California Opens Investigation into Tesla Workplace Conditions - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-18/california-opens-investigation-into-tesla-workplace-conditions <comment><USER3> > It was difficult to find employees to go on the record. Like a lot of tech > companies in Silicon Valley, workers signed non-disclosure agreements. NDAs > usually are put in place so workers don't share any trade secrets or > proprietary technology. So some workers were scared to talk to us because of > this NDA they sign for working at Tesla.

Damn, so workers were afraid to speak up and spread the injury info because they were forced to sign an NDA and we're worried about being sued. I think somebody needs to do something about this NDA situation, it's getting out of control in SV

<comment><USER4> > I think somebody needs to do something about this NDA situation, it's > getting out of control in SV

Not just in SV, it's all over the world. IMHO the right of protection for whistleblowers should be made a basic human right, in order to protect people worldwide who are afraid to speak out.

<comment><USER5> California law DOES protect whistleblowers. The law is extremely clear. Those laws even provide for damages due to retailiation.

<comment><USER6> Even in that situation, if you're a paycheck-to-paycheck worker, how much boat-rocking can you endure? On some theoretical future date according to the law you can get back at your employer, great: in the meantime, maybe you got fired and now you can't feed yourself?

We've seen plenty of companies that shrug off large fines and such. Whatever the rules, it has to reach the point of being seriously unprofitable to disobey (i.e. investors knocking to demand compliance).

<comment><USER7> Not to mention the further stigmatization that results from being a whistleblower- having your name in published sources associated with calling out an employer may impact how quickly you can find a new job. Future employers also like seeing $LARGE_CORP experience on a resume, where I've seen colleagues stay at a job they didn't like only for the prestige attached to this line item.

For a worker without this safety net there really isn't reason for them to violate an NDA and have to rely on whistleblower protections for future remidial damages if there isn't a guarantee that their current living situation would be able to be maintained. We saw last week how Apple fired leakers on the spot and have their name blacklisted towards future tech employers as such.

<comment><USER8> Not to mention the emotional toll. Having an entire HR department viciously attacking you when you've already been wrongned, while backing the party who wronged you, can be extremely scary and depleting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The real problem for Tesla is that their destiny is probably to be the next BMW - a good midrange luxury car maker, about #12 in the world on volume. That would be fine except for the excessive market cap. Tesla's market cap exceeded GM's at one point. The stock has to come down a lot if Tesla ends up at BMW's scale. Even with Tesla's most optimistic production estimates, Tesla will make far fewer cars than BMW in the next few years.

Silicon Valley has a few other companies like that, Uber and Twitter being the most prominent.

<comment><USER10> the cars are a product demo. selling batteries by the gigawatt is the real biz. GE not GM.

<comment><USER11> Then you should back Panasonic, not Tesla, because they're the ones with the tech.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Related: the two Reveal reporters who worked on the investigation are currently doing an IAMA:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/8d7khd/were_two_inves...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/8d7khd/were_two_investigative_reporters_who_looked_into/)

<comment><USER12> From that thread:

> Have you investigated any other auto manufacturer?

> (ajpreports) I haven't nor has Will. But maybe that's our next venture!

That diminishes their credibility a lot in my mind. This is a type of investigation that should be done by people with experience in the area. Especially on a company that pushes the envelope like Tesla.

<comment><USER12> Five people downvoted but only one replied. I would appreciate a line explaining, since I didn't think my opinion was so controversial.

<comment><USER13> I think in general HN finds any idea that Tesla should get a free pass distasteful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Don't know about Tesla, but have heard horror stories about SpaceX here in LA. 60+ hour weeks, butts in seats, whole depts fired/walkouts, sweatshop conditions, etc.

Some folks are still not aware that these practices lower productivity. _shrug_

<comment><USER15> Worked at SpaceX in LA on software. It was generally quite pleasant but you do put in a lot of hours. No one asks you to work overtime or work extra hours - it's just a fun environment and you like your coworkers so you stay at work longer than you should. Most people who were there longer than I was ended up finding a healthy work / life balance that they could sustain... I don't think the new folks do this because they're obsessed with learning as much as they can.

I left because the space industry moves at quite a slow pace compared to the rest of the software world and I was tired of working on one small piece of software while the world was changing around me...

All in all? SpaceX was pretty wonderful and I don't think anyone should judge employee happiness solely from hours worked. I was frequently encouraged to take some recharge time for me. This is just one data point and maybe we're all only hearing the negative data points?

<comment><USER16> > I left because the space industry moves at quite a slow pace compared to the > rest of the software world and I was tired of working on one small piece of > software while the world was changing around me...

Would love it if you could shed some more light on this point :)

Was it that you were using an old programming language or something? It's hard for me to believe that the space industry didn't present some pretty awesome opportunities to use your brain. Sometimes building CRUD apps with the latest X framework is just too damn easy.

<comment><USER15> I wasn't working on any code that was changing rapidly. I was basically making small tweaks to existing projects without the opportunity to refactor. The work being done by the whole company was fascinating... the small part of that I was working on was somewhat mind numbing. I kept doing some one off projects that were fun for a day or two but nothing that took multiple months or people to build and get into production. Nothing that I was personally super proud of. Others were in more substantial projects and probably enjoyed their work more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does Tesla have automation problems? They appear to be having atrocious labor conditions while putting out a very small quantity of product compared with absolutely everybody else.

