> Amazon's Fair Pricing Policy lets it remove the Buy Box (the "Add to Cart" button), or even suspend a seller, if they're offering their item cheaper elsewhere.
This kind of abusive practice needs to be banned in whichever countries it's still legal.
You can't really aspire to improve the situation if such things continue to be legal.
Isn't this like Costco requiring manufacturers to offer SKUs at Costco that are not sold anywhere else? Or mattress stores offering to match price knowing full well that the SKUs in their store are not sold elsewhere?
This policy feels like incentive enough for Chinese manufacturers to not build behind a single brand, so the policy will not apply. Materially the same product, different SKU under a different brand name.
Yes, Costco's proprietary program has different rules from Amazon's proprietary program. This is obvious.
I am suggesting that for a manufacturer larger than the very smallest, compliance is simple. They just create another SKU (or brand) and sell it for less off Amazon. Voila, the customer cannot purchase the same product for less money off of Amazon.
Why should it be illegal? Its their platform. If enough sellers don't like it and leave then Amazon will have to change their policy. There's several other platforms people can sell their stuff on.
Yes, because “free” market deregulation has worked out so well for consumers over the last 30 years.
“Don’t like the monopoly? You’re free to go elsewhere. No wait, there is no elsewhere. Oh well, I guess you must like it here then since you keep coming back. “
I really don't understand this monopoly argument at all for Amazon. What category of product is sold there, but nowhere else? Between big box stores, Wal-Mart, Target, eBay, B&H, local stores, independent online stores. I don't feel at all that I'm forced to shop at Amazon for lack of choice. Is this an American thing?
That part is fine. The fact that Amazon controls their vendor's pricing across the rest of their channels is a major issue though. It's price fixing tbh.
Because its a collective action problem. Being on Amazon is the least bad option for any individual business even though they would all be better off if they left simultaneously. IMO a primary purpose of market regulation should be to counteract these types of problems so that the market can move itself out of a local maxima and become more efficient overall.
mkdocs still uses "web fonts" for icons. This hack was required for compatibility with Internet Explorer, but is just cargo-culting these days. It's an accessibility issue in that users who disable web fonts (for readability) don't see icons, they just see unicode placeholders everywhere ("tofu").
You can use a bouncer on IRC to retain messages while you were offline. In reality, it's the same with every other network: you need a server which receives and retains messages while you're offline.
With WhatsApp, Discord, etc, that server is provided by Facebook, Discard respectively. With XMPP, Matrix, that server is the instance in which you have an account or where the channel is hosted.
With IRC, you use a bouncer. What makes IRC unique is that a bouncer is _optional_. You can even join a channel without an account and without a server which keeps logs while you're offline. This ephemeral level of joining doesn't exist in WhatsApp, Discord, XMPP, Matrix, etc.
And, btw, this is not a new thing: I first saw bouncers 15 years ago and they weren't even new back then.
I know there are technical ways to work around IRC's limitations, my point is that their mere existence adds more friction to using IRC so people move on to more frictionless places - and with chat apps being fundamentally social, that friction affects people who don't even mind the frictions themselves but their peers do (though personally i do mind these frictions - i do not want to bother with hosting anything or setting up bouncers or anything of the sort, i just want to pop in a channel, see what people were discussing, talk with whoever is there and/or share some of my own stuff and that's it).
Agreed. The lack of stored history for every user is a huge blocker for new users. They enter a pretty active chat but they see nothing. They wait 10 mins after asking a question and bounce.
All of our comms for https://pico.sh are on irc and we have tons of users join and leave immediately because the room feels cold / dead even tho we were chatting 10 mins prior.
Rather than claim a Discord-esque feel, you should point out the features you're referring to explicitly. Discord is infamous for its absolutely awful UX and hostility to open source ecosystem. I'm sure you're referring to neither of those aspects, but consider that those reading your reference might be entirely unfamiliar with the (presumably) positive aspects that you're actually imitating.
Infamous for it's bad UX? This thread is genuinely the first time I've ever heard this, all of my extended circles were overjoyed when Discord came onto the scene and displaced the patchy, hodgepodge UI's of Mumble, Ventrilo, IRC, Skype simultaneously. Both from a feature and a visual perspective it was a breath of fresh air for the programmers, gamers, and casuals alike for everyone I know. Maybe the only thing that still survives alongside it for the folks I know as a preferred communication channel is sporadic Whatsapp among the EU guys and iOS group chats for the Americans locked into the Apple ecosystem.
What about it makes it terrible UX for you? Feature set seems to get better every year as far as I'm concerned, inclusion of ads aside.
My single biggest complaint, other than it being an Electron app, is their insistence on changing the notification sounds seasonally. I do not want surprise Halloween music when I'm trying to start a video call with someone, nor do I want it themed. You can offer it, sure - I get that it's free, and they're trying to keep users on their platform - but it's just grating to me.
I love Mumble and IRC. You could put a gun to my head and I still wouldn't use Discord. When all these proprietary chats are dead and the kids have moved on to something else, Mumble and IRC will still work. They are eternal. Anything proprietary and centralized can't compete with that. IRC outlived AIM and MSN and so on.
my latest annoyance is the way they keep making the gift nitro button bigger and more likely to be where you tap when trying to send a message. I don't know what their PMs are smoking to think that gifting nitro is something people do so often that there needs to be a permanent flashing button on screen to do it.
