition how I'm beating them.

Internet marketers who idolize internet marketing speakers are insufferable, I'll give you that. It comes from a good place of wanting to learn by listening to the experts. Unfortunately, these experts spend more time talking about how to be like them rather than how to build something people want. I think this also comes from a good place: let me help you achieve success like I have found.

Meanwhile the more technical marketers roll their eyes, get to work, and quietly make their companies money.

I know this is a bit cheeky, but HN sometimes has this comically simplistic view of other professions. It's as bad as the older C_Os who refer to all of dev and IT as "computer people." As someone who is both a developer and a marketer I can tell you both fields have depth and value, and neither is easy to do well.

Success often hinges on making something people want. Marketing done well is hugely helpful in determining both what people want and whether they perceive a product as a solution to their problems, and it can help guide product development with marketing analytics and other user data. I don't think I'd ever have been successful without a marketing background.

To take it back to the original point, I will never move to AMP. I spend a lot of time speeding up my pages through simplification, caching, and any other trick that makes sense (deferment, lazy loading, minification, combining, etc.) But there are a lot of reasons to not want your link to start with amp.google.com when someone shares my page.

* Any links to that URL rely on the good graces of the search engines to "count" for rankings and continue sending traffic. This is especially worrying if I decide to change standards. Will my rankings tank? Will the crawlers get totally confused and think I have a bunch of 404s? Both have been reported. These are not risks I'm willing to take with my sites that took so much work to build and promote.

* When someone shares my page I want my URL to be clear - not some google.com URL. That's both confusing for the user and bad for building a brand. Even if it was a cname to my own subdomain I'd feel better, e.g. amp.mysite.com

* Aside from the reason above, the lock-in is philosophically problematic. I intentionally use cross-platform apps on my phone because I don't want to be locked into an ecosystem. I don't foresee switching to Apple, but I didn't foresee switching to Android either. The point is that I could. This freedom is important to me.

* I don't trust that Google is committed to me and my content. Just look at the YouTubers getting screwed over by Google's lazy copyright policy. What makes you think they're going to suddenly staff up and/or care more on web content?

Anyway, as a writer, marketer, business owner, and web developer: fuck AMP.

It speaks to a poor understand of kids, schools, and reality. I think we often underestimate kids and their intellectual capacity, but this is just ridiculous. I started outlining how bad this would be for kids, but the list was getting so long that I had to stop. Let's just rely on common sense here.

I never felt I was "ravaged by capitalism," but I was never forced as a kid to compete in cutthroat markets where I was pretty likely to fail against adults who had fully-developed brains and more experience in every relevant field.

Yes, let's get kids more hands-on experience. But the feeling of failing as a kid is brutal. Don't set them up to fail. More importantly, let's teach them critical thinking skills so they can adapt. Focus less on facts and more on solving problems and finding their own solutions. This is possible without forcing them into a high-stress environment where many adults (with far more experience in markets and as consumers) fail.

There's a big button to switch.

https://championtraveler.com/travel-weather-map/travel-weath...

I'm not sure many people would be interested, but I'd have no problem doing a write up with the relevant source. I'll try to get to it next week after fixing all these bugs people are finding.

No, sadly. I had to use a scraper. I think that's part of the reason the tourist volume data was sub-par, so I really need to find a better data source.

Very helpful, thank you. I will look into these.

Ooops... looks like the scale on my graph somehow got thrown off. Thanks for the find! I've fixed Cuba manually but will go back through looking for the source of this problem.

Yeah, you've uncovered one where the average month in Google was not reported. Generally that means few people searching. In a few cases, sadly, that may be because the hotels are all full and there's no point to searching.

As I've said elsewhere, I think the solution to this is better data on travel volume. I have a lead thanks to this thread on some better data, which is very exciting for me and exactly what I was hoping for in HN.

That's great! May I ask where you're getting your data?

The search needs some work :) Sadly it is not popularity-based at all.

Hmm, sorry about that. I'll look into that, but for now the nearby cities of Amagasaki and Sakai are probably very similar.

https://championtraveler.com/dates/best-time-to-visit-amagas...

https://championtraveler.com/dates/best-time-to-visit-sakai-...