<comment><USER18> Musk in an interview last week said as much (re: automation). He claims that the Model 3 line was over-automated so now they're tearing out sections for rework while doing more with the labor on hand. (Although they're about to also install new sections from their German automation subsidiary so it goes both ways).

<comment><USER19> The whole play with making their own tooling seems ill conceived at Tesla's small scale, and it has definitely set the Model 3's production back quite a bit.

<comment><USER20> This has been true across the board at Tesla... they make almost all of the parts in house, even when there are established reliable providers... even when it costs them more and results in lower quality.. even when they are already short staffed. Musk is pro-NIH syndrome.

In fairness, Musk says they will eventually be as reliable, and as high quality as others and it'll be cheaper.. one day. That's the common NIH fallacy though.

<comment><USER21> There are quite a few parts in the Model S that come from suppliers. The steering wheel, window / mirror controls all appear to come from the same folks that supply Mercedes. I don't know where the parts for the Model 3 come from - the steering wheel and window / mirror controls are definitely different.

<comment><USER20> Yes, but Tesla has the highest rate of vertical integration in the industry. In 2016, Goldman visited their factory and put it at 80% vertically integrated: [https://www.valuewalk.com/2016/02/tesla-stock-rallies- after-...](https://www.valuewalk.com/2016/02/tesla-stock-rallies-after-tough- couple-of-weeks/)

And they've brought in house more since then (like the seats).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Wonder if Alabama will see the opportunity this might represent for them. High tech and high relative pay.

<comment><USER23> Alabama produces a million cars a year, in factories that are actually high- tech unlike Tesla's. You think they are clamoring to bring in an automaker struggling to produce a handful of cars with double the industry injury rate?

<comment><USER24> > actually high-tech unlike Tesla's

citation needed.

<comment><USER25> Having toured the Tesla plant a few months after touring BMW in Munich, they're worlds apart. I also toured the Fremont plant back in the NUMMI days.

That said, I don't think it's necessarily a huge strike against Tesla; they're at a different scale and at a different stage in the life of the company.

<comment><USER24> That's pretty fascinating; I'd love to hear more about your various plant tours. Roughly when did you visit BMW and Tesla? Also comparing it to pre-2010 would be interesting. Thanks!

<comment><USER25> It's just been far too long for me to remember NUMMI that well, but as far as I remember, it was a pretty automated plant. At Tesla, I saw tons of forklifts being driven around manually, occasionally bumping into things, one with a broken piece of pallet stuck under a wheel, people hand-polishing parts, etc. Workers with boomboxes setup in their desk area on the factory floor, fun stuff like that. I don't begrudge them this, as they have tons of space and are building a car company from scratch; it won't be as automated on day or week or even decade 1 as an existing established manufacturer. But when you compare to BMW, where virtually every operation is highly automated, it's quite a change.

Of course, there's also the matter of what the manufacturer is willing to show you (perhaps we didn't visit the forklift floor at BMW!), and also BMW is highly space constrained building cars right in the heart of Munich.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _"... ideologically motivated attack by an extremist organization working directly with union supporters to create a calculated disinformation campaign against Tesla. The piece even includes an interview with Worksafe – the same organization that the UAW enlisted to publish a negative report against Tesla last year, and whose board includes labor union officials and advocates._"[1] - from Tesla's own site.

Wow. That sounds like something Hannity or Trump would say. Is Musk losing it?

The United Automotive Workers union is hardly an "extremist organization".

[1] [https://www.tesla.com/blog/not-so-revealing- story](https://www.tesla.com/blog/not-so-revealing-story)

<comment><USER26> Reveal won a Pulitzer Prize in this year for revealing how all around the country judges steered convicted drug offenders into rehab / thinly disguised private industry work camps. I guess that is pretty extremist if one is in favor of private industry work camps and judges benefiting from them. Nomination details: [http://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/amy-julia-harris-and- shosh...](http://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/amy-julia-harris-and-shoshana- walter-reveal-center-investigative-reporting)

<comment><AUTHOR> Clarification: they were finalists for the award in national reporting. The WaPo and NYT were the winners this year: [http://www.pulitzer.org/winners/staffs-new-york-times-and- wa...](http://www.pulitzer.org/winners/staffs-new-york-times-and-washington- post)

Reveal was also a finalist in 2013 (back when it was named California Watch) for the award in public service (generally considered the most prestigious of the Pulitzers): [http://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/california- watch](http://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/california-watch)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The original Reveal article [1] didn't get much discussion here, but it's pretty damning.

[1]: [https://www.revealnews.org/article/tesla-says-its-factory- is...](https://www.revealnews.org/article/tesla-says-its-factory-is-safer-but- it-left-injuries-off-the-books/)

</comment><comment><USER28> THIS IS FANTASTIC.

I've had a friend, a specialist engineer doing failure analysis, who has been largely incapacitated from any work because of Tesla. He sustained an injury during a high urgency project (which failed, whodathunk) which required him to work 16 hour days for a few months. During the course of this, he sustained injuries to arms and legs due to machinery issues (the machinery at Tesla often has workers contorting into unnatural positions, I've heard). It's been 2 years and my friend is unable to pay for the requisite operations and can't get a cent out of Tesla. He is unable to work because of his injuries and so really has been confined to his home for 2 years now.

I have no respect for Musk. An employer who has no respect for their employees, a leader who has no regard for those he leads, is morally bankrupt and seeks only their own good.

<comment><USER29> With respect to you and your friend, I'm automatically skeptical of stories like this. We're on the internet, after all.

Has your friend spoken to news agencies about this? Why not, if he/she hasn't? Surely _any_ of the major news agencies would be watering at the mouth for a story like this.

<comment><USER30> What are you skeptical about? That this person's friend is actually injured? That it happened because of tesla? People get injured at work. Maybe not where YOU work, but it absolutely happens.

Also, the subtext of your comment - that this person OF COURSE would have contacted a news organization if their claim was legitimate is frankly very weird.

<comment><USER31> > What are you skeptical about? That this person's friend is actually injured? > That it happened because of tesla?

What I (not the original poster of the comment you are questioning) is that they were injured in the workplace at Tesla as en employee and unable to get anything from Tesla to deal with that, since workers compensation is a bright- line legal requirement for all employers and covers all employees.

Now, bureaucratic difficulties dealing with Tesla's WC insurer resulting in annoying runarounds, poor doctors in inconvenient locations, and disappointing care quality would be credible. Crickets, though, stretches belief.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It's really surprising to me see posts critical of Tesla highly upvoted on HN these days. It tells me the narrative around Tesla is finally starting to break down, and naturally the stock price has declined from its highs as well.

A few years ago most of the comments here would have been much more sycophantic. It's very refreshing to see.

edit: Ok maybe it's not completely gone yet.

<comment><USER33> Because we all want Tesla to succeed. It's competition in an industry that needs what Tesla is trying to bring to market. It will also greatly benefit the American economy to be the first to mass produce inexpensive electric cars.

So personally, I read comments like yours and wonder who you are and why you feel it is necessary to be critical of that motive.

<comment><USER34> I want the electric car transition to succeed, but if Tesla's becoming a bad actor in their quest to be the biggest winner, than I don't think that's helpful for the overall effort anymore.

<comment><USER35> > if Tesla's becoming a bad actor in their quest to be the biggest winner, > than I don't think that's helpful

It's still super helpful. We need to advance our tech at all costs. It's the only thing we have on this continent. We've gifted foreign nations with our manufacturing industries and gutted the American middle class, and the entrails have been used to lift 250,000 people a day out of poverty since 1990. This is a serious gift and a serious tragedy at the same time.

Now there is nothing good about herniated disks from 16 hours of holding your arms over your head every day. I am not defending that. But you have to put it in perspective. Things are so damn good all the frigging time in America and Canada, _relatively speaking_, that we look at herniated disks from hard work like it's some great tragedy that should net each suffering worker $400,000 and a couple years off. But if you lived in China you'd be faced with taking zero dollars, or going to prison for complaining, or getting caught in one of the suicide nets on the sides of Foxconn.

So what's it going to be, guy? Are we going to stifle our tech because we aren't willing to break eggs to make an omelette? Or are we going to let go of our hatred for the tall poppy and let him do his job?

Let me finish by saying that Elon Musk inspired me to move to the big city and get a comp sci education 3 years ago, at this point I am now an intermediate- level dev with great prospects and without Elon Musk striking inspiration and courage in my heart I would be much more bitter and resentful and lame than I am now. So I will defend him to the end of the Earth for setting such a shining and glorious example for me to follow.

<comment><USER36> The comparison to China is whataboutism and/or a false equivalence. Chinese work practices and available legal recourse might be worse than what Americans have today, but that doesn't mean Americans have to sacrifice their quality of life to remain competitive. The application of "breaking a few eggs to make an omelette" to workplace injuries is also insensitive at best: what if a family member or friend in your life suffered the same? Would that individual be a "broken egg" for someone else's potential "omelette" in your opinion?

We might not be able to stop all workplace injuries, and I totally agree that Elon Musk has accomplished a lot in his all of his ventures to date; however, if Musk's path to future success requires further harm towards his customers and/or his employees, then I'd rather wait for someone else to accomplish the same without any lives being in jeopardy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> _"...an ideologically motivated attack by an extremist organization working directly with union supporters to create a calculated disinformation campaign against Tesla"_

vs.

 _"...Tesla failed to report serious injuries on legally mandated reports to make its numbers appear better than they actually were."_

Now use Occam's Razor.

<comment><USER38> I'm actually willing to give Tesla credit here precisely for that reason -- not because unions are bad (many industries need it, auto included), but because UAW in my possibly-misinformed mind has been at least indirectly the cause of a decline in build quality in American cars.

<comment><USER39> This is a self-contradictory statement and the end of which you're blaming unions for something you don't provide evidence.

Citation please.

