We'd need a compelling reason to do a major surgery like that. It's possible to imagine scenarios, so it's great to have the option, but I think it would be a mistake to exercise it just-because. I say that for at least two reasons: (1) users hate change; and (2) the feedback loops between HN and YC are vital to both, so it would be bad to weaken them.
If I might suggest a major: (3) breaks SEO for potentially a very long time causing HN to fall out of search results to common queries on the major search engines. (I'm aware of site move tools and 301's, but we almost always see some decline on a domain switchover that takes time to recover)
Now that you mention it, I hardly ever see HN results on Google. Not that I would necessarily expect to — or maybe I’ve just learned to not expect them to.
But there is quality content here that doesn’t seem to show up in search the way Reddit and Stackoverflow content often show up in search.
Have dang/others looked into SEO? Or maybe it’s explicitly not a priority?
I've actually been surprised how quickly HN is indexed. When I see comments about a seemingly niche thing, I often google for more details - and often enough the comment that made me google it is among the top results.
I can see a world where drawing people in from search could be a bad thing. But I know I’ve found many things at Reddit and Stackoverflow (for example) by searching, when I very rarely frequent those sites (only ever visit from search results).
So I could imagine others similarly would find content here valuable via search queries.
Generally SEO should work fine if the migration is managed well (on Google at least). Google has a tool to verify ownership on both sites and notify them of the move explicitly.
That's really interesting, that you take advantage of symbiosis between the YC and HN functions. Have you ever published or written about the relationships and benefits to each? I'd be fascinated to read more. I'm sure some of it is completely obvious and some much less so. Curious to hear what would surprise me.
That introduces a problem where certain browsers ask the user to confirm the cross-domain interaction before proceeding (which I suppose mitigates various silent credentials theft and tracking problems) unless you do whole-page SSO, in which case you end up with cookie, anti-tracking, and container-routing problems.
What browser prompts for permission to follow a redirect? OAuth flows don't require cross-domain interaction in any of the ways that browsers have fought to reduce.
Redirects are fine as long as no container-type things are in play (since those don't necessarily carry the origin's cookies across the boundary), it's embedded cross-domain auth forms in an iframe that can cause a dialog.
$120M budget to bus 30,000 children to school? Does that sound like a lot, or is it just me?
That's $4,000 per child per year. At 180 school days per year, that's $22.22 per child per day!
At that rate, they could save many more millions by switching to Uber or some other ride sharing service.
It might be against the terms of service of the website you're crawling, which puts you in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (i.e. you're considered to be "hacking" them).
Well however you classify it doesn't matter, what matters is how the government classifies it. There's the tragic story of Aaron Swartz who was caught up in this non-sense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz.
1) It's illegal to impersonate law enforcement online.
2) It's illegal to commit fraud by pretending to be someone else online (when, for example, using someone else's credit card or opening a bank account in their name).
3) You can be sued for things that are totally legal, such as blemishing Google's brand my impersonate them and doing things that annoy people.
I wouldn't actually say it's a terrible idea, for 99% of users it should work better, faster, and easier for them, since -very- few people have the same habits as you.
However, having said that, I do otherwise agree with you, I also don't want to give my email out to all of them, and when I do, it may be one of a few address, depending on how much I trust them, or care about the responses. I'm given very little option in that regard.
It's hard to do completely cleanly -- building an independent IdP that uses iris scanning or other two-factor systems is totally possible, and actually relatively easy.
Providing anonymized addresses is harder, since your IdP wouldn't be contacted until after the user has selected an address. In that case, you'd want a browser extension that generated addresses conforming to some scheme @youridp.com and automatically filled or selected them in the dialog when using Persona. Totally doable, but that part requires getting out in front of the call to navigator.id.request.
Think of the ant's progress as a percentage. Every step he makes will increase his progress percentage across the rubber band. Therefore, if he keeps walking he will eventually make it to the other side. Am I missing something?
That's necessary but not sufficient for the ant to make it to the end. Imagine an ant walking on a fixed rope but reducing its speed, such that during the first second it covers one quarter of the rope, the next second covers one eight, and reducing its speed by half like this each second. It will never reach the halfway point of the rope, let alone the end, but the percentage of the rope that it covers always increases.
In this particular case it does make it to the end, just showing how the fact that the percentage always increases is not quite enough to show it.
Huh? I am posing a different hypothetical problem to illustrate how covering a steadily increasing percentage of the total length doesn't necessarily imply that the ant ever reaches the end.
If the rubberband doubled in length every minute, the ant would still make progress in terms of percentage, but never come close to the end of the rubberband. He would approach the 2% point -- the sum of 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + ...
In this case, he will eventually make it to the end -- the sum of 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + 1/5 + ... is divergent.
