Pirated Courses on Udemy - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@robconery/how-udemy-is-profiting-from-piracy-5638b929ffca#.pv6r512t8 <comment><USER2> This happens fairly frequently to Jeffrey Way of Laracasts and there's a lot of money involved in stealing his material:

        Hey @udemy - For the third time this year, my content
        is being stolen and sold on your site. Don't use Udemy,
        folks.

        [1] So @udemy, 373 users signed up for that
        stolen series at $19 - or a total of $7,087.

...

        Update on the Udemy selling my stolen content
        issue: they finally responded, and will not
        reimburse me, unless there is a court ruling.

Udemy do not care.

[https://twitter.com/jeffrey_way/status/649933605305774081](https://twitter.com/jeffrey_way/status/649933605305774081)

[https://twitter.com/jeffrey_way/status/649936961105432576](https://twitter.com/jeffrey_way/status/649936961105432576)

[https://twitter.com/jeffrey_way/status/649937073407979520](https://twitter.com/jeffrey_way/status/649937073407979520)

[https://twitter.com/jeffrey_way/status/651215238470090754](https://twitter.com/jeffrey_way/status/651215238470090754)

[https://twitter.com/jeffrey_way/status/651215565713870849](https://twitter.com/jeffrey_way/status/651215565713870849)

<comment><USER3> I couldnt tell from the tweets but did Udemy keep the money or did they refund the users once the content was taken down? If refunds are issued to users, it seems unreasonable for the author to claim that Udemy should be paying them 100% of any money transacted. Is Rob and Jeffrey suggesting that Udemy should pay $2 for every $1 involved in fraud?

EDIT: People are making a lot of claims that Udemy are profiting from this but no one has linked to anything to indicate that when content is removed if the people who paid for it who can no longer access the content are issued refunds or not.

Does anyone have any information to suggest that Udemy isnt refunding users?

<comment><USER4> Thats not the way copyright works. If you think it is, please, let RIAA know you've stolen some records and let's see how much they charge you.

Last time I checked, users are sued for thousands of dollars per infringing instance, held up in court.

Why shouldn't that hold for a COMPANY doing it? Seems a little unreasonable to me.

Edit: and for people down-voting, please explain why?

<comment><USER5> Well, it is how the DMCA works. If the videos are uploaded by someone else (not by Udemy), then all they have to do is remove the video promptly if sent a DMCA request. If they did that, they would not be liable for damages.

<comment><USER4> IANAL, but DMCA applies to penalties, not to the issue of whether or not they're infringing copyright.

Though, I will note that Udemy does have a designated agent in regards to DMCA Safe Harbor, so the OP may want to check that they submitted complains the correct place:

> Via E-mail: firstname.lastname@example.com[1]

[1][https://www.udemy.com/terms/copyright/](https://www.udemy.com/terms/copyright/)

<comment><USER5> The guy I was replying to was saying they should have huge damages, which they won't as long as they remove it promptly.

<comment><USER6> It's the same guy...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You can go after Udemy. They're not just a hosting service. They _claim ownership of the content_. "Each of _our_ 35,000+ courses is taught by an expert instructor". Many courses are paid. If Udemy charges for access to the course, they lose the DMCA safe harbor. Then they're liable for full copyright damages.

This may even be criminal copyright infringment under 18 U.S. Code § 2319 (Criminal infringement of a copyright) if the total retail value exceeds $2500.

Get a lawyer. This looks winnable.

<comment><USER8> Make sure you file copyright for each video before making it available on your own website. Having a copyright in place before any theft allows you to go after (by threat or course) statutory damages for each theft of your work. I learned this a few years ago from our own IP lawyer when someone was reusing some of our material. We now file the $35(or whatever it is) fee before posting the material online.

<comment><USER9> File for copyright? how do you mean: Copyright is implicit, unlike patents, upon creation of a work.

<comment><USER10> >Registration is still required in the US for some benefits, such as awards of statutory damages. [1]

>You must register your copyright with the U.S. Copyright Office before you are legally permitted to bring a lawsuit to enforce it. [2]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_registration#Require...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_registration#Requirement_of_registration) [2] [http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/copyright- registratio...](http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/copyright-registration- notice-enforcement-faq-29067.html)

<comment><USER11> Can you just register your copyright after the infringement?

<comment><USER8> Yes but statutory damages will not be available and according to our lawyer. The statutory damages is what gets people to comply because it is the one that can multiply exponentially as it applies to EACH violation (download, sale, ect...). If you use the implicit copyright you can only go after actual damages which will be harder to prove. I'm not suggesting you file a copyright for everything, just stuff you want to absolutely protect. In the context of this discussion it is education videos.

<comment><USER12> > can multiply _exponentially_ as it applies to EACH violation

You meant "linearly", right?

<comment><USER8> probably

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Lol you people are really amazing. No sense of irony? Really?

Hey guess what, Silicon Valley has been doing this for nearly 20 years to other people. Funny how the HN crowd gets riled up when it happens to programmers.

Movies cost tens of millions to make and employ hundreds if not thousands. Tv shows are maybe an order of magnitude smaller, records maybe one more. Any of those media products blow these aggrieved programmers out of the water, impact wise.

But the founders of YouTube -- who played this little copyright game like a fiddle -- are heroes in the Valley. So are the founders of Napster, one of whom helped get Facebook going.

I guess "move fast and break things" is a great motto until it's your stuff getting broken.

<comment><USER14> While it doesn't change the point of your comment, I saw a different ironic thing: how can people even think they can sell videos on-line and capture most of the viewers?

It's like The First and Only Iron Law of the Internet: if you post it, it will be copied and it will be distributed free. I understand that movie studios or record labels may be doing stuff the way they were always doing stuff, but an individual, especially a tech-minded one, expecting to earn money on selling videos in XXI century? Seriously? I mean, you can have any business model you like, but the real world is not obliged to comply.

So that's practical point - you don't get to set up a permanent passive income for yourself just because you publish a series of videos. Some people like to believe that (I've been personally convincing one such person recently to stop thinking along these lines and instead treat educational videos as a loss leader, and use those to sell webinars and/or personal tutoring instead). But I have also a general point to make:

In general, for some reason people imagine that just because they make something and start to sell it, they get to have full control over its life cycle. They don't, they _never_ did. If you make a new widget, it'll get cloned by your competition. If you try to prevent it with $RANDOM_LEGAL_QUIRK, the Chinese will clone it anyway and good luck chasing them down. It's how it was since the dawn of time. And it's good, that's how stuff is supposed to work - this way new things join the shared wealth of humanity.

You're not entitled to capture _all_ value from what you make. You get to only capture some. Expecting more is just plain, textbook greed.

And as a society, we should be nice enough to ensure you're capturing _enough_ value for yourself.

<comment><USER15> > how can people even think they can sell videos on-line and capture most of > the viewers?

It doesn't have to be most, it just has to be enough.

You'd be surprised at how many people _are_ willing to simply pay for what they consume.

So what if it will be copied, as long as the fraction that is willing to pay is large enough it might be a very profitable venture.

<comment><USER14> Yes, exactly. But those who understand it don't usually complain about getting their videos copied - they seek ways to monetize it in some way. After all, they have proof the market is there; maybe not as wealthy and as willing to pay as they expected.

<comment><USER15> I don't think they're upset so much about the copying as they are that the copiers are re-selling the copies.

<comment><USER14> This is a somewhat new plot development here; I agree I've never before seen someone blatantly selling content like that, charging _per piece of content_. It used to be that people sold copyrighted content per megabyte, or you paid for faster transfer - and mostly it was sold as data, not as a particular type of work (i.e. you pay to download "a file", not "a course").

<comment><USER16> I feel that you are talking about pirates capturing a different section of the market. Well, in this case, the pirates are going after the exact same market (people willing to pay for legitimate content), and they are selling the original product.

It's a bit like if I work in the Rolex factory and just decide to set up Rolex outlets everywhere with the watches I've stolen from there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Udemy really is one of the worst platforms imaginable for instructors.

They will even brand your videos without your consent by adding Udemy logo watermarks to every video.

If you guys want to hear another horror story about Udemy, take a skim through:

[http://blog.nickjanetakis.com/post/133482093993/less- than-24...](http://blog.nickjanetakis.com/post/133482093993/less- than-24-hours-on-udemy-as-an-instructor-and)

(note: the above post is a few days old)

Someone really needs to step up and create a more reasonable course hosting platform.

<comment><USER18> There is edx, coursera, etc.

<comment><USER19> But I think those are only for university-level courses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Filling out Udemy's "Report Abuse" form to report a "Copyright or Trademark Violation" probably doesn't create any legal obligation on their part to take any action. The author (copyright holder) should have filed an official DMCA takedown request, directed at Udemy's designated DMCA contact, whose e-mail and postal addresses can be found here:

[https://www.udemy.com/terms/copyright/](https://www.udemy.com/terms/copyright/)

<comment><USER21> Udemy must "not receive a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity" in order for DCMA to be applicable. Since they're charging for the courses it's probably ordinary copyright infringement on their part. You should send them a Cease and Desist and then sue them.

<comment><USER22> How long before instructors file a class action?

What will it cost Udemy if instructors start to register copyright and Udemy become liable for statutory damages?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I feel like the OP highlights a problem common to the new breed of "marketplace" platforms like Uber, Airbnb, and Udemy. All of these substitute open, public, regulated markets (taxis, hotels, universities) with closed, private, unregulated markets. Once a near-monopoly is reached, the rules of the marketplace can be changed to benefit the marketplace owner (instead of the service provider).