<comment><USER38> [https://mobile.nytimes.com/2007/09/27/business/27auto.html?m...](https://mobile.nytimes.com/2007/09/27/business/27auto.html?mtrref=undefined)

[https://mobile.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/business/28auto.html](https://mobile.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/business/28auto.html)

[https://mobile.nytimes.com/2007/11/15/business/15auto.html](https://mobile.nytimes.com/2007/11/15/business/15auto.html)

Closest I can get you since all the journal articles are from conservative- leaning institutions with a vested interest against unionization. All three articles are about the new contracts UAW signed in 2007 as the auto industry was collapsing in the United States, all of which cite massive concessions back to the auto companies. Notably, Ford still got to fold 10 of their original 16 plants scheduled for closure, GM got to shift away massive healthcare obligations, and Chrysler managed to substantially reduce their employment guarantees.

If you were a union interested in a happy balance between company and employee rather than just making your employees score every short-term dollar that they could, you wouldn't need to concede like this with one, let alone every, major United States-founded auto maker.

It's worth noting that GM actually got the biggest haul up front since they got the opportunity to negotiate first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is why you shouldn't put your business in California. There's a legion of highly-paid bureaucrats who have nothing, I mean nothing, better to do than screw with you.

<comment><USER41> It was a gamble when he was aiming for the ultra-high automation route - <USER2> now that he is reverting to the big labor route, it seems positively unwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Elon Musk is the Preston Tucker of our time — seems to get hammered from all sides while trying to break the status quo. I have no information to comment on the validity of any allegations, but it seems like Musk is continually under attack. I was a moderate Musk fan before, but now I am really hoping for his success. It seems to me that if you are pissing off everyone, you're doing something right.

I highly recommend watching the Coppola film "Tucker, A Man and His Dream."

<comment><USER37> If everybody hates you, you are NOT doing something right. If everybody loves you, then you're doing it right, and in fact you barely even have to do anything because everybody's helping you.

<comment><USER42> Listen up, kids! Always do what everyone else is doing, never make anyone mad, always choose the popular path.

/s

It seems like everything worth doing nowadays results in someone hating you.

<comment><USER37> I'm not talking high school here, I'm talking about real life. Popularity and conformity are orthogonal. In the early stages of doing something, they can be somewhat opposed, so you'd be partly right in that case. But you push through that and don't complain, and wait and see what people think whom you've actually managed to help.

The most worthy path is the one that helps the most people. Not coincidentally, each of those people you've helped, becomes a supporter of yours, in some capacity. You become popular. So the worthy path ends up being the popular path.

That doesn't mean the popular path is always the worthy path. People can become popular for really stupid reasons and without really helping anybody. I actually think Musk is such a person; I literally don't think any of his projects are "worth doing" and you are just gonna have to grant me my opinion there. So if I'm not impressed with his outlandish narcissistic persecution- fantasy of _extremist groups_ being out to get him, it's not because he's doing something worth doing, it's because he's NOT.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


RJ45-sized Linux networking server goes IPv6 - <AUTHOR> http://linuxgizmos.com/rj45-sized-linux-networking-server-goes-ipv6/

<comment><USER2> Out of curiousity does anyone use any of these style devices? And if so what for?

<comment><USER3> Robotics, consolidate all your sensors and controllers onto Ethernet. Its quite hard finding a microcontroller with good Ethernet.

<comment><USER4> I've had good success with the NXP LPC178x series. Cortex M3 with onboard Flash and SRAM. Ethernet is onboard and easy to attach with a simple PHY, also works well with extenral SDRAM and expanded Flash.

<comment><USER3> yeah I also used that a while ago, but I don't think I can fit an ethernet client for Robotic Operating System on it. Doesn't appear straight forward anyway:-

[http://mbed.org/forum/bugs- suggestions/topic/2662/?page=1#co...](http://mbed.org/forum/bugs- suggestions/topic/2662/?page=1#comment-13870)

Hmm, that Xport product is £50 from mouser. Not bad

<comment><USER4> I don't quite understand mbed. It seems...toylike. I've been using ucLinux for 1788-based stuff. You get the full stack with that.

The other option is something like the TI CC3000, a serially driven wifi module. Adafruit just launched a cheap breakout module.

[http://www.adafruit.com/products/1469](http://www.adafruit.com/products/1469)

<comment><USER3> everything we do is in volumes of 1. What is the dev board you use? Mbed is quite convenient for us doing random 1 offs.

EDIT: also can't find evidence of a ROS client working on ucLinux :(

<comment><USER4> For LPC I've prototyped on boards from Future Designs, like this one:

[http://www.teamfdi.com/development-tools- kits/products/1/DK-...](http://www.teamfdi.com/development-tools- kits/products/1/DK-57VTS-LPC1788)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Isn't IPv6 a feature of the Linux networking stack? Shouldn't everything that runs Linux be IPv6 capable? Or is there some IPv6 stuff implemented in hardware here?

<comment><USER6> Many embedded devices compile out IPv6 to save flash and RAM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I read "RJ45-sized" and thought they meant the size of the connector.

<comment><USER8> It's the size of a (female) connector.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wish this thing was double sided so I can make a router out of it.

