I stopped using Yelp and uninstalled it from my iPhone when I read the article last year.

Yelp's business model doesn't sit well with me. Even if the allegations of good reviews disappearing for businesses who don't pay up aren't true, the idea that there is a service out there that you don't want but you're almost forced into paying for since it's affecting your business directly feels to me like paying the mafia to 'protect' your business.

If Yelp really does want to help both businesses and consumers, give businesses the ability to respond to reviews for free and don't artificially alter results, be like Google and let your algorithm work. Make money selling ads.

It reminds me of the whole GetSatisfaction drama with 37 Signals from a few months ago (https://hackertimes.com/item?id=540540). This type of business model where you provide a business a "service" they didn't ask for then try to charge them for it will never go over well.

[Edit] FWIW this page, found below in relme's comment (http://www.yelp.com/myths) directly answers every one of my concerns with Yelp. If it's true then great, sounds like they're doing things well. I find it hard to write off all the complaints as fictional though.

I discourage it. People will always look for you (and worse still, send you mail) at the dot com. And there are lots of decent dot com names still available.

I found myself thinking: If you have slow sales, you should have more time to straighten up the place.

Doesn't work with lynx either.

For the curious: jpg's are interpreted from the beginning, zip's from the end, so "cat image.jpg archive.zip > doublefile" will make you one of these 'magic' files.

This is actually racketeering and not extortion.

My wife and I both recently posted negative reviews at businesses that were advertising with Yelp. Neither review (which were both fair and truthful) ever showed up on site.

edit: Just to clarify, I spoke to Yelp about it. The reply I got was "[The] spam algorithm can filter based on how established user is. [Your post was] not deleted & can re-appear on biz page. Still live on your profile."

I'm not following some of this. It's true that the marginal benefits of salary changes for wealthy[1] parents with children in private (US) colleges who also are applying for a mortgage payment reduction on homes they can't afford is very small. And for these folks, it may be very tempting to take a part time position[2] instead of working harder.

But needless to say, that's a rather small population. The article is cherry picking this small population[3] of kinda-sorta-unfortunates (they're still making $120k a year!) and using it to argue against a bunch of government programs that provide real benefits to people with a fraction of their income.

Could things be tuned better? Yeah. Benefits programs are filled with this kind of unintended side effect. But to write this kind of blanket argument cautioning against them seems awfully partisan to me. It's a fairly typical right-wing Forbes editorial in journalism clothing.

[1] $120k per year is in the top 10th percentile or thereabouts -- it's at the very edge of what most people would consider "middle class".

[2] NOT simply a lower paying one, as the article implies. A lower paying position is still full time work, after all. The contention that making less is "bad for the economy" isn't really sound. Downward wage pressure in high-paying jobs is a good thing for the export economy and a good thing for profits (companies are paying historically high fractions to their most highly compensated employees).

[3] That is: gate the income to a small range just big enough to be affected by the loss of financial and mortgage aid, but not so big that it dillutes back to the overall tax rate of ~38%. Then pick out only the people who actually need that tuition and mortgage aid: parents with both underwater mortgages and privately-school children in the right 4-year age range. If this isn't cooking the books, I don't know what qualifies.

the disincentive to work is very real, it is not a bogeyman of the free market advocates. that said, it's also a common mistake of free marketers to think of a work disincentive as inherently bad. people would do well to remember that economic statements in themselves are value free: If you do X, Y will happen. it says nothing about whether Y is good or bad. That is up to the people Y affects to decide for themselves.

I propose "worms". As in bookworms.

Here's another piece of advice that covers a lot more than matrix inversion: don't solve math problems yourself in code if you can in any way avoid it.

Use a library instead, and use the most specific methods that are available: if there are specialized routines to solve Ax=b, use them, don't use the matrix inversion methods (which are probably also there), or even the LU decomposition ones, even if Real Math tells you that the result is equivalent - in numerical computation, mathematical equivalence is an entirely different entity than what "real" mathematicians concern themselves with.

