That said. Fortnite. Yes, I still play it with friends and cannot play it on Mac or Linux. :(

I'm sure others have similar examples. Also there are just simple things like playing with friends and streaming on Discord. Anybody streaming from Windows always comes across smooth and HD to the other participants while anybody on Linux seems to consistently be received (I don't know where exactly in the chain the problem exists, so just "received", as it may not be a broadcasting or encoding problem, I'm not an expert in this) with a lot of artifacts and lower framerates.

There was a hook to get the funding (easy to get weapons funding in wartime). Recruiting the top talent. Urgency (beat everybody else to the punch). Outsourcing the building of infrastructure while you focus on the unique/hard part.

I'm not seeing how you can't see the parallels with startups.

The chances of those numbers occurring normally for all 3 vote counts together is just ridiculously tiny.

1. It's very easy to arrive at the provided values, if you make up some percentages that only go to a single decimal value (1/10th). Though doing so would result in vote counts that are decimal, as well. Then if you just remove the decimal from those values, the given percentages don't change enough to be incorrect, but even when taken to 7 decimal places, the new values are pretty clearly due to the rounding (44.2%: 44.1999989%, 4.6%: 4.6000039%).

2. While yes, the chance of these vote counts coming up in this kind of pattern is similar to the example you provided, even if you were using 0-9 for your example of 6 values, the total combinations is about an order of magnitude less than the total vote count provided here.

3. The finer point made is that there's a very small chance for one of the vote counts to show up as a number that so nicely fits the single decimal percentage, but in this case, all 3 vote counts fit this pattern. The calculations are shown for just 2 of the candidates (so not including the "other") resulting only a 1 in 100 million chance.

First, that you're even using Google search or Gmail is providing Google with data they use for marketing. On top of the data those services take in (what you search for, what you click on in the results, how much time you spend watching one video compared to another, what mailing lists you're subscribed to, etc. etc.) they are provided tracking information from the majority of sites you visit (either directly or aggregated from other services). That allows them to let their customers market directly to you or even provide data to other companies (for a fee) so they can market to you more successfully (than not having that data).

Even when paying for a service, the next step is to add ads back into it.

For example, as a paying customer Amazon Video used to let you just watch the movies/shows they had available. Then they started advertising movies that they didn't have available to stream, but you could purchase or rent them. Then they started adding in ads for content that was available on 3rd party services. Now they have in-content ads that you can pay extra to remove.

They're not the only company doing this, but it was just the first/easiest example I could call up that shows a progression of what a company does when they already have your attention/money.

You can see that Google has become progressively more aggressive in pushing ads in their search over the years. They didn't have ads at first, worked their way up to being the "standard" search engine, then started putting ads between results, eventually getting to where we are today. I can do a search today and the entire first screen of results (1080p, zoom level 100%) is just sponsored results. One usually has to scroll a full page to get to any "real" results, assuming that the top non-sponsored results aren't skewed by "the algorithm", which might include things like whether or not the target page uses GA, has ads that benefit Google, conform to what Google thinks is "relevant" (very loose term) basically.

I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to find an excessive amount of examples where services that started making money with a simple product you could pay for, then turned to subscriptions, then turned to add-ons for the subscription, then just started pushing ads into their service regardless if you're already paying or not.

The actual stats are that it reached, at maximum, with the fan running, 86.3% filtration. That's almost 3x the amount of crap getting through than an actual N95 certified mask (without needing a fan).

Even calling the mask "N95 Grade", which is an obvious statement that it didn't pass actual testing, is a major problem. It's vague enough that most will believe that it is equivalent to one that has actually passed testing. When it's supposed to catch 95% and catches 10% less, that's _triple_ the amount of crap passing through.

If you read through the FTC documents, you can see that they (Razer) knew it would not pass and so went with the strategy of getting people to believe that it was the same, without any proof.

The FTC could not prevent them from releasing the product or immediately cause them to remove it from market as Razer did not claim that it was N95 certified. Razer knew exactly what they were doing in getting around this and now they're paying the price for doing so, while the FTC sets an example for others that "if you even imply that your product is equivalent to being certified, we'll pin you for it."

Or better yet, can you elaborate on how any of the content up the chain from your comment that shows why Safari shouldn't be considered a user friendly browser?

0/10 indeed

This is another place where Pandora really set themselves apart, the Music Genome Project. Any given track that went through curation has a (possibly very) large set of attributes assigned to it. This song you liked, it has a heavy bass-line, noticeable amount of shuffle, light drums, syncopated rhythms, etc. That's far better (to me) than "you might like other songs by this artist" or "other listeners of this artist also listen to", where the last one gets really sketchy when there's not a lot of listeners for the artist.

I'm also curious how it treats listening to a track on a Spotify station that is mixed, where they transition in to and out of the track late or early, so you won't hear the full track, does that still count?

Heck, sometimes I'll get almost to the end of the track and skip to the next just because the track has a long tail and I want to get to something that has more energy, not the dwindling remains of the rhythm or some soft piano fade out at the end of a 130 BPM track that had a lot of energy throughout most of it.

If they're going to make all of these sometimes seemingly arbitrary judgements of whether or not I like something based on these weird things like "there's a common English word in the playlist title that also shows up in all these song titles we're going to recommend to you", at least a list or chart of how it works somewhere would be nice, so I can make more effective use of the system.

I think the real point to be made here is that this is part of the inner workings of the system, that most users of the system are unaware of. Hell, this article and the ensuing discussions do not leave it completely clear how much of the system works. Like, I despise that when I create a new playlist with a name, it recommends a bunch of tracks based on the name of the playlist. Sometimes that'll be tracks with words in the name of the playlist in their name or some other odd metric, like it'll add songs from an artist that has a song that happens to be the name of the playlist. If you don't puzzle this out for yourself, you're possibly creating a very UN-optimized playlist for yourself.

Where is your evidence or even subjective knowledge about Reddit being the company that's trying the hardest to make this work?

Also, to answer your initial question, regardless of anything else in your comment, the rate is absurd because it clearly falls under bait and switch. Build up your userbase, including offering your content from an API until you're basically the monopoly in your market and then start charging per month, per user, for API access. It's not like individual users are paying for their API access and feeding that API key to other apps to use. It's clearly meant to crush 3rd party apps, not facilitate Reddit making money through 3rd party apps. They can make far more money through their own massively ad infested app without providing any of the features that make other apps attractive, if they just crush 3rd party apps. In which case, why both charging for the API. As others have suggested, why not just shut it down or limit it? Simply because they want to appear as if they're not shutting out the world, while still doing exactly that.

May work great for some people. May be terrible for others.

The internet is a wonderful place for the open exchange of ideas, if you just treat them as such.