WTF Delaware? - <AUTHOR> http://joshliptzin.svbtle.com/wtf-delaware <comment><USER2> There appears to be a giant
 on top of the entire website. It's the first non-comment child of :

With the CSS of:

      height: 3000px
      width: 3000px
      position: absolute
      top: 0px
      z-index: 50000

I do love arbitrary constants.

Killing it makes the site responsive. No idea what it's there for. I'm guessing that it should be moved by JS, but the JS is failing. There's a lot of these:

      Uncaught TypeError: Property '$' of object [object Object] is not a function

Looks like jQuery isn't getting loaded, but that's probably because of:

       [blocked] The page at 'https://corp.delaware.gov/paytaxes.shtml' was loaded over HTTPS, but ran insecure content from 'http://www.delaware.gov/CLF2012/js/jquery-1.5.1.min.js': this content should also be loaded over HTTPS.

So, yeah, no jQuery, no script, defunct page. The problems seem to be rooted in the fact that jQuery didn't load due to it being sent over HTTP, and not HTTPS; indeed, loading the page on HTTP causes things to appear to work.

Just don't use any security, and everything will work just fine. :-) This problem seems to cover the entirety of corp.delaware.gov, too.

Also, the 404's the article mentions,

      GET https://corp.delaware.gov/undefined?1394573701086 404 (Not Found)

I doubt that the URL is supposed to have "undefined", but rather that JS has stabbed yet another dev in the back.

<comment><USER3> He's been building web apps professionally for over 10 years, and he didn't think to right click somewhere (anywhere) and "Inspect Element"? That's the first thing I did on that page.

EDIT: That came off a bit more snarky (snarkier?) than I meant. To the OP: If you inspect the element, you can then delete it with the backspace/delete key to get to the link that you need, which ultimately leads to a separate subdomain that doesn't seem to exhibit this problem: [https://delecorp.delaware.gov/eCorp/LoginAnnualReportsCLF](https://delecorp.delaware.gov/eCorp/LoginAnnualReportsCLF)

Don't be too quick to write the site off as "utterly dysfunctional". Any one of us could have made a similar mistake, and once you get past that glaring bug (which only appears on pages served over SSL), it's not bad for a state government site.

Perhaps you or someone else could get in touch with them to explain the issue? [http://corp.delaware.gov/contact.shtml](http://corp.delaware.gov/contact.shtml)

<comment><USER4> > He's been building web apps professionally for over 10 years, and he didn't > think to right click somewhere (anywhere) and "Inspect Element"? That's the > first thing I did on that page.

That's odd too, it was basically my first thought to inspect the element which used this pointless div and then tried deleting it. Total time spent: 15 seconds, less than reading this rant.

(This is actually a habit I formed by getting rid of huge overlay ads that cover the page or try to force me to log in. No sir, I'll just have this node removed, thank you very much)

<comment><USER5> I do the same thing. I wouldn't mind a plugin that automatically recognized crippling overlays and deletes them for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are sometimes reasons for odd stuff like this. We take our tax payment system offline for a short period every day for several reasons. First, the actual system that stores the data is on ancient system where the database needs to be shut down to do backups. Most the system was written in the early 90's, and we hope to replace it soon, but it is easier said than done. (We tried once, and lost close to $1m when the vendor folded 2 years into the migration) The second reason is if you begin your transaction at 11:55 the system calculates your amount owed based on the day the transactions begins, but if the transaction doesn't complete until 12:01 then (in the case of late payments) the amount paid is inaccurate with regard to penalty and interest. Technically we're not allowed to take partial payments, so we have to do some silly things to ensure that we follow the law (we would have more control if we processed credit cards internally, but that is done by a payment processor.) So while I know nothing about Delaware, I can sympathize with building systems like this inside of government rules.

</comment><comment><USER7> _> "Our government has likely forked over millions of our tax dollars (how much did Obamacare cost?) to private contractors in exchange for a site so utterly dysfunctional that it can't even serve its purpose of collecting those very tax dollars!"_

Oh wow, a "My tax dollars!" complaint in the middle of a "My tax dodge is inconvenient!" complaint with a little "Thanks, Obama!" thrown in for good measure.

<comment><USER8> >"Oh wow, a "My tax dollars!" complaint in the middle of a "My tax dodge is inconvenient!" complaint with a little "Thanks, Obama!" thrown in for good measure."

Delawares taxes are competitive but not actually the lowest. The following is a succinct explanation from a 3 second Google search on the issue.

"There are two major reasons for Delaware's dominance of the corporate incorporation business. One reason is the bi-partisan political consensus in Delaware to keep the Delaware corporation statute modern and up-to-date, and to rely on Delaware's corporate law specialists for advice in how to do this. As a result, law students at every law school in the United States study the Delaware corporation statute and the decisions of Delaware courts interpreting that law."

"The other major reason corporations choose to incorporate in Delaware is the quality of Delaware courts and judges. Delaware has a special court, the Court of Chancery, to rule on corporate law disputes without juries. Corporate cases do not get stuck on dockets behind the multitude of non-corporate cases. Instead, Delaware corporations can expect their legal disputes to be addressed promptly and expertly by judges who specialize in corporate law."

[http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/local/brandywine-to- broad...](http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/local/brandywine-to- broad/18206-why-do-so-many-corporations-choose-to-incorporate-in-delaware)

<comment><USER9> A third major reason is fashion. People want to incorporate, and they look and see a bunch of major corporations are incorporated in Delaware even though they don't have any serious business connection with Delaware other than being incorporated there, and so they think it is a good idea for them to incorporate their small local business in far off Delaware just like the giant public companies do. (Or rather, usually do...Microsoft reincorporated back to Washington after a few years in Delaware).

<comment><USER10> A fourth reason is that incorporation in your home state can be complicated; for instance, in NY, it (IIRC) involves running newspaper ads. If you're not going to incorporate in your home state, Delaware is a sane default choice.

A fifth reason is that it's extremely easy to incorporate in Delaware; it's the Internet's default choice, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > "This application is available daily between 8:00 am and 11:45 pm Easter > Time."

I really hope the "Easter [sic] Time" is from the original site, not a typo in the blog.

The only other business I've seen do this is B&H[0], which refuses to accept _online_ orders during the Sabbath, as well as during several other Jewish holidays (such as the first and last days of Passover).

The only other business I've seen do this was my previous landlord[1]. They used to let me pay my rent online. However, their system only let you pay during "standard business hours", completely negating (for me) the convenience of an online payment - I like to take care of my bills after-hours at home, not at work, thank you very much.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%26H](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%26H)

[1] Unlike B&H, the management company was not run by Hasidim.

<comment><USER12> I'm a grad student at Tufts, and our online course registration app does this (called "SIS"). You can only register for classes during some time period: 8am to 6pm, I think. It's crazy.

Tufts recently hired a huge team to "fix" SIS. It's now called iSIS and you can tell it's still using SIS underneath. (The HTML markup returned is the exact same as before, but it's dressed up a little nicer.)

Nuts.

<comment><USER13> _God_ I hated this when I was at Tufts. But its far from the only university system to do this. I suspect a middleware vendor somewhere.

<comment><USER12> Oh, most definitely.

I was at Worcester State before Tufts, and part of their registration had to be done via paper (in person at the registrar). It was almost as convenient as these online systems... (Assuming I was on campus anyway.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The IRS EIN Application also has "hours":

[http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Small-Businesses-&-Self- Employ...](http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Small-Businesses-&-Self- Employed/Apply-for-an-Employer-Identification-Number-\(EIN\)-Online)

> Our new hours of operation [for the application] are Monday through Friday > 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. Eastern time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is there a good reason to do this? I'm actually curious

<comment><USER15> In Nevada (where I pay my corporate taxes) it was claimed that hours restrictions were mandated by law ("No part of the office can be open outside of the following hours" kind of thing) I have yet to find the statute though that says that. I agree it is a very weird thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you open it in IE, it asks to display insecure content. If you click yes, the site works. (You can click buttons).

They must have linked a .js that wasn't on a https.

<comment><USER17> So they just forgot their "Optimized for Internet Explorer" badge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> My only guess is a batch job that really really doesn't want data changing out from under it (and the devs were too lazy to batch up the next days changes to be submitted post-job).

<comment><USER19> I think you have it. 11:45PM sounds suspiciously like the batch job kicks off at midnight and should be done by opening of business the next day. I figure if it looks like it will go over 8AM then they have to kill it because the office staff is going to change data regardless of what IT wants.

<comment><USER20> 2014: I can take credit cards for my startup in 10 minutes with Stripe, but Delaware needs 8+ hours to run a batch job to collect taxes.

W. T. F.

<comment><USER19> There is no money to "fix" and IT system that "works". Think of the children you'll be taking money from to pay for this non-essential work.

Why yes, I have been in THAT meeting, just not in Delaware.

<comment><USER20> Shit like this makes my blood boil.

<comment><USER19> The true blood boiler is when the system finally collapses and IT gets hit with the "why didn't you fix this before it collapsed"-lecture from the same folks who wouldn't give you the budget to fix it in the first place.

This is generally followed by the hiring of some consulting firm to propose the solution you wanted budget for at a fair multiple of the original budget. They, after all, are consultants and you are a peon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> As a web developer I'm kind of impressed how broken it is. It takes significantly more effort to break something to this magnitude.

I mean, you have to go out of your way to break things this badly. If you just play normally, your website cannot and WILL NOT crash and burn like this.