Thanks! Most places actually give far more specific date ranges, but San Diego is so temperate just listing the months made more sense.

"Powder" I guess is not the word I should be using in places like this, but the dates are usually accurate in places that get powder at all :)

what are your factors for deciding the best time to visit?

I used almost exclusively weather data. My scoring process is linked to near the date ranges I provide, so hopefully that is clear.

I would love to make better use of the number of people visiting. I had a really hard time getting additional travel data for what times are busiest, but I did my best with Google data. I'd even be willing to pay for tourist data by week or month, but I don't believe it exists on the scale I'd need it. If I find it, though, I'll be sure to iterate!

Lastly, I don't recommend bucketing NZ under Australia :)

Good call. I changed the heading to "Australia & Oceania"

It's says the daily highs in the summer are low 60s

Temperature numbers show the average for the week. E.g. the "high" on the dot is not the highest average day, but the average high. I double checked and these look correct. Check out the "heat index" adjusted numbers below for perceived temperatures, as Portland feels significantly warmer due to humidity in the summer.

the driest months are in the middle of the winter.

I'm confused here. If you're looking at Portland, OR the driest months are shown as being in the summer, so I'm not sure what you're referring to. Did you maybe look at another Portland?

Thank you! I am very glad others find the algorithm finding the "best times" to be accurate as well. This was definitely the hardest problem to solve as some places have two seasons, some have one, and I'm trying to find the best time on a scale relative to that place.

I'm aware not everyone will be satisfied the "pleasant weather" parameters I used, but I don't think there's another way to give a range quickly. Perhaps I could add some options on those pages. I'm not sure it would be worth the extra clutter and work to catch edge cases, though, as I'll never satisfy everyone's travel preference. Right now those looking for other weather preferences can use the map, but I understand clicking through several weeks is less than ideal. Hopefully the graphs on the page offer a bit more guidance for you.

One question: are you aware of any dataset that would help locate rare species? I can't guarantee I'll use it, but I love having lots of data handy.

Thanks! I agree on the search functionality. Right now this is just a WordPress search, but it would probably be wise to use Google's location API to help find the right place or the closest place to it. I have no experience here, but I can work on adding it.

Will have to think about the community option as well. I'm not sure what the best implementation would be, but it's a good idea. Thanks for the positive response and constructive feedback!

Okay, this is really interesting. I'm pretty skeptical of their methodology for assessing "statistical training." The setup could result in studying a different correlation entirely. For example, we might instead be studying the difference in a researcher who's unwilling to send a survey back without Googling or double-checking the work vs. a researcher who is busy or willing to be wrong... among researchers who are willing to respond in the first place. I don't expect that to be a productive line of discussion, though, so I'll try to ignore it.

I can't help but think of Thomas Kuhn, who argued that the institutions of science (from researchers to reviewers to the press) tend to ignore study results that conflict with the current paradigm. So as long as our paradigm is correct, science progresses extremely quickly. When our paradigm and assumptions are wrong we spend a lot of time floundering because we ignore conflicting data that should instead lead to refinements or more questions. We want to slap a label of right/wrong on something and move on to the next question. That mentality can really hinder our ability to assess anomalies later on.

This is similar to the problem discussed in the paper. When researchers decide a paradigm or test result is true or false with no further thought to the confidence level or details, you end up with a system where uncertainty and anomaly are both ignored. It then takes a tremendous amount of momentum to overcome the assumptions, which are sometimes several steps back into "accepted science" at that point. We might even throw out some good ideas from the previous paradigm as we transition. I'm not a physicist, but it seems like they're seeing this happen right now. We've certainly seen this several times with dietary health.

A decent analogy might be a hike with unclear trails and markers. At the first crossroads we might decide that left is the correct path to your destination. Once down that path, there are dozens of other paths. If we find trails that continually lead nowhere, the common human response is to keep trying well past the point where we should have gone back to our original assumption. When we finally decide to go back and try the right-side path we completely give up on the left side, despite the fact that we haven't checked every possible sub-trail on the left side.

Wandering may be impossible to avoid, even with good judgement, but we can avoid a lot of wasted time by looking back at each of our crossroads/assumptions, assessing the probability that each is correct, then moving forward in a way that's most likely to answer a new question while testing the previous assumptions. By and large this is not how science is working. We get a few studies, accept something is true, and then wander off randomly down the trails that look most interesting.

But I so badly wanted to share my opinion on /r/askhn rehashing commonly-held beliefs..

Am I pressuring myself too much to make the switch? How did you do it?

It sounds to me like you feel pressure to do this because someone told you that you should be a creator. So in that sense, yes, that's foolish. Instead pressure yourself to accomplish something you want to accomplish.

Let me use a parallel from my previous life as a technical/digital marketer. There was a prevalent idea out there that you should be "building your personal brand" all the time. Every speaker would tell me this, and they were the experts, right? So I wrote lengthy blog posts in my free time. I'd tweet and retweet and follow the right people, making the right connections, working for the right company.

I had built up to several hundred twitter followers, hundreds of thousands of pageviews, and was on a path to becoming a well-known voice in digital marketing. And I was absolutely miserable. I felt constant pressure to say something meaningful every day. When my blog posts received lukewarm reception or criticism it was very hard for me. I'd internalize it and try to use it as fuel to do better next time.

Then one day I followed a fantasy author I had just read. He had 100 tweets, 10k followers, and only following a few others. And he'd only written one book so far! He'd done none of the work I had to "build his own brand," but he was infinitely more famous than I was. The reason why was obvious: he'd contributed something of great value. I was out there rehashing knowledge and adding 160 character commentary, but it was all low-value high-volume stuff. And I wasn't contributing because I enjoyed it. I was doing it because someone told me I should from a podium.

Those people who talk about contributing are the contributors. Those people who talk about building a personal brand have the podium because they built their personal brand. They're approaching things from their perspective. But I was an introvert who hated speaking. I was working to a goal I would HATE.

So how did I make the switch? I thought about what I wanted to accomplish. That was a comfortable life with financial independence with very little attention from the outside world. I realized the speaking circuit was a high-investment highly-visible way to make money, so I abandoned my "personal brand" altogether, which didn't make my bosses overly happy. After all, I was getting their name out their as well.

Instead I created something that made money quietly. I enjoyed the challenge of it, and I felt like I was finally working towards something worthwhile. I worked most weekends, and honed my skills. I became a better writer and learned a lot more about coding. Knowing I'd started on the right path - a competitive but clearly potentially lucrative path - gave me confidence and motivation. Now, a few years later, I'm basically retired. I still have goals, but things that would have seemed ridiculous to me a few years ago seem within reach now.

If you want to cure cancer, you don't need to write a blog or contribute to projects. If your goal is to become a name in the software development community, maybe you do. But don't create for creation's sake. Think about what you want to get done, and if that involves making money be certain that you can do something measurably better than what's out there already.

TL;DR: Don't focus on 'creating' as your goal, but on what you want to accomplish

I thought this was a neat tool, and also an excellent demonstration of ReactJS working quickly.

In full disclosure I know the developer who built this, so I may be biased.

I do a lot of marketing, and I smiled seeing what you spent money on. I've been most of those places with bigger budgets and similar results. When I'm working with good companies it usually turns into something more like product management with some relevant search or contextual advertising.

We fell into a trap. We thought marketing meant we had to come at people sideways to get them to give us money. Turn’s [sic] out, the game’s just good and people want to play it.

One small suggestion: you're not doing a great job on the up/cross sale. I went to your site and added the game to the cart. But after reading about the expansion I WANTED the expansion. Make it easier for people to add them on. Every large ecommerce store does this. It's helpful to your users, increases RPS, and (when done right) relevant enough to not be annoying. Make sure to find a non-popup solution that won't get blocked by ad blockers.

I'll be buying the product and an expansion based on the Amazon reviews: good luck making some money!

I believe the trick is that they harvest "95 percent of it from the light they absorb", emphasis added. It's sort of like saying an efficient solar system only loses 5% of the energy absorbed by the solar panels.

Photosynthesis may be quite efficient internally, but it's not very good at capturing all of the available power. It really is 3-6%, where even cheap solar panels can achieve 15-20% or higher these days.