<comment><USER24> ^This. I cringe every time I hear someone say X is democratizing Y or that X is the "sharing economy". These are unregulated (near) monopoly markets.

Craigslist was democratizing. "Freebie" mailing lists and swap meets are the "sharing economy". Services like AirBnB are doing everything they possibly can to disconnect people (and keep them disconnected). You aren't even permitted to screen your own clients, they are so concerned you'll cut them out prior to billing. At least when posting a flyer in your community or listing on CL, there is no false pretext about screening or due diligence being performed.

<comment><USER25> So if platforms like udemy, app store, uber, etc. eventually gained monopolistic position (which makes business sense) and then adversely taking advantage from it in the long run, what is an alternative model? Transferring them to a blockain'esque infrastructure of public good? I'm seriously interested in a techno-organizational evolution of the platform model.

<comment><USER24> I don't know. I've put a lot of thought into it, but this is a Herculean task (like David versus Goliath). Hopefully there are better minds out there who can come up with something. Blockchains and distributed platforms like Etherium look really promising. So does OpenBazaar [1]. There was also an article on the topic recently posted to HN [2]. It has a great quote, "Uber's big bet is global monopoly or bust.".

[1]: [https://openbazaar.org/](https://openbazaar.org/)

[2]: [https://medium.com/dark-mountain/how-platform-coops-can- beat...](https://medium.com/dark-mountain/how-platform-coops-can-beat-death- stars-like-uber-to-create-a-real-sharing-economy-5a9752258d3c#.j56jlgwah)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I don't want to derail this with a personal story but this might be useful.

I wrote a JavaScript course that I was contracted by someone on Elance to do for very little ( relative to the amount of time I put into it ), he then sold it to another company, that company then put it on Udemy. For a small amount of time it was at the top of the list of beginner JavaScript courses and had over 10,000 students enrolled. I'm grateful my name wasn't on it as it was my first shot at a full on multi hour long course and there were some problems with it...

but.....

Lesson: If you create courses and sell them to people have stipulations regarding resale.

:/

My story wasn't theft so it's not the same, but I figure it might have some utility to someone on hacker news.

<comment><USER27> > _Lesson: If you create courses and sell them to people have stipulations > regarding resale._

What? No! That shouldn't be the lesson at all! The lesson should be to charge a reasonable amount for your work, and let the purchaser do whatever they want with it.

At least in the U.S., the First-sale doctrine[0] is very important, enabling things like libraries and re-selling things you purchase. That is, you _can 't_ make a stipulation like that.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First- sale_doctrine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine)

<comment><USER28> First-sale isn't relevant to this scenario. First-sale applies only to a specific copy. This is either a transfer of ownership or licensing agreement issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I saw and reported some plagiarised content at Sitepoint. After what I assume was a fact-checking and research period, they got in touch and told me they were taking down the plagiarised material and banning that submitter. Not only that, but they put in place a peer review system for submitted content. That's how you handle this sort of thing, you take ownership of the problem.

</comment><comment><USER30> HAHA! I got myself into a wrong course and Udemy haven't refunded me till now. They say you can try it before you buy, But they don't give the money back once they have it. Nobody even answers your queries seemed very shady. Not surprised to see this now.

<comment><USER24> Wow that is scummy. Can't you do a chargeback?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The sad thing is that in this day and age, independent content creators don't have their copyrights respected, while megacorporations patent troll and abuse our broken intellectual property system.

The only solution that comes to mind is for independent content creators to vigorously litigate and ensure that their DMCA claims are taken seriously.

</comment><comment><USER32> Perhaps they need to start periodically saying things like "just a reminder, this video is from <University of XYZ> and is copyright by us" and periodically scribble that on a whiteboard too. It may make the class sound a bit silly at times but we live in a world where plenty of people are just fine with making blatant copies of things.

I am against DRM. I don't think it helps anyone to hide content behind buggy technologies, especially when they cause problems that have nothing to do with protection such as security holes. I think you just have to modify the content itself; make it "hard" to cleanse every last mention of the true copyright owner, and stop worrying if some loser actually wants to spend the time and effort it would take to strip all of those mentions out.

</comment><comment><USER33> Wow. Ironic...

[https://www.udemy.com/copyright-law-for-online- entrepreneurs...](https://www.udemy.com/copyright-law-for-online- entrepreneurs/?utm_campaign=cision&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter)

</comment><comment><USER3> Using DCMA is a good first step when trying to deal with these issues, posting an angry blog and defaming a company as being made explicitly to sell stolen content on twitter shouldn't be your first action.

[https://support.udemy.com/customer/en/portal/articles/150577...](https://support.udemy.com/customer/en/portal/articles/1505776-how- do-i-report-a-udemy-course-infringing-my-copyright-?t=597588)

</comment><comment><USER34> Udemy is one of those sites that surprise me. No offense, but it looks and feels like a shitty wordpress themed site, with a crappy backend system tied to it. I've never bought anything from it just because of this intangible 'ick' factor. It seems my gut feeling was right on the money.

</comment><comment><USER35> Udemy always seemed questionable with some of their course titles. Lots of 'How to make money easily doing X' and other extremely clickbait-y names.

Now it's actually proven they don't give a shit what's happening on their 'platform' and have a frankly absurd response to copyright claims. Given how quickly Youtube will block a video given a content claim, it seems any sort of legal action against Udemy will bring their house of cards down extremely quickly.

</comment><comment><USER36> Besides piracy, udemy itself is just a terrible platform. Unless you agree to sell your course for $10, you'll pretty much never get promoted there organically. They want YOU to do all the work of promoting it to your list, etc. What's worse is that they close off their system as well, making it impossible for you to collect email addresses or send marketing messages.

It's a much better idea to use your own platform.

</comment><comment><USER37> Maybe an approach could be to actually reach out to authors that are creating accounts and to verify identities more than just an email account rather than focus on contents of that said account. I would also imagine that certain geographic regions have higher reports of said activities. So extra checks should be added for them in the approval process. In the end if they don't shape up they are only hurting themsleves in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER38> I just deleted my account at udemy:

"Dear Udemy Company,

I read about your questionable practice of not fighting against pirated content on your platform and not rightfully reimbursing the original creators. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10638795](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10638795) I am not willing to support your stance on this topic and will delete my account within minutes.

Good bye!"

</comment><comment><USER39> >and Udemy not only let them do this, they're encouraging others to do the same.

Is there proof of this? Author went from providing examples and evidence, to pure speculation. Kind of lost me there.

</comment><comment><USER40> Doesn't Udemy lose safe haven when they start taking a cut?

<comment><USER24> Yes. It sure bit Grooveshark in the ass [1] though in their case it was revealed that they were aware of the presence of infringing material in addition to receiving a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity. These people are crazy for not implementing any sort of review process.

[1]: [http://artlawjournal.com/grooveshark-protected-dmca-safe- har...](http://artlawjournal.com/grooveshark-protected-dmca-safe-harbor/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> When I was at Quora, people posting Udemy courses were a major source of spam content. The system clearly has very broken incentive systems.

</comment><comment><USER42> Oh the delicious irony! [https://mobile.twitter.com/udemy/status/670328744754573312](https://mobile.twitter.com/udemy/status/670328744754573312)

</comment><comment><USER6> Udemy is just a ecommerce/merchant service that just happens to be tailored for hosting video series. This is no different than users stealing content and then uploading to youtube or selling it through a paypal/gumroad/stripe link. In every case the companies would be making a profit either through ads or transactions.

The fault is with the user who uploaded the content and the most effective and realistic option for companies that host user provided content is the DMCA process. No matter how good the filtering process (and I do think Udemy needs to improve vastly here) it's never going to catch everything and this situation is all explained and handled by the DMCA.

The real issue is how they're handling the takedown requests. If they are prompt and accurate with the takedowns and refunding customers then there should be no issue. How they get their own money back from the fraud user is their problem as well. If Udemy is not handling takedowns or refunding customers, then there definitely is a problem and that should be met with actual legal action, not just social/twitter justice.

Edit - why the instant downvotes? haven't seen much other than emotional rants about how Udemy is profiteering but no evidence that the proper DMCA process was followed but denied.

</comment><comment><USER43> This post would benefit from providing more context. Did the author make those videos on behalf of a company? Did he post them somewhere online? Was there ever any kind of license (creative commons for instance) attached to them?

My expectation is that at a minimum, Udemy would investigate the claim once it's reported to them. But you need to provide sufficient proof that you are the content owner. Just because your face is in the video is not enough, but it's a great start.

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</comment><comment><USER45> Is udemy just a scam site that trades ofd consumer confusion in with Udacity?

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</comment><comment><USER46> What is a good Udemy alternative?

<comment><USER47> Anything realy. Udemy has a terrible signal to noise ratio, and they do scummy stuff like what's going on here. Read a respected book, try Udacity or Coursera, or ask the community what course is good.

<comment><USER48> I don't know why kids these days are so down on programming ebooks. I have a ton of them in a Dropbox folder, and they're my main source of learning new programming languages. Sure, they date fast, can't be updated fast, and aren't interactive. They're old school now that we're in the era of MOOCs.

But you can still learn a lot if you know what to look for, know how to skim, and know which books are good.

Alternatively: maybe I'm just old.

<comment><USER49> >ebooks

...or old-style internet tutorials formatted as static mostly-HTML webpages.

Or what about printed books. After reading that kind of internet tutorial I got K&R and some less memorable C++ book from the local library.

<comment><USER50> I find that physical books work way better for me.. I have a mostly photographic memory and the feel of book, and position of the content adds additional context I just don't have reading an e-format for too much at once. It all tends to just blur together pretty quickly.

Quick blog posts, and tutorials aren't too bad.. short specifications are fine too.. but longer content just doesn't work in an electronic interface for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> The number of people who really want to live off of other people's work is much smaller than we often think. More often than not harm is done by people that are either incompetent or desperate.

Should that stop us from getting a lawyer? Certainly not. Can we still believe in humans usually trying to do good? Yes.

</comment><comment><USER52> We create content in spanish www.oja.la here in udemy [https://www.udemy.com/u/pixelpro/](https://www.udemy.com/u/pixelpro/)

it has been almost a year since I notified them

</comment><comment><USER53> where is udemy? is there a small claims court there? File for 100% of the money.

</comment><comment><USER54> Not the first time I am hearing this. Udemy has no standards whatsoever!

</comment><comment><USER55> After reading the blog post and the comments here, I'm wondering what are the affected parties waiting for? they should organise a class action lawsuit and sue Udemy's ass...

</comment><comment><USER56> To all who try to discuss the details of DCMA, copyright, etc. the bottom line is this part from the first comment "Udemy do not care.". THIS is the real issue.

</comment><comment><USER57> I really hope the programs that I've purchased aren't pirated, But Then again I just used the code that made anything 5 dollars. So... eh?

</comment><comment><USER58> He sounds so mad. Writing something while angry is not wise. Still, I knew Udemy was bad but not THAT bad.

</comment><comment><USER59> If Udemy is such a bad service, what are the hurdles to create a better, more ethical competitor?

 _"It's not like there's a database of copyrighted content out there you know"_

Ahh so a database of copyright might work. cf [https://twitter.com/robconery/status/670389852974657536](https://twitter.com/robconery/status/670389852974657536)

</comment><comment><USER60> I wonder how many people who wrote courses that are now being pirated on Udemy ever torrented music or movies illegally, used someone else's Netflix account, DRM stripped Kindle books etc. I don't agree with Udemy, but it's always crappier when it happens to you.

<comment><USER11> Let's play devil's advocate and say that you are right. All of these people have at some time downloaded a movie or used someone else's Netflix account. Your argument still wouldn't be valid. Udemy is making presumably 10s of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars off of stolen content. This is the difference between shoplifting a dvd and opening up blockbusters all across the world with movies you stole. The difference is night and day. Not just logically or morally, but legally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> > But I had never seen a business actually profiting from piracy.

Youtube?

Facebook freebooting, too.

</comment><comment><USER62> disgusting! either way I dont use Udemy because of the cost involved, now I am _definitely_ not paying for someone else's stolen hard work

</comment><comment><USER63> Scary that we'd get no response on this.

</comment><comment><USER64> Growth hacking?

<comment><USER65> Hack growth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> This is rich. There is a set of HN readers who are outraged over this while at the same time waiting for their next movie torrents to seed. Seems like a tiny bit of hypocrisy happening. The simple truth is that if you own a piece of content, you should have control of that content. Stealing movies, books or music is wrong no matter how much you may pontificate against the "evil" copyright owner. Copyright infringement is a disincentive to content creation.

<comment><USER67> Could also it be two set of users orthogonally outraging.

Just sain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Did he even try to contact Udemy support and get a response? It would seem like the thing to do before writing a hit piece. I interviewed at Udemy, but ended up taking a position somewhere else, yet they struck me as good people trying to make a good product. I don't like piracy and the author has been wronged, but this blog post is unfair.

<comment><USER69> Yes, I did. As did Troy. No reponse (now as then).

You entirely miss the point of the article - it's not about piracy, it's about a marketplace for pirated goods. That's what Udemy does. Sorry if I'm not nice about it.

<comment><USER70> So if a burglar steals a TV, sells it to someone else, and they list it on eBay, does that make eBay guilty of the burglary? If someone buys it using Paypal, do you consider Paypal to be the burglar? If the currency mode used was USD, do you consider the U.S. government to be the guilty burglar?

I suppose if it was explicitly listed as 'Stolen 40" TV!' in the 'Stolen Goods' category of eBay you could say that they should have known, and if Paypal had special 'funds to buy stolen things' accounts and one of those was used to buy it, then you could put some blame to them, etc.

But how far away do you project the blame from the actual criminal? If Udemy is responsible, then do you absolve the person who pirated and uploaded it of guilt? Or do you divide and dilute it? How long does the chain need to be before each participant's share of the guilt is so small as to be negligible and irrelevant?

Why not instead blame the person who uploaded it to make money while knowing that they hadn't created it and didn't own the rights?

<comment><USER69> It's a little different than the simple theft of a TV, although yes you raise a decent point. As I've been saying to people: _just a reasonable effort is all I ask_.

There is a watermark on the entire video, and you can quite easily tell the voice changes from the intro to the main body (where I also mention Pluralsight a few times). A very, very simple review process would catch this.

Every video I submit to Pluralsight goes through a 3-step review (Peer, A/V, tech) and they catch _any_ possibility of copyright infringement (though yes, things do get through).

Udemy is not doing anything this way, and have admitted it publicly (see the post, I updated it at the bottom). They flatly say that they rely on their users to tell them if something has a copyright problem.

<comment><USER71> Yeah, it makes sense that users have to tell them theres a copyright problem, just like a copy-righted YouTube video.

<comment><USER72> No, it doesn't. Udemy would fall apart as a company without illegal content. Their entire business DEPENDS on pirated content. You really think they would be making any money with the very very few legitimate courses? The business knows the majority of courses are pirated, and they don't care. This is how they make their money.

<comment><USER73> That's just a stupid, slanderous comment. Do you have any reason to say such a thing? Can you please give us links to some of the many pirated courses?

<comment><USER74> > _That 's just a stupid, slanderous comment._

This comment breaks the HN guidelines. Please read and follow them when posting here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html)

<comment><USER73> >>>>Their entire business DEPENDS on pirated content. You really think they would be making any money with the very very few legitimate courses? The business knows the majority of courses are pirated, and they don't care. This is how they make their money.<<<<<

I'm sorry I don't know how to edit my comment which broke the rules. I'm not sure why it's OK for this poster to claim that Udemy is a thief and it's not OK for me to claim that the poster has made a stupid comment, but if those are the rules, then those are the rules.

I'll restate. Because the poster made that comment, which I've quoted above, I would appreciate it if he would provide links to the many pirated courses that he says Udemy DEPENDS on.

Please don't mark me down for the caps. I'm just quoting him.

If Udemy depends on pirated courses it shouldn't be too much trouble for him to supply a link to a couple of the courses.

Here's the problem. Thousands of us have our courses on Udemy and we rely on our Udemy income to pay our bills. It's not OK for people to sling false accusations around and try to stir up people to boycott Udemy without having some reasonable argument to make. They should have some slim evidence that what they are saying is true. Making false accusations is bad behavior. It may not break the posting rules on this forum, but it is egregious behavior and it ought not be tolerated.

<comment><USER74> > _I 'm not sure why it's OK for this poster to claim_

It may not be. We (I'm a moderator here) try to be consistent, but it's impossible for us to see everything, let alone consider it all carefully.

The trouble with your comment was that it went straight to name-calling ("stupid and slanderous"), when it should have provided information. Your final paragraph above, the one that begins "Here's the problem", is much better. It's an informative expression of what lies behind your defense of Udemy and makes a fine contribution to the thread.

HN can be a cryptic place sometimes and I apologize if it felt like we were picking on you personally. That was not my intention. It's entirely fair for you to stand up for Udemy based on your experience. But to be a good HN citizen, please do so informatively and neutrally, even when other commenters say unfair things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> While I sympathize with the author its (edit)unreasonable to suggest that they should be validating each course. However it appears more should be done to ease the path to getting your content taken down.

You would think the person selling the course would have payment information that could be used to track that individual down, the correct course of action is to sue.

If the content isnt worth doing this then the content isnt actually that valuable to the author.

<comment><USER69> Define "dangerous". Listen mate, if you make money on something and that something is stolen - _you_ are responsible. Udemy created this marketplace for stolen things; people steal things and sell them there.

> the correct course of action is to sue

Nope. That's what people do in a dispute to solve the dispute. The correct course of action is something else entirely as we're talking about copyright law, not pissing on your neighbors orchids.

<comment><USER3> > Define "dangerous"

Dangerous was a bad word choice, perhaps "unreasonable".

> Listen mate, if you make money on something and that something is stolen - > you are responsible

I never claimed they arent responsible and as the DCMA outlines they mitigate their responsibility for hosting this content by allowing DCMA take downs. What are you suggesting Udemy do to validate that the content creator owns the content they are selling. Copyright law and ownership is a very complicated issue. There isnt a copyright database where they can validate that the content is owned by that person but also the content in the actual content is owned by the person who created the content.

What are you suggesting they do?

> The correct course of action is something else entirely

Like?

> > [https://twitter.com/robconery/status/664960173455224832](https://twitter.com/robconery/status/664960173455224832)

Do you have a licence for this content?</comment></comment></comment>


Life is exactly what you make of it - For most people, this is a bad thing - <AUTHOR> http://andrewoneverything.com/life-is-exactly-what-you-make-of-it-for-most

<comment><USER2> Andrew got it right, it is a problem of survival bias.

I have been lucky two times.

I have been an entrepreneur, I was succesfull enough but not enough to cover the risks (i am italian, doing business here _is_ risky).

Then I set up myself to find a job, in a time where there aren't many and in a country in full recession. And found a good one!

I can say it was hard. But even if I had been told that i could try and fail, I would have tried anyway.

Sometimes, you really have nothing to lose.

</comment><comment><USER3> He disputes the success stories because of absence of failure stories (survivorship bias) - and then uses this lack of evidence to assert the opposite is true.

</comment><comment><USER4> Those who failed might have been tried very hard indeed, but this doesn't mean that they were moving in right direction. My opinion is that each one can excel, if they really would want it, put a lot into it, would be willing to constantly learn from their mistakes.

As for the poem… Liked it very much. I think I can get that feeling myself sometimes. But—it's been said a lot that the way itself should be the end goal, not destination. Otherwise such pessimism would be inevitable. Don't look to get to 'another land, another sea'. Enjoy the journey.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm curious what you guys think of this.

It very closely relates to something we see a lot here on HN, which is the call to leave the boring job at the "big company" and follow your entrepreneurship dreams.

The issue is that not everyone is cut out to be a successful entrepreneur, no matter how much effort they put into it. And I don't see this aspect discussed on HN much.

<comment><USER5> _The issue is that not everyone is cut out to be a successful entrepreneur, no matter how much effort they put into it. And I don't see this aspect discussed on HN much._

A much more important issue is that the system cannot work, and actually WONT work, with everybody being an entrepreneur, so not only are not everyone cut for it, even if they were, they would still could not be. An economy NEEDS the office drones, the service workers, somebody to take out your garbage, etc etc.

But this "everybody can be anything" is a fairy-tale ingredient of the American Dream, so it's not talked down that much.

Like how only one guy out of 300,000,000 can be the President, but there's this wishful thinking that "anybody can be". Well, no, each term is 4 years, so only around 15-20 people in a generation's lifetime (~80 years) get to be the President (and I'm not even counting double terms, or that you have to be > 21 to become the President).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interview lottery winners.

I've been saying this for years.

</comment><comment><USER5> _The cliche that "life is what you make of it" is actually true. In a free and developed country, whatever job, friends, or relationships you have are all dependent on you._

No, you have _some_ power.

Let's ignore random events that can happen to everyone regardless of their starting condition (i.e getting run over by a car).

Even with those out, you cannot chose to be born with caring or rich parents, or to have been raised in an environment where your drunk father didn't hit your crack addicted mom, for example.

Now, despite those things, is it possible to make to it to achieve some X? Well, people have achieved any given X (like: being a rich entrepreneur, a famous actor, a great scientist, a good parent, etc) from very different starting points, including unfavorable ones.

But this "life's what you make it" thing misses one basic point: that the WORK and CIRCUMSTANCIAL LUCK needed to achieve X varies widely based on the starting point. A poor black kid born in the 1920 would have zero chance to become, say, the President. As would an atheist, cross-dressing communist. But if you think those are extremes, consider that people from poop backgrounds are much less likely to become, say, doctors that people from rich families and/or people with doctors as parents.

So, "like if what you make it" can be better rephrased as: "life is what you make it, but for a lot of people it takes 10 times the effort other people to make it the same thing, and/or extremely rare lucky breaks".

<comment><AUTHOR> > _No, you have some power_

I agree, which is why the post says "the reality is that what we achieve is limited by our abilities, our personality, timing, and luck"

That is, yes, there is an element of timing and luck and other things beyond your control, but a huge portion of it is your abilities and talents.

> _Even with those out, you cannot chose to be born with caring or rich > parents, or to have been raised in an environment where your drunk father > didn't hit your crack addicted mom, for example._

Well, those things _are_ part of who you are. That is, a person with a given DNA, if raised by caring and educated parent will turn out to be a very different person, with different abilities, talents, and character, than if they were raised by a crack addicted illiterate mom.

So, the phrase "life is what you make of it" means not, "life is what your DNA has dictated" but "life is what you (as shaped by your DNA, your upbringing, and major events in your life) make of it"

> _So, "like if what you make it" can be better rephrased as: "life is what > you make it, but for a lot of people it takes 10 times the effort other > people to make it the same thing, and/or extremely rare lucky breaks"._

I agree, but the main point of the post was not to focus on the large hurdles that the disadvantaged have in achieving any given goal.

The main focus was on the fact that, for people facing a similar set of hurdles, their whole persona (abilities, talents, personality) is a huge determinant of their success, and as a result, the life they can make will be very different, even if they both work equally hard.

For example, take two middle-class fresh grads from great schools moving to Silicon Valley to make it. One is a top-notch programmer and great at socializing and is immediately likable when people meet him, while the other is a so-so programmer and not that good at socializing and meeting people. Who do you think will make more connections in Silicon Valley, get better job offers, etc?

To summarize, the main point of the post can be captured by the following: "Life is what you make of it, but for most people, what they _can_ make of it is not much (especially if their sights are too high)"</comment></comment>


Show HN: A pure Python Bitcoin protocol implementation - <AUTHOR> http://protocoin.readthedocs.org/

<comment><USER2> Nice. I'm the developer of [http://github.com/vbuterin/pybitcointools](http://github.com/vbuterin/pybitcointools) , a Python implementation of most of the parts of the protocol that you do not handle. Perhaps we could work on making the two work together as a complete Bitcoin node?</comment>


Remote work: Employers are taking over our living spaces and passing on costs - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/remote-work-employers-are-taking-over-our-living-spaces-and-passing-on-costs-140610 <comment><USER2> I mean I would agree with the author but then we'd both be wrong...

Transportation costs are not modest when opportunity-cost for time is factored in (i.e. a $150K Software engineer doing a 1hr daily commute loses ~20K in time, that's before owning a vehicle etc) and working from home does not require a cleaning service.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. The cost and time of transportation would seem to far outweigh the cost of a home office in the long run. My main concession might be the cost associated with paying for high speed internet, if much of that bandwidth is going to be used for work purposes.</comment></comment>


Agile is a process - <AUTHOR>

A few recent new stories on Slashdot and HN have led me to contemplate the definition of "agile" in the context of software development.
I believe "agile" is defined not by how to do certain things but by the purpose of avoiding technical debt. Therefore "agile" is synonymous with "whereby technical debt is avoided".
Does HN agree/disagree? <comment><USER2> Adjective: Able to move quickly and easily: "as agile as a monkey"; "an agile mind".

so, in the context of software development, I picture a room full of code monkeys changing their code in an agile manner as agile managers flip flop requirements.</comment>


Social news rumors - Yahoo buzz to launch tomorrow - <AUTHOR> http://fvrit.com/archive/2008/02/25/social-news-rumors---yahoo-buzz-to-launch-tomorrow.aspx

<comment><USER2> better technology != community killer

They could add all the bells and whistles they want, but coining something as a "community killer" (or "Digg killer" in this case) is laughable at best.

The only way Digg can be killed is if a community shows up that is in some way culturally hip. For example, if some celebrities were to band together and unexpectedly show how hard-core geeky/nerdy they can be, I'm certain it would be more of a Digg killer because they immediately will be pulling attention away for the right reason (what geek wouldn't love to associate themselves with Keanu Reeves if the real-life Neo turns out to be a automata theory junkie!?!?!). Communal value is immediately created around such an individual in the same way Kevin Rose is the focal point for Digg (I'd be hard pressed to be convinced otherwise of Kevin Rose's celebrity status).

A concrete example is del.icio.us. Yahoo! ended up purchasing del.icio.us even though, one may argue, Yahoo!'s service was technologically superior (tell me otherwise and I'll merely point to the fact that del.icio.us, prior to acquisition and for a period of time afterwards, suffered frequent outages the likes of which would cause heads to roll at Yahoo!). It's true that availability might be classified as different than "feature-set", but my counter argument would be that the reliability of ANY application contributes to the user experience in either a positive or a negative way the same way the color selection might impact the overall user experience. The community wouldn't leave del.icio.us for a reason, and so it didn't matter what technology ANYBODY (Google included) would build to try and move the critical mass away.

From where did del.icio.us originate? From the mind of an overworked quant jock working for a market maker in Manhattan; Joshua Schachter even got turned down for a job at Google, and I suppose it is up for debate that tagging has revolutionized (ala Clay Shirky) the way we interact with the amount of information we sift through on the internet, but it has definitely changed things in a rather dramatic way. The reason why I mention this last fact is because there is something to be said for hiring people that are not "optimized" enough on their resume because sometimes ideas that formulate from nowhere turn into revolutionary concepts. Similarly, I have very little faith in groups of engineers who can create technologically superior platforms to understand (on average mind you) the cultural/social aspect of WHY certain cultural phenomenon grow in the first place anymore than I would expect TV show writers to understand inductive reasoning/logic and how it relates to creating quality software.

I would place my money on a geek/nerd who spends his spare time playing with Legos to come up with the next big community than anything that would come from the minds of one of the big internet giants because chances are the geek is more in tune with a trend that is likely to catch on with his friends and then grow virally as opposed to engineered, advertising-driven attempts to create online culture. But I wouldn't at all say that such a community would be a "Digg killer" because the reasons for assembly are different, at a different time, and for the sake of a different user experience. And this type of user experience has NOTHING to do with how windows might expand or hide the way they do on OSX vs. Windows.

Social software operates on different principles of competition than does software that helps people achieve something. To illustrate further, you don't hear people in the entertainment industry make statements such as, "Is 'Heroes' Going To Be the 'Lost' Killer?" - of course not!

Social groups are very nebulous and they assemble for reasons completely different than why somebody might choose a web browser, operating system, or any other piece of software that involves achieving how we interact with computers. Social software is about interacting with others and, MOST IMPORTANTLY, the quality of that interaction.</comment>


Without radical change in patent law, Android's ecosystem will die - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/without-radical-change-in-patent-law-androids-ecosystem-will-die-7000004311/ <comment><USER2> Sounds like the writer is ok if Samsung won the trial. Bad article from a bad writer.</comment>


25 Words that Simply Don't Exist in English - <AUTHOR> http://sobadsogood.com/2012/04/29/25-words-that-simply-dont-exist-in-english/

<comment><USER2> I have to object "arigatameiwaku". First off, it's really two words: "arigata", which means (in this context) "appreciated", and "meiwaku", which really is a word that we don't exactly have in English but roughly means "annoyance", and is tightly coupled with Japanese cultural concepts of societal acceptance.

Secondly, we do, in fact, have a very closely related term in English: "white elephant".

</comment><comment><USER3> Regarding two of the German words: I don't know if I have ever heard somebody using "Backpfeifengesicht" recently, but I have heard the english term 'fist magnet', which I think is pretty much the same. And "Waldeinsamkeit" is a word I have never heard before and I do not see how this is "handy" (as the post's original title suggests).

If you are really looking for good words that don't exist english, you should read Douglas Adam's "The Deeper Meaning of Liff"

</comment><comment><USER4> They've never heard a girl called a "butterface", I guess. e.g. "She looks good (from the neck down / from behind), but her _face_..."

</comment><comment><USER5> The Russian "Pochemuchka" is a portmanteau. "Pochemu" translates to "why" or "how come" and "chka" is a common ending for something small or someone little, usually a girl. Its not really a word, just a use of a suffix. You can modify most words like this. For example car is "machina", little car is "machinachka". There isn't an English word for little car but so what?

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't think we need a word for Backpfeifengesicht. We can just say that's a face needing fist. "face needing fist" is actually one character shorter than Backpfeifengesicht.

For L'esprit de l'escalier, the phrase "jerk store" would probably be sufficient to convey that sentiment for anyone familiar with the Seinfeld TV series.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hm, since when is "duende" not an english word? I'm pretty sure we borrowed that one and it's not _that_ uncommon. The dictionary definition that I'm aware of differs slightly from the definition given though the spirit of the word is similar.

</comment><comment><USER8> <http://j-klein.blogspot.com/2011/05/its-dinglehopper.html> covers much the same ground with illustrations.

</comment><comment><USER9> Schadenfreude is one I am familiar with as an adopted English word.

Desenrascanco: They gave the English equivalent: "to Macgyver it".

Guanxi: We call that "goodwill".

Nunchi: Social savvy. It's opposite is called socially awkward or gets labeled as ASD (and, no, I am not joking).</comment>


Sup: The Hacker's Mail User Agent - <AUTHOR> http://supmua.org/ <comment><USER2> I've been thinking about switching to sup a few times, but the inability to sync changes back to the IMAP server is a deal breaker to me.

If I mark an email as read in sup, I don't want it to show up as unread on my phone. If I delete an email on the phone, I don't want it to stay in sup.

I know there's been a branch of sup that synced IMAP flags from the local repo to the server, solving at least the read status problem. But it seems the version linked here does not include that branch.

<comment><USER3> FWIW, I never considered that a serious limitation. On my phone, I don't want to read email. It's a sub-par experience, especially if you're used to Sup/Gmail/Notmuch. You can't just go back to "regular" email clients anymore :).

As for using multiple computers: with sup I used to run it in screen and attach that screen session whenever I needed it. With notmuch, I can just tell it to run notmuch(1) on a remote machine and even use a local UI.

<comment><USER4> I do some email using my phone when on the go, and although I'd like a better sync experience, it's not a showstopper. OfflineIMAP (buggy as hell, but works) can sync unread and flagged/starred status, which is the most important part. In a normal day where I mostly use notmuch, I just batch-archive the day's messages. I don't like the latency of using a remote notmuch, especially when going through a string of 5MB log files (remote debugging a user's mis- configuration) on conference wireless or while tethering.

<comment><USER5> If you haven't already considered mbsync as an alternative to OfflineIMAP, I suggest taking a look. I also found OfflineIMAP buggy (many years ago) and mbsync has been syncing my mailboxes reliably since. [http://isync.sourceforge.net/](http://isync.sourceforge.net/) I say this as the author of a program that runs mailbox syncers like mbsync when there are changes to sync (mswatch: [http://mswatch.sourceforge.net/](http://mswatch.sourceforge.net/)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been a mutt user since around 1997, and elm and mail before that.

I now do something crazy with maildir sync via mbsync and then mutt. Works pretty well. This lets me use push mail from an EAS (Kerio or Z-push) server on the iPhone to get push email, as well as getting mail on a few computers, all with full local archives. I just use the mail server for webmail in the cases I need to use it, but kerio's webmail is pretty crap.

Unclear what benefit sup gives over mutt. Mutt's killer feature is folder hooks, I think. I can't think of anything which can't be done with folder hooks, other than maybe tags, which I just solve with full-text search.

<comment><USER7> Could you say a little bit about what you do with folder hooks?

I've been using mutt for ages (not quite as long as you!) but I don't do anything clever with folder hooks, so it would be interesting to see what you do.

<comment><USER8> I, too, have been using mutt for a while now. I get emails at lots of different addresses and filter them into various folders. I use folder hooks to set my email address, depending the current folder.

<comment><USER7> Ah right. I typically use send hooks for that, based on the To: address but folder hooks would help me out too. I'll have to look into that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Apparently, somebody else is continuing sup development.

It used to be that William Morgan was the BDFL, and he started working on heliotrope/turnsole (a successor), which, AFAICT, never got anywhere serious.

I long since switched from sup to notmuch, which makes me much happier in terms of performance, documentation and stability.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you mind detailing your notmuch setup a little? In particular, what frontend? I used notmuch with mutt and the search was so slow that I went back to Mail.app on the mac (and now back to sup).

<comment><USER3> I use the canonical notmuch-emacs frontend, because all the others are not as good as the emacs one (I was not an emacs user before that).

Search is as fast as it was with sup for me, which is not a surprise, given that both use Xapian :).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> When I was using NetBSD in 2001 I actually liked the built-in "mail" command to read email. It was very minimal. Sadly, I could never figure out how to handle attachments with it.

<comment><USER10> "mail" is actually a fantastic interface to an email box assuming you don't receive very much mail. I still use it for things like sending myself an email notification when a long-running job is finished.

Maybe this wasn't the case back then, but with the mailx the comes with modern Linux distros you can attach files using the -a flag

<comment><USER9> That sounds like a great idea.

EDIT: NetBSD does support the -a flag (since version 1.23 of mail in 2006) but OpenBSD and FreeBSD doesn't. Good to know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Looks like sup is under new leadership with some recent releases, a new homepage, and new github repo: [https://github.com/sup- heliotrope/sup](https://github.com/sup-heliotrope/sup)

</comment><comment><USER11> Awesome. I've been looking for something like this. I know of mut and pine, but I've been looking for something new and shiny.

<comment><USER12> How does this go beyond what you can do with mutt? Plus mutt handles IMAP out of the box.

<comment><USER3> It mimics the gmail look & feel, i.e. one line of text represents one thread in your inbox, and when you open it, you get all the messages of the thread (with read messages collapsed), instead of precisely one message.

Edit: also fast (!) full-text search thanks to Xapian, tags instead of folders

<comment><USER13> > It mimics the gmail look & feel, i.e. one line of text represents one thread > in your inbox

folder-hook . "exec collapse-all"

set sort=threads

set sort_aux=last-date-received

<comment><USER14> Yup. I do this since I'm used to _za_ in Vim for toggling folds:

        # Collapse all threads by default, except if
        # there's new mail in one.
        unset collapse_unread
        folder-hook . "exec collapse-all"
        # Toggle collapsed threads with za, like in vim.
        bind index za collapse-thread

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I like nmh, though it takes a lot of setup to get usable (which I've admittedly not yet done since my last change of computers).

</comment><comment><USER16> Rubyists. Reinventing wheels since 1995.</comment>


Windows has an embedded transactional database engine - <AUTHOR> http://coolthingoftheday.blogspot.com/2008/10/did-you-know-windows-since-windows.html

<comment><USER2> Features include "record-level locking — multi-versioning provides non- blocking reads" and "highly concurrent database access", but "the database file cannot be shared between multiple processes simultaneously."

Uh, huh? So none of those concurrent features can actually be used?

<comment><USER3> Likely they mean for multi-threaded apps.

<comment><USER2> I considered that, but that feature set, even with the concurrency support, doesn't say "you're going to want to use this with a multi-threaded process".

Well, berkeley db's been around forever, and sqlite would be the modern standard: can be accessed by multiple processes, supports loose and relational schemas, ACID compliant, can be embedded/statically linked, no "installation" required by end users (this is a bogus point for most embedded database engines, as "no downloads required because it comes with the OS" seems like Microsoft's response to Microsoft's own JET engine which always seemed to be needed to be installed separately from the main programs that used it).</comment></comment></comment>


Uploaded.to blocked U.S. visitors as a response to the MegaUpload takedown - <AUTHOR> http://uploaded.to/

<comment><USER2> This is a great initiative, and one that sparks an interesting dilemma.

Might the US wake up one day to find itself secluded on the internets? Just like the average Nigerian, who has exactly 0% chance of successfully ordering a product on eBay.

What happens when the world becomes fed up with the horrendous US legal system? I can easily see a file-sharing site (e.g. megaupload) blocking all US IP addresses from accessing its service. Essentially annulling any trace of liability against a corrupt and rotten legal and political system.

Granted, we're still pretty high up on the slippery slope. But, it still would be very interesting the moment _the US_ becomes the country with 'unfavorable political climate'.

<comment><USER3> Right, punish the users for the failings of their government. What are they supposed to do?

<comment><USER4> It's not about punishing the user's, but about keeping yourself out of jail.

Why should the operators of a site risk getting extradited to the US, when what they are doing is perfectly legal in their home countries and lots of other countries?

If you are a user and want to access this site just buy VPN access in the free world and enjoy uncensored browsing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a European who constantly runs into the same "go away, foreigner" notices on US sites, I find this way funnier than I should.

<comment><USER6> Yeah it's weird going to a site you expect to see blocked and seeing that it works just fine. Anyone have a screenshot of what it says to US visitors?

<comment> alexis-d arn posted this screen below: <http://imgur.com/BJJOs>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's funny how legal content is blocked outside of the USA (every other movie/music/tv site) and the illegal one is getting blocked in the USA.

<comment><USER8> Isn't that because the content is only legal to stream in the USA? (e.g. what you'd find on Hulu) It'd technically be illegal to stream it outside of the USA, so it _is_ blocked. That's how I've always assumed that online streaming contracts with the content providers worked. I'd love to know if it works differently

<comment><USER9> What could possibly be _illegal_ about it? The TV companies just don't _want_ to let non-US people watch.

<comment><USER10> That's not correct. You have to license different works for different purposes, and there are many, many stakeholders whose permission you have to get. This varies by country. For example, a network may by the exclusive rights to air a show in the US. They only pay for those rights. Then someone else buys the exclusive rights in the UK. And someone else buys another country. Then, when it comes time for internet streaming, you not only have to get licenses from the original owner, plus perhaps this organization or that organization, and then you have to get licenses from....

You get the point. So with all of that work involved they look at the revenue potential of smaller countries and, frankly, it's just not worth it in many cases. They don't know what the demand is there. They don't have a marketing plan, and they have bigger opportunities available to them by working on yet another show's licensing for the US or other large country, so they just don't go to all of that trouble to make things available in smaller markets.

<comment><USER9> I did express that poorly. There can certainly be logistic factors at play.

But my point was that it's not _illegal_. It's a decision, not law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm a bit unsure this is actually a good idea.

I think the people behind SOPA are happy that uploaded.to decides to block US citizens. Cause that's exactly what they wanted in the first place.

What i would rather see is that companies move off US soil as a response to US Law. And stay off TLD's controlled by the US.

Also proxying should be promoted to circumvent the censorship that the government puts down over it's own citizens.

The movie industry has to adapt to a new market. The government should not adapt to an industry that has lost it's ability to innovate.

<comment><USER12> If I understood the MegaUpload news correctly, the founders were arrested in New Zealand. So, obviously the US has a much bigger jurisdiction than it geographically should have. I don't think that your suggestions would help.

The reason why I believe uploaded.to did this is not to support/protest SOPA, but to protect themselves from liability.

<comment><USER13> But if US users can't access the site then the US has no forum to precede with legal action, and then they can't call for extradition either. In the end they would need to prosecute in the target jurisdiction via the Berne Treaty.

<comment><USER14> No, they wouldn't. You have a nice legal argument there, but JUST THIS WEEK the owners and operators of Megaupload were arrested by US authorities with no extradition, no "prosecution in the target jurisdiction", just arrested in New Zealand for running a company from there.

<comment><USER15> _the owners and operators of Megaupload were arrested by US authorities with no extradition_

Umm no, they were arrested in New Zealand by New Zealand authorities.

 _Dotcom, as well as Bram van der Kolk, Finn Batato and Mathias Ortman were arrested by Organised & Financial Crime Agency New Zealand (OFCANZ) as well as New Zealand police earlier today._ from <http://gizmodo.com/5877779/>

<comment><USER16> > Umm no, they were arrested in New Zealand by New Zealand authorities.

At the behest of the US entertainment industry.

<comment><USER15> And the US law enforcement authorities. Hollywood did not ring up the NZ police and say "Arrest these guys". The US police did not fly over to NZ and arrest them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you read the 'evidence' against MU the mere blocking of US traffic to your website could be seen as 'evidence' that you are concealing a crime.

</comment><comment><USER18> I thought about this a little more this morning and realized that Megaupload was shut down because it was using piracy as a means to fund the owners' multi-million dollar lifestyle. Just because uploaded.to blocks US visitors does this make it safe from being taken down? I think not. Not if it is making $$$. They must be in #denial

<comment><USER19> good thing they are making €€€

<comment><USER20> Your name and comment made me chuckle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wrote about this a month or so ago. Sites self censoring. Much easier that way isn't it? [http://danielmillsap.com/blog/technology-news/using-game- the...](http://danielmillsap.com/blog/technology-news/using-game-theory-to- break-the-sopa-code/)

</comment><comment><USER21> How about a screenshot for non-U.S. users?

<comment><USER22> It's nothing particularly special

<http://cl.ly/2R3G1t3l2Z2O2A0x1u08>

<comment><USER21> Indeed, doesn't look blocked at all.

Is the submission title correct?

<comment><USER23> I'm in the US and it's blocked for me.

Good for them - this is a rational response and I hope it gets a lot of press.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Maybe some start-up will establish a foreign VPN service (in China or Iran) to help people in the US to freely connect to these services without fear of reprisal.

</comment><comment><USER25> This move makes no sense to me. Blocking US users will not stop them from seeking out foreign users uploading 'infringing' content. It's also as easily circumvented as the tactics many Europeans use to access those lame American sites that block Europe.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is an example of the chilling effect you get when you hold service providers liable for users' behavior.

Are there any other examples of this post Megaupload?

<comment><USER27> Except that in this case Mega Conspiracy (the company behind MegaUpload) is being held liable for their _own_ behavior. I'm used to Reddit being ill- informed but I was not expecting to see this attitude being so prevalent on HN!

Just in the comment thread for this post I've seen assertions that the U.S. avoided extradition treaties (untrue) and that MegaUpload was shut down just because of what their users were doing (also untrue).

Just as an example of things from the indictment (which you should really at least read a summary of):

* MegaConspiracy employees were discussing a way to avoid reposts of child porn by killing any video with a matching md5sum of movies which were deemed by MegaConspiracy to be child porn, but did not employ that same tactic for files uploaded that infringed copyright. Now you and I know that it's trivial to make the md5sum change without making the video look any different, but why does MegaConspiracy 'try harder' for some categories of illegal material and not others that just conveniently happen to make them more money?

* MegaConspiracy seeded their own website with videos copied straight from YouTube (thing wget --mirror) without so much as bothering to verify the license of those videos. This wouldn't be acceptable with open source software, why should this be acceptable for Mega Upload?

* MegaConspiracy distributed known infringing videos internally to staff (so it's not "just the users" doing it)

* MegaConspiracy rewarded uploaders monetarily for uploading popular videos despite the lack of authorization on the part of those users to redistribute the video (so it's not "just the users" asking for it)

So while I certainly appreciate that the movie/music industry are hopelessly out-of-tune with digital distribution, that doesn't make MegaConspiracy a bunch of good guys, and it doesn't make their behavior defensible.

<comment><USER28> For you 1st point: because in most jurisdiction CP is absolutely forbidden and typically you are not protected if you don't proactively act to eradicate CP on your service with reasonable dilligence, whereas an upload of a film might or might not be problematic, given that it can be for private use or public distribution.

For the third point who are you kidding. Technically this is problematic. In the real world even representatives and people in grand jury exchange ripped films, most probably most judges do it too. So this is both technically a reason but an highly hypocritical one.

<comment><USER27> > For you 1st point: because in most jurisdiction CP is absolutely forbidden > and typically you are not protected if you don't proactively act to > eradicate CP on your service with reasonable dilligence, whereas an upload > of a film might or might not be problematic, given that it can be for > private use or public distribution.

That's not at all the point though. It would be one thing if MegaConspiracy had a policy to only "full ban" videos that were targets of DMCA-complaints if it was clear to them that the content was actually infringing. Then they'd have a plethora of excuses (e.g. no time to sort through all the DMCA requests, "investigations" revealed it was unclear material was infringing, etc.)

Instead what the judge and jury will see is that MegaConspiracy had a "permaban video" tool which they didn't even _attempt_ to use.

> For the third point [MegaConspiracy distributing infringing material > internally] who are you kidding. Technically this is problematic.

Well, this is the best kind of "technically", given that it's exactly what they're being accused of! If the grand jury was as sympathetic to that as you think then why did they hand down the indictment?

Either way it's not very hypocritical given that some naïve users might be able to claim ignorance of the progeny of videos from the Internet, but MegaConspiracy went out of their way to establish DMCA protocol so they have no excuse for ignorance of the "safe harbor" provisions at all.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Putting Google Wifi to the test - <AUTHOR> https://blog.google/products/google-wifi/putting-google-wifi-test/ <comment><USER2> Competition is good for everyone-- I just worry about having Google Control even more:

Internet (Fiber), router (Wifi), personal and work email, all web browsing in my main browser (Chrome), maps, my only phone line, Docs, news, etc...

It's beyond scary.

<comment><AUTHOR> Honestly, I've been considering switching to Firefox.

Chrome... I dunno, Chrome just ain't that good _although_ they have really improved memory usage over the past like 2-3 years.

OTOH, Firefox's JS performance (which used to be a major sticking point) is getting a lot better, so I'm sorta getting everything I ever wanted in a browser.</comment></comment>


Scaling the Universe: How Large GPU Clusters Help Understand of Galaxy Formation - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2018/12/07/gpu-clusters-aid-understanding-of-galaxy-formation/ <comment><USER2> Anyone who's interested in these kind of simulations can check out the following project sites, as well as those linked in the article:

[http://www.illustris-project.org](http://www.illustris-project.org) [http://icc.dur.ac.uk/Eagle](http://icc.dur.ac.uk/Eagle) [http://SWIFTsim.com](http://SWIFTsim.com)

Disclaimer: I am heavily involved with the latter two projects.

<comment><USER3> Can you simulate a Galaxy and get a realistic rotation curve?

<comment><USER2> Yeah, in fact we simulate many thousands of galaxies all at once in a big cosmological volume and they all have very realistic rotation curves -- we match these to the observed rotation curves of galaxies, or use them to make predictions about galaxies that we have not yet observed.

See e.g. Fig 1. in this paper: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1504.01437.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1504.01437.pdf)</comment></comment></comment>


CockroachDB Stability Post-Mortem: From 1 Node to 100 Nodes - <AUTHOR> https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/cockroachdb-stability-from-1-node-to-100-nodes/ <comment><USER2> Makes me really happy to see how earnest y'all are being about these issues and how you're approaching them.

FWIW, we had very similar issues at Neo4j a few years back; I kind of wish we'd have blogged about it, but like you insinuate, I guess there's a strong social pressure to keep your dirty laundry in the hamper.

One of the interesting things we learned was that testing "worst case" was often not very useful - the first time we shipped a GA that'd gone through months-long soak testing in the worst possible load we could imagine, it took less than a few weeks for a customer with a seemingly benign load to come back with an unstable cluster.

Today, stability testing is done both on the "max out write throughput, then pull the power cord, then pull the powercord again while it recovers, and do that a million times"-level and "run these four customer use cases, including their devops setup, for two months and fail if uptime is not 100%"-level.

I'm not at Neo anymore, but I do wish someone who is would blog about the stability testing regimen, because at this point, it is brutal.

<comment><USER3> Unleash the chaos monkey!

<comment><USER2> Which reminds me - another thing we learned is that too much chaos can be easier on a distributed system than less chaos.

One of the robustness suites tries as hard as it can to permanently destroy a Neo4j cluster, looking for things like distributed deadlocks, faults in the leader election, data inconsistencies between replicas and so on.

It does that by applying a randomized load of all operations the system supports; reads, writes and schema changes. That's then combined with induced hardware faults and "regular" operational restarts and cluster configuration changes.

The problem was that, early on, the test would actually create unresponsive clusters, but then the "chaos" would continue, stirring up enough dust to get the cluster going again before the "unresponsive" timeouts triggered, causing false green tests.

Hence: Today this suite plays out a "chaos" scenario, but then it heals network partitions, turns unpowered instances back on and so forth, and sits back and waits for the cluster to recover "on its own".

<comment><USER4> This is considered multiple unrelated failures. You usually don't want to (at least to start) design a system to handle this.

handle a machine power down? Yes. Handle a network cable unplug? Yes. Handle 1 machine power down and 1 network cable unplug at the same time? That may be impossible to handle, or it may be an order of magnitude harder to handle.

Get all the single failure issues nailed down. Then perhaps you can do a little work on multiple unrelated failures, but it gets insanely complex fast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I found the conclusions for mitigating instability in future efforts very surprising. There was no mention of test suites, dependency injection, etc.

If I was building this type of system, I would want to build an exhaustive test suite that allowed me to make stability invariant forward progress on the code base without relying on engineers eye catching regressions.

That would mean constructing a system to enumerate all the edge cases at different cluster sizes, automate testing, be able to simulate the network with DI and without docker, and be able configure different network delays and other salient parameters.

The omission of a system like this is surprising because it's really not that hard to build and make it an integral part of core development. I may be wrong, but the last paragraph of the post certainly seems to imply that this isn't done or hasn't been considered.

<comment><USER6> There is nothing simple in building or testing a system like this. How exactly would DI help you test multi-node system?

<comment><USER5> Everything's relative. It's easier to build a test framework for CockroachDB than to build CockroachDB itself. DI could help by simulating the network. It gives you more power to test out and record states around weird edge cases. If you were using docker, there are things that you either probably can't configure or it would be very difficult to. Eg. changing dns lookup latency for a subset of hosts.

<comment><USER7> Oh, come on. Nothing short of formal verification is going to be sufficient for testing something like this (and formal verification is far, far harder for distributed systems than it is for single-node ones), and even then it still can't validate your environment assumptions. DI isn't even a drop in the bucket. If anything, DI makes it more likely your tests will be off, _especially_ if you're relying in any way on (even loose) global clock synchronization.

<comment><USER5> As the author mentioned in the original article TLA+, ATPs etc verify the correctness of systems, they don't apply to the type of stability problems which have plagued CockroachDB. That emergent behavior arose from it's implementation, optimizations, etc. Just because a system is unstable doesn't mean it's incorrect (or correct).

That is why a simulator is useful. The entire point of building a sim is so you can run the exact code that comprises CockroachDB and control for any situation. For example, an optimization that works great at 10 nodes may be terrible for larger clusters. You need to find that out through testing because most humans can't look at a line of code and infer that.

A side benefit of this approach is that if you change some parameter and suddenly experience a big increase or decrease in db throughput you gain a sense for which parameters are most sensitive to the overall system and will then be able to more easily diagnose problems in production.

<comment><USER7> What sort of cycle-accurate simulation are you proposing, exactly (I assume you're aiming for something pretty accurate if your simulation is going to figure out performance-related problems!), and how will it be improved by dependency injection? If you just want to simulate a network, why not use something like [http://mininet.org/](http://mininet.org/)?

(Also: formal proofs of correctness for stuff like leader election are very much concerned with stability / liveness, not just safety; that's a common misconception).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> They also recently got joins working[1], so it's pretty close now to being like etcd, but with sql instead of KV.

Once they get to the rest of the stability and performance roadmap milestones, it seems like they are positioned to be a great backing store for a lot of interesting use cases.

Nice work!

[1] [https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/issues/2970](https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/issues/2970)

<comment><USER9> our current implementation for JOINs is our first, non-optimized implementation. we're currently working on speeding this up but here's the blog post from when our first implementation was out if you're interested [1].

[1]: [https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/cockroachdbs-first- join/](https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/cockroachdbs-first-join/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Cockroach seems like a great product to me. I have a project i'm developing against it, If they can launch a managed version which is set and forget I would be very tempted to pay for it.

I have concerns they will not be able to reach stability in a reasonable time frame and am prepared to pull the plug and go to postgres if needed. The fact that they are trying to maintain compatibility with postgres really makes this gamble far less risky, and was a wise strategic move.

I wish them the best.

<comment><USER11> So if you can get away with Postgres then why do you want to use Cocroach?

<comment><USER10> I like the idea of a self healing cluster where each node is equal and the amount of work required to maintain it is kept to a minimum.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This sounds like a cool project - Similar claims to spanner? [http://research.google.com/archive/spanner.html](http://research.google.com/archive/spanner.html)

I'll keep watching for jepsen tests!! :) [https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/diy-jepsen-testing- cockro...](https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/diy-jepsen-testing-cockroachdb/)

<comment><USER9> Spanner and F1[1] were actually the inspirations for the project[2].

[1][http://research.google.com/pubs/pub41344.html](http://research.google.com/pubs/pub41344.html)

[2][https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/frequently-asked- question...](https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/frequently-asked- questions.html#what-is-cockroachdb)

<comment><USER12> Thanks! I missed that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Given some nasty comments about this here before, I just want to say I really appreciate these kinds of transparent postmortems. Credit to the cockroach folks for putting themselves out there in a way many would not.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm so ashamed of HN after reading the previous comments here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12361921](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12361921). Glad these are more positive :)

Love @redwood's response though: "This is like a parent saying "We're really looking forward to our child learning to walk by her next birthday" and you responding: "I've got children in their 30s... what kind of parents focus on getting their kids to walk?""

<comment><USER15> That response to "ok we're going to make the database stable now" is quite reasonable for something which has had the publicity that CockroachDB has had. (Even the name suggests stability/availability above all else!)

The alternative is for CockroachDB devs to clearly state "this does not work yet, no one should be trying to use it" before all notable communications.

This is actually a necessary immune response to a "open source ecosystem" that is becoming overwhelming to navigate - people need to know what to not bother paying any attention to yet.

<comment><USER14> It's only overwhelming if you jump from technology to technology for real products. I have a list of up and coming technologies that I will play around with and build toy projects on over a year. If it lives up to it's claims, I might consider using it for real products.