I attribute it to malice, I just don't see it happening this badly without intent.

</comment><comment><USER22> A 3000x3000 div with a z-index of 50000 just sits on top of everything. Delete that node and the page reacts normally at least.

</comment><comment><USER23> ``This application is available daily between 8:00 am and 11:45 pm Easter Time''

Easter is on the 20th of April this year. You will miss the boat completely!

</comment><comment><USER24> Welcome to the wonderful world of government websites - (un)fortunately you're not alone... I've had almost exactly the same experience with the German e-government "solutions" last year: [http://distributed.hamann.se/blog/2013/08/31/the- horrifying-...](http://distributed.hamann.se/blog/2013/08/31/the-horrifying- state-of-egovernment-in-germany/)

</comment><comment><USER25> Most of these were paid for long ago in the age of Internet Explorer, I bet it works fine in that. Hopefully gov't contracts now focus on open technologies and have to support more browsers now but all of them are broken.

I use AZ and Nevada, Nevada was horrid but got a little better, still on par with insurance sites or offshored services. These types of systems would never survive if they didn't collude a useful or required service behind them.

The worst services I have to deal with are paying my state taxes (EFTPS for federal isn't too bad) and insurance websites for healthcare. The healthcare.gov site, even though it launched bad, actually looks good and has some usability, relative to the insurance/tax/govt sites of the same caliber.

</comment><comment><USER26> Seems like their website wasn't suppose to be served over a secure connection, just use [http://corp.delaware.gov/paytaxes.shtml](http://corp.delaware.gov/paytaxes.shtml) and all is fine.

<comment><USER27> Just as long as there's nothing in your financial information that you consider confidential.

<comment><USER27> Although when supplying information to an organisation which has such as poor approach to running its computer systems, you may as well assume you are making it public anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Pretty sure the root cause is the blend of http/https sources. Chrome and perhaps other browsers helpfully block the http content some of which is probably needed for the webpage to function.

In Chrome you click the shield icon next to the bookmarks star in the address bar. I believe the page will then reload showing the http content which will usually fix the issue.

I say "helpful" un-ironically above because the http content can compromise whatever is on the page.

The OP is of course right that the developer of this page is dangerously incompetent.

</comment><comment><USER29> > "This application is available daily between 8:00 am and 11:45 pm Easter[n] > Time."

We're not used to sites like Amazon being shut down during nighttime hours, but I've come across it before for government sites. For example, when I filed a corporation with the IRS, after I answered a few pages, the site said I should come back during work hours. They probably have a person at the other end who handles the forms...

</comment><comment><USER30> Easy to fix on Chrome. Just click on the little shield at the top-right of the omnibar and click "load unsafe script."

Yes, it's broken and they should have caught it, but it's so hyperbolic to call it an "utterly dysfunctional site." This isn't a screwup like healthcare.gov, which had major architecture problems.

This is literally just the omission of the "s" in https.

</comment><comment><USER31> Is this the franchise tax that depends on the assets of the company? The one where the registered agents routinely send estimated payments invoices with assumptions far in excess of the actual taxes?

Excuse my tinfoil hattery, but I have to wonder whether the accuracy of payments has something to do with the lack of website usability.

<comment><USER32> There are two ways to calculate your Delaware taxes (assuming registered as a C-Corp) - the authorized shares method and the assumed par value method. The online annual filing form makes this quite easy to calculate. Unless you are generating huge revenue then par value is the way to go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Those pages lead you here, which works: [https://delecorp.delaware.gov/eCorp/LoginAnnualReportsCLF](https://delecorp.delaware.gov/eCorp/LoginAnnualReportsCLF)

Their problem is the div#forceDOMredraw which appears over everything. Good times. Remove that node and the page works again.

</comment><comment><USER34> They don't allow late march filing on the site, some genius thought that instead of showing a pop-up or error message he just freezes the page. Same behavior noticed when we tried filing during off hours.

</comment><comment><USER35> Here is a working link to pay taxes which I believe also includes franchise taxes:

[http://corp.delaware.gov/paytaxes.shtml](http://corp.delaware.gov/paytaxes.shtml)

</comment><comment><USER36> Just got bit by Delaware's corporate name-check service. It only runs during EST business hours. I just want to query a database to see if a name is already taken, thank you..

</comment><comment><USER37> Incidentally, you could just do:

        * {
          pointer-events: none !important;
        }

If you did want to make a site work like this.

</comment><comment><USER38> I had to resort to IE to get my franchise tax paid--during their business hours, of course.

</comment><comment><USER39> www.AmeriStartup.com can take care of your Delaware corporate compliance for you if your having issues (Annual Report, Franchise Taxes,Delaware Business License, and Registered Agent Service).

</comment><comment><USER40> it's the same way at the Rutgers web registration software. It's actually a pretty nicely done web app, but it is "unavailable" at night.

</comment><comment><USER41> Thanks, this crashed my browser!

</comment><comment><USER42> It works in IE. :(

</comment><comment><USER43> Easter Time?

</comment><comment><USER44> I can't pay my "greatly reduced taxes because I am a Delaware corp" in two seconds! Imagine if you had real problems.

<comment><USER45> Right, I found this amusing:

"I hope by now you've seen the irony here. Our government has likely forked over millions of our tax dollars (how much did Obamacare cost?) to private contractors in exchange for a site so utterly dysfunctional that it can't even serve its purpose of collecting those very tax dollars! That's how broken our system is."

Our system is so broken that most new corporations are formed in a company with _no_ space available for your business or for you to live, only a person who sits and answers a phone for a few thousand or hundred thousand companies to prove an 'office location' or whatever wording.

Delaware doesn't care because they get some taxes, what you'd really call a payoff for being a tax protector.

There were pretty heinous problems with the situation at hand before OP opened his web browser.

<comment><USER46> And what are those problems?

That I can choose at which 'location' I incorporate for something that is immaterial?</comment></comment></comment>


TikTok Admits It Suppressed Videos by Disabled, Queer, and Fat Creators - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/technology/2019/12/tiktok-disabled-users-videos-suppressed.html <comment><USER2> Not as bad as it sounds. TikTok tried to create somewhat of a safe space and it backfired.

<comment><USER3> That is the other direction; they were not trying to create a safe space, they accepted their own platform as toxic and tried to protect vulnerable individuals by excluding them.

I am not saying that there should be a mob with pitchforks, but it is surely a backward way to handle the problem; it is like saying "If we forbid employing women then we have no maternity leave problem"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> as opposed to western social media promoting it. hard choice.

<comment><USER5> At least with the Western media, a person has the choice as to whether he/she wants to view the content.</comment></comment>


Webapps in Go – How to write webapps without a framework - <AUTHOR> https://leanpub.com/antitextbookGo/ <comment><AUTHOR> I've been wanting to learn Go web development without having to dive into using any of the existing frameworks, I want to be able to look at the standard docs, and only use libraries as the need makes sense, e.g. for database. So I found this e-book through a list of e-books. I figure someone else out there might be interested in the same.

GitHub for book:

[https://github.com/thewhitetulip/web-dev-golang-anti- textboo...](https://github.com/thewhitetulip/web-dev-golang-anti-textbook)</comment>


Cameo raises $50M to deliver personalized messages from celebrities, influencers - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2019/06/25/cameo/# <comment><USER2> I hadn't heard of cameo before, but my wife and I went to a broadway show, she very much enjoyed one of the performers, and afterwards she looked him up on twitter and sent me his twitter feed to show me some tweet or other. On his twitter profile he had a link to his Cameo profile, and for $20 I had him send my wife a little video about that performance we were at, and to talk about the show generally. A couple days later she got a 45 second clip he recorded during intermission, he talked about the show, thanked her for being a fan, and was generally very gracious. She was surprised and delighted, and I felt like it was $20 well-spent.

So, while I'm super skeptical about the C-list celebrity market ($50 for Chris Hansen? Presumably to make a to catch a predator joke?), I think there may be an opportunity here for fans to connect with the long tail of artists and celebrities.

<comment><USER3> your anecdote makes me understand a little bit of the value of cameo, despite otherwise being baffled by the product.

celebrity culture is fascinating, not because i care much about celebrities, but because its value seems on the surface of it both out of proportion and hard to pin down. and our emotional and social systems seem to be subverted somehow in the process.

the entertainment value of a movie, show or concert, and even their cultural value, seems somewhat straightforward, but how do we (over-?)value the entertainer beyond their craft skills? why do people so adore them from a distance, enough for something like cameo to have a valuation in the hundreds of millions?

<comment><USER4> I think people might be underestimating how the meaning of celebrity has changed - I have two kids who follow all sorts of different people on Youtube and elsewhere from whom they would be far more thrilled to get a personalized video message than from some "real" A-list celebrity, and I would even go so far to say the same for myself.

$20 bucks for a 1 minute personalized clip for a special occasion is pocket change (how many hundreds of dollars do we spend on toys that we know very well are going to end up on the shelf with all the others), and for all but the biggest Youtubers, $20/minute (plus overhead time, etc) is _easy money_. Plus, 3 years later the kid gets to rewatch the video and laugh at how dumb they were for liking that person!