Seriously. I don't care if you're a math PhD, I don't even care if you know a decent amount about numerical methods. Whatever code you're going to put together to do the job will be inferior to what a mature library can do, simply because the library has been put through many iterations and has had a lot more time to get patched up to handle all those special cases (usually related to finite precision or discretization) that Real Math doesn't have to worry about. And it will probably be vastly more optimized than anything you'll put together, because it's spent years of heavy use in some critical research environments.

The only time you should be writing your own math code (beyond simple arithmetic) is if no mature libraries are available to you. In which case you should allocate at the very least twice the amount of time it will take to research and implement the methods, and probably a lot more, because you're going to have a lot of fiddling to do.

I'd hire him. It's easy to forget now how completely IE pwned Netscape in 1995-2002. They won by being better. I was a die-hard Netscape loyalist and Microsoft hater. I finally switched in 2000 because Microsoft's offering worked and Netscape's didn't, and I couldn't ignore that anymore.

The fact that Chrome and Firefox are simply better than IE now doesn't change that. People should be evaluated by how well they did with the technology and resources available at the time they did the work, and not by how badly their employer fucked things up after they left.

In the guy's own words, "it was a pretty fun way to learn WPF." So, you know, if the love thing doesn't pan out, he's at least gained another marketable skill.

While I'm normally the first to pile on and complain about Google, in this case I'm going to hold off unless/until they try to enforce their patent. The big companies like Google and Microsoft need to preemptively patent everything they can, in order to stave off the real patent trolls.

Of course, the necessity for defensive patenting itself just goes to show how silly the current patent system is.

There're costs to that economic output that are not reflected in its dollar value.

For example, what's the value of having a parent at home full-time? What's the value of having both parents home for dinner? A bunch of studies have shown that one of the best predictors for having successful, well-adapted children is how much time the family spends together. But how do you quantify that? You won't know what the exact payoff is until 10-15 years later, when the kids are well into their own careers and having their own children. And it varies a lot from kid to kid - someone who's performing well academically with a supportive peer group needs a lot less parental involvement than a loner with no friends who's threatening to blow up the school.

Or another example: when I went to college, I believe the fin-aid formula was that the college would take 100% of my assets, based on my age and income. That meant my gap year was revenue neutral - it didn't matter how much I worked or what I worked on, I wouldn't be able to keep any of it. But that gave me the freedom to observe and to try things out, without the stress of trying to make a lot of money, and in the process I found my eventual career.

You don't want to run an economy like this - there needs to be some accountability so that people work on things that are actually useful. But a high school grad who's time-limited to one year of work isn't going to accomplish anything actually useful anyway - instead, that gap year is an investment in perspective, a way to understand more of the world before you commit to four years in college.

The same thing often comes up in research - a short-sighted focus on increased economic output leads you to miss opportunities that have no obvious dollar value attached, but can be big economy-changers in the long run. How long did it take GMail to become profitable, and would it have existed had Google had the same quarterly bottom-line orientation that most public companies do? How about Google itself? If Larry and Sergey had done the economically rational thing in 1995, would we still be searching on AltaVista? Is Twitter making money yet?

Yelp doesn't charge biz owners to respond to reviews, in public or in private. I'm pretty sure about this because I built the feature.

China has not been conducting attacks on foreign companies via the Internet for 5000 years and it's not inappropriate to question an environment which forces US-based companies to deal with sophisticated computer attacks just because they're doing something China doesn't like.

We've been very good about ignoring what China does in China. (One could argue that Americans, myself included, are exceptionally good at this actually!) This recent wave of controversy is about what China does outside of China.

I would expect the same outcry to occur if any other country was staging the type of operations the PRC regularly conducts in foreign infrastructure. Frankly, the fact that outcry is so long in coming is the only thing that surprises most people in security.

I agree that people need to be careful to not go overboard, but your assertion that no one should ever be critical of China because they're different is equally absurd. Different systems deserve to be appropriately examined and talking about the ramifications of each is both appropriate and necessary.