4 ms·

The absolute worst posts on HN start with "I just want..." and then selfishly lowball the cost of whatever it is they want. Anyway, you've described a cable bu

• bena 6y ago
  "Just". If I could get rid of that word, I would. "Just" is the tip of the iceberg. It often means the speaker has no idea how to implement or what it would take to implement.
  • mistermann 6y ago
    Good point. There are a fair number of words and language forms that are often "tells" of how the person saying them conceptualized and overly simplifies complex scenarios.
• sqrt17 6y ago
  > selfishly lowball the cost of whatever it is they want. if you asked a recording industry person in the CD age if 10$/month flatrate for music (as offered by Spotify, Google, Amazon, Apple) was a fair deal, they'd have said the same or worse. The point is, there's enough people willing to pay something but now paying exactly 0$ and not willing to pay north of 200$/year. And we're still stuck at the "newspaper bundle" stage where publications that used to bundle articles into a mass-produced paper copy and distributing them want to use that same one-size-fits-all bundle for how they charge users, even if those same users would only ever read articles by one author on one topic.
• mmm_grayons 6y ago
  A customer saying, "My reservation price for the following good is $X." is not selfish. Information is easier to access and so, whether you agree with it, people are willing to pay less for information (including newspapers). We've seen many other "information services" get much cheaper due to this demand. The news media have simply been slow to change.
• hinkley 6y ago
  The worst questions to ask an engineer start with, "why can't we just..."