To be honest, I don't think most people's first interpretation of someone's claim to a "Discord-esque feel" when describing the UX of their open-source IRC client is that it's therefore riddled with dark patterns to sell an upgraded version of the service. I think it's probably more likely that they were referring to the general layout (eg: having circular server icons as a vertical list on the left hand side). I'm guessing that that's also why they mentioned Slack, since that has the same layout too.
It's laden with ads and microtransactions, but if you remove those (shady scripts abound for those who don't want to do it themselves), the UX is one of the best on the market. There's a reason so many alternative chat clients are basically Discord clones without the microtransactions (for now).
Its open source hostility doesn't really change how well it works. You can copy the good parts without the awful parts, like so many people and companies are already doing.
Laden with ads is an overstatement considering Quests are tucked away in their own menu.
The problem with those many alternate chat clients is that they either require self-hosting, making them a nonstarter for probably 95% or more of Discord's userbase, or their lack of monetisation makes them non-viable long term.
You are right. To be perfectly honest, the only thing I took from Discord at all (it's UI is generally awful yes, I agree!) is the support for multiple servers. But now that I think about it some more, that's not really even a unique feature.
Anyway, you are right. But that's more about Ahoy and less about Parley. Parley was just answering the question of "What if IRC was federated, and what if it borrowed some ideas from Salty.im -- DNS discovery + WKID".
Wasn't IRC always federated? There were different networks, but each network was a federation of independent servers.owmed by independent operators as far as I understand...
> A federated network is a system where independent networks, servers, or organizations agree to follow common standards so they can talk to each other without giving up control to a single central company.
In traditional IRC networks, you end up forming a spanning tree of servers that belong to a common name, "the network". However control remains in the hands of the operators of that network.
The "control" was basically permission to connect (and thus share messages/users/etc) between multiple servers. So I see your point, you couldn't just randomly connect your server to someone else's server in quite the same way email worked, but at the same time the servers could be easily owned by different people running different software.
> the only thing I took from Discord at all (it's UI is generally awful yes, I agree!) is the support for multiple servers.
To be sure, Discord "servers" are not servers in the sense the word is used in virtually every other context. They are more like group chats that share a hosting location. If anything the hard part for Discord is making them seem disparate enough that someone might rent their "own server".
...But one of these things is not like the others.
"Anyone can start a server" is only true when you're lying about what a "server" is. (Or redefining it to the point of usefulness.)
A Discord "server" is just a defined chat namespace. All the Discord chat "servers" live together on the same actual load-balanced VMs or whatever on the physical servers they run.
It's honestly the thing that's annoyed me most about Discord from the very beginning, long before they introduced the ads and the microtransactions and the mandatory doxxing.
At least 4 people I know. It's super easy to put up an instance of ergo now. I was using one for LAN communication during internet outages for a while.
IRC sure hasn't! Well, the IRC most people are using, anyway. You can work around these by using things like bouncers and third party HTTP hosts and assuming everyone else has a client that inlines media.
Multimedia transfer is still a practical impossibility, for better or for worse.
Mobile IRC works, sort of, if you don't mind spamming the channel every time you lose connectivity when you drive into a tunnel or when your phone goes to deep sleep. Again, you can set up a bouncer for that.
I welcome the new changes in IRCv3 and hope that one day soon all IRC users will be able to use the features everyone else has been using for fifteen years or so.
There's a zeroth step missing from both the Quickstart and Full Set Up: install php-fpm, configure it, and configure your http server to serve using it as a backend.
It seems to be taken for granted — that's something you'd already have in place if you're already serving applications in PHP, but would have to figure out on your own if you haven't served anything in PHP so far in your life.
It's a tricky problem. How far back in the stack do you go? The README assumes that you know how to use git to check out the files - or that you can easily save them from the repository. Should it include that as a step in the tutorial?
As I say in the linked article, it depends on what sort of user you have. For a "getting started with Raspberry Pi" document, you might well want to include how to insert an SD card etc.
I'll have a think about the best way to help people figure out if they're running PHP. Thanks for the feedback!
Installation instructions usually (should) have a “prerequisites” section. You don’t have to explain how to install the prerequisites, but they should be listed.
Feedback and issues you need to troubleshoot with your projects is a good indicator of your audience level, and from my experience it’s helpful to understand that documentation is always under development just like the code
from experience in ENT support where i was sending instructions & quick fix scripts to technically capable persons, you will learn very fast when you’ve missed the mark with your documentation / instructions. tons of times i had ready made solutions that i thought “just copy and paste and go what could possibly go wrong?” and was caught off guard how often a little too much knowledge lends to confusion. i am not blaming the users here it is my fault that i didn’t explain things like “no don’t change this date in the fix that is a special date when the issue could have earliest occurred and it’s there to avoid grabbing more than we need to parse”, but i didn’t tell that so of course people changed it to all sorts of dates thinking they had to
such feedback and issues also got me way better about writing code that avoided chances for such mistakes as i didn’t want users to have to read a novel to understand what to do; it’s a fine balance between what to solve with documentation and what to solve with code
My rule of thumb for my READMEs: there should be a list of commands, that when executed in order and in a clean machine, result in the software doing something useful. Yes, this includes `git clone`.