It's a shame it's no longer an option to invest in startups like you could back during the dotcom boom, although any of the big platforms could probably knock off this technology in a weekend or two.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm honestly surprised Cameo is doing as well as it is. To me, I personally find it sort of cheesy. I didn't purchase a Cameo or anything, but I did sign up on the service to see what it was like, and who all was on it. It seemed to be filled with quite a range of actors/actresses/celebs/etc. but since each of them were basically just reading a cliché "happy birthday" type script with insert {blank} name into the Cameo, it just felt disingenuous to me. A lot of actors also seemed to really "phone it in" for it. I was surprised how much people were paying for these, to be frank. If I received one from a friend, I just don't think I'd see the value, and I'm even a big tv/movie fan. "So, you just paid a celeb to say a few lines? Okay, neat, I guess?" I feel like it was probably more unique at the start when X friend didn't realize you had easy access to the celeb, so it felt like "OMG, how did you get them to do/say that?!" But now that it's getting more popular, it seems to me the value of it being unique would get washed out fast. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

I think the best way for Cameo to actually expand would be to open it up to allow you to book a celeb for more than just a quick little video blurb. Like being able to invite them to parties, or events, and pay them for an actual true "cameo." It would obviously come with a price, but to me, that would be much more innovative.

<comment><USER6> In my experience as a Cameo customer, the videos are received very well as a gag gift. "OMG, I can't believe you got them to make me a video!"

To me, the open question is if the novelty factor will wear off. I don't think I would ever get the same person a second Cameo. I'm not even sure if I would keep buying Cameos if the service was well-known. A big part of the gag is "How did you pull that off?!" Maybe there are enough birthdays that it just doesn't matter.

<comment><USER7> Also wondering if deepfake could eventually disrupt them

<comment><USER8> Surely no one actually cares all _that_ much about the video itself? The novelty is the fact the actual celebrity took some time to do something involving you or someone you know.

You can already happily Photoshop a hugely convincing signed celebrity photo, I don't see people who want such things affected by this or feeling the real thing is worth any less. Giving someone a deep fake as a gift or novelty would feel somewhat strange/hollow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> People pay tons of money to take posed pictures with celebrities at meet and greets all the time, so I think that Cameos at least have a clear audience. It might not be for everyone, but I think it's kind of fun especially for minor celebrities who are fairly affordable to hire for something silly.

</comment><comment><USER10> On the one hand I feel the desire to drop a sighing Jesus as to how stupid this is (how many companies/ideas were thought to be just ridiculous). On the other hand I can't help but see the similarity with plain old advertising, where someone gets paid to read lines to a camera and fake feelings on how awesome/cool something is. We know ice cream doesn't provoke orgasm like facial expressions in most people, but somehow the spots still get made and sold. This could turn out to be _huge_.

For instance, there are night establishments that have entertainers (singers, mainly) who get requests from the audience to say something, in exchange for money. It gets pretty ridiculous like things that go like "Let those who come from neighborhood X know that we have plenty of money and we made it ages ago... Screw the new rich. Check out my {fancy_car} outside.. Die of jealousy".

These people are considered stupid by almost everyone, however we're talking about serious cash. Alcohol, women, drugs, and _egos_. Some individuals leave something like $200k on the table on a given night. They want to be remembered as badasses or something.

Then there's the give and take. The entertainer gets paid. Even poor people put in money for their 15 seconds.

Ads are about products, in general. Cameo seems to be about people, and people have egos. This could really turn out to be huge, despite the initial cheesiness.

</comment><comment><USER11> > _Cameo has a roster of 15,000 celebrities that they believe could expand to > 5 million._

5 million celebrities???

What does the platform offer the celebrities for the 25% cut? This is a cute gimmick, but how on earth is it worth $300MM? Any value comes from novelty; when everyone is getting a custom message from a "celebrity", how much value is left? Are they betting that this society gets _more_ enamored with influencers and celebrity? God, I hope not.

<comment><USER5> On top of that, is there even _5 million_ celebs to begin with? That number seems to high to me.

<comment><USER12> If you count niche markets, then yes.

I just found out that a friend of mine is one of the best players in the world of a certain card game similar to Magic The Gathering(but _nowhere_ near as popular). I knew he played the game and was good at it, but only found out he was 'famous' in the scene when someone came up to our table when were getting lunch to take a selfie with him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Will a funny 30 second video to kick off your fantasy football draft ever not be worth $100?

<comment><USER14> Exactly. I'm really blown away at how others cannot see how this is a license to print money, now that they have amassed such celebrities who are constantly responding to fans.

Sure it might be a fad, but network effects are already kickin' and they might just win this market. They might very well be cash flow positive and just not lucrative right now bc focusing on growth/marketing.

Personally, like the first response above, I race in an amateur, local kart league, which is not a cheap sport, and we have a site, instagram, video coverage, everything. The list of F1 & Indy race drivers who could do a video saying "hello" to our league, comparing to what we indulge on a hobby already, is peanuts. I'm sure my friends would take doing a few proposals very seriously.

IMO wannabe YT-IG influencers would FLOCK at the chance of having a celeb saying hello to them and posting on their timelines ("look who just sent hi").

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Whilst this market baffles me theres no doubht its massively lucrative when you consider it can likely compare to atwitch service like twitch in a broad sense

Pay a personality for a second of recognition except as an added bonus you get some reactions in the chat

</comment><comment><USER16> I used this service a while ago, when I saw the host of podcast I follow was available as a "cameo", my request for the video was a in-joke from the podcast, I was sent the video a couple days later, I watched it, laughed and waited for the next podcast where I hoped he would talk about it, when he did it was equally as funny as the original video and took the in-joke deeper again.

I think this use case provided a lot more value and depth than a more pedestrian "congratulations on graduating".

</comment><comment><USER17> Whilst I think 300mm is pretty punchy, I'm with a lot of commenters here that they make an excellent novelty gift.

We used [https://www.celebvm.com/](https://www.celebvm.com/) (an English competitor that doesn't seem to have taken off in the same way) a few years back to get John Challis (Boyce from Only Fools, for the UK readers) to do a message for a relative. Which to be fair was very good and absolutely worth £20.

The relative was delighted - but I think a lot of that was "wow, how did you get him to do that". If Cameo becomes as big as the valuation, I think some of the magic sauce is lost. "Wow, how did you get that?!" becomes "oh, you paid X to get me a video from Cameo."

</comment><comment><USER18> Cameo is a competitor to a project I worked on that just launched called Givvli - [https://givvli.com](https://givvli.com)

These platforms could be particularly fruitful for musicians and YouTube stars. It's a fascinating space to watch.

</comment><comment><USER19> "It's a new way for people to connect and the delight generated from this platform is unparalleled," Galanis said.

This is interesting; I would think the wow-effect wears off the more celebrity cameos someone receives. Clever way to make money using internet technology and access to celebrities/influencers.

I could see a deepfake shadow business arising whose customers are the celebrities -- now the celebrity can do many more unique Cameos a day

</comment><comment><USER20> If any Cameo employees are on HN please note that clicking "Visit Ice-T's Page" is a broken link :)

</comment><comment><USER21> If the celebs are just doing pre-scripted videos with fill in the blanks, how hard would it be to alter the audio and fill in the blanks yourself using a machine?

IIRC there was a Google deep AI project or something similar which was able to "match" a human voice.

</comment><comment><USER22> Oh I remember this app:

[https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ellievhall/celebrities-...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ellievhall/celebrities- white-supremacists-video-app-cameo-anti-semitic)

</comment><comment><USER23> KP is a bit washed up at the moment, so I wouldn't take them leading on an investment as a sign this is an obvious home run. Feels very faddy to me.

<comment><USER24> agreed

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Oh heck yeah Cameo team, ya'll are killing it!

</comment><comment><USER26> $50M means a valuation at least north of $150M I just don't see how this gets to that sum.

How is this a sustainable business at the kind of scale needed to 10x a $50M investment?

Especially by KP?

#Bubblesignal

<comment><USER27> It's pretty hard to ascertain the value of a company and the required exit size from a a single investment round's size alone. There could be warrants to buy more stock, liquidation preferences, ratchets, etc. The math from this alone can get pretty tricky.

This seems like a revenue generating company from the get-go, unlike something like facebook, so I suspect they already have revenue and it's growing pretty fast. Given America's (and other countries too) fascination with Celebrities, I could see this as a pretty highly valued company.

<comment><USER26> Finding the 'technical value' of things can be tricky, as you say with all the special features of a deal.

But in general, it's actually fairly straightforward.

Investors are usually looking to take x% ownership, ballpark in a round, and they are all looking for at least a 10x return.

Technicalities of deals vary, but in the end, a 'round' of investors may get 10-30% and they have big expectations for returns, otherwise it's not worth it.

Given the paths to liquidity are IPO or 'get acquired', I'm hard pressed to see the logic on this one. How many pure media companies have done major IPO's based on hard, forecastable metrics lately? And what kind of 'big pockets' company would be interested in making a $500M-$1B acquisition of such a thing? Disney? I don't think so really.

I can certainly see the founders making some kind of 'big story' about what they are going to do, but the essentials of what they are doing is not great. I don't see how the experience will be protected, I don't see a lot of competitive advantage, I don't see how they get to the kinds of sales required for those massive valuations, and of course this has a lot of 'fad risk'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Another 50 million dollars of the world's hard-earned time and effort well spent by the VCs there.</comment>


Ask HN: How can I sell my hacker house business? - <AUTHOR> My friends and I run a hacker house in the Bay Area. It allows us to live for free in downtown Mountain View, be ramen-profitable, and give us the free time to try new startup ideas. We also met tons of great people, which is really going to help with recruiting later. One of our startup attempts is taking off, and so we'd like to sell our business quickly. Unfortunately it isn't a very traditional business and we don't have much of an idea of how to price this or find potential buyers.
The house makes about 90k/year in profit the year it opened, and could probably do better (~150k) with full time management by one person. That also includes a free 1 bedroom apartment. We're likely more successful than most of our competitors because of our unique location and housing structure, which we aggressively scouted for.
Who should we target as a buyer? Other founders, hacker house chains, or somebody else entirely? <comment><USER2> This is probably a good place to ask as any; I might be interested myself (depending on the price point you're looking for), so I'm going to ask more questions:

\- What price point are you looking for? 1 year profit, 2 year profit, so like $90-180k? (seems like a normal range for valuation of companies)

\- For that matter, you mentioned 90k/year "the year it opened", implying that that was the first year and you're not on your first year now. Are you making more, less, same right now?

\- What does running the business entail, what is the day to day operation like? Talking with residents and maintaining condition of the place?

\- Does the day to day operation require living in the complex in Mountain View? (I know you mentioned it as a perk, but I own a house myself, with a family, elsewhere, and am not interested to move. Am I the wrong "target audience" to sell to?) [edit:] To clarify, I am in the bay area, but not in Mountain View. [edit 2:] To clarify again, I don't have a problem with commuting to MV to work here, I only mean that I don't intend to live there, and would probably rent out the "master rooms" also just as any other, if I run this.

<comment><USER2> One more question, I read from your other replies below that there are 3 of you running this now. Does it take all 3 of you full time to run this? Or is it reasonable to operate solo?

<comment><USER3> Didn't know how to handle this, so question merged to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14809337](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14809337)

Short version, we spend one long day a week on the house. There are also checkins.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> what are you selling exactly? a company? a condo? developers? apps? how do you make 90k/year? what's your business model?

Not sure your message was clear enough.

<comment><AUTHOR> We rent bunk beds in shared rooms, mostly to people on fixed short term stays -- interns, visiting academics, founders in accelerators (particularly 500 Startups as they're extremely close).

We're selling the company itself.

<comment><USER4> Do you guys own the rooms or are you renting them out, then subleasing them to people at a higher cost per head? There might be some legal issues in this case?

<comment><USER3> The company holds a lease on a small apartment complex

<comment><USER5> How long is the lease for? I really don't know the space that well but I would imagine it would be hard to get a premium for a one year lease. If its true that the major value add the lease is the one thing of value.

If you look at it from the buyer's perspective, they would be paying you for a job that pay's roughly 90k per year.

This is just my $.02 but I think it makes sense to hire someone to run this full time. For 90k + free room and board I would imagine you could find someone very competent to take it over. You would get the profits and likely make your business more marketable.

<comment><USER3> If the company was still owned by us I do not believe a $90K salary is a given, especially prior to that person going full time to run the company at a higher efficiency.

We have reason to believe our lease is good indefinitely.

We think there are other things of value in the company than the lease. Starting one of these places yourself isn't cheap, easy or quick. Making sure your dorm is listed in new hire/intern/founder material takes time and connections, generally from former residents.

It also takes experience and skill to properly lay out houses and incentive structures which motivate residents to cooperate and be good to each other. Some of our systems are pretty elaborate. For example: we manufacture large batches of dish sets and silverware each with a different animal. Residents are assigned an animal, and only allowed to use the dish set with that animal. This has lots of utility: it means residents have to clean their dishes before making more dishes, it creates personal responsibility around abandoned dirty dishes so the kitchens do not become hellish, and it mitigates the variation in the definition of "clean" one might find between an undergraduate intern and a doctor doing their residency. We also believe it is a key piece of what has helped prevent the dorms from ever having a flu outbreak.

<comment><USER2> Hey, how should I reach out to you if I'm interested? Can't find a PM function on HN, maybe email?

<comment><USER3> email@example.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why do you want to sell this? if you are profitable and making 90k/year then it doesn't make sense to sell it. I would say rather try building a brand. Expand to one more location and increase revenue. Struggle for few more years and have at least 3-5 outlets and then think of selling it. The way I see it is you have a good business model and there is a scope in the market for such thing. You should rather focus on expanding than selling it.

<comment><USER3> We used this company to bootstrap software startups. One looks more promising than this company, and splitting our efforts up seems unwise.

Also, we need to travel for the software startup, and this isn't exactly a remote job.

It's more or less "one or the other" and we chose "the other."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Huh.

This is super interesting to me. I don't live out in the valley though.

Would you consider essentially hiring someone to come and run the place? I actually think this is something I would be good at.

How did you get into this space? I may start to seriously look into this. I actually have a business idea I'm working on that is somewhat related.

<comment><USER3> I started running these places to get an internship program I was in un- cancelled. When I ditched being an engineer to do nonprofit work I started another to make up the income gap but it was pretty casual. I met the OP and the 3rd person there. Together we decided to start running these places at scale to give us an infinite runway to bootstrap companies.

The three of us talked and we're open to somebody managing the place. We have done house head training when it is needed to open a location, but we like to have somebody experienced shadow them for a few months before going solo. The timelines are pretty tough for this house though. This is why we were going to sell the company for the location the three of us live in.

All of that said, if you're interested in having this conversation, we are willing to have it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What is the difference with a hostel or a pension? For what I understand this is just that but with a fancy name

<comment><USER3> Hostels take people over shorter periods, like weekends. Dorms have people for 3-6 months so they can complete an internship.

Hostels are fairly transactional. Dorms involve community responsibilities, including from the residents. This is everything from helping sort clutter each week to running a really cool house every year for the local trick-or- treaters.

Pensions are things where you don't have to work. This is a job, not a full- time job, but it still does require work. There is an aspect of running the place (we order a LOT of toilet paper from Costco) but also we are responsible for a community. We once had a resident whose parent died when they lived here, and yesterday a resident was hit by a car while biking to work (a long way from our place, and yes the doctor said he is fine. He more or less only lost some mustache).

These folks are sometimes a long way from home, often quite young (early undergrad), and sometimes foreign. We are their community out here, and often act as a sort of designated older sibling when stuff really gets real.

<comment><USER9> Miscommunication there.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pension_(lodging)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pension_\(lodging\))

Pension has a totally different meaning in Europe in the context of accommodation.

<comment><USER8> Hehe yes, I didn't remember the term in english, in my country a pension gives you a bed sometimes shared and sometimes on a private room but no food, but they have a kitchen where you can cook.

Anyways from what the OP describes his business is much more intensive and involved with his guests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is it legal?

Seems like if you have more than 5 bedrooms for guests it may not be?

[https://patch.com/california/mountainview/hacker-hostel- ille...](https://patch.com/california/mountainview/hacker-hostel-illegal-says- code-enforcement-unit)

<comment><USER3> I am not a lawyer.

We operate very very differently than Chez JJ did.

Because of our community focus, the vast majority of the residents in the house at any given time are long-term, and here much longer than 30 days.

Even if this was not the case, this location is composed of more than one building and no building has more than 5 bedrooms.

Mostly, we have an excellent real estate lawyer.

<comment><USER10> Nice

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Have you considered hiring someone full time to manage it? You could include the apartment as part of the compensation and maybe provide some kind of profit sharing bonus incentive as well.

<comment><USER3> Question merged to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14808712](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14808712)

Short version: we're open to it. This said, normally house head training to work under our systems is longer and we like to have somebody experienced shadow the new person for a few months before going solo. We were worried about the timeline, so we were considering just selling the company that runs the location we live in.</comment></comment>


Olin Shivers: History of T - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html#

<comment><USER2> More on T here: [http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/scheme_fam...](http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/scheme_family/#T_) .</comment>


China's 'Artificial Sun' achieves fusion breakthrough - <AUTHOR> http://en.people.cn/n3/2016/1103/c90000-9136786.html <comment><USER2> I would love to see a huge effort towards fusion, on the same (or even greater) scale as the Manhattan project or the Apollo program. I had been disappointed in the way that fusion always seemed to be 30 years away no matter how many years went past, but I just assumed that that was because the science was hard and just the way it had to be.

[https://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg)

[https://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles_2010/Winter_...](https://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles_2010/Winter_2009/Who_Killed_Fusion.pdf)

In 1976, a number of plans for investing in fusion were described, and what actually happened was that less was invested in fusion even than the level at which the program plan predicted we would never achieve fusion. This is the kind of thing that anyone who cares about humanity in general should find upsetting.

Massively abundant, cheap, clean energy should be one of humanity's top priorities.

Working, economic fusion power has a chance to revolutionize life as we know it. The countries that have access to the technology first will be at the forefront of a huge economic, social, cultural, scientific change.

It's more important than going to Mars (and would probably make going to Mars significantly easier). It's more important than nearly anything we're working on.

<comment><USER3> > Massively abundant, cheap, clean energy should be one of humanity's top > priorities.

What about the big fusion reactor in the Sky? Shouldn't we go all in on solar? Why is so difficult to harness that source? Maybe the same obstacles make fusion so difficult to pursue.

<comment><USER4> Land utilization is the issue. The largest solar farms in the US requires an order of magnitude more land to produce the same amount of power as a relatively average nuclear plant.

The largest solar farm in the US, the Topaz Solar Farm in California, covers 25sq/km has a peak generation capacity of 550MW. The source uses the median of the 59 nuclear plants in the US to arrive at its 3.36sq/km (1.3sq/mile) per 1,000MW figure but the largest nuclear plant ever built, the Kashiwazaki- Kariwa plant in Japan, produces ~8MW on just 4.2sq/km of land which makes it twice as efficient in terms of land use as the median US plant.

That places solar at 13.75 sq/km per 1,000MW compared to nuclear's 0.525sq/km using the best case scenario for the density of existing sources. That doesn't even account for the variable output of the solar plant versus the consistency of nuclear generation. Solar is ultimately far too land hungry to ever serve as the world's primary source of electrity.

Source: [http://www.nei.org/CorporateSite/media/filefolder/Policy/Pap...](http://www.nei.org/CorporateSite/media/filefolder/Policy/Papers/Land_Use_Carbon_Free_Technologies.pdf?ext=.pdf)

<comment><USER5> More importantly, with fusion, energy could become significantly cheaper allowing us to do things which weren't economically viable.

Make everything out of environmentally friendly, lighter and long lasting aluminium rather than steel + concrete.

Have street lighting that is as bright as sunlight over entire cities, allowing us to no longer be dependant on time of day.

Growing food crops indoors with artificial light, saving massive amounts of land.

Desalination to make all our water. No longer extracting it from rivers and aquifers. A cleaner, less polluted water source.

A single energy source - today we use petroleum (cars), natural gas (cooking and heating), electricity (lighting etc.), diesel (transport) and many more in industry. All of those need distribution networks. A single cheap energy source could coalesce a lot of infrastructure.

<comment><USER3> I made me curious about something.

Will the heat from all that electricity generation affect the environment in significant ways?

At which energy usage scale humanity will be restricted by the planet environment capacity to deal with the generated heat?

<comment><USER5> If you have enough cheap energy, you could refrigerate earth and send excess heat to space.

I think we're a long way from that yet though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's unfortunate that it's like this, but I automatically do not believe any scientific breakthroughs that come from China.

There has simply been too much fraud for me to believe anything they say.

[http://www.sciencealert.com/80-of-the-data-in-chinese- clinic...](http://www.sciencealert.com/80-of-the-data-in-chinese-clinical- trial-is-fabricated)

<comment><USER7> In a few decades, when most of the new inventions will start coming from China, this attitude is going to be very difficult to maintain.

<comment><USER8> It is quite possible that most of the new inventions will be coming from China, _and also_ most of China's scientific production will be rubbish. China has been great with scaling up its scientific community, but the problem of establishing an academic culture of scientific honesty is harder.

<comment><USER9> I'm a bit confused by this comment. Are you implying that "an academic culture of scientific honesty" is something the non-Chinese world _has_ but China doesn't?

I'll concede it's probably a matter of degree.

<comment><USER10> Especially on the front of medical trials, a recent Chinese government probe found 80% of data used was falsified [0]

[0] [http://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/clinical- fakes-0927201...](http://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/clinical- fakes-09272016141438.html)

<comment><USER11> Sounds like a better track record than Theranos to me.

<comment><USER12> You are demonstrating awareness of the point being made: if scientific fraud was as rampant here as it is in China, Theranos wouldn't even be remarkable and still unknown. But it is in fact rare enough to cause scandal.

If you want to keep that attitude and make non-contributory quips, go back to Reddit. It is not appreciated here.

<comment><USER9> Most of Big Pharma's medicines don't actually work.

As in, they don't work to _cure_ the underlying condition. They work to treat the symptoms, and thereby require you to take the medicine fairly indefinitely if you want to by symptom free, side effects notwithstanding. Thereby extracting economic value from the generally unwell and ageing population and concentrating it in the hands of Big Pharma.

In that way I see _most_ of medicine as being fraudulent.

Also, you're probably being down-voted for your last sentence, as it is, as you say _not appreciated here._

<comment><USER13> If Big Pharma developed treatments-rather-than-cures as a deliberate strategy to milk recurring revenue, biotech startups could ignore those recurring treatments and take over the market with easier-or-equally-difficult-to-find one shot cures that doctors, patients, and insurance companies would all prefer. But it turns out that Biology is Hard and the indefinite treatments are still used because neither incumbents nor startups have been able to find drugs that are once-and-for-all _cures_ for diabetes, heart disease, Parkinson's, etc. It's the same reason we don't have Mr. Fusion powering our cars instead of liquid hydrocarbons: not because the sinister oil cartels are suppressing technology, but because developing that sort of breakthrough is extremely hard.

<comment><USER7> And then you get to this convoluted certification and approval process that more or less guarantees that the startup is going to be dead before it starts selling anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Weird, as far as I can tell this result was essentially achieved in February; at least that's when the register reported on it: [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/06/china_shows_how_fusi...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/06/china_shows_how_fusion_is_done/)

EAST seems to be connected to ITER, and is testing confinement methods like those planned for ITER. Here is an ITER press release about EAST hitting that 32 s H-mode confinement: [https://www.iter.org/newsline/291/1783](https://www.iter.org/newsline/291/1783)

And here is a later article about EAST receiving an upgrade and shooting for those 100 seconds in 2014: [https://www.iter.org/newsline/-/1916](https://www.iter.org/newsline/-/1916)

<comment><USER15> Hm, so I think the experiment this article alludes to is not exactly the same as the February one. This article seems to be based on this press release: [http://www.ipp.ac.cn/xwdt/tpxw/201611/t20161102_352924.html](http://www.ipp.ac.cn/xwdt/tpxw/201611/t20161102_352924.html) which (using Google Translate) says "In a new round of physical experiments launched in August 2016, the EAST team achieved steady-state, high- confinement-mode plasmas for more than 60 seconds in mid-October by further optimizing the steady-state operation integrated control at long pulse time scales".

It seems they reported their latest results at the IAEA Fusion Energy Conference (17–22 October 2016); I'm guessing that they did a press release based on that, and that's why it's getting picked up by news.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Anyone remember that really old game Outpost? It ran on Windows 3.1; used a CD recording of The Planets as its soundtrack. That's the first time I've heard of Tokamak reactors.

What these are trying to achieve is pretty amazing. I hope one day, one of these reactors will be able to sustain a greater output than input. It has the potential to move the planet into a completely different energy age. Imagine if we could build something with that kind of energy output on Mars.

<comment><USER17> I remember that game! Mini black hole starts gobbling up planet Earth. :) And the voxels.

<comment><USER18> You're thinking of Outcast (aka Infogrames Outcast).

<comment><USER17> doh yes! Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> For someone more knowledgeable about the state of fusion research: is this really a "breakthrough" or just another incremental step? It seems they only kept it stable for about twice as long as they did four year ago and that's not much of a breakthrough even if we did break the arbitrary one minute limit (or maybe its not arbitrary and becomes harder to keep stable approaching a minute for some reason?)

At this point it seems that the only real breakthroughs we can make in fusion research is maybe another technique like magnetic or inertial confinement and a power neutral/positive reactor, along with breakthroughs in orthogonal fields like material science.

<comment><USER20> It's an incremental step on a long road. To be sure, the ultimate goal is to understand how to control the plasma well enough to support indefinitely long pulses. But incremental improvements add up, or rather they compound like interest.

<comment><USER9> What is the plan to extract energy from these things?

Same old heat exchanger > supercritical steam > steam turbine > alternator?

Or is there some way of getting electricity out of the plasma directly?

<comment><USER21> Yes. That also makes it difficult to scale up to energy production - now you need to route a bunch of cooling water plumbing and heat exchangers around it, engineer it to transfer the bulk of the reactor heat output to the cooling water without melting any heat exchangers, then build a turbine/generator rig to attach to it. Might possibly need an extra water loop too, depending on how much neutron flux ends up hitting the water and plumbing when running at a reaction rate sufficient to generate power.

<comment><USER9> The bulk of the reactor heat needs to stay in the reactor though, doesn't it? as that is essential in keeping the reaction going?

How does that affect the economics?

<comment><USER21> Actually no, the heat needs to escape to keep the temperature under control. The temperature is what has to be kept in the proper range for Fusion to occur at the planned rate. I don't know as much about control of fusion reactions as I'd like, but I think the reaction rate is highly temperature-dependant, so we'll want to keep the temperature in a tight range. Too low a reaction rate, and the plasma cools down too much and would have to be re-heated externally; too high and you might burn up fuel faster than you can resupply it, causing what I guess you would call a stall, also requiring a restart.

All of the reactions we've generated so far have a low to nonexistent reaction rate, because the reaction generates lots of heat, and the research reactor designs we're using don't have a way to extract that heat at power-generation levels. To build a power reactor, we'll have to maintain the reaction temperature, at which massive amounts of heat are generated, and extract that heat to keep the temperature stable.

Designing the heat transfer for that is sure to be fun. I don't know the temperature of the burning plasma, but I'm sure it's insanely high compared to any kind of conventional material or process. So somebody has to design a system to transfer GigaWatts of heat from a burning plasma at effectively infinite temperature to some perfectly ordinary water at a controlled rate without melting anything.

<comment><USER20> I don't think the plasma being too hot is a problem in a tokamak. The average ion energy is not enough for fusion; we rely on the high-energy tail end of the Maxwellian distribution. Any potential source of heat loss from the ions is a liability, including the natural predilection for ions to transfer their energy to electrons, not to mention radiative losses. Keeping the plasma hot enough is really the essential problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Just a quick note that this report comes from people.cn, a mouthpiece media of the CCP. Perhaps more coverage from other sources would make this more persuasive.

<comment><USER23> A _mouthpiece media of the CCP_!

So if the NYT reports on the results of an amazing research from the JPL, you'll not believe it, right?

<comment><USER24> Uh, the situations are not analogous.

People.cn is the website of the [People's Daily][1], which is a longstanding, official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party. Not figuratively or in the sense of having a slant or something, but it's literally the Party's official newspaper.

It's tempting to equate it to Voice of America, but even VoR is managed quite differently. There's not a direct equivalent in the US press, because the systems work differently.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Daily](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Daily)

<comment><USER25> The US press has lost fair amount of credibility in this election cycle. Case in point, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOCcRnvMPEU&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOCcRnvMPEU&feature=youtu.be)

<comment><USER26> The journalists who cover science have lost credibility because of the journalists who cover politics? Why would you think those things are related?

<comment><USER25> Isn't that the premise of the whole thread? Lumping all the reporting by its organization.

<comment><USER26> That's not what I've read above. It seems to me that some on this thread are saying they distrust science (and therefore science reporting) out of China because of the low quality of historical science and science journalism from China.

See the difference?

<comment><USER25> Kadin's comment, which I replied to, never mentioned anything about science or science reporting. He only talked about press in general and made the point that since the news organization is not trustworthy, any news out of it can't be trusted. You were the only one talking about science reporting out of all the comments in the whole thread. That's kind of irrelevant to the specific discussion.

Edit: Or are you saying the science news reporting from People.cn are separated from the political reporting and thus can be trusted? You were making the point that science reporting and political reporting are different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Compared to the stellerator, tokamak is an older design. Germans have sucessfully built and tested the _second generation_ stellerator, Wendelstein 7-X[1]. Now it will run for 32 minutes, where the Tokamak design is targeted for 1000 seconds, or 16 minutes. (Yes, a stellerator is much harder to build, but it's easier to control the plasma with; building one became feasible only after doing finite element analysis optimizations.)

That they got the tokamak design to work is a testament to "when in doubt, use brute force" maxim by Ken Thompson. It shows what can be done when banging on something until it works, but I don't think it's the best way forward, because the stellerator design already works, is easier to control plasma with, and is now in its third revision.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X)

<comment><USER28> Hold your horses, it hasn't run for 32 minutes yet. If it succeeds in that, I expect we'll all be hearing about it.

This is a big improvement compared to the microseconds once was. So maybe we're getting there.

Edit: removed some stuff that turned out to be fluff once I'd actually read the article. Whoops...

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> An edit-compile-run cycle of 4 years. Must be tedious.

<comment><USER30> That's hardware R&D for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> "This is not the first time that EAST has generated enduring plasma. In 2012, plasma in a similar environment was maintained for 32 seconds, breaking the world record at that time. Since then, EAST has had its tungsten diverters and auxiliary heating system upgraded, laying the foundation to create long-pulse, high-confinement plasma. Officially established in 2006, the EAST fusion reactor is run by the Institute of Plasma Physics in Hefei, which aims for plasma pulses lasting up to 1,000 seconds."

6 years after establishment, it got to 3.2% of its goal. What was the new record time?

<comment><USER15> 102 seconds.

<comment><USER31> So after 10 years, it's 10.2% of their goal. ~3% in 6 years to ~7% in 4 years. The rate may keep rising or they may find something sooner. Hopefully it won't take another 50 years to reach their goal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> In A Nutshell just published a primer on nuclear fusion yesterday! It's my favorite ELI5 style science channel.

[https://youtu.be/mZsaaturR6E](https://youtu.be/mZsaaturR6E)

</comment><comment><USER33> As per every fusion breakthrough I've read about ever:

"Sure hope so! Not quite ready to short fossil fuels yet though."

<comment><USER34> But solar/wind is good reason to. I was amazed at how low the energy payment time for solar is - 0.5-1.5 years. With span of 20 - it gives 10 EROEI ... that is respectable. Not as oil in eras past (1 to 100) but in line with current 1 to 13

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The Manhattan Project cost about $26bn in 2016 dollars, while ITER is expected to cost over $20bn by the time it's done.

The problem with trying to solve something like this by throwing money at it too early, is what if the technological approach chosen doesn't work out? The more money you put into it, the more you would waste. Right now there at least half a dozen possible ways Fusion could be achieved commercially, but we don't know which one(s) will pan out. Even then, to be viable some of them may require the development of enabling technologies we haven't even thought of yet. So yes they are worth pursuing, but on the basis of a measured assessment of cost and benefit.

<comment><USER2> The Manhattan project took place over about 5 years. The US has been investigating fusion since at least the 40s.

ITER is also an international effort, funded by 36 countries, not just the US. The US also withdrew from funding it for 6 years in 2000 so I don't know what its total involvement will be, but so far it will be __well __short of its involvement in the Manhattan project.

I agree that the money that should be invested in fusion shouldn't all be spent on a single approach though.

<comment><USER36> ICF is also funded, though it has its fair share of problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Doesn't fusion pose the ability to overcome our energy needs without threatening the environment? Also, if one nation were to gain exclusive access to fusion, wouldn't they have an extreme advantage?

Should we be doing a Manhattan project to get fusion powerplants?

<comment><USER38> Building a wall is our first priority. /s

<comment><USER39> I thought it was powering everything with coal again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> You can make a lightning rod with a plasma creating laser. Could you make a fusion container with a 3d printed plasma cage, through which you channel lightning? Or at least patch existing unwinding containment with this?

</comment><comment><USER40> Congrats to China- go team humanity!

</comment><comment><USER41> Incremental progress, yay!

</comment><comment><USER42> Extraordinary breakthroughs require extraordinary evidence.

I am waiting for such evidence now.

</comment><comment><USER43> Confirmed?

</comment><comment><USER44> We already have a free fusion plant: the sun.

</comment><comment><USER45> What could possibly go wrong, really.

<comment><USER46> Not as much as could go wrong with a fission reaction.

<comment><USER46> And I don't mean to demonize fission power at all. Just wanted to point out that a fusion reaction must be sustained while a fission reaction must be controlled. Of course there's more to that story as well since a fission reactor could be designed with some kind of passive failsafe (e.g. a frozen plug which seals the reactor core or something similar).</comment></comment></comment>


Cloudy with a Chance of Lock-In - <AUTHOR> http://jacquesmattheij.com/cloudy-with-a-chance-of-lock-in <comment><USER2> The "Internet of Rentiers" argument is exactly right. Things are made unnecessarily cloud-y for monetisation reasons.

In some ways this is the end of the software piracy wars. Software as a single purchase that you buy once and use forever without restriction is basically over. Besides, it needs updating to cope with both security threats and changing ecosystems. So that requires ongoing effort. But users don't want to pay for it in the first place.

So the solution we've arrived at by default is for the software to remain inside the datacentre fortress where the user can't pirate it, and make the user bring their data inside the fortress instead where it can be ransomed. Quite a lot of SaaS is "free!" but with monetised privacy invasion or the questionable gimmicks of free2play games.

IoT makes it possible for this untransparent renting business model to be brought to physical objects. If you buy an appliance once and then use it for 20 years, to the capitalist you're a bad customer. Why do that when you can pay for annual fridge software updates and a new fridge every 5 years when it stops being "smart"?

<comment><USER3> This started at least 20 years ago. I remember my dad complaining when I was a pre-teen about how everything was moving towards disposable or recurring-fee models, and you couldn't buy anything that was built to last and hold onto it for a lifetime anymore.

It's kinda ironic - during the Bush II presidency everyone was talking about the "ownership society", but the trend today has been toward the "renters' society", where consumers own nothing, the means of production are increasingly centralized in a few specialized producers, and everybody pays out of pocket for momentary needs. It's accelerating, too: car ownership => leases => Uber, suburban homes => urban apartments, vacation homes => timeshares => prepackaged "experiences", careers => gig economy, pay for printers => pay for ink, books => the Internet, videos & DVDs => Netflix, CDs => Spotify, exercise bikes => gym membership, building companies to last => hitting quarterly numbers.

I wonder sometimes why consumers put up with it, but most seem to actually prefer renting things for the short term rather than buying them for the long term. It's like the time preferences of society have compressed radically, and where people would used to think about investing in things that last for 30 years, they now focus on what they need in the next 30 minutes.

<comment><USER4> Very good points. I wonder why many consumers act like that.

I understand that companies prefer to rent or lease because of tax avoidance and/or lowering overhead (fixed costs) (because of inflexible accounting programs, blabla).

On the otherside, as a consumer (and if you have the money and your interest is longterm), why not just buy it? Why rent/lease something? In the long term you are better of buying it. Renting/Leases are always more expensive in the long run.

Also owning something is a lot more rewarding, relaxing, (and it can be used many years later) than handling some leased/rented subject with utmost care.

<comment><USER3> I've got a hypothesis, but it's kinda out-there. It has to do with shifting time priorities across society.

The generations that grew up in the 50s-80s could be reasonably confident that the world a decade later would be more or less what it was before. Fashions would change, social movements would get started, more home appliances would be introduced, but as long as nuclear war never happened, the basic economic underpinnings of society wouldn't change too much. And so it made sense for them to buy things for the long term, because the purchase they made now would still be relevant & useful in 20 years.

Starting with the Netscape's IPO in 1995 and perhaps exacerbated by the fall of communism in the early 90s, that changed. Even before they came of age, Millenials had witnessed the dot-com boom & crash (in which many of their elders lost their life savings); obsolescence of PCs every 2-4 years; 9/11; the rise of MP3 sharing and then its clampdown; the rise of cellphones, their replacement by smartphones, and then the 1-2 year upgrade cycle of continually getting a new smartphone; the 2008 financial crisis; manufacturing jobs moving from the U.S. to Japan to India to Bangladesh to China to Southeast Asia; and the rise of sharing-economy companies providing services that you previously needed to buy a product for. Many have also been personally burned by investments in skills that were supposed to be a sure thing, like taking on $100K in student loan debt and not being able to get a job afterwards or landing your dream job and then being fired or laid off 3 months later.

The combined effect of all these is to send the message that the future is not worth planning for. There will be better products on the market in 2 years. There will be new services. That skillset that's so hot right now may be completely obsolete. The education that everyone says is crucial to your future won't get you a damn thing. The financial investment that's up 400% now may crash to zero tomorrow. You may have to move to a new city to find work, or to follow a significant other who needs to find work.

When the future becomes radically unpredictable, it makes sense to buy for the here-and-now, because the durable product you carefully invested in may be useless anyway.

<comment><USER2> This sounds very plausible to me. The world is uncertain enough that it's safer to pay for it month by month rather than risk a stranded investment in the wrong thing. The only "stable" investment is real estate, which has therefore shot up in price. Physical "durable" goods are by comparison very cheap.

<comment><USER5> That's flawed reasoning. The uncertainty should cause you to save before you spend and to own rather than rent on a contract that you can't get out of. After all, even if you have a stranded investment it will not cost you more for the next x months. But a rental agreement will usually have termination conditions that need to be met and if you can't get out of it then you're much worse off than if you owned the item outright.

The biggest money maker for such subscription type purchases are impulse purchases. Buy now on cheap credit, pay a premium for a long time on top of the value of the item. And for those type of purchases if you were to do them with money saved over time you probably wouldn't buy them at all. (And your life would be better, not worse, all this stuff is really owning us.)

<comment><USER2> I suspect we also need to look at carrying costs. Let's go back to the list from the comment above:

 _car ownership = > leases => Uber suburban homes => urban apartments vacation homes => timeshares => prepackaged "experiences" careers => gig economy pay for printers => pay for ink books => the Internet videos & DVDs => Netflix CDs => Spotify exercise bikes => gym membership building companies to last => hitting quarterly numbers._

Gig economy and short-term companies are arguably not a choice but exogenous. The job for life has been replaced by "at will" redundancies.

Home downsizing is clearly down to rising cost; saving up gets less and less feasible. But the move from suburbs into the centre is cultural.

Home gym => gym membership I suspect is also down to increasing real estate cost. A gym is much cheaper than the incremental mortgage cost of an extra room.

Media libraries => Spotify/Netflix is about increasing choice. They're not entirely replacing the library (people are buying more _vinyl_ for totemic ownership), but replacing the radio and TV channels. Replacing someone else's limited range of choices with a much wider one. It then gets put on in the background as wallpaper.

(dear god this site needs a formatting reminder and preview button)

<comment><USER5> You can resize the input box, that goes a long way towards keeping an overview over what you wrote for larger comments. Hover over the lower right hand corner of the edge of the box, then a resize mouse pointer should appear.

<comment><USER4> That's browser dependent, and only a few let you do that. Try that on a mobile browser...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > In the case of the TV the service component wasn't even mentioned at all > until well after installing the bloody thing

In europe there's a seven day money back no question answered right to protect consumers from hardware trying to pull these tricks. Won't last forever, but I could recently return a digital camera trying to pull this very trick.

Vote with the wallet, educate those who don't etc etc. It wont ultimately work, but if we can postpone it enough it'll become a next generation problem.

</comment><comment><USER7> > In the case of the TV the service component wasn't even mentioned at all > until well after installing the bloody thing

Yap same here. Bought a TV (Vizio). Without agree-ing to their "we'll monitor everything about you" disclaimer couldn't connect it to the wifi, couldn't start any of the apps. So agreed to it. Then had set up rules in the router's firewall to block it and have to un-block it if I want to watch Netflix for example. What a pain. Supposedly I could make a more complicated rule to allow only netflix traffic and no other traffic from it...

There was no, "let me connect to Netflix" but don't auto-update anything, don't phone home, don't send metrics etc. It was all or nothing. And then of course the apps are slow, crappy, and buggy.

<comment><USER8> Wow, that makes me never want to buy a Vizio, ever. Although from what I hear, their apps are pretty bad anyway, so you'd probably be better off using an external box (Roku or AppleTV or Chromecast) for your Netflix et cetera. This assumes that said devices are not phoning back to _their_ home, which might be a slippery assumption.

<comment><USER9> Of course they are. But it's interesting that you and I care about _who_ phones back home - why do we trust Roku more than Vizio? Is it that it feels "unnatural" for an existing object like a TV to change the relationship?

And of course, most people actually don't care about this.

<comment><USER7> That is a good point, I have Roku as well in another room (connected to a "dumb" older TV). And yeah, I trust Roku more. And I trust Google -- I have a Gmail. Heck old work trusted Google with their internal discussion and files!

Thinking about it, I guess I made a (perhaps bad) bargain -- you can have my data if you give me something useful and working that I want back. Roku works and gives me something useful, working apps and I expected I had to do it when I bought it. Google gives me Gmail, so it can spy on me. Vizio gave me a TV, but I paid for it, and I didn't expect that it would need an invasive home phoning agreement to be usable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The worst offenders, in my opinion are operating systems. Every time I start my computer I get an annoying prompt to sign into iCloud, which will reappear immediately on cancel, so I end up having to close it about five times. Apple is trying to browbeat me into using their service by being as annoying as possible. At this point, even if iCloud was great I wouldn't use it on principal.

Microsoft is even worse, not only do they have their own annoying cloud "features" they opt you into, now they've decided to administer your computer for you from afar. I had to wait an hour yesterday for Windows to install a giant update that requires multiple reboots because they tried to install it overnight. Worse, it was applying it at the boot screen, so I couldn't even pause it or read the web while I waited. If Microsoft can just put my laptop out of commission for hours on a whim, with no warning, I can't trust their os for anything important. I'm not a Linux fanboy in the least, but since both major os's make me feel like I'm just renting my own computer I might make the switch.

</comment><comment><USER11> It really irks me that I can't find a high end television set that isn't Smart. I'd rather not have a bunch of features baked into my TV that are going to stop working in months or years. I received an email from Roku just the other day telling me about buttons on my remote that will no longer work, I doubt TV manufacturers would even be bothered to give you that courtesy.

<comment><USER12> I don't see the point of a Smart TV. My TV is a 40" monitor for my Chromecast. I don't know what value a Smart TV could offer me.

<comment><USER13> Nothing at all, but I'm sure the target consumer for one doesn't post on HN.

<comment><USER14> I just bought one - I planned to get a non-smart TV, but found a Smart TV on sale for the same price. I expected to use my Chromecast for everything, but instead I'm using all the built-in Smart apps and the Chromecast very rarely. The usability of controlling everything from one remote (and even having a remote) is better, and means everyone can watch Netflix etc regardless of whether they brought a phone with a Netflix account or not.

<comment><USER15> How long have you owned the TV though? The concern is that 3 years from now, will they still work, vs the easily replaceable Chromecast?

<comment><USER16> Well if it was the same price, then you could just add a chromecast or such later, and it wouldn't be a big deal. I definitely agree under normal circumstances where smart TVs are way more expensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I offer two version of my software - a system that can be run offline at your faculty and a version that is basically cloud based. The two versions are aimed at different types of users. It works well as an approach.

The cause of Jacques complaint is that it is very hard to sell a perpetual offline version at the true economic value of the software. In my case the customer would need to pay 72x the monthly cost for the value to me to be equivalent. Everytime I discuss this with a customer they don't want to pay anywhere near this amount. I know much more about how likely a customer is to keep using a product long term than the customer :)

</comment><comment><USER18> Ignoring the fact that a lot of software/hardware with cloud components is about lock-in, lately I've been on a quest to replace as many cloud components as I can with sandstorm.io apps.

Some things just work better with centralized cloud-based storage, but there's no reason users shouldn't be in control of that data. Social networks are the big exception. People are working on decentralized social networks, but it's a much harder problem. Many cloud services are just data storage, though.

</comment><comment><USER19> I agree, but only mostly: there will always be companies that 'get it' and offer both a cloud and a standalone version.

For example (plug), we offer a product called Userify (ssh key management for the cloud) but we also offer a (rather expensive) enterprise version for people to deploy it on-site. In fact, we recommend that, since it's more secure for you to deploy and lock down your own version in your own VPC or DC.

And this is good for us, since the cloud version is free in its base form, and the enterprise version is currently the only way we're driving any revenue.

As time goes on, these models will stabilize and companies will go back to giving people what they actually want. You can't optimize for yourself forever; at some point, you lose customers.

So, as a counterpoint, large mobile providers have largely stopped subsidizing phones (which was blatant lock-in) in order to give people what they really want, which is choice. It makes more sense for the customer, and _therefore_ automatically makes more sense for the company. Unless they have absolute market power, they can't throw their weight around that much.

