I believe someone is working on an emacs in guile. That's the right approach. I don't believe it's necessary or sensible myself. I like Scheme a lot. But Emacs resembles CommonLISP more than Scheme so for Emacs future CommonLISP seems the most sensible option.
Anyway, we're ages away from any of that. Although I do believe we'll see a more capable LISP inside Emacs within a few years now.
I believe there is a google summer of code project to this effect, but as has been said previously in this thread "I'll believe it when I see it".
I think it more likely that Emacs-Lisp will continue to grow on its own incorporating its own threading support and continually reducing the motivations for a rebase overtop of Guile.
> One of the things that prompted me to do this is that all the other attempts seem constrained in ways that were not really useful to me.
Running inside tmux seems pretty near perfect for the kind of stuff I do. What are you looking for that tmux doesn't address? Is it just being able to run on machines without ssh, because that seems like a pretty minor edge case.
ok. interesting you think that. I do extensive team development with gnu screen but there are still times when I am trapped in my X window and behind my firewall and bringing someone into my machine would be an extensive job.
What I'm working on has 2 use cases:
1. sharing document editing from inside your local machine's emacs with someone else on the Internet (this includes things like quick code review or any of the use cases for etherpad)
2. sharing data from your emacs with the Internet in some way, for example with a mobile app. The current mobile apps for emacs data all have to rebuild the application logic all the time, well, an elnode based org-mode app wouldn't have to do that (for example). In the article I also use the example of the diary.
And that's exactly what I'm working on right now. It won't quite be an etherpad because doing constant diff is not a trivial thing... but bi-directional "live" editing session over the web will be possible.
I am a couple of weeks away from having something.
for the record, robin wauters didn't approach us to verify anything in the story and the accusations are untrue and misleading.
we focus very hard on getting people to talk to each other and interact and we have a number of features on the site, driven by users, that make that happen.
Ironically, the user featured in the pic is one of the longest standing and most active on WooMe.
"wooMe is the most fun you'll have online for FREE!"
"get started now! it's 100% free and takes 30 secs to sign up"
Doing a Bayesian update on the claims of automated bot messages, with the fact that the company is willing to make obviously untrue statements on its front page, it seems reasonably likely that they would be willing to lie in other places too. I realise that claiming to be free probably increases conversions, but you shouldn't pursue conversions at the expense of basic ethics. Would you shoot a puppy to increase conversions too?
So, at the moment, I'd evaluate as 80% likely the claims in the TC blog post. Still waiting to read nicferrier's responses to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2170210 though.
Getting started is 100% free. It seem's like it's the actual talking to other people that you have to pay for. If not bait-and-switch, these weasel words are certainly misleading.
I can only imagine what the bounce rate is when you put the payment details after the signup for a nerfed account. You can't do much until you upload a photo of yourself and by then they have already gotten something from you: the appearance of activity and photos they can dangle in front of other users. What do they call that again… bait for the lobster trap?
When you register with WooMe, you create your own profile and privacy settings. Your profile information, as well as your name, email and photo, are displayed to people in the networks specified in your privacy settings to enable you to connect with people on WooMe.
...
Profile information is used by WooMe primarily to be presented back to and edited by you when you access the service and to be presented to others permitted to view that information by your privacy settings.
You know, it is certainly possible that those messages are all either spam accounts or real people trying to make the money they paid worthwhile by meeting someone. Then again, pyramid schemes are perpetuated by real people trying hard to make their investment worth it too.
"Profile information is used by WooMe primarily to be..." — that 'primarily' is plausible grounds for secondary uses, such as making up 'new' (new to you) 'real' (there is a user who has this profile image) profiles to be shown in different demo/geo segments
I did contact WooMe. The accusations are not misleading, see also the update to my post.
Also, the user featured in the top picture personally contacted me, and while I never claimed her profile was fake (but mine obviously was), it turns out she's pretending to be someone else on there (confirmed).
It's easy to say I fabricated the story, much harder to prove, isn't it?
I wouldn't be calling you out if I didn't think you really need to take a good look of how what kind of shady business you're running.
I didn't say you fabricated the story, I am taking issue with you claiming they are fake users, made by us. They are not, they're real users of the site. Could be there was a lot of spam on the site at that time - but we weren't sending you fake activity. You acknowledge that the lady in the picture was real.
We didn't do anything to stop these getting to you, as you say elsewhere in this thread. Since you weren't top online anymore (and if you're not engaging you also drop off the top of the 'online now' list) you just didn't get these messages anymore.
As for contacting us... well, I'm sorry, I guessed we dropped it. I've been trying to track down your email and I can't find it.
The statement of "I've been trying to track down your email and I can't find it" falls right into the problem with the site. It is obvious you did not try to hard or at all. Robin is active on Twitter, has his own domain name with links to among other things an email address, and if all else fails, reaching out directly to TechCrunch for contact to a writer is fairly simple.
If someone signs up and realises they've been duped, they probably won't even contest the CC charge due to a variation on the Small Penis Rule: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_penis_rule
They'll just cancel their account to avoid being rebilled.
I imagine that happens a lot, although that wasn't the case for me.
And actually, they handled the cancellation process well (at least for me).
I called them up and said I want to cancel because "their site is a scam" and in a no-nonsense way the person started helping me undo the payment (without defending the site). Since I paid through PayPal, I did have to dispute the payment via them (which took a month or two) but I eventually got all of my money back.
So I give the company (or at least the person I talked with) props for their cancellation process, although not everyone may experience it that way.
As much as I'm NOT here to stick up for Nic and his site, he is telling the truth that this is a 3rd party service. http://www.intellichat.com/demo is one of a number of services like that.
You put a tiny fake-ai-chatbot on the page to help with conversions.
Here in Toronto, I interviewed once with a dating site similar dating site similar to WooMee /* on second thought I won't link to them */ who "Seem" to be doing similar things (this is of course only alleged misconduct, as I have no proof)
There are also numerous accounts of the dating scam sites out there. I read one story of a "Sugar Daddies Dating" site that charged huge fees to sign up, then when you did a chargeback, they'd refer you to collections for many times what you originally pledged.
Who are you trying to kid here? It's obvious to those here that it's an automated response system...a.k.a. a bot. Many of the users here could / have written such a bot at one time with far less nefarious reasoning behind doing so. You can't deny that the purpose of that bot is to fool people into thinking that they're talking to 'Jen', a user on your site (whether or not you specifically say so does not discard the intent).
Stop treating the people on this site like we're simply misinformed teenagers crying wolf.
You're right, that was totally unprofessional of me to lay such an ad hominem attack and run away...so let me expand upon my thought some more.
Your site either uses fake accounts to trick legitimate users into paying to view messages from these supposed hot women looking for dates with horses and guys who have just signed up yet haven't provided any personal details...or you have a very serious spam problem where bots are running rampant across your site with hordes of fake accounts trolling for new profiles to scam (or a combination therein).
As evidence, I just logged in to my woome account, which I haven't logged into in maybe 3 years, and immediately I got a request for a video chat from http://www.woome.com/sallyl3462/ . Who wants to get laid tonight? Sally does!
I can't say there aren't spammers using our site. that problem waxes and wanes and we try to deal with it as best we can. The user quoted is most definitely a spammer and I'll look into why we haven't caught that.
I don't think that's what robin is trying to say tho.
We are simply trying to make introductions happen as much as possible because that's what people use woome for. To meet new people.
It seems to work, to my knowledge our users are generally happy we have good time on site, repeat vistits and viping.
The same game as google plays with the adsense spam sites. As long as they make money, allow them to stay even though in public you say taht you will do everything to ban them.
It's not that hard to spot users messaging new users during the first few minutes. If one user does this multiple times, just ban him.
> I'm not sure what I can do to combat the perception that I sell snake oil.
1. Delete the fake bot accounts
2. Re-word your homepage so that it is clear to users that you need to pay money to do anything useful
3. Come out and say 'in an effort to ramp up user engagement we went too far and made a mistake. apologies'
I signed up for your site years ago. I have slowly watched it progress from something useful to a totally degenerate spam and bait site.
(Edit: I will add that if it is your affiliates who are doing the spamming, then ban them and put in better controls. I just logged into my account and got 3 messages in less than a second)
I don't know what he received so I can't say. But our tools promote real users interacting with real users. Maybe Robin could talk to us if he has a problem.
I got about 5 messages the first 2-3 minutes after signing up. A short while later, I had roughly 20 random women contacting me. Good thing I have screenshots, because they stopped coming as soon as WooMe noticed my post.
I can only see what these supposedly real women are trying to tell or ask me until I pay up. That's all fine and dandy, but there's no point in pretending that real users were just all jumping on the opportunity to meet a horse in such a short time period.
Yes, I'm curious to see how they deal with a response to the messages. Seems like it would be a lot of trouble for them to do anything besides send some fake messages and not reply to them (although I guess they could automate those, too).
It would really be interesting to create a second account, or even a second paid account, and see if any of the messages were exactly the same.
They might be paying commission to users that get other users to pay for membership. That would generate very bot-like behavior even if the users are "real".
I've not yet signed up, but I will later today to check out how this services tries to trick people into paying money with the promise of good looking girls waiting to talk to you.
From TC:
" After a user "friends" someone, we pop up 6 "other people like him" and the user can select up to 6 people to "say hi" to. Again, we try to focus on 1) relevance and 2) online now in populating those suggestions."
Does that mean that a user has to pay for his curiosity just to see a bunch of "say hi" messages?
devops makes so much sense to me because it's what I've been doing my whole career. The trouble is with the devops movement, as the blog says, the old tools and processes are sometimes still relevant. Sysadmins in that category 2 from the first comment need to be persuaded that a lot of their old skills are absolutely still usable. The example from the article, of bash scripts getting version controlled is a really good one I think.
And of course, sysadmins have a wealth of experience to bring to the way development is done. It wouldn't hurt if a few more developers learned bash and the different levels of RAID.
