Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | tomjen2's commentslogin

Is something wrong with you? You are usually reasonable, intelligent and have a good point, but this - what on earth gives you the idea that only females by stuff?

I pay for last.fm to give me recommendations for music that I will properly like, then I buy the best tracks in iTunes. I would do the same with tv-shows if Apple would let me (non-us, don't even get me started). I am a male CS student, so by your comment I shouldn't spend any money at all.


>only females buy stuff?

He's talking about the teachers that are his customers, I think.


The "technologically disinclined females" are his market, but the "pay money for software" one stings no matter who you sell to.


I assumed he was referring to the target customers for his bingo card creator app, making the point that Reddit ads are only useful to people looking to reach redditors, which is a very narrow segment of the population.


1. He didn't say that men were worthless, just less interesting.

2. Women are responsible for 80% of discretionary spending decisions (http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/feb2005/nf200502...), so if you're arbitrarily refusing to target them, you're wasting lots of money.

Yes, I'm sure you can come up with examples of men making spending decisions. But marketing-by-anecdote is not as effective as marketing-by-data.


My parents had a simple rule they instituted after our food fights: You can eat what is on the table or go hungry - obviously if there was only 4 of some kind, I would only get to eat one.

That means that if I didn't care about a particular kind of food I didn't have too eat it, but on the other hand I wouldn't eat junk because it wasn't served.

The problem with eating everything that is on your plate is that it steams from a time when you could actually risk not being able to afford food tomorrow - today it just causes overeating.


I have seen how much time Facebook eats, so between Reddit and hacker news I don't have more to waste.

Granted I could properly just ignore it most days, but then people would be annoyed that I haven't friended them yet, send me messages that I would have to respond to, etc.

As for the "login using facebook", you can do the same with openid (heck facebook is an openid provider) - but without pissing of the part of your users that don't have an account or don't want to let you know it.


That might work, but why give them the ability to post stories initially? That way, to get karma they would have to be able to impress the insiders with what they have to bring to the table personally and can't just find some good stuff made by others.

You could even combine them, so that the threshold is different - you can post stories with karma of, say, 30 but you can't vote before you have hit a karma of 500.

I have lived in my country all my life, but I was 18 before they let me vote.


I think story submission is a really important way to add to the HN community. New users who can contribute what the community thinks are interesting articles are valuable users. Plus, if new users cannot vote until receiving a certain karma threshold, stories would only be upvoted by users with some familiarity with HN culture.


Like they sign the EULA for software?


Yeah kinda, but designed to actually be read :P

I was thinking it would contain the offending comment, a little message about it being flagged for not meeting community standards, then briefly list the community standards. A little word of encouragement and a button to show they've actually got the message- and off they go. I don't think it would need to be confrontational or make them actually agree to anything (since they might have good reason to disagree). But a gentle reminder about acceptable behavior could help new people get acclimated.


I flagged that article, but I guess I don't have enough karma for it to matter yet.

I properly also triggered the spam filter, because I just went to the thread and downvoted all the comments.


> I just went to the thread and downvoted all the comments.

Now why on earth would you do that ?


The arcticle is blogspam. The right one is here.

Okay that took nine.


Personally I don't care. Unless I am writting a letter to the Queen, I will use lose/loose as I fancy, and I hope no one here will waste a braincell trying to figure out the difference between effect and affect.

Correct grammar is for people who have too much time on their hands.


> Correct grammar is for people who have too much time on their hands.

Or people who care about expressing themselves clearly.


How do you clearly express the difference between homophones when speaking? It's obviously unnecessary for clear communication. Correct spelling is more generally used to convey educational status.


Correct spelling is more generally used to convey educational status.

...which, like it or not, is often a fairly reliable mental cue for determining how much importance to place on someone's opinion. Clarity is only part of the equation.


Of course, I engage in the practice myself. However, my point was about the subject of the post, homophones. If you have a way of distinguishing them while speaking, they aren't homophones. If you have a way of distinguishing them when writing, you have a poorly constructed phonetic alphabet.


Everytime I see someone misuse lose/loose, it makes me want to kill them with knives. It's important to be precise, you can't just work everything out from context!


Then come up with simple rules (no more than 8 words total) for when to use one or the other.

English has the most moddy grammar of all languages, with so many exceptions and shit - this is one of the things I hope disappear as the world embraces English.


You lose an object; unattached objects are loose.

Which doesn't cover every case I can think of, but demonstrates the difference. Also lose is a verb, loose is (almost always) an adjective.


Could we please keep politics of the front page?


Perhaps not, but you can ship a physical drive to Amazon and they will put it into the cloud for you.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: