Ask HN:  How will the world change when the PageRank patent expires? - <AUTHOR>

Most Web 2.0 sites including HN would benefit from PageRank or a variant thereof for example.<p>How do you think the world will change? <comment><USER2> Google itself has largely abandoned PageRank as described in the original paper. It's only one of the signals used to rank web pages.

I don't understand your assertion that Web 2.0 sites would benefit from PageRank. And in any case, the patent is not what was holding them back.

<comment><USER3> So they say. It may be "only one of the signals", but its the biggest by a long shot.

Don't believe what Google tells you about its algo, test it yourself. Remember, its in their best interests for everyone to think their algorithm is so complex that it can't be spammed or replicated. Neither is true.

<comment> onreact-com No, by now domain age and authority are most probably the single most important ranking factors of Google, among 200+ other so called "signals". I can see it in my SEO work. No domain age and authority means you can't rank in results even with substantial PageRank.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not much, PageRank was never the brilliant innovation it was made out to be. It was a nice improvement ca 1998 but Google has spent most of the last ten years throwing patches at the problem of people gaming the system. They've been the Red Queen, running faster and faster to stay in place. In terms of actually finding what you're looking for, I don't think Google today is much better than it was then, which is maybe twice as good as Alta Vista 1998. Search engine scalability has come a long way, but search engine results have improved little.

</comment><comment><USER3> Every major search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing, ~Ask) uses a form of "PageRank" for their rankings. That is to say, all major search engines use the a graph as their primary ranking metric (other than relevancy, obviously).

I don't know how the patent plays in, but its fair to say "the cat is out of the bag" that a weighted link graph is (currently) the best way to algorithmically determine a given website's authority.

Disclaimer: I don't work for a search engine, but I am an SEO.

</comment><comment><USER5> most likely it won't change a bit

<comment><USER6> Agreed. Having PageRank in your product is one thing, but using it well and scaling it up (like Google has done) is a way different (and probably much more difficult) matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> tens if not hundreds of companies are using it right now, but because they're not selling a product based on it there is no infringement.

You have to prove that, as long as you can't take apart some machine to prove infringement it is just another fishing expedition.

And even if you did, I'm not sure if that would constitute infringement (since you are not selling an apparatus containing the infringing item). Maybe one of the legal eagles here can fill that one in ?

<comment><USER8> IANAL, but using a patent is grounds for infringement. Unlike the GPL, patent law has no SaaS loophole.

<comment><USER9> True, but how would you prove it? A service just gives you the results, it does not tell you how it comes up with the results. Someone looking for infringement would need access to a similar base dataset and would have to run a lot of queries to develop enough proof to get any potential lawsuit off the ground. The only path I could see for such a lawsuit to develop would be one where a disgruntled employee provides enough evidence to get things rolling.

<comment><USER10> 1\. You sue.

2\. You go through discovery, comb every line of code of the person you are accusing, until you find what you are looking for

It's really that simple. All it costs is money (for both sides unfortunately).

<comment><USER7> no, it's not that simple, that is a fishing expedition.

No judge would allow that during discovery.

<comment><USER11> Quite simple: a plaintiff is not required to have complete proof of the defendant's wrongful acts prior to suing them in court. The burden would be too high, and most aggrieved plaintiffs would be unable to recover the harm caused them by the defendant.

Plaintiffs have the right to get "discovery" to prove their claims _because the defendant is usually the only person/company with evidence of the defendant's wrongful acts_.

A fishing expedition is where the plaintiff cannot articulate any particular type of evidence sought, or how such evidence would be useful/necessary to its case, or how such evidence would result in evidence it could actually use.

Example: P sues D for patent infringement, demands in discovery D's head researcher's notes. Not fishing. Example 2: Same, except that P demands the CEO's call logs. Fishing, b/c not reasonably related to the patent infringement claim. Example 3: Same as Ex 2, except that P alleges that the CEO knew about the patent b/c he spoke with a former employee of P before launching D's infringing product. NOT fishing, b/c now it's shown to be relevant.

How to tell the difference: If you can't articulate something relevant to your claims that the discovery _could_ reveal, it's a fishing expedition.

<comment><USER7> If you have absolutely no proof but only a suspicion: 'your honour, their search results are so good, they must be infringing on pagerank' then it really isn't going to fly. You have to have more than just a suspicion before you can go in to discovery.

Knowing about a patent (because it has been published) is not enough.

Google could sue every other search engine right this second for infringement of pagerank and the judge would (upon a motion by the defendants lawyers) toss them right out without any kind of substantiation.

A declaration of a disgruntled employee, leaked source, a statement by a prominent member of the board of the competitor, all those would be grounds to let the trial proceed, but _nothing_ would get you tossed out.

The operative word in your argument is 'complete'.

You will not get to read your opponents code on a hunch.

<comment><USER10> Sorry Jacques, you are wrong on that point. Been there, done that. Fishing expeditions are very easy to hide when it relates to highly technical patents.

No point in quoting what the law says, that's all theory. In practice, it happens.

Google _could_ sue all the search engines out there. But there is no _business_ reason for them to. But if it ever became critically important to them to kill a given competitor, patent infringment of the fishing kind would be high on their list of options.

I am not a lawyer but I play one on the Founder Institute :-)

<comment><USER7> Ok, I believe you!

Now excuse me while I go sue the pants of some competitors in the hope of finding some infringement during discovery ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> PageRank is only interesting to people who do not understand it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you elaborate?

Do you disagree that using it in social news sites would result in an improvement?

<comment><USER12> Yes, I disagree, but let's approach this from a different angle.

What do YOU think is so unique and valuable about pagerank and its applicability to social news sites?

From where I sit, it's just an algorithm to spit out a relative 1-10 ranking of a given pages authority.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can use it to compute the importance of submissions and users in a way that is less susceptible to manipulation.

Submissions by more important users would themselves be more important before anyone else votes on them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> According to Matt Cutts, PageRank is the main way Google orders pages for crawling. If you have high page rank, you get crawled first.

mat didn't say this, but beyond that, I think the reaction of users is by far the biggest determinant in which pages get top ranked.

<comment> onreact-com That's true but you can make Google crawl your site even without PageRank. Think XML sitemaps and blog pings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't think PageRank is what set Google apart. It was multi-word tokens.

</comment><comment><USER14> huh... there will be one more expired patent?

Even at this point (30 or 40 years) from that day, PR is, practically, only of academic interest.

<comment><USER15> patents now expire in 20 years, so <http://www.google.com/patents?vid=6285999> expires in 2018. agreed, however, that the world will be so vastly different by then that this won't be as significant as, say, the rsa or lzw expirations (unless google's lawyers get their teeth into anything).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Very lightly. more small vendors will start selling inmplementations...</comment>


Ask HN: Best countries for international grad student to bootstrap a startup - <AUTHOR>

I'm finishing my master's degree in bioinformatics from the UK now and would continue for a PhD in either CS/bioinfo afterwards. During the PhD, I would also like to try to slowly bootstrap an Internet startup idea that I have in mind (not related to bioinformatics). My question is, which country would allow me to do graduate study while working on bootstrapping the start-up at the same time? For the UK, at least, people on student visa are not allowed to work on their own business during the course of their study, which is why I'm thinking of leaving after the master's. I'd considered the US too but the multi-decades timeframe required to complete the grad study there is quite scary.
Also, my current citizenship is Indonesian, so I could encounter visa restrictions for working in many western countries. Regardless, I hope this questions might be of some relevancy to others who're in the same situation as me.
PS. The matter of finding a suitable advisor in that country can be considered to be outside the scope. Thanks! <comment><USER2> Multi-decade time frame required to complete grad study? If you have a master's degree already then you only need two more years for a Ph.D (in most cases - or at least both of my parents did and I highly doubt they were both abnormally fast).

Are you solely working on the start-up? I would suggest going about your business without the need to incorporate right away. A lot of people waste a lot of time and money incorporating when they have no idea if the product can be built, is desired in the market place, or validated.

My suggestion would be to come to the U.S for your Ph.D (if visa requirements allow you to do so). You will have two years to work on your studies and then also validate your startup idea in the U.S, which may be more friendly in terms of validation and (if you moved to startup hubs) could be useful in terms of incorporating and scaling.

Whatever you decide to do, best of luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> The 'multi-decade' bit was just meant to be tongue-in-cheek. I was just implying that it took sooo much longer to complete the PhD in the US, as opposed to Commonwealth countries (UK, and to some extent, Australia, New Zealand). Giving up 7 years of my life is just too much to ask.