So I'm not worried about TV manufacturers that require a monthly subscription. Those will get returned to the store fairly quickly and the ones that hide their costs will have a growing black stain on their brand and eventually fade into oblivion. It's said that customers are fickle, but customers as a whole are really quite rational.

(Counterpoint to this counterpoint: Apple and everything they make.)

</comment><comment><USER20> Autodesk recently went this way. All their products, even old AutoCAD, are now rented, not sold.

<comment><USER5> In a way this is a golden opportunity for open source.

<comment><USER21> Ha! Good luck creating open-source CAD software that engineers and manufacturers will trust and use.

<comment><USER5> You would have said the exact same thing about schematic capture and layout not that long ago, about compilers and operating systems a while longer ago than that.

<comment><USER22> The real question is, given how much work is involved in implementing a CAD system, how can a person/business make money from an open source CAD ?

<comment><USER23> You can't. And that's why all the open source CAD systems suck.

People pay $10K per license to Altium or Solidworks for a reason.

<comment><USER20> Try FreeCAD. It's a true solid modeler, like Autodesk Inventor. The solid modelling has roughly the same functionality as Inventor or SolidWorks, but the user interface is far worse. It's so open source. There's a pane which shows you the standard output from Python, in case something happens to print something. (This is mostly useful for people writing extensions to the program in Python, and, in typical open-source style, it's far too prominent.) There are panes in which dialogs appear, but they don't fit properly; they may be higher or wider than the pane. They're all QT-ugly, of course. There's no visibility in the UI of what's important and what isn't. Everything has a large number of properties, most of which are irrelevant unless you're developing. And, of course, the program has a huge number of modal hotkeys.

Basically, someone slapped the UI of an integrated development environment onto a CAD program. That's so open source.

This is a rather good program, too. The underlying solid modeler seems to have all the right stuff. That's the hard part. Then they blew the UI.

3D content generation UIs are very hard. Some of the issues:

\- Things may be very cluttered. Selecting can be difficult.

\- Some systems allow you to select volumes, faces, edges, or vertices. In tight spots, selection needs smarts.

\- For some operations, you need to select a subject and an object. But you may need to pan, zoom, or rotate between those two selections. Exactly when thing get deselected is a big issue.

\- Most GUIs are subject-verb. (Select something, then do operation.) That follows Macintosh and Windows practice. This doesn't always work out for CAD, where you may need to select multiple things, multiple kinds of things, deselect mistakes, and perhaps perform other operations while selecting. Bad solutions involve holding down SHIFT or CTRL or two mouse buttons at once.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Great article, it expresses my own thoughts and attitude very well.

I understand why companies aim for this lock-in, but I believe that the question to ask is: why are such companies successful with such lock-in based products? I believe that they are successful with such strategies because of the lack of matching alternatives that offer the same usability for the majority of users. And when talking about usability I explicitly include the aspect of operation management. With cloud-based solutions, operation management is effectively zero from a user perspective.

During the past 10-20 years, the web has evolved significantly w.r.t. content rendering, content authoring, and content transport solutions. Today people can very easily watch movies, read articles, listen to music, or write articles, upload movies, and share music themselves. At the same time, the web did not (or only slightly) evolve in its underlying architecture. It does not provide the primitives required to bring content producers and consumers directly together. If you are a content producer, you either need to use a centralized service operated by a third party, or you need to have the technical skills to setup and operate your own IT-infrastructure.

The effect of this gap is even more significant if you look at todays users. Since they have multiple devices, the become content producers on one device, and their own content consumer on the next device. While technically skilled people could easily implement own alternatives (that run on their desktop) in the past to get away from online services and protect their privacy, they are faced with the challenge that such an application needs to feature smart synchronization among multiple devices in order to provide the same level of usability.

</comment><comment><USER25> I bought omnigraffle several years ago, and have been using it a lot ever since. But really, it works for me. I know it. There is a new version, which adds some needed features, but I just don't need them enough to upgrade for $100 or so.

So, they only ever made the original $120 off of me, years ago. But they obviously still need to be making money in the meantime; but short of incompatibility in some way, i doubt i'll ever upgrade. So, I'm a huge fan of their software, but they could go out of business for being so good, if nobody ever upgrades. But if they went to a cloud solution, I wouldn't pay for that either, because I don't use it THAT much, and already have the app which works fine.

Same goes for Sublime Text; I paid for 2, but I doubt I'll buy 3; or even use it. But yet there's a company behind it that obviously needs to keep making money.

The answer, classically, seems to be new users, and new versions. If your software is really good, different products. Or just target Enterprise and charge a ton.

It's a tricky situation if you're trying to make money in software.

But on the web, you can build one thing, and people can pay you every month to use it. You don't even have to change anything, just keep it running. That's a pretty attractive model in contrast.

I don't like office in the cloud, and I don't like adobe in the cloud. I think there is probably a market of people who do, and that's great. But for those things, I prefer them on the desktop.

Same goes for music. I like having it with me; not tied to a music service.

But movies and TV shows are often watch-once for me, so a service like Netflix works well for something like that.

But as someone launching a collaborative SaaS, I can appreciate both sides. For me, the immediate need is SaaS, and secondary to that is offering buy once, use forever, once the economics are in place. I think there will always be some people who just want to pay for a SaaS, and others who refuse to but will pay for onsite. So, I think the best thing you can do is target both. People usually want to pay for something, if its worth it and fair. But what's fair and reasonable is different for everyone, so cast a wider net and you'll catch more fish.

And maybe one day, I'll buy that new version of Omnigraffle.

</comment><comment><USER26> Funny, I feel that some interesting online tools have little business being online:

Email services like "SendWithUs" which allow for A-B testing of your emails... It has very little use being on someone else's servers. If your server can send an email, you can easily run a lightweight service that does more or less what they do. They sell a product, you pay for updates.

There are many such examples of services which don't really need to be online, but they want that monthly payment.

Furthermore, I remember buying SpaceMonkey. It was a great idea, except that I had this 2tb hard drive that was just sitting around being unable to be used because I refused to pay a yearly $50 fee. I ended up just prying it open and using the hard drive (mind you, you pay for the drive too).

One positive one is WesternDigital's NAS drive (my cloud). It has a feature you can turn on to use it as a "cloud storage device", but that is an optional feature which you don't have to use, instead you can have it 100% local NAS, or turn it on (granted from a security perspective, I'd rather NOT have it open to the open internet)

<comment><USER27> > Email services like "SendWithUs" which allow for A-B testing of your > emails... It has very little use being on someone else's servers. If your > server can send an email, you can easily run a lightweight service that does > more or less what they do. They sell a product, you pay for updates.

I have only experimented a bit with these services and am not actively marketing, but it is my understanding that there are several reasons to use them:

> you can easily run a lightweight service that does more or less what they > do. They sell a product, you pay for updates.

* You can run your own git/github repo, make your own irc setup and write your own javascript framework but you can get to market faster using React, github and slack.

* Mail is annoying from what I understand. You can have your servers blacklisted pretty quickly even if you are simply trying to do casual email, this is abstracted away.

* I have build email templates, and it is pretty annoying because cross compatibility is hell. The assumptions and basic template I used to put together my email was from a service like this, I think mailgun. They keep updated info on compatibility and provide free templates and inline tooling to get this done quick even if you don;t use the service. However, if no one used the service these resources would have to be found from various blogs, etc. More time not developing.

* Building tracking and programatic email generation and transactional logic is probably not so trivial that the free for < 10K email limit most providers have would make the engineering spend worth it.

So the point is, some services are useful because they provide more value than building them in house. I have never used spacemonkey but the value prop is you can keep your data locally and back it up yourself. If you didn't want to pay the fees you could just buy 1 (or if you wanted redundancey) 2 drives and do it yourself.

The value propositions are presented up front. The real issue is when these services pivot or change and you are left in the lurch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > All this of course to 'better serve you' and 'for your convenience', those > two sentence fragments are like little alarm bells that you're about to be > screwed.

I'm glad that I'm not the only one who thinks this way when I see those words.

<comment><USER15> I've taken to looking at marketing statements in general as from "opposite- world". If a sales-blurb is about how great their customer-service is, I'm guessing they are trying to clean up a bad reputation, without fixing the problem. Same thing when they say their product is "reliable".

When I see "to better serve you", all I can think of is: "we found a way to make things better for us"

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I have a hard time coming up with any pressing example of this in categories of software that interest me - I wish he'd provided more?

<comment><USER30> Adobe Creative Cloud

<comment><USER31> Adobe (and others) are in a tight spot called "how do we keep selling our product when we've achieved almost-100% market saturation".

A sort of silver lining is that with the rentier model companies will have an interest to produce more reliable products, rather than ones which break exactly one day after the warranty ends.

<comment><USER32> Not just 100% market saturation, but often "no real reason to upgrade". Adobe CS2 is actually offered for free download off Adobe's website, and it does 98% of what anyone needs Creative Suite for anyways. The biggest problem is it doesn't recognize some features of newer Creative Suite files, like folders of layers in Photoshop.

I have a Photoshop CS5 license, and I can't ever conceive of any reason I'd pay for CC. I have gotten my money's worth out of Photoshop CS5, and I'll continue to get that value, but I don't use Photoshop nearly enough to ever justify a monthly cost.

<comment><USER33> I think that they host CS2 for the sake of letting existing license holders continue using the software, and public access is just an obvious side effect iirc.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>