If there's something the user might already have, like the webserver, I add a comment "skip this if you already have a web server". If there are any shortcuts that make it not production-ready, it's time to break out the ALL CAPS.
Limiting the operations to simple commands also helps me keep honest about the instructions (no hidden assumptions), and forces the software to be minimally testable.
I used to think it was a struggle to walk the user through introductory EM physics.
But, it turns out that was a walk in the park compared to explaining how to acquire and isolate the dopants, not to mention building up the pure silicon wafers.
If Windows/MacOS doesn't ship git by default, then yes, that should be included. On Linux, the people who are running Linux From Scratch can probably infer what the problem is.
I don't know about these days, but at some point neither Debian or Ubuntu Server shipped with Git. You can still find tutorials that start with apt-get update and apt-get install git-core
In my company that comes be default. Also, `git clone` helpfully includes a canonical path to the repository, in case you found the README laying around somewhere.
Otherwise, yes, I would include apt install for the dependencies, which is also incredibly valuable to make explicit. The only tricky part is what package manager to reference.
Generally it seems like good READMEs assume you have a compatible OS ready to go, but will give you a summary of all commands to get a working setup from there.
Even as someone working with PHP I would prefer if the project provides we with some guidelines for setup. Especially if it requires some specific version or extension. Ideally the whole dev environment should be containerized. Then you would again require people to understand and use that layer, but depending on the projects complexity definitely something to consider to make it easier to work with
It's a really dangerous precedent that we say "a rogue computer did X". Especially when the police does so.
We don't say "a rogue knife stabbed someone", or "a rogue scalpel botched a surgery". There's a human behind this, who set everything up. They might have lost control at some point, but when someone loses control while driving, we don't say that "a rogue car crashed into some kids" and call it a day. When a surgeon "loses control of their scalpel" we question whether they're qualified to perform surgeries.
The person responsible who lost control is still responsible for losing control, and it's dangerous precedent that we pretend otherwise for these cases.
A rogue knife could potentially stab someone if it was secretly a people-stabbing robot which was unknowingly activated, causing it to move towards people to stab. What AI companies are doing is handling this robot that they know can potentially stab people, and trying to convince it nicely not to activate because they don't know what the activation trigger is and how to remove it. "Rogue" doesn't really make sense in this context.
> We don't say "a rogue knife stabbed someone", or "a rogue scalpel botched a surgery".
Well, yeah. It's almost as if LLMs are different from knifes.
> The person responsible who lost control is still responsible for losing control.
That's valid, and yet one can advocate for AI companies to be culpable for actions of their agents, while still admitting that rogue AI agents are a thing that exists.
It is different perspectives on the same thing I guess. On a global statistical level it is risk = impact x likelihood . On a local level your controls need to be appropriate for the risk. If accepting those risks globally goes without a consequence and companies accept a huge risk appetite, it is time for law enforcement and policy making to correct this in the interest of third parties impacted.
Yes a judge a Canadian woman was not able to book a hotel since her credit card was cancelled. And other services as well anything needed a credit card to work.
"You start to lose services from American companies, Amazon, Google, potentially Apple, whatever it may be," she told Morning Edition. "Completely randomly, though, you don't know when something's going to happen."
One of those moments came during an ordinary moment at home.
"I went home and Alexa wouldn't talk to me," she told NPR's Steve Inskeep.
Her credit cards, issued in the Netherlands and Canada, were canceled. She has managed to keep some bank accounts, but says her banking services are extremely limited and even small transfers can be blocked.
Scope of the sanctions is unclear, but it seems unlikely to me. This appears more like "US companies can't do direct business with the ICC organization."
E.g., the ICC ditched Microsoft last year, likely foreseeing this type of action.
These reactions are reasonable and are largely due to the US sanctions imposed on European judges at the ICC.
Nicolas Guillou, the French judge, has had all his bank assets in the US frozen; he has been banned from all US digital services (Google, Apple, Visa, Mastercard), as have many of his familly just in case.
There are literally proven war criminals who are not treated in the same way.
Repeating a comment I belatedly made in another thread about sanctioned people:
Looking at it from the reverse side, I am not sure many people are aware of the underlying business risk: if you do business with this individual (or others in a similar situation), you risk being associated with them and suffer similar consequences.
Question to the HN crowd that sells services online: do you check/vet every one of your customers against the Entity List?
I know AWS and similar sites have no such concepts, but other than those, this is an existing option of most kinds of service providers.
Realistically, most providers can't even allow you to consume $10k usage if they don't have the certainty that you can pay up. Prepaid is what gives them that certainty.
I thought Microsoft used to give student's some free Azure credits - say $200. Rumor is, Microsoft was very good at pulling the plug the instant you went over that billing limit.
This kind of abusive practice needs to be banned in whichever countries it's still legal.
You can't really aspire to improve the situation if such things continue to be legal.
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