</comment><comment><USER10> Am I missing something or does the article not state how much RAM the server comes with?

<comment><USER11> It says 16MB. Nowhere can I find what the CPU architecture is though.

<comment><USER12> In the same sentence. :)

 _> The 32-bit RISC CPU appears to be the same, but instead of coming standard with 8MB SDRAM, it now ships with the previously optional 16MB._

<comment><USER13> IIRC RISC is a category of architecture, rather than a concrete implementation

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Now if it had PoE it would be awesome</comment>


In Palo Alto, Google/Apple Would Have Been Evicted from Their Garage Offices - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@_andrewlee/in-palo-alto-google-apple-would-have-been-evicted-from-their-first-garage-offices-ba0cc26eff2c#.m5806kk3v <comment><USER2> I imagine it's illegal most places. Even without a zoning violation, garages tend not to meet basic habitability rules.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why not go work in cities that don't mind building vertically and having mixed use zoning? A lot of people like urban living.

<comment><USER4> Yeah. Writing from front-window home-office here: I live in China. The windows is open and the view is greenery, there are birds chirping, with only distant hum from city noise, and the occasional walker-by. Every time my brother, an urban designer, comes to visit he comments on how intelligent and high-density the cities are here. Very human scale, though they're losing a lot to cars these days. Hanoi is another great one.

Anyway our team is 3 right now, we use the lounge room and large TV for meetings and stuff, the office is mostly heads-down space and storage. The last company I started here in China about 8 years ago was in a similar (ground floor, 3 bedroom) apartment, and we had something like 10 people at times. Never any complaints. I lived there too initially, but moved out to dedicate the space to the company after awhile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't see why they couldn't have gone to any of the dozens of other municipalities in the region.

<comment><USER6> Sure they could also go start their business in the middle of Kansas, too. However, There is a huge benefit to being centrally located in Silicon Valley

<comment><USER5> If they wanted to be centrally located, they should have been in Sunnyvale or something instead of Palo Alto.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Don't make it obvious and sit in front your entire team in front of a window? Why is a neighbor "crazy" for not wanting a business run out of an adjacent apartment? Meh.

<comment><USER8> Neighbors don't like it because it impacts property values to be in commercial areas. (Strange people around who don't have kids) Of course worrying about protecting property value in Palo Alto is a little absurd.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why not just work "remotely?" Everyone meets up at coffee shop or something at the start of the day and at the end of the day to discuss and review action items, and then communicates via tools like Slack and Google Hangouts. As a bonus, you also start a culture where you can hire employees from anywhere in the U.S. (or "world", if you decide to go the global route) since working remotely becomes the norm.</comment>


Amazon.com Announces First Quarter Sales Up 43% to $51.0B - <AUTHOR> http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=RssLanding&cat=news&id=2345075 <comment><USER2> Anyone else think the 50% cloud revenue increase might be due to spectre and meltdown mitigations? Those mitigations caused a 30% "slowdown" for many major workloads. That slowdown translates directly to CPU credits, i.e. minutes spent over baseline CPU usage. It also means any company operating servers with less than 30% headroom had to provision additional capacity to continue meeting demand.

<comment><USER3> AWS Meltdown patch only affected a very small portion of customers and the issue was fixed after rebooting the instances, so people who got affected were able to recover fastly, so no.

<comment><USER2> My understanding is the patch removed certain branch prediction optimizations. Systems post-patch were running some loads at 30% higher usage. I don't see how a reboot would affect that?

<comment><USER4> It reduced capacity by 30% which means a 40% increase in cpu usage. Here is one of my teams RDS instances during the timeline of the patch: [https://imgur.com/a/khGxU](https://imgur.com/a/khGxU)

<comment><USER2> Exactly. That's what I was suggesting originally. It seems pretty cut and dry and would certainly explain the abnormally large increase in cloud revenue.

This is ongoing, correct? Since fundamentally the patch disables optimizations that would reduce cpu workload for many tasks?

<comment><USER4> It is definitely permanent and I agree this is almost certainly a certainly a contributing factor in the increased cloud revenue.

However, the increase was only 2.7% (44% YOY cloud revenue growth last quarter and 48% YOY cloud revenue growth this quarter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Also announced on the earnings call:

Annual Prime membership in US to $119 from $99 in the coming months

</comment><comment><USER6> I have no idea what I'm talking about, but somehow 43% sales growth strikes me as implausibly large.

<comment><USER7> That's exactly what it is. The increase in prime price makes me think they're feeling very confident in their market demand. Also very damn greedy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Segment Highlights:

Y/Y net sales growth:

North America 46 %

International 34 %

AWS 49 %

Consolidated 43 %

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

Net sales mix:

North America 60 %

International 29 %

AWS 11 %

Consolidated 100 %

<comment><USER8> International Y/Y net sales growth is 34%, but adjusting for the forex tailwinds it's 21%.

North America Y/Y net sales growth is 46%, but adjusting for the Whole Foods acquisition it's... unfortunately they won't tell us (maybe 25%?).</comment></comment>


Bedrock: Enterprise ML platform to deploy AI responsibly - <AUTHOR> https://basis-ai.com/product <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I am the product manager for Bedrock. We recently launched Bedrock, an end-to-end platform for enterprises to productionise machine learning.

You can read our motivation to build Bedrock here: [https://blog.basis- ai.com/why-we..](https://blog.basis-ai.com/why-we..).

Happy to answer any questions you have!</comment>


Scientists identify DNA that may contribute to each person's uniqueness - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100811085416.htm <comment><USER2> This article sounds really interesting but I got lost in the details when I started reading it. Why do transposons make us unique? It seems to assume I would know that. Are they handled specially during recombination?</comment>


Samsung announces 3,000MB/s enterprise SSD - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2013/07/18/samsung-enterprise-ssd-NVMe-XS1715/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=feedly

<comment><USER2> How much would this speed up say a MySQL DB? Would it be enough to eliminate the need to do some caching? Would it allow joins to be fast enough to not need to denormalize so soon?

My point is, does this buy out of the need (up to a certain scale) to use engineering time to solve scaling problems?

NOTE: I realize that you still want to use good design and plan for the appropriate amount of scale, I am just curious how much dev time this could potential save in terms of rewriting code for scale.

<comment><USER3> It can definitely save you some time (SSDs in general, not just this one,) but how much depends on the operations in question.

Example workflow - SQL Server, approx 1TB working set - putting it all on SSD (a RAID set of consumer level SSDs) basically doubled our operations per second. Modifying the algorithm a bit while still on the SSD gave 20x speed up.

2nd example - SQL Server, approx 10TB of RAID Prosumer SSD vs same amt of 15k SAS drives: SSD = 8x speedup.

3rd example - SSD as swap on linux operations - performance dropped by 10%. This mostly had to do with the SSD used and its role.

In other words - it's not a magic bullet but it can definitely buy you some breathing room.</comment></comment>


The Foo at bar.com - <AUTHOR> http://bar.com

<comment><USER2> Remember there are special domain names you can use to enter fake email addresses like example.com[1]

I also entered addresses I thought were fake. But there are so many registered domain names you can't make sure they are really fake.

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

</comment><comment><USER3> Reminds me of the guy who owns DoNotReply.com:

[http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/03/they_to...](http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/03/they_told_you_not_to_reply.html)

<comment><USER4> And yes, that is the same Chet Faliszek of Valve/Old Man Murray 'fame'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> When I was a comp sci student in the 90s, I was testing some code where I used firstname.lastname@example.com as a placeholder. Amusingly, I got a reply from The Foo, and now I'm glad to know I wasn't the only one who accidentally emailed him/her.

As others have pointed out, email@example.com is a better choice for documentation and examples.

</comment><comment><USER6> Currently overloaded. Mirror: [https://web.archive.org/web/20150623195101/http://bar.com/](https://web.archive.org/web/20150623195101/http://bar.com/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I hope you are a millionaire already, because you are sitting on some with that domain name. Kudos to you for keeping it this long.

<comment><USER8> Love stumbling across domain/site combos like this. Like the digital equivalent of holdouts/nail houses ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holdout_%28real_estate%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holdout_%28real_estate%29)). There's a surprising amount of them still out there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Since I own bar.io and firstname.lastname@example.com is a valid email address, I also receive some interesting emails from time to time.

</comment><comment><USER10> Also see email@example.com: [http://asdf.com/asdfemail.html](http://asdf.com/asdfemail.html) I've gone to asdf.com for about 15 years now, and it hasn't changed it all. It's also _always_ up, so it's handy to go to to test and see if I have Internet. I love that site.

<comment><USER11> It also loads quickly and runs almost no Javascript, making it great for anything you want to test in the dev console.

<comment><USER12> I use [http://to/](http://to/) for testing purposes. It has the shortest url and the the webpage consists of only 4 short lines of html.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I too am guilty of this and I would like to apologize if any of my old mistakes have ever caused you any additional work.

I have since seen the light and switched over to example.com which doesn't have an MX and doesn't listen on port 25, so no harm can be done to it.

</comment><comment><USER14> I typically use `firstname.lastname@example.com` [1] and `07700 900000` for mobile [2]

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

[2] [http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/telecoms/numbering/guidance...](http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/telecoms/numbering/guidance- tele-no/numbers-for-drama)

</comment><comment><USER15> Relevant: [http://acme.com/mail_filtering/](http://acme.com/mail_filtering/)

</comment><comment><USER16> _lots of folks_

I wonder if these were the general population of users seen today, since AFAIK foo/bar are not in the vocabulary of most people as metasyntactic variables; I hear "blah" more commonly used for this purpose.

<comment><USER17> It's not in the vocabulary of users (who don't know what "metasyntactic" means anyway), but it's still prominent in the vocabulary of developers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Sitting on gold with that domain name.

[https://www.metricsbot.com/www/bar.com](https://www.metricsbot.com/www/bar.com)

<comment><USER19> I can't help but think the pricing methodology on this site might be a bit off. I put uw.com in to check it because I know some of the history of that site. It said the site is worth less than $9.00!?

uw.com was originally owned by a company called Underware. Their biggest product was a defect tracking tool called TrackRecord. They were bought by Compuware in the 90s, and in early 2000 or 2001, Compuware forgot to renew the domain and it was bought out from under them. Last I checked, two letter .com domains were pretty rare and valuable.

<comment><USER20> > Last I checked, two letter .com domains were pretty rare and valuable.

That was last time you checked. Now they're extremely rare and astoundingly valuable.

<comment><USER21> Last time I checked, you were no longer allowed to register 2-letter domains at .com, .org, or .net.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Anything @test.com would have gotten sample stuff from at least one dev as well, so sorry about that!

</comment><comment><USER23> Well, I guess I should apologize to the folks at bob.com. It's example.com for me from now on.

</comment><comment><USER24> I love the MX 127.0.0.1 trick. I'm curious if that works as well as I think it does.

</comment><comment><USER25> I feel kind shamefully guilty now. I'm sorry.

</comment><comment><USER26> I think their database-foo is somewhat lacking...

</comment><comment><USER27> [http://www.something.com/](http://www.something.com/)

</comment><comment><USER28> email@example.com

<comment><USER29> That's another legal address. You knew that, didn't you?</comment></comment>


PrivacySco.re - <AUTHOR> https://privacysco.re/ <comment><USER2> GeoLocation appears to default to the country this service is hosted instead of the country the request is coming from; as a result, report claims the foreign IP addresses are called when they're not.

</comment><comment><USER3> Meh. I'd rather see lost points for my outdated wordpress version, outdated plugins, and insecure comment section.

-6 for no https, but -10 for using google fonts and wordpress.

-5 for youtube embed.

</comment><comment><USER4> nice! this could also rate the hosts regarding their tracking/adserving history perhaps.</comment>


Las Vegas's city government is now powered by 100% renewable energy - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/867024/las-vegas-100-percent-renewable-energy/ <comment><USER2> This is the more accurate headline, only government facilities are renewable not the entire city itself.

</comment><comment><USER3> Except NVEnergy is still 78% natural gas generation. I think they are just trying say that some portion of the other 22% is allocated to Vegas city government and supposedly none from the gas although I doubt that.

</comment><comment><USER4> Surely this isn't a big deal? The entire city of Wellington, NZ generates enough energy from windfarms that frame the city to power every single household - I'm sure plenty of cities in Europe are the same.

</comment><comment><USER5> I must admit I hadn't thought of Las Vegas as a champion of sustainability, but maybe I should revise my views.

<comment><USER6> It's easier when you're both in a desert and near a big dam.

<comment><USER7> Except to my understanding, they aren't currently using any big dam power. Though they plan to soon.

<comment><USER8> Third sentence in the article:

 _The power flows from a mix of solar panels and hydroelectric turbines including the Hoover Dam._

It seems odd to think about hydroelectric power in a desert as a renewable resource, but it does come from snow in Colorado.

<comment><USER9> Its not sustainable at current Las Vegas water consumption rates.

[http://www.ibtimes.com/lake-mead-water-level-drops-record- lo...](http://www.ibtimes.com/lake-mead-water-level-drops-record-low-drought- dries-colorado-river-basin-2372146)

<comment><USER10> California is apportioned 14x more water from the Colorado Basin than Nevada, Arizona 9x more [1]. Las Vegas has implemented several water conservation measures [2].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River_Compact](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River_Compact) [2] [https://www.brookings.edu/blog/planetpolicy/2015/05/02/5-fac...](https://www.brookings.edu/blog/planetpolicy/2015/05/02/5-facts- you-need-to-know-about-lake-meads-water-crisis/)

<comment><USER11> California also has 14x the population of Nevada, so that's not too surprising

<comment><USER12> That's not why California gets more water. It has to do with how Water Rights in the Western US work [1].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior- appropriation_water_righ...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior- appropriation_water_rights)

<comment><USER13> Well, sort of. The fact that CA has 14 times the population today is strongly related to the fact that it applied 14 times the water for productive use in the past.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Decide the Career Track – Developer or QA - <AUTHOR> Recently my younger cousin asked me about how to decide about selecting being a QA or a developer in Software Engineering Career. Suggest any questions or aspects which help in deciding the cross roads. <comment><USER2> QA hardly exists in in SaaS industry. It's been replaced with unit tests, integration tests, and deployment processes that include things like blue green tests, canaries, and all that jazz.

I say go for Software Engineering. I'm biased though, having only worked in SaaS. At the end of the day whatever your cousins interests are should guide them.</comment>


Branch-free FizzBuzz in Assembly - <AUTHOR> http://pepijndevos.nl/2015/01/03/branch-free-fizzbuzz-in-assembly.html <comment><USER2> I've been writing a bunch of branch-free code recently, so I took a crack at it. In my world, data-dependent table lookups might as well be branches, so let's eliminate those as well.

Here's a fizzbuzz(char*, int) function that can accept any number up to 99999999, and will put the correct FizzBuzz result into the provided buffer (either the printed number, "Fizz ", " Buzz", or "FizzBuzz"). As promised, it's loop-free, and as a bonus it should be constant-time as well:

Assembly: [http://pastebin.com/EnJEuxnp](http://pastebin.com/EnJEuxnp) compiled from this C: [http://pastebin.com/PCQQQ2cn](http://pastebin.com/PCQQQ2cn) [edit] generated from this Python: [http://pastebin.com/ijr3thE2](http://pastebin.com/ijr3thE2)

Pastebinned since it's about 700 assembly instructions.

Unrolling the loop and printing to the screen are left as exercises...

<comment><USER3> Oops: _0x00000001000015af <fizzbuzz+47>: cmp edx,0x0_

                                            ^^^

<comment><USER2> It does a cmp+setz, which isn't a branch (and I believe is constant-time). An x86 branch would be cmp+jne or something similar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is equivalent code in C if anyone is interested.

      #include <stdio.h>
      #include <stdlib.h>

      const char* table[] = { "%d\n" , "Fizz\n" , "Buzz\n" , "FizzBuzz\n" } ;

      void E( int i )
    	{
    	    exit( 0 ) ;
    	}

      void F( int i )
    	{
    	        size_t c = !( i%3 ) + !( i%5 )*2 ;
    		printf( table[c] , i ) ;
    	}

      void ( *func[2] )( int ) = { F , E } ;

      int main( void )
    	{
    		int p = 1 ;
    		while( 1 )
    		{
    			func[p/102]( p++ ) ;
    		}

    		return 0 ;
    	}

This of course only avoids conditional branches.

EDIT: I just noticed I have undefined behavior in my code.

 _Bonus internet points for the first one to point it out!_

<comment><USER4> Have you looked at the generated ASM? I suspect printf contains a lot of branches. But then so might those syscalls I guess.

<comment><USER3> Yes.

Library calls will have conditionals, but apart from that there are none.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Random fizzy buzzy observation:

Always a little baffled when I see three cases (fizz, buzz, and fizzbuzz) rather than both fizz and buzz handled well such that modulo 15 gets a fizz and a buzz.

The normal fizz buzz is divisible by 3 gives a fizz, divisible by 5 gives a buzz. It so happens that 15 is both, so should exhibit both. But as I see it, handling the 15 right should be emergent behavior of a correctly written fizz and correctly written buzz, not a separate test case.

But what if the business requirement changes that divisible by 4 gives a fizz and divisible by 5 gives a buzz? Now the "3 cases" programmer doesn't just change 3 to 4, and correctly see fizzbuzz emerge on divisible by 20, he's still got a spurious fizzbuzz on the divisible by 15 case. He's got to remember this case, do some manual computation, and change his 15 to 20. Structuring the code in such a way the programmer has to track all ancillary implications of one business rule change seems a recipe for disaster.

So I consider as broken all code that explicitly prints "fizzbuzz" with a third conditional.

<comment><USER6> I consider as broken all interviewers who extrapolate a candidate's decision on this issue to real-world "business requirement changes."

<comment><USER7> This is one of the worst parts of technical interviews.

"Take 10 minutes to write out code for this simple, abstract, poorly defined problem. Okay, now I'm going to ding you because you didn't write it using the same mindset you'd use when writing a large application tailored towards a specific domain and given a detailed set of constraints."

Maybe we should call this sort of cargo-cultism Schroedinger interviews. If you make your code simple and easily readable in order to solve the problem in the most intelligible way, you get penalized for not making your solution scalable/easily adaptable to "business requirement changes". If you structure your code so that it can easily be extended or modified you get penalized for YAGNI and premature optimization. Of course, exactly what the interviewer is looking for is never actually specified as part of the problem statement, because it exists in a state of quantum superposition until right before the interviewer decides whether or not he or she likes your physical appearance/sense of humor/"cultural fit".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Apparently the Rust compiler produces a slightly different branch-free FizzBuzz[1] involving this delightful snippet:

        static OUT: &'static [u8] = b"\
        1\n2\nFizz\n4\nBuzz\nFizz\n7\n8\nFizz\nBuzz\n11\nFizz\n13\n14\nFizzBuzz\n\
        16\n17\nFizz\n19\nBuzz\nFizz\n22\n23\nFizz\nBuzz\n26\nFizz\n28\n29\nFizzBuzz\n\
        31\n32\nFizz\n34\nBuzz\nFizz\n37\n38\nFizz\nBuzz\n41\nFizz\n43\n44\nFizzBuzz\n\
        46\n47\nFizz\n49\nBuzz\nFizz\n52\n53\nFizz\nBuzz\n56\nFizz\n58\n59\nFizzBuzz\n\
        61\n62\nFizz\n64\nBuzz\nFizz\n67\n68\nFizz\nBuzz\n71\nFizz\n73\n74\nFizzBuzz\n\
        76\n77\nFizz\n79\nBuzz\nFizz\n82\n83\nFizz\nBuzz\n86\nFizz\n88\n89\nFizzBuzz\n\
        91\n92\nFizz\n94\nBuzz\nFizz\n97\n98\nFizz\nBuzz\n";

        ...

1: [http://chrismorgan.info/blog/rust- fizzbuzz.html](http://chrismorgan.info/blog/rust-fizzbuzz.html)

<comment><USER9> By my reading that implementation was assembled by humans, not the optimizer.

Although, there's certainly nothing magical that _prