I've never understood the real significance of automatic bill pay. Once a month, within 30 minutes, all bills can be paid online at each website manually.
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It's funny how people are scared about Google this and Google that, yet are okay with credit bureaus and credit card companies selling one's information to third parties. Very funny, I say.
I am not OK with credit card bureaus in any sense of the word. I hate their guts and I think their shitty technology has royally screwed me. And selling my information is certainly not OK. I use Google a lot, I just know that depending on one organization to fulfill one or more services often leads to shitty service or a very serious power imbalance. For example if your search results change their is nothing you can do because Google owns search so they don't even have to bother explaining it to you. Generally it feels like The Google is the most wonderful magical benevolent dictator ever. Still a dictator.
Livefyre was one of their early users. Every comment submitted into any comment widget hosted by Livefyre was sent over to Impermium for spam analysis. Impermium had a pretty cool 2 phase process where they'd give you a rough spam score within seconds and then a more accurate score within minutes.
Livefyre had some sophisticated behavior as a result. Comments were always pushed live to other page viewers immediately while simultaneously sent to Impermium, then revoked (via live update) if either the first or second pass through Impermium resulted in a spam indication. Email notifications weren't released until the second pass indicated nonspam.
Not sure if Livefyre still uses Impermium today or what this buyout may mean for them, but I always thought the concept was pretty cool.
Yep, can't find the game. This leads to the #1 thing to do is make it easy for people to get your game. Should have double checked that you had a good URL.
These content paywalls are killing me. I can't even read the story. Even one of my local newspapers decided to put up a paywall. They're losing a lot of readers because of it.
Gannett has been trying an interesting concept on some of their web publications (Military Times, Army Times, Etc.). They have certain content that is marked "premium" that requires a subscription. You have three options to view the article: Subscribe on a monthly basis, subscribe for the day, or watch a 15 second advertisement. Watching the 15 second advertisement will give you 24 hours of access to any premium article. I'm sure this is done on other publications as well, but I thought it was pretty smart.
I'm the OP. FT seems better at the paywall thing than NYT, for example. I couldn't quite figure out a way to link to the article that didn't bring up the paywall. (Admittedly I didn't try that hard).
Do something like the following: right click on the link, click "search with Google" in the context menu and navigate to the first link on the search results page.
I have a subscription to a couple of news sources. I'm not super willing to just subscribe to things that show up on HN. I know FT is highly regarded, but the only articles I've ever successfully read on it are those bizarre fetishistic lunch interview things.
There is some sort of balance you need to strike between porous and impenetrable with a paywall. FT is too closed to be compelling to me, and probably a lot of other people.
More broadly, if you're putting a link on HN, it's your responsibility to make sure people can read it. If they can't, don't post it, please.
The first problem is inertia. You need a critical mass of users before anyone will bother to accept a particular payment processor, but users don't sign up if no one accepts the payment service. This is the reason why people still use Paypal.
The second problem is fraud. If someone commits fraud over a matter of $0.20, what amount of resources can you really afford to spend investigating it? A micropayment processor that thoroughly investigates fraud will have to charge the sellers a large chunk of the payments they process, but one that doesn't will be bankrupted by fraudsters.
Crypto currencies have some potential to break this by changing who eats the loss in the case of fraud. If it isn't the payment processor (or there is no payment processor) then micro-payments become viable. You still have problems with e.g. malicious software stealing bitcoins, but they're different problems that don't break micro-payments.
Except it's a sucky paywall for new readers/people who don't frequent the Financial Times. I don't recall ever reading anything on the Financial Times before; in fact, it's not even a familiar news source for me. And their paywall just prevented me from even reading one article. My reaction was to hit the back button and go check out the comments on HN for a summary/discussion. I'm not going to pay for something before becoming familiar with what I'm going to be buying. Their paywall just isn't a friendly experience for new readers.