Also, when I mention about visa requirement, I mean the restriction on freely moving into a country and expecting to be able to work right away. Studying anywhere in the world is not much of a problem for me, visa-wise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm curious about the statement you made that the UK uni's won't let you work on a startup during your course of study. I plan to apply for the PhD (as an American in the UK) in personal informatics. I have been very upfront when speaking to advisors in the uni's that it directly relates to my company and no one has mentioned that I can't work on my business and PhD.

Anyway - to answer your question: have you looked at the Eastern European schools? Slovakia, Czech - both countries have wonderful tech uni's.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you come here on the Tier 4 student visa (as what most people do), you'd face the following restriction:

A student from outside of the EEA must not: • engage in business; or • engage in self-employment; or • provide services as a professional sportsperson or entertainer; or • pursue a career by filling a permanent full-time vacancy.

You can see that from page 71 here: [http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/sitecontent/documents/empl...](http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/sitecontent/documents/employersandsponsors/preventingillegalworking/currentguidanceandcodes/comprehensiveguidancefeb08.pdf?view=Binary)

There used to be a Post Study Visa that gave you the freedom for two years post-study to goof off/work/incorporate/whatnot but unfortunately that had been cancelled last year (just the moment when I enrolled .. sigh). However, there's an entrepreneur visa that an aspiring startup might try to aim for. However, my question specifically pertains to the cases where it would be good to incorporate (say, after the business proves to be feasible).

<comment><USER4> I was wondering about what the current policy was myself. I have been debating on studying in the UK and Europe, but ending up choosing to stay the U.S. for the startup resources. Thanks for explaining the new visa policy.

I talked with two guys from Germany and Australia, and both said incorporating in their respective countries was difficult. I'd research either Chile or Israel and see what their policies are.

For the entrepreneur visa, it looks like you must have 200,000 pounds in the bank, so for me that definitely takes the option off the table: <http://www.visabureau.com/uk/entrepreneur-visa.aspx> Feel free to let me know if you find other ways to do a startup in the UK or Europe. Good luck!

<comment><USER3> Indeed, I've heard great things about Chile. <http://www.startupchile.org/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Also check out Israel, specifically Tel Aviv: [http://www.amazon.com/Start-up- Nation-Israels-Economic-Mirac...](http://www.amazon.com/Start-up-Nation- Israels-Economic-Miracle/dp/044654146X)

</comment><comment><USER5> Berlin, Germany is awesome, very vibrant scene, quite cheap compared to London, not big in bioinformatics though

</comment><comment><USER6> Would incorporating a shell company and operating your startup inside a corporate entity be allowable in the UK?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm afraid I don't really get this. Would you elaborate more ? Thanks !

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Try Chile: <http://www.startupchile.org/></comment>


How does Linux's perf utility understand stack traces? - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/a/38280294/46799 <comment><USER2> It isn't listed in the article, but I wrote about this in my blog also: [http://blog.reverberate.org/2013/05/deep-wizardry-stack- unwi...](http://blog.reverberate.org/2013/05/deep-wizardry-stack- unwinding.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> What's the simplified explanation how perf uses CPU performance counters to know what functions are called. I mean, what kind of book-keeping is going on that allows it to map instructions executed to symbols (functions) called?

<comment><USER4> Perf uses hardware performance counters to interrupt on some instructions and records their program counter: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28661430/how-does-a- syste...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28661430/how-does-a-system-wide- profiler-e-g-perf-correlate-counters-with-instructions). It uses symbol lists from ELF files to find functions for every recorded program counter ([http://www.brendangregg.com/perf.html#Symbols](http://www.brendangregg.com/perf.html#Symbols)), like nm ([https://sourceware.org/binutils/docs/binutils/nm.html](https://sourceware.org/binutils/docs/binutils/nm.html)), and can also use debugging information to get source file names and lines like addr2line ([https://sourceware.org/binutils/docs/binutils/addr2line.html](https://sourceware.org/binutils/docs/binutils/addr2line.html)).</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should I do a closed beta stage of my SaaS? - <AUTHOR>

Hey guys,
I'm currently in the middle of developing a SaaS and am already wondering if I should do a beta stage with limited users (invite only or something like that).
The product is not something too niche (any non-impulsive buyer who uses e-shops would do) so I suppose I could find people who would benefit from the service that might not be 100% done, a bit buggy and a bit broken. But where should I look first? I suppose, HN would be the first place I look to.
The product would not be free (once it's mostly done) as it would also be costing me (vps, emails, text messages etc). I suppose I should be letting people use the SaaS for free for the beta duration and probably give them discounts if they are willing to use it once it's live?
How should I take their feedback? Currently looking at something like UserVoice. It would take me back $20 every month I'm doing the Beta and if I decide to keep it further on.
Any other advice on how I should handle the birth of a SaaS? <comment><USER2> You should allow in as many users as you can handle the support and feature requests for.

One user can take up to 90% of your time, other times ten users come in and happily use the software with no complaints.

Take their feedback with gmail. Don't get too fancy.

Proactively ask for advice and comments. Sometimes people don't complain until they leave.

</comment><comment><USER3> The sooner you get paying users, the better, because then you can figure out what they really want and move in that direction.

Depending on what kind of users you have in mind, HN may or may not be a good place to find them. There are plenty of products, like patio11's stuff, that probably don't convert at all from HN since we're not his target market. Maybe find a niche and concentrate on that?

I'd just use email or the phone for feedback.

<comment><AUTHOR> The problem would probably be driving the users out because of some features not working/working incorrectly.

I should maybe just do very thorough inside beta with a few selected people I know to fix up at least the most annoying things.

<comment><USER3> Attracting users is not going to be easy in any case, so I would start trying to pull them in and get them using it, a bit at a time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 1\. In case you do not currently have a marketing site that lets people signup for an invitation to the beta, stop all development and create the marketing site right away. Having this done before you code lets you gauge whether your value proposition resonates with your target audience.

2\. Start sending prospects to the site (post to forums where your customers hand out, run some ads via adwords or facebook etc) and let them sign up for the beta invitation. During the signup, get some additional information in order to segment them for step 4 below. Be very clear that your product will be in a beta stage, so that customers know there may be bugs/unfinished features. Promise to grandfather in the beta customers for a significant lifetime discount once the beta is over (and actually do so when the time comes).

3\. Code and get your product ready for beta. This should be the minimum viable product and you can call it beta v1.0. Now segment your list so that you allow only x customers for v1.0, then later y additional customers when you go to beta v2.0 and so on. This will ensure that you do not get overwhelmed with too many customers giving you too much feedback. Depending on your product, segment the customers based on niche, so that you can focus all your energies creating a product solution fit for that specific set. Each beta cycle should be iterative - learn, build, measure.

4\. Charge for the beta v1.0. This will go a long way in validating your idea and your product market fit. If you are not sure what to price your offering at, go with your gut instinct. You can always increase or decrease pricing later.

5\. Take feedback over skype, phone or email. If you start with a small set of early customers, it should be possible for you to spend enough time with them. Scaling using UserVoice can be done later, since you are limiting the first set of customers.

</comment><comment><USER5> I am in the same boat, I plan on just releasing mine out into the wild. I want as many users as soon as possible so I can get feedback and tune features.</comment>


How Did the Romans Make Concrete That Lasts Longer Than Modern Concrete? - <AUTHOR> http://www.openculture.com/2017/07/how-did-the-romans-make-concrete-that-lasts-longer-than-modern-concrete-the-mystery-finally-solved.html <comment><USER2> Are we talking about concrete structures in general, or specifically marine concrete structures? This topic (or variants thereof) have been floating around the net for months. They're mostly bullshit. All modern-day PCC (portland cement concrete) structures continue to harden ('cure') for an indefinite period after pouring. A 30 year old building is stronger than a 3 month old building.

There's nothing magic or secret about this phenomenon. Adding fly ash (very similar to volcanic ash) to PCC is a well known ingredient for making high strength concrete.

<comment><USER3> Portland cement is also incredibly brittle (and thus short-lasting) compared to the natural lime-based concrete used pre 19th century.

Here's a great explanation of the differences: [http://limes.us/about-saint- astier-nhl/what-is-natural-hydra...](http://limes.us/about-saint-astier- nhl/what-is-natural-hydraulic-lime/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Related:

[http://99percentinvisible.org/article/cracking-case- secret-i...](http://99percentinvisible.org/article/cracking-case-secret- ingredient-explains-durability-roman-concrete/)</comment>


How to add a million bugs to a program, and why you might want to - <AUTHOR> http://moyix.blogspot.com/2016/06/how-to-add-a-million-bugs-to-a-program.html <comment><USER2> Answer to Question 1: Use our program! Answer to Question 2: To see if your automated bug-testing is finding all the bugs.

<comment><USER3> I'm not impressed with their answer to the second question. Knowing if your automated bug-finding tools manage to find all of the bugs _introduced by this tool_ tells you very little about whether they will find bugs not introduced by this tool unless we have some assurance that the bugs introduced by this tool are somehow representative of bugs in general -- and I see no such assurance.

<comment><USER4> Regardless, defect seeding is a standard (albeit not common) practice in software quality. Nowadays it's more common to talk about it in the form of mutation testing, which is what this basically is.

There are a number of types of bugs that are significantly more common than others, so it's possible to draw equivalence classes around them and use them as representatives of the whole. That's the basic technical skill around testing in general so isn't terribly scary as part of a SQA process.

<comment><USER5> Those who are using the JVM platform can use the pitest maven plugin.

It runs the test suite, then introduce bugs and test and at the end compiles a line-by-line summary of what bugs where injected, caught and missed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I toyed with this idea a little while back; I wrote some very critical tooling in bash, and wanted to make certain that no matter where in the program I encountered an error, the second try would work (presuming I had diagnosed the error).

My thought was: These scripts are running with set -euxo pipefail. I can insert a 'false' line between any two lines, run the script, then remove it and run it again and I should still get the correct results. I never finished writing this test tool, but I still think it's a good idea I want to get back to.

</comment><comment><USER7> Didn't Netflix have some programs they'd call "monkeys" that randomly wreak havoc in their codebase / infrastructure? Is that related to this?

<comment><USER8> Chaos monkey - [http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/chaos-monkey-released- in...](http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/chaos-monkey-released-into- wild.html)

Nope, not related.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> there is a 'fault-injection-framework' available here: [https://blitiri.com.ar/p/libfiu/](https://blitiri.com.ar/p/libfiu/)

haven't used it for anything realistic, so not sure how well it pans out in practise.</comment>


Google, FTC Near Settlement on Privacy  - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052702303567704577517081178553046-lMyQjAxMTAyMDEwMDExNDAyWj.html

<comment><USER2> A ridiculously irrelevant fine. Fines need to be based on a percentage of revenue or something similar (with a fixed minimum).

>Google officials say tracking of Apple users was inadvertent

Good grief. They really expect anybody to buy that? They must have a pretty low opinion of the intelligence of their users.

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't (always) be evil.</comment>


Search Anything - <AUTHOR> http://search.sbf5.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> This was a little midnight web programming project of mine. Maybe there's another service like it, but I haven't found it yet. If you have any suggestions for additional shortcuts, send them over!

<comment><USER2> Well, I'm impressed. It worked without fuss for my, hardly known photography blog (photub). I thought maybe there was just a list of aliases, but that can't be the case... are you just relying on a common url pattern of search/?q=<query> or are you actually a reader of my blog?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I tried "search.sbf5.com anything" and it just took me to a domain squatter page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that is where www.anything.com goes. Try, perhaps, "ebay anything"?

</comment></comment><comment> Tuna-Fish <http://yubnub.org/> ? I have it integrated to my address bar, works like a dream.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, didn't know about that, but it looks cool. It looks like it just uses a list of aliases though, while I default to treating the keyword as the domain name itself and extracting the form from the HTML of the page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> you need to validate the input more. Not including a site gave me an ugly error message.</comment>


Deprived of food and smartphones, students work harder to get phones back - <AUTHOR> https://www.psypost.org/2018/11/when-deprived-of-food-and-smartphones-college-students-worker-harder-to-get-their-phones-back-52449 <comment> crooked-v > In the study, 76 college students were deprived of food for three hours and > deprived of their smartphones for two hours while they studied. They were > then allowed to use a computerized game, which was similar to a slot > machine, to earn time to use their smartphones or 100-calorie portions of > snack food.

No food for 3 hours isn't "deprivation", it's a normal school day.

</comment><comment><USER2> Nothing unethical about that experiment...</comment>


Use of Google Translate in medical communication: evaluation of accuracy - <AUTHOR> http://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g7392 This study evaluates the accuracy and usefulness of Google Translate in translating common English medical statements. There were some serious errors. For instance, in Polish "Your husband has the opportunity to donate his organs" translated to "Your husband can donate his tools." "Your wife needs to be ventilated" in Bengali translated to "Your wife wind movement needed." <comment><USER2> with subtitles available for so many tv shows in multiple languages online I have always wondered if google bot scans and adds those translations in its algorithms for google translate. As most are done by dual language speakers they are a great open source resource of translated languages.

<comment><USER3> The would be copyrighted, so google would have to buy them or pay a licence fee.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > while "Your child has been fitting" was translated [with the least amount of > accuracy, at] 7.7%

For what its worth, Even as a native english speaker, I had to look up what that meant in english.</comment>


Show HN: First site I've built, Personalized Makeup site for Beginners - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN,
This is the first site I've built. I know it probably won't be interesting to most of you but I think it's pretty helpful to people interested in  makeup: http://www.savvyist.com
I hope to make it easier for anyone who wants to get started with makeup, as it can be a really useful tool, and I know firsthand how overwhelming it can be.
I learned Ruby on Rails to create it using the  amazing book/tutorial by Michael Hartl and some good codecademy courses. I was formerly a User Experience Designer at Nokia & didn't know how to code before then. If you want to know more about how I got started, feel free to ask me, I can give you my email address. I would love to meet more female coders in particular!
Hope you like it :) <comment><USER2> Looks great! Can't tell anything about the content really... but for the site itself:

\- I like the merged signup/in

\- The "try customizing this page" is a bit technical and it's far enough from the following text that I didn't think they were related

\- I find the constantly changing faces distracting... maybe a smoother and/or longer transition could help?

\- After clicking on one of the guides, I got the top bar and a white page - the main image took so long to load that I thought the page broke. This may just happen on slow connections. (I could scroll down already, but wouldn't know that without looking at the scroll bar)

\- The footer with about / story / blog / legal links is not available on the front page - on purpose?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much for checking it out and for the feedback, viraptor!!

\- Good point on the "customize this page". I showed it to someone today and they thought it changed the page "skin", like the color of the page. I will muse about how to make it clearer...

\- You're right, the transition is quite slow. I think maybe it is jquery being laggy? I'm pretty newb with javascript, I will look into if there are any smoother transitions.

\- Lol. That's what I get for being close to a university and having really good connections. I will try to figure out how to make it faster on slow connections.

\- For the footer, not on purpose, I just didn't want there to be too many things to take them off the homepage. Also the About/story/ is pretty outdated so I need to update that. I will add it in after I update, since you think it is useful to see early on.

Thank you again for taking the time to check it out, I really appreciate it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks great, especially for your first site.

How long did it take you to learn Ruby/Rails?

Do you have prior software development experience?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi ddv,

Thanks so much for the compliments!

It took me about 2 weeks to go through Michael Hartl's tutorial, [https://www.railstutorial.org/](https://www.railstutorial.org/). After I had gone through the tutorial, I still didn't fully grasp some fundamentals like what an MVC framework was; I only figured that out as I started building out my site. I still feel like I can't call myself a developer, since I have a poor understanding of things like JSON and asynchronous stuff.

I had taken an intro course a while ago in college; it was on ANT assembly language and C. So I had some understanding of if/then loops and obscure things like pointers, but I had no understanding of web development and how to create something myself. I also had no knowledge of Javascript or CSS beforehand, and little understanding of HTML. I used Codeacademy to learn the basics, and of course the wonderland, Stack Overflow :)

My next goal is to learn how to create an app, but I haven't found any good resources for that yet.

Let me know if you have any more questions!

<comment><USER4> Really nice portal. From the design point is quite good, the backgorund palette of colors contrast nicely with the makeup photos. Don't worry too much about technical details, design layout is what clients see on first spot. And your design is quite good !

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks marvel_boy :) I appreciate it!!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Clickable: [http://www.savvyist.com](http://www.savvyist.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you :)</comment></comment>


Show HN: CSL, a C++ Integrated Shading Language - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/thonatt/CSL <comment><AUTHOR> Disclaimer: I'm not the author but I've taken part in some initial discussions and testing of this project.

Usually writing GPU shaders in GLSL is a bit of a pain because they are often compiled on the fly (the application passes them to the GPU driver). In production you would set up a specific toolchain to compile shaders ahead of time and catch compilation errors, but it's cumbersome for smaller projects.

The goal here is to instead use the C++ compiler to validate shaders, by writing them as C++ code (using additional keywords and helpers on top of C++ and template metaprogramming). If a shader is invalid, you'll get 'regular' compilation errors in your IDE. The corresponding GLSL code can be retrieved at runtime by the application to give to the driver.

As the author explains in the readme, it started more as a thought experiment and a way to push C++ templates to their limits than anything else, but I found this quite insightful.</comment>


D3.js application in education - <AUTHOR> http://dieukien.hpu.edu.vn It's small, but i think it help students in credit system enough information to lead the road. Thank you, open source community. <comment><AUTHOR> You can try with this SISID: 1112103002.</comment>


Electric scooter design that makes a hole lot of sense - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130714-hole-new-design-for-scooters

<comment><USER3> An electric-assist bakfiets (dutch-style cargo bike) costs around €1600 - <USER2> less than this thing; and it works when out of juice. The scooter is probably a bit faster, but with the speed of city traffic and 30km/h / 20mph zones popping up all over, I don't see much of an advantage there.

Of course, the market has room for many variations on a theme. But it also makes me wonder if the motivation for variation sometimes isn't like the design of the Strida ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strida](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strida)). According to an interview Mark Sanders (the designer) gave on TV in the 80s, that was originally designed with an X frame and looked more like a normal bike, but then they did a patent search and discovered a folding bike with that design in Asia. So Mark redesigned it to the A frame you see today not because it was better from an engineering/design standpoint, but to make a protectable design. I'd be surprised if this company didn't have a sheaf of patents in its pocket.

</comment><comment><USER4> Note that the article is dated 2013. The company [http://litmotors.com](http://litmotors.com) has now pivoted (don't see that scooter anywhere on its website) to a bigger personal vehicle.

</comment><comment><USER5> How about: a regular scooter with a small one-wheel trailer?

</comment><comment><USER6> I live in China. An electric scooter here is 500 USD, and that's the nice model that expatriates buy.

</comment><comment><USER7> Comparison by "price point", gotta love it. "This costs about the same as other $5000 scooters!"

Sounds a bit high to market in India to me.

</comment><comment><USER8> This looks like it would be insanely difficult to park. Plus, there's nowhere to put your feet, though that's easily remedied.

</comment><comment><USER9> Nice for loads, but I don't see how you could sit with multiple people on it.

<comment><USER10> Good point. In Vietnam I witnessed a family of four riding a single scooter. Baby brother was standing on the seat between mom and big sister!

<comment><USER7> Seeing that kind of thing in downtown Hyderabad made me want to cry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Article dated 15 July 2013</comment>


iOS 12 uses Lua code downloaded from Apple's servers - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/_inside/status/1026173832527265792 <comment><USER2> It's nice that Apple isn't tying this functionality to OS updates. It was pretty bad a few months back when typing prediction went haywire and we had to wait weeks for a fix.

Separately, I'm surprised Apple didn't do this with Swift. I thought one of the goals of Swift was to be a good language for low level code up to high level scripting.

<comment><USER3> One purpose for making Swift was because Objective C is dynamic, and they thought they could get a speed boost by going fully static. The other is because they were having a hard time evolving a C-based language because C is full of plot holes. Swift is meant to be efficient but still allow abstractions, which C is really bad at. (The best you can get with C is leaky abstractions.)

This should be dynamic, but it shouldn't be LUA. It should be something like JSON. Although Lua is sandboxed, so it's safer that way, it is still an easier and bigger attack vector for hackers than JSON would be.

<comment><USER4> Do you really believe that if Apple wrote their own interpreter for their own custom language that serializes into JSON it would be safer than using one of the battle-tested LUA implementations?

<comment><USER3> I was suggesting that they don't have executable code at all, that they use static configuration. But it may not be possible within their problem domain, I don't know. I always prefer static solutions until dynamic becomes necessary.

<comment><USER5> Between code signing and sandboxing, this probably isn't any more dangerous than the JS that Safari downloads and runs every time you open a webpage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The example is interesting (a suggestion to contact the organizer of an event you're running late to), and supports my suspicion that much of the "smartness" ascribed to modern devices boils down to lots of hand-crafted pattern-response rules. Pay no attention to the programmers behind the curtain.

<comment> dan-robertson I'm not really sure anyone should be surprised that much of the smartness is rule-based with maybe a bit of "AI" to help with speech recognition and fiddling with the words a bit. I think this is good because it tends to lead to misunderstanding being biased towards not doing anything instead of doing something particularly wrong. The downside is that the rules never seem to cope with enough inputs.

My hope is basically that many more rules will be written and they will slowly move towards handling more general problems as well as a very large variety of specific cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks like the code is not obfuscated and even includes comments. Does anyone here have the URLs? Might be an interesting read.

</comment><comment><USER8> Is the "not obfuscated" part potentially just because the OS is still Beta? Seems somewhat similar to not encrypting the kernel, from iOS 10 ([https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/22/apple-unencrypted- kernel/](https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/22/apple-unencrypted-kernel/)).

</comment><comment><USER9> It's like a WoW addon. They should make the entire UI scriptable and create an addon store.

<comment><USER10> They won't do that because they want a consistent look for their devices. If you jailbreak, though, you can inject code that hooks into random methods and changes the ui; but that's not officially supported.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> That's something that Apple forbids app developers from doing (unless the lua interpreter is running in a webview).

<comment><USER12> [https://developer.apple.com/app- store/review/guidelines/](https://developer.apple.com/app- store/review/guidelines/)

      > 2.5.2 Apps should be self-contained in their bundles,
      > and may not read or write data outside the designated
      > container area, nor may they download, install, or
      > execute code which introduces or changes features or
      > functionality of the app, including other apps.

The wiggle room is in the "introduces or changes features or functionality of the app" line, they've given themselves vague discretion to reject things that download _too much_ code, but there are tons of apps that do OTA updates that haven't been rejected because they aren't changing fundamental features/functionality.

<comment><USER13> Also if there was no wiggle room here, then any app that downloads and displays webpage content would be in violation due to embedded javascript.

<comment><USER14> For a long time, downloaded code could only run inside Apple's WebKit or JavaScriptCore, but since June 2017, you can use any language and interpreter. Apparently, almost nobody noticed: [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/07/apple_relaxes_devel...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/07/apple_relaxes_developer_rules/)

<comment><USER15> It's good that they revised that ridiculous restriction, but I think they should go further still. It was disingenuous to advertise the iPad as a "computer replacement" when having an environment for Python coding (widely used for beginner programming) was essentially banned. There really _should_ be a way to work in even compiled languages on iDevices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wait, am I understanding this right? Apple is doing _exactly_ what they forbid iOS developers from doing for _years_? Downloading code from the internet and executing it, in order to make runtime decisions or to allow live upgrades? That's just hypocritical BS right there. But the comment thread in the tweet is wrong about it being dangerous. Lua can be sandboxed like any decent VM in 2018. "Danger" isn't the problem.

<comment><USER16> What. Apple has no issues trusting Apple 100% completely, nor do any of their users. Or more specifically, Apple itself is simply an inseparable part of the core trust foundation since they control the entire stack of hardware, firmware and software. You calling this "hypocritical BS" is just nonsense, it's like acting shocked that Apple doesn't allow any random developer to issue microcode processor updates even though Apple could. Of course Apple can, there is no equality there. Apple develops private code and dogfoods it before making it public. Any platform developer by definition has to do low level stuff as part of making higher level stuff. This is not difficult.

"Hypocrisy" gets thrown around _way_ too often on the Internet, and if you do so you are basically always wrong, either because it's not actually hypocrisy at all (the word is not a synonym for "anything I don't like") or because it's a meaningless thing to say anyway vs more substantive complaints.

<comment><USER17> It's also worth noting that the bundle that includes the Lua code is signed and its signature gets verified by the OS before running.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Rails in 2019? - <AUTHOR> I've finally started learning to code, but it's about 10 years later than I wanted to (life gets in the way sometimes). When I first started learning I loved the ruby community and rails with it. But Whenever I talk to colleagues or other students about thinking I want to learn it I'm only met with blank stares or confusion about why I would want to ("why not node?" they say). I try to explain that I still think it's used a lot, that I liked the community or what I remember of it and that it's great for making things quickly (especially proof of concepts). I don't think I was very convincing though because I don't really know enough yet.
So I guess my question is, is it worth learning still? I have a curiosity toward it but I don't want to learn an outdated stack. Also what would be similar, what communities feel like ruby did in 2011? Any resources to learn that are good today? I'm open to possibilities here.
Thanks all. <comment><USER2> I work for a famous Silicon Valley company and we use Ruby, Python, Swift, C++, Obj. C primarily. JavaScript is used by front-end types, but at least around here, JavaScript isn't really a serious language outside of front end development. It's certainly not being used for server-side anything or at least not on any project I know about. However there are some serious systems (hundreds of millions of user accounts) that actually use rails. There is a lot of python here but not much Django. A bit of Java in some systems, but the "cool" stuff is Swift, Objective C, Ruby, C++.

The Ruby community is just as vibrant as is always has been but it's a little less infected with hipster trend chasing than it used to be. JavaScript is the clear winner in that regard. JavaScript is also a noisy community in that there is a lot of ways to skin a cat, while the Ruby world tends to be more opinionated. So, in my opinion, the Ruby (and Rails) Way is a "thing," while there really isn't a cohesive "JavaScript Way."

If I were starting over from zero, I'd still learn Ruby and Rails, but I'd probably lean towards Swift and Vapor. Vapor feels like the Rails community circa 2010 and Swift is blazing fast and can be used for native Mac/iOS, web applications, and highly performant server applications.

To be clear, I am not suggesting not learning JavaScript, but I personally wouldn't make it my primary language. But I kind of follow my own trail, so my advice might not be popular, however it has worked for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Swift and vapor I wouldn't have even known to look up, thank you.

Cool, so the hype died down but a lot of the substance is still there, that's helpful too, thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Rails is effective, boring, productive, and widely used.

What kinds of things are you interested in building?

If you're learning to code to get a web development job, I would lean towards starting with learning Javascript, then building small front-end games and tools (whatever you think would be fun to make), and then learning to use a library like React to make those even better.

At some point after that, sure, learn how to be productive with Ruby/Rails. It's not going anywhere. Or maybe at that point there will be some amazing Node framework with similar strengths to Rails that you can learn instead, but that would surprise me.</comment>


CloudFlare Enables ChaCha20/Poly1305 for all sites - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/do-the-chacha-better-mobile-performance-with-cryptography/

<comment><USER2> It does feel a bit scary being this far on the bleeding edge of adoption of cryptography (since people tend to be really conservative), but since the alternative is known to be bad (RC4...), there really isn't much choice.

Thank you Google for everything you've done on this; Android and Chrome are doing a lot for Internet security.

<comment> floody-berry When Rijndael was chosen as AES, it was ~3 years old and was broken for 6-7 rounds out of 10 with 128 bit keys, and 7-8 rounds out of 14 with 256 bit keys. Chacha20 is 7 years old now and is broken for 7 rounds out of 20, with the attacks on BLAKE/BLAKE2 holding up that margin. You should be very comfortable with Chacha20!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thank you also to djb for _designing_ the salsa20 family & poly1305.

And kudos to Cloudflare for pushing the envelope in this regard!</comment>


Is Amazon Violating U.S. Antitrust Laws? - <AUTHOR> http://inthesetimes.com/article/21850/is-amazon-using-predatory-pricing-in-violation-of-antitrust-laws-monopoly <comment><USER3> Amazon has a team called "Amazon Profitability Group". I used to work for said team, albeit only briefly.

The purpose of the team is to calculate the proper price to sell items for, the "discount" to vendors, and the items to put in the "buy box" in order to make the most profit for Amazon. I think the what is described here in the article is only the tip of the iceberg. Amazon isn't doing something as simplistic as cutting out the competition with low prices... they are feeding all the numbers into neural networks and analyzing and predicting competition and profits, and then doing what the systems tell them is the most profitable.

That is, anything that Amazon can predict will make them more money or gain more market share... they are doing. I have full confidence that they are doing all of the terrible things outlined and more. The bigger question is whether government and law allow them to continue doing this. I think that it will continue to be allowed, despite being super shady and destroying both small and medium size businesses.

It cannot easily be proven that there is anyone orchestrating the monopolistic processes, because Amazon has essentially turned the process of dominating the market into an equation and they just do what the equation tells them to.

Amazon will claim "we are just being smarter; we mean no harm", and without providing open minutes of their internal discussions it will be impossible to prove wrongdoing.

What is needed is open accountability for internal plans, but that is against the "American way" so I doubt it will happen anytime soon.

<comment><USER4> I do believe these sorts of "Amazon is amazingly smart" posts.

But they are hard to reconcile with why Amazon keeps showing me a rice cooker ad, after I buy a rice cooker from them.

<comment><USER5> Because ad click through rates are so low and the signal is so incredibly sparse. It's all measured against a test set which the researchers rarely look at directly (because the data set is so large). So if something lifts ad vlicks by 1% and that's from 100 in 10k to 101 in 10k, they don't really care if 9k of the ads get appreciably dumber.

<comment><USER6> Sure, but if you buy a rice cooker, maybe the ads to show you are for: rice, cookbooks (featuring lots of rice?), pressure cookers, cast iron pans, sous vide recirculators, and so on. I mean, you have a rice cooker, you won't want another, but chances are you'd buy other things you don't already have.

<comment><USER7> Its funny you should use that example. I recently bought a rice cooker, and then bought another a few weeks later.

I've done similar things a lot, in this case it was because the first cooker had too large a minimum cooking amount. I'm currently looking at buying my mother google WiFi - which I bought a few weeks ago. And a few months back I rebought a tool I had just purchased because I lost it.

I currently work for a (responsible) own site adtech (personalization) company. Its surprising what behaviours our clients find profitable for their business.

<comment><USER8> There's a whole lot about advertising I don't know, but the question that sticks in my mind is, did you _need_ that ad to know which rice cooker to buy the second time? Did it change your decision? Did you see an ad for a different rice cooker and act on that?

It seems like an effective ad would be this: Say you bought a rice cooker on Amazon for $75. Now Walmart shows you an ad for the _same_ rice cooker for $60. That would certainly stick in my head- not for the rice cooker but for the price difference that Walmart can provide.

<comment><USER9> These are amazon internal adds, they don't care about the specific rice cooker they show as much as the rice cooker category. Thus simply getting you to think about them while you're on the website is enough they don't need to predict your specific purchase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As an accounting student, the idea that Amazon is using _capital_ leases as way of manipulating their financials is hilarious. That's the exact opposite of what everyone else does. Most companies try to hide debt they incur to buy infrastructure by claiming that they're actually renting it. This is why there are complicated rules about what kind leasing agreements count as debt and which count as expenses.

The claim repeatedly and misleadingly made in the article that Amazon doesn't post a profit is easily debunked by the fact that they're a publicly traded company that legally has to have it profits made publicly available. They make a profit. They have for a long time. It goes up and it goes down as they expand and reinvest, but they're definitely not intentionally taking a loss.

And they have to have their accounting methods and control systems used to be audited by an independent third party annually to ensure compliance with generally accepted accounting principles. As far as I'm aware, they've never had an adverse opinion issued against them. The whole point of making public companies undergo an audit every single year is to make sure they're doing any shenanigans that make their annual statements in some way not comparable to the financial statements of other companies in that industry.

It's incredibly annoying to see an article like this get shared because it's incredibly obvious the author doesn't know what the heck he's talking about, but just enough to fool readers into thinking he does.

</comment><comment> munk-a Yes, via vertical integration[1] - this should be obvious to anyone outside of the FTC[2].

[1] For people unaware of Amazon's practice of pushing out middlemen who conduct high volumes of business: [http://fortune.com/2016/04/20/amazon- copies-merchants/](http://fortune.com/2016/04/20/amazon-copies-merchants/)

[2] People inside of the FTC are almost certainly aware, but happily continue to shove their fingers in their ears and sing "la la la I can't hear you la la la".

<comment><USER11> Vertical integration, or cutting out the 'middle-man' is not in and of itself illegal.

What might be illegal would be selling products at a loss to drive others away.

<comment><USER12> Loss leaders are legal, right? What's the effective difference between those and predatory pricing? Is it just the intention rather than the actual effect?

<comment><USER13> Loss leaders are to bring customers in with the hope of selling them some higher margin products, predatory pricing is selling products below the price to push competition out of business.

<comment><USER14> So yes, it's not externally distinguishable and basically boils down to intent.

<comment><USER13> I am not sure what you mean by _externally distinguishable_ but pattern- behavior is hard to hide.

        1. undercut product x and y that Z Corp sales
        2. wait for Z Corp to go out of business
        3. Increase price of x and y

VS

        1. sale product x cheap
        2. sale other products to people who buy x
        3. continue to step 1 or terminate selling below market

<comment><USER15> How about:

      1. Sell products x cheap and y at higher margin.
         (x happens to be what Z Corp also sells)
      2. At some point in time, coincidentally after Z Corp
         folds, decide to stop selling x cheap.

Was x the case of predatory pricing? Or was it just a loss leader to get people to buy y, and it's just a coincidence that the company abandoned it around the same time Z Corp gave up?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> (Disclaimer: I work for Amazon, but not in the retail, legal, or finance departments, and I have no inside information about what the company is doing with respect to its pricing. Opinions are my own and not of the company.)

Yet another sensationalist headline that is unsubstantiated by the article.

"This law student" has a _theory_. He does not have _evidence_ \-- and, in fact, much ink in the article is spilled on the fact that the evidence needed to sustain an antitrust case against Amazon isn't readily available to the public or to the Government.

Nor has any Court ever held, to my knowledge, that an antitrust action can be sustained without consumer prices going up - merely keeping them the same is not enough.

Key quotes (emphasis mine):

"Sussman _believes_ that _if_ Amazon gave the full picture, it would show negative cash flow."

"No current accounting rules force full disclosure of itemized costs. Considered highly confidential, they're typically redacted from public legal documents, even when a company is sued. More definitive cash flow numbers could help prove whether Amazon sells items below cost."

"Sussman believes that the Federal Trade Commission should force companies to break down their costs in confidential examinations."

"Right now, anti-competitive conduct like predatory pricing is judged under the "consumer welfare standard," which has been interpreted to mean simply whether a market dominated by a single company results in higher or lower prices. But even though prices are the same on Amazon, consumers are arguably missing out, Sussman explains, because they're not benefiting from Amazon's soaring profits." (This is not my understanding of an actionable situation under current antitrust law.)

<comment><USER17> There is, in fact, evidence that

1\. Amazon occasionally sells below cost (hence existence of CRaP products)

2\. Amazon has pushed some vendors to 3p

3\. Amazon directly or indirectly dictates allowable 3p prices

The progression from Amazon selling at a loss to them pawning the product off to 3p sellers and taking a larger cut is reasonably argued in the source article to be harmful to consumer welfare.

<comment><USER18> Re: 1, selling below cost isn't always illegal. Loss leaders, for example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The root of the problem is that corporations have fooled governments into mixing up 'consumers' with 'people'. Governments should serve people, not consumers. This is a big mistake because people spend most of their lives working; this means that the average person spends the vast majority of their time producing value instead of consuming it. So the average person is not a consumer, they're a producer. The biggest consumers are rich people. Whenever you make laws to protect consumers, you're mostly protecting rich people. As wealth becomes increasingly centralized, this statement becomes increasingly true and it becomes a vicious cycle.

</comment><comment><USER20> Interesting piece from the article: "Sussman points to evidence that Amazon has already flipped the switch, moving from dominating the market by undercutting rivals to reaping the profits from that dominance."

So according to Sussman, Amazon is already making money. I wonder what point in time the author thinks Amazon started making money.

If the author claims that happened e.g. in 2016, them Amazon was actually losing money for the first 20 years of its operation. That would require Amazon to have been raising capital for a long, long time. Can that be verified? Are there stock market metrics on total amount of capital raised/net borrowed in a given year?

Has anyone been able to access the actual article to check the details of authors claims?

<comment><USER21> They haven't needed outside capital because Amazon has been generating free cash flow since 2002 or 2003. They were losing money on a GAAP basis because they were investing in capex heavy things like warehouses and data centers.

Looking at Amazon's aggregate financials doesn't tell us anything about whether they're doing something anticompetitive.

<comment><USER20> The root of Sussman's claim is that Amazon was hiding some expenses to _pretend_ that they were cash flow positive. (since being cash flow positive strongly suggests that there is no predatory pricing)

<quote>However, Sussman asserts in his paper, "Amazon utilizes existing loopholes in Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) disclosure regulations to exclude a significant portion of its expenses."</quote>

So the author is claiming amazon's _not_ been cash flow positive. If that is the case, then where was the money coming from?

<comment><USER18> Yeah, this is what I don't get. Amazon has been steadily growing without injections of investor cash for a long time now. If they were constantly selling stuff at a loss, that would be impossible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's not illegal to drive down prices in a competitive environment. In fact, economic theory says that in a sector that has 'perfect' competition, prices will essentially be the cost of production.

What Amazon is currently doing isn't illegal. In the future, if they abuse their dominant position to jack up prices, they might be in some trouble. But running on thin margins isn't illegal, and it seems Amazon has created avenues to produce profit without increasing prices, thus falling within the law and also with what economic theory predicts should happen.

<comment> munk-a It is illegal to do this when you slip below the cost of production line - <USER2> that point your lost profit becomes an investment (if you're doing it right) in either securing long term profits[1] (printers and toner) or driving competitors out of business (predatory pricing[2] or possibly dumping[3] if done for market control)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_\(pricing_policy\)) Dumping is a particularly interesting instance since there isn't a direct realized economic gain.

<comment><USER22> From the article:

> 5 percent profit margin on Amazon's own retail sales

Last I checked, 5 percent margin is still making a profit, and definitely doesn't fit the definition of dumping nor predatory pricing.

Part of the theory hinges on this:

> However, Sussman asserts in his paper, "Amazon utilizes existing loopholes > in Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) disclosure regulations to > exclude a significant portion of its expenses."

> Amazon accomplishes this in part through using capital leases to purchase > equipment and some of its 288 million square feet of office space. Instead > of paying cash, Amazon borrows and finances these purchases over time. The > leases don't show up as expenses in Amazon's free cash flow calculations, > even though the equipment is listed as an asset. A 2017 Motley Fool report > showed that, when you add in capital leases, Amazon's 2017 cash flow was > indeed over $1 billion in the red, although more recent numbers have bounced > back.

Again though, there's nothing illegal about a firm using debt to finance expansion, nor is there anything illegal about a firm's net profit being negative, especially if there's positive cashflow from selling to consumers.

The whole article is nothing more than theories without any proof that Amazon is actually dumping products. And like I said, running thin margins isn't illegal. Undercutting your competition isn't illegal. Scaling out so your costs are less than your competition isn't illegal. You need to _prove_ that a firm is actually dumping, it's not enough to think that they _might_ be because they're out-competing you.

More from the article:

> As Sussman explains, if Amazon is recouping losses from a predatory pricing > scheme by reducing its costs, the windfall profits aren't being transferred > to customers.

Reducing their costs to realize a profit literally _is_ passing on the benefits to customers by continuing to sell at a low price.

<comment><USER23> > The leases don't show up as expenses in Amazon's free cash flow > calculations, even though the equipment is listed as an asset.

Article aside, how does this work?

<comment><USER22> Let's say you mortgage something, take on $250k in debt. You now have $250k in assets. Net is zero. You don't take away the debt payments from your income, since you received something from taking on the debt, and it becomes a net positive over time.

It works similarly with operating leases. But the actual accounting is a tad more complicated, so here's a link:

[https://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/operatinglease.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/operatinglease.asp)

<comment><USER24> Am I missing something below?

Equity = Sigma(Free-cash-flow) summed over time. In the case of AMZN, equity is about 43B. 18B of this amount is goodwill(intangible vaporware). That leaves with about 25B real equity. And surprisingly, this 25B matches with FCF over the last 2 years(2017-2018). Which essentially means, cumulative FCF until 2017 was indeed 0. Numbers do seem to support the claim that AMZN was running on 0(averaged over time) FCF. Showing 1B in one quarter, -1B in another. But overall 0.

Whether 0 cumulative FCF means predatory pricing is a different question altogether. I'm not so sure about that. How would visionaries build big things, that need, and money? If AMZN loses it and acts monopolistic, I think people will respond by migrating en-masse. No one likes too much inequality. Jeff should do something about that image.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The real danger is in debasement—something we've seen with product over the past 40-50 years and it's no different than Walmart putting pricing pressure on it's suppliers. If suppliers can't increase costs and they've maxed out economies of scale then they need to debase their product to Suppliers need to cut corners to generate additional profits.

<comment><USER26> This squeeze on suppliers is a big part of why Amazon has such a problem with counterfeit goods, IMO. If you start blindly optimizing on supplier prices, counterfeiters can often win those price competitions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Companies achieving a kind of monopoly status should be subject to additional financial disclosures and reporting. The benefit here is (1) not all companies need to meet this compliance standard (2) we get a much better look into the books to determine if there is something illegal/nefarious going on (3) this additional reporting gives upstarts an insight to chip away at any monopoly by having access to data that sustains that monopoly in the first place. Let's not use a heavy hand of busting up a company, just let capitalism do the work.

</comment><comment><USER25> >Sellers can use "Fulfillment by Amazon," so Amazon handles storage and shipping of its products through its vast logistics network. But Amazon also charges for that privilege.

We used to call this kind of activity a 'service' but apparently it's now called a 'privilege'

<comment><USER27> Right? I wonder if we take storage out of it...

>Sellers can use "Fulfillment by UPS," so UPS handles shipping of its products through its vast logistics network. But UPS also charges for that privilege.

Spooky!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> For me, this is difficult to reconcile with my experience that there is barely any product left on Amazon where they really are the cheapest. You'll almost always find well rated smaller online shops across all categories that sell substantially below Amazon's prices. This is even more so true if you want something sold and fulfilled by Amazon.

<comment><USER18> Yes, but it's unlikely that they have fast, free/cheap shipping. And Amazon's customer service/return policy/overall UX is top notch compared to smaller retailers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> A little late.

Amazon launched a product called "Amazon Drive" in 2015 ...

Unlimited cloud storage! $11.99/year for photos and $59.99/year for everything:

[https://venturebeat.com/2015/03/26/amazon-launches-two- new-c...](https://venturebeat.com/2015/03/26/amazon-launches-two-new-cloud- drive-unlimited-plans-11-99year-for-photos-and-59-99year-for-everything/)

At the time, anyone familiar with cloud storage (Dropbox, Sync.com, Box etc.) knew that Amazon was undercutting their rivals (selling at a loss) to enter the consumer market.

Worse, many cloud providers resell AWS storage (Dropbox did at the time, and was an Amazon customer).

Amazon ran this "loss leader" for almost 2 years, hoping to drive the competition out.

In the end all they did was upset existing AWS customers, and eventually duped their own newly minted Amazon Drive customers, because they shuttered the service 2 years later (the losses started adding up on both sides):

[https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/08/amazon-ends-its- unlimited-...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/08/amazon-ends-its-unlimited- cloud-storage-plan/)

[https://www.geekwire.com/2018/dropbox-saved- almost-75-millio...](https://www.geekwire.com/2018/dropbox-saved- almost-75-million-two-years-building-tech-infrastructure/)

</comment><comment><USER30> Economically speaking, the question should boil down to "is Amazon operating in a contestable market, and/or are they engaging in abusive behavior to raise barriers to entry in the market, lowering its contestability". The notion of predatory pricing _per se_ , in contrast, is not really well-defined. Is there some inherent reason why the suppliers and wholesalers who are supposedly being harmed by this monopoly could not simply move to an established competitor, e.g. eBay, Alibaba or whatever, or even start a platform of their own along more favorable principles?

<comment><USER31> It _should_ , but the "consumer welfare standard" explicitly repudiates such approach. In US, a company can be a complete monopoly, wiping out all competition, and still not cross the line for anti-trust purposes.

This is actually kinda ironic, given that US is generally considered to be more on the side of the spectrum that strongly believes in the "invisible hand of the market" \- and so it would make more sense for anti-trust to be defined in terms that would protect that hand from being "broken". And indeed, it was so defined originally, until this new standard came to be. Since then, we've seen steadily increasing market concentration [1], and the corresponding decline in competition, all while being assured that it's not harmful to us as consumers, and with some people even openly extolling the virtues of monopolies for consumers (e.g. Thiel).

To me, these sound very similar to the arguments that are used to justify "benevolent dictatorships", except here we're talking about economic power rather than political (and, of course, the two are not independent).

[1] [https://concentrationcrisis.openmarketsinstitute.org/](https://concentrationcrisis.openmarketsinstitute.org/)

<comment><USER30> > ...In US, a company can be a complete monopoly, wiping out all competition, > and still not cross the line for anti-trust purposes.

That's actually allowed by the contestable-market framing, at least in some cases. It all depends what you mean by "a complete monopoly" and "wiping out" competition - does it happen via some "natural" cost advantages, or has the company been building up an abusive "moat" around their position. Though even in the former case, economic theory implies that forcing a break-up of the firm that isolates the "naturally dominating" part of its business, and then subjecting that to appropriate regulation and market-openness requirements, can be a highly efficient approach and lead to improved consumer welfare.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Reminds me of the astonishing anti-trust case against Microsoft arguing that giving consumers free stuff was harming them.

</comment><comment><USER33> What about Uber and Lyft?

Aren't they known to operate at a loss to undercut the competition, and couldn't taxi drivers bring them to court for that?

<comment><USER34> according to the article, if the company is operate at loss and it benefit customers, it is fine!

"Both of these outcomes reflect consumers failing to share in Amazon's bounty, which is key for current antitrust law. Right now, anti-competitive conduct like predatory pricing is judged under the "consumer welfare standard," which has been interpreted to mean simply whether a market dominated by a single company results in higher or lower prices. But even though prices are the same on Amazon, consumers are arguably missing out, Sussman explains, because they're not benefiting from Amazon's soaring profits. "It's illegal and even the most conservative neoclassical thinker would agree," he says."

<comment><USER35> I'd argue consumers are benefiting greatly from Amazon's profits. They have overall re-invested those profits into other businesses that benefit consumers.

Ex: Purchased Whole Foods and have brought down those prices overall plus building Amazon Go stores which offer a much better consumer experience than traditional grocery. Amazon's Web Services platform has leveled the playing field and enabled many startups. Amazon has pressured almost all other retailers online & offline to offer free or cheap delivery which is great for consumers. Walmart would likely never have done this without pressure from Amazon.

<comment><USER36> Benefiting now perhaps, but isn't the point that in the long run customers will be worse off because of what Amazon is doing?

<comment><USER35> Maybe, but Amazon faces competition from Ebay, Alibaba, even Walmart. It's unlikely they can raise prices significantly and maintain market share, nor is it likely that they can push out all of those competitors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Regardless of law, they are profitably delivering a very wide variety of items to my door for significantly cheaper than anywhere else I look. I cannot ignore that

<comment><USER38> What about if/when they are the only retail company left and significantly raise prices? This is the reason such laws exist.

<comment><USER39> Its funny how this is a worry but it basically never happens. There is basically a incredibly tiny number of actual cases where this 'predatory pricing and then raise prices' has worked and not in markets as open as e-commerce and delivery that other companies could easily get into.

In fact historically this has not happened before Anti-Trust laws. It has basically been used by competitors who couldn't compete on the market so they went to their friends in government to stop their competition. Since they didn't want to argue 'Their product is better and cheaper' they argued, 'Its predatory pricing, as soon as I'm gone this company is gone raise prices'.

The first US anti-trust law was enacted because butchers were extremely angry about centralized slaughtering houses that used refrigerated trains to transport meat. Classic special interest politics. But somehow 150 years later the evil centralized slaughtering houses haven't raised the prices yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Does antitrust law apply to a monopsony?

</comment><comment><USER41> That Bork theory is nutty. Imagine thinking that businesses don't take calculated risks. There is a conveyor belt of judges supported and moved forward by big money corporate interests.

</comment><comment><USER42> Maybe this so-called "law student" should read up on retail marketing terms from time to time. Loss-leaders have been a thing for decades if not longer. Amazon is just able to maintain more loss-leaders than your average brick-and- mortar store (chain or non-chain), and their operations are diversified beyond E-commerce/retail with higher margins which can polish the numbers quite a bit.

The world has yet to see another monopoly on the scale of Standard Oil, and no, Amazon (specifically in the E-commerce market) is nowhere even close to that. One law student's "predatory pricing" is just another business' loss- leader.

I hope Mr.Sussman will one day acquire the knowledge that he won't be the first nor the last to come up with ideas on how to challenge Amazon.

<comment><USER43> And look at some of the super aggressive (ok bullying) that the big supermarket chains do to suppliers /farmers etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I think if it's this complicated or needs internal documents then the laws need to be revised.

To me it's very obvious that Amazon has a monopoly that is harmful to retailers. It also seems straightforward that it is an undesirable situation for consumers because it puts everyone at the mercy of this monopoly. Just because it isn't obvious that they are screwing us yet doesn't mean we should let them have total control until they do.

Anyone who wants to sell online has to worry what Amazon is going to do with them.

It's as if there was a big public square in the middle of the city and some day one of the vendors bought the entire square and then started charging all of the other vendors for the privilege of using the square.

The reason they are successful I think is because people need a platform for online shopping. Websites are not that platform. What I think we need are public decentralized protocols that vendors, logistics, and applications can plug into. Similar to what Amazon is doing now, but not controlled by one company who is also a competitor.</comment>


Tell your ISP to stop retaining your data - <AUTHOR> https://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/tell-your-isp-to-stop-retaining-your-data <comment><USER3> I'm with Andrews & Arnold. I won't need to tell them anything because I know they take my privacy very seriously. They're the best ISP I've ever dealt with.

<comment><AUTHOR> I did consider switching to them, but the plan I looked at (Fiber to the cabinet and a higher 200GB download cap) comes in at £50 + (as far as I'm aware) BT line rental, so around £66/month... My BT bill for the above is around £40... Do you think it's worth the extra £26 ish for peace and mind? Are they really that much better than other ISPs? Thanks for the info!

EDIT: Ignore my comment, after reading up on them a bit more, they do seem like a pretty amazing ISP. Thanks for reminding me of them :)

<comment><USER4> That's pretty much the A&A plan that I have, and I think it's worth it _for me_. This is a case where you get what you pay for, and I both need an excellent level of service (because I depend on my ISP for work) and can afford to pay for it. The equation would be different for other, say, casual users or people on tight budgets.

Also ... IPv6 just works, and I have a /48 assignment.

<comment><USER5> A&A doesn't supply enough bandwidth for our home (including work from home) use, at least on their pricing page.

On a 5Mbps line, our average monthly usage was about 300G/month, according to router statistics.

Now that we're on BT FTTC at 76Mbps (rate to nearest speedtest.net when there's no contention), I wouldn't like to guess the usage, but I'd estimate over 1TB a month at least. The BT provided router resets its count every 30 minutes or so, and I've not yet put my own routing box in the middle, so I don't know exactly.

Both my GF and I stream a lot of HD video, and I mirror a number of repositories every week. That video is a lot more HD now, and there's far less need to ever turn it off, since it doesn't significantly affect other users.

A more feasible approach would be to combine A&A with BT, and switch depending on reliability vs bulk requirements, but that would require a level of systems administration I'd want to be compensated for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I work for one of the ISPs in question as an Analyst and work is in progress to stop the storing of certain data after a certain time period.

The main reason for holding call data is for billing purposes, no e-mail information has ever been stored (other than in customer's own inboxes and sent items in their e-mail accounts). All browsing data is anonymised and only used for optimisation purposes.

Hundreds of thousands of pounds are spent annually on data storage, it's welcoming that there is now a reason to reduce the amount of useless data we hold.

<comment><USER7> Can you clarify what you mean by "browsing data"? I understand why some data could be useful for debugging, but it's the DPI-style data that I'm most concerned about. I'd assumed that it would be too expensive for ISPs to bother collecting it if they weren't legally obliged to.

<comment><USER6> So information is collected regarding what IP addresses are accessed from our network, it isn't traceable back to customer accounts (in its usual form anyway, I'm sure if some data forensics people got hold of it they could maybe do something, but that's outside my scope of knowledge) this information is used to improve customer experience and reduce network traffic.

For example, in 2012-2013 almost 40% of traffic on our Network was Youtube related, not just streaming, Youtube specifically! Obviously millions of these requests are going to be for the exact same video, say for example Gangnam Style. So instead of us pulling the data from Youtube every time a user requests that particular video we store that video on our Network, so when a user requests it (even for the first time), it actually comes from us. All my company needs to do is check for any changes to the specific page. The result is a better customer experience (faster streaming) but also far less network traffic (this literally saves millions).

Without the storing of IP addresses accessed we wouldn't have the information needed to determine what sites/data we should be cashing and what we don't need to bother with and this sort of thing would be considerably harder to pull off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> UK ISP have probably the best track record in the world when it comes to defending their customers data and rights.

They have fought the Government and the Judiciary at every juncture to ensure net neutrality.

Where legally compelled to do so; the interpret the law in the absolute narrowest sense of the ruling.

I would be loathe to suggest they can do more. I trust my ISP more than I trust most people.

There are a ton if links I could produce but am on a mobile device. A simple Google search regarding Sky, TalkTalk et al will yield the case history and lobbying for privacy.

<comment><USER9> While this may look like bitching at ISPs, I think it's just recognising that they can only really go into bat for their customers if we actually show we care. Otherwise they might as well do what the government asks and get on with their business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Germany has a very similar problem. By law, the ISPs are only allowed to store user-identifiable information for billing purposes. When you have a flat rate (and nearly everybody has), there's no reason whatsoever to store any IPs, and yet they are stored for at least two weeks.

I wish somebody would do something about that.

</comment><comment><USER11> Can anyone evidence the claim that Virgin Media record internet access in line with the EU DRD? I tweeted them about it but they said they don't, and while I'm sure that's wrong I can't find a source that names them explicitly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Virgin Media have replied to some users already - here's the email (copied from the Open Rights Group blog post[1])

Virgin Media's response says: "...We have also been in contact with government and with the Information Commissioner's Office following the ruling and the UK government's current position is that although the Directive was held to be invalid, our own Data Retention Regulations are still in force and we must comply with them until such time as they are struck down by a UK court."

[1] [https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2014/data-retention- why...](https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2014/data-retention-why-we-have- to-keep-the-pressure-on-isps)

<comment><USER11> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> While we're recommending alternative ISPs in the UK, here's a nod to Fast[1]. UK-based support, no filtering or other obstruction, even remaining polite and understanding when I inadvertently took down a large portion of their network for the afternoon. Competitively priced FTTC (I'm on a £22/m 40/10 offer - <USER2> expired) including cheap no-frills line-rental.

I remain very interested in A&A but by comparison I have all I need for now with Fast. A&A have my full support (fwiw) in their vocalisation of tech- community concerns and I hope Fast can follow suit.

[1] - [http://www.fast.co.uk](http://www.fast.co.uk)

</comment><comment><USER13> Sky replied saying that the UK Data Retention law takes precedent to the European ruling.

Their T&C state they keep data for 12 months.

</comment><comment><USER14> Amusing. I mailed BT (firstname.lastname@example.com) and got an out of office reply.</comment>


Ask HN: What skills do I need to work at a startup? - <AUTHOR>

Interested in seeing if I have what it takes to work at a startup as a programmer and if not see what I need to do to make it happen.<p>So I guess the question is what do you look for when hiring engineers? Are there any must have skills? <comment><USER2> For software engineers, I believe grit and persistence is the top skill. Startups need people who take ownership of their work as if their lives depended on it.

<comment><USER3> In my experience, "as if their lives depended on it" means "for 10-14 hours per day, and most weekends". Also, don't expect to be terribly well- compensated for your efforts. Your pay will be below market rate, and job security is (understandably) pretty low. Your goals should be aligned with the startup's mission - you can't be in it for the money.

I think a lot of people are attracted to the startup lifestyle because it's been so glamorized (I was). It actually really sucks, and more than likely the startup will fail. I couldn't find a single startup in SF willing to compensate fairly given that fact, because they have to "stay lean". You really have to want what the startup wants, and join for altruistic reasons - the pay is just to keep you from starving to death while you work there.

<comment><USER4> I've worked at startups all my life. Two lived; the others didn't. In each case I was fairly compensated when I joined, but no raises for several years put me behind the curve for most of my working life.

Combine no raises with a poor starting salary (which is not the norm in my experience) and indeed you would have a recipe for a bad return.

Even counting my two successes, in the cases we were bought, the parent company's stock subsequently tanked so I made very little of the difference back.

<comment><USER3> I couldn't find a starting salary for a mid-level backend + senior-level frontend engineer in the Bay area above 80k. One company offered 60k, which would be low for Alabama - in SF, that's downright insulting. I'm pretty sure I just got unlucky with the companies I talked to, though.

<comment><USER5> I find that really hard to believe. I'm a designer / junior front-end dev & I would laugh at 80k now that I'm in SFBA.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Stop Disabling SELinux - <AUTHOR> http://tag1consulting.com/blog/stop-disabling-selinux

<comment><USER2> I installed SELinux on LMDE and Firefox was crashing all the time. I had to remove it.

SELinux is a good idea except... it isn't, because everything breaks with SELinux and makes your Linux installation unstable, at least for the desktop.</comment>