Software is fast paced. You just can't ignore all unstable/beta technologies, you'll be far behind the game when they hit 1.0.

<comment><USER15> Hah - these days 1.0 is still alpha. Docker was still unstable at v1.6 (but I was able to deploy it at v1.8.2 if I carefully avoided many of its features). MySQL is actually pretty good at 5.5 / 5.6 but earlier versions were a bit of trouble ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I love the project. Technologically, this thing is _awesome_ and I want to try it out.

But I haven't because of the name.

I want to raise a totally sideways concern that has no relevance to the project, just so it gets out there. The only problem I'm having is that I, like about 10% of the US Population, have Entomophobia.

The name of the project gives me the heebie-jeebies and keeps me from wanting to work with it because I loath cockroaches. I know it's not relevant technologically, but I really can't imagine doing training on cockroach for example.

Oh. My. God. No.

Anyways, wanted to provide the feedback. Sorry if it's totally weird.

<comment><USER5> I think the branding is brilliant. It's unforgettable. It's a statement of purpose. It hits their target market (engineers) perfectly.

I sympathize though. Entomophobia must be a bummer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> _" We accomplished this by splitting our master branch into two branches: the master branch would be dedicated to stability, freezing with the exception of pull requests targeting stability. All other development would continue in a develop branch."_

There was a time when most software was developed that way.

</comment><comment><USER18> Raft is useful for handling redundancy (involving a limited number of nodes) but it has hard scalability limits. To achieve theoretically unlimited scalability, EVERY subsystem has to be embarrassingly parallel (which as far as I know Raft isn't) - If even one subsystem is not embarrassingly parallel, then the system as a whole will be limited in terms of scalability.

To build an embarrassingly parallel system; you can't avoid some sort of sharding. I haven't looked too deeply into 'Quiescing Raft', but it still looks like scalability would be limited - It still looks like we have a scenario where each node might communicate with every other node (though in a more economical way).

To remove the limit completely, you'd have to settle with a solution that has fixed-size Raft groups which do not grow as you add more nodes to the cluster.

</comment><comment><USER19> Sorry for a question that is not directly related to the blog post, but anyway. CockroachDB is the only Go project I'm aware of that uses `2 spaces` indentation instead of `tab`s. I'm curious, is there any reason for that?

<comment><USER20> (Cockroach Labs co-founder here) The source files contain tab characters (gofmt enforces this for all go projects). We configure our editors to render tabs as two spaces. There's no deep reason for this; we've just gotten used to two-space indents from our time at Google and other projects that used this convention.

Since Go code is formatted with tabs, you can mostly get away with setting the indentation to whatever you want. The one practical problem with letting people choose their own values for the width of a tab is that it becomes tricky to enforce a uniform line length, so we've standardized on two-space indents (and 100-char line lengths) across the project.

<comment><USER19> Thanks, now I see those are tabs. I didn't know Github indentation style is customizable. Interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The final bullet point is super weird to me:

>Systems like CockroachDB must be tested in a real world setting. However, there is significant overhead to debugging a cluster on AWS. The cycle to develop, deploy, and debug using the cloud is very slow. An incredibly helpful intermediate step is to deploy clusters locally as part of every engineer's normal development cycle (use multiple processes on different ports). See the allocsim and zerosum tools.

I'd like to know more details about why for this use case, AWS deployment is slower; bandwidth?

<comment><USER22> It's a combination of bandwidth and latency. Latency in particular feels slow; you need to copy the new binary on every node, then issue commands over ssh to scrub any previous leftover files, initialize a cluster, run the tests, stop the cluster, retrieve the log files. Doing all this over the network is just taking a few more seconds which makes running hundreds of tests much longer than they would locally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Seeing random data corruption over network, try: /sbin/ethtool -K ethX gso off tso off sg off gro off

udev rule something like: SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", ATTRS{vendor}=="0x8086", ATTRS{device}=="0x10c9", ATTRS{subsystem_vendor}=="0x103c", ATTRS{subsystem_device}=="0x323f", RUN+="/sbin/ethtool -K $name gso off tso off sg off gro off"

<comment><USER24> What does this do and what are the downsides?

<comment><USER23> It disables some of the network card's hardware offloading. Some have occasional faults, as low as every 4TB of data. The corrupt packets has valid TCP CRC. Commonly first spotted with an ssh error of "Corrupted MAC on input"

Example of an OpenStack vendor guide recommending turning the offloading off: [http://clouddoc.stratus.com/126.96.36.199/en- us/Content/Help/P03_S...](http://clouddoc.stratus.com/126.96.36.199/en- us/Content/Help/P03_Support/C02_InstallGuide/C05_OpenStackInstall/T_DisablingTCPOffload.htm)

Downside is you may have slightly higher CPU usage and/or slightly lower network throughput, I personally have not noticed a significant drop in performance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> What did you use to create your animated simulations?

<comment><AUTHOR> (Cockroach Labs here) The simulations are available on Spencer's github repo here: [https://github.com/spencerkimball/spencerkimball.github.io/t...](https://github.com/spencerkimball/spencerkimball.github.io/tree/master/simulation)

<comment><USER25> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The links in the article seem broken (all point to to the blog post).

Would be cool to see some of the bigger relevant PRs

<comment><USER9> [cockroach labs employee] most of the 'stability' related PRs/isues were labelled explicitly [1]. Going over the ones with the heaviest discussions could maybe point you to what you were looking for [2].

[1][https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/labels/stability](https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/labels/stability)

[2][https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%...](https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=label%3Astability%20sort%3Acomments- desc%20)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Anybody using it in production yet?

<comment><USER28> Not me. However, I starting planning for a new product that needs to scale to reliably hold a lot of measurement data. I initially was thinking Cassandra might be a good fit. After doing some research, I like the design of CockroachDB better.

<comment><USER27> I'm also looking at this project for a similar use case. Have you looked at InfluxDB or Prometheus?</comment></comment></comment>


ATLAS 3.10.3 released - <AUTHOR> https://sourceforge.net/p/math-atlas/mailman/message/35248575/ <comment><USER2> To save others from searching for it:

> ATLAS (Automatically Tuned Linear Algebra Software) provides highly > optimized Linear Algebra kernels for arbitrary cache-based architectures. > ATLAS provides ANSI C and Fortran77 interfaces for the entire BLAS API, and > a small portion of the LAPACK AP

[https://sourceforge.net/projects/math- atlas/](https://sourceforge.net/projects/math-atlas/)</comment>


How Facebook is turning into one of the biggest content farm - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ricodigo.com/blog/2012/03/09/is-facebook-turning-into-the-new-biggest-content-farm/

<comment><USER2> I know that they attribute the content to Wikipedia, but this seems like stealing.</comment>


An Analysis of Epub3: "Website in a box," and why that's bad - <AUTHOR> http://sigildev.blogspot.com/2011/02/analysis-of-epub3-and-uh-bit-more.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Thought this might interest those of you who, like me, are messing around with ePub files on their readers. The article goes on a few tangents but the core is a good read.

Building a cross-reader ePub today is faintly reminiscent of building a cross- browser website in the early 2000's. Sounds like the complexity added by ePub3 will only make it worse.

Not to mention that when I'm reading a book, I want it to be a book--otherwise I'd go read a website!</comment>


I do not believe Google invented the term "A/B test" - <AUTHOR> http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2015/06/i-do-not-believe-google-invented-the-term-ab-test/

<comment><USER2> Google doesn't even call them "A/B tests", they're just "experiments". And there are frequently more than 2 alternatives - the typical experiment I ran usually had about 4 arms, and there've been ones that go up to 51 (the infamous "41 shades of blue" experiment [1]). It's largely the press that has latched onto "A/B testing", along with the open-source and SaaS communities.

[1] [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/05/why- google...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/05/why-google- engineers-designers)</comment>


Ask HN: Review my email collaboration app - MooGroups - <AUTHOR>

I first posted here a couple weeks ago and since have gotten some good feedback and have revamped the UI to make it easier to understand and more inviting.
MooGroups is a group email collaboration tool that gives you an instant mailing group for each conversation. It provides embedding polls, archived attachments, all directly in your email and without having to signup.  It's built for group email conversations that don't need a formal group service (such as google groups).
Let me know what you guys think!
Thanks!
http://moogroups.com <comment><USER2> It seems really silly that you have to CC the recipients and tell them to ignore the message and instead look for a different message from some other address... I think that's gonna be a problem. You should try to figure out another way to handle that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. That is the trickiest part of getting started. However that step negates the user from needing to signup with another service. Normally, you would have to signup with a service, create your list, then invite your users, then send your message. This simplifies all of that with the cost of 1 initial email.

I've thought about this a lot and there just isn't any other option. One way to get around this is to build my own web/iphone/etc client which would know exactly how to handle the Cc's. But that is out of the current scope.

Putting the recipients in the body is not really an option since there is no auto-completion for email address in the body.

I'm left with trying to hammer that concept into anyone that uses the service with clear/concise/clever instructions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have NoScript and, when I browse, it says, "This text will be replaced" in the top bar.

It says, "Use any email program" but all screenshots are from a Mac. Would suggest a few screenshots from Windows if that is also your audience.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> I was actually just going to use gmail screenshots, but I thought the Mac screenshots looked better. I tried to make it generic enough so that it could be just about any email program (minus the title bar buttons I guess).

Appreciate the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> <http://moogroups.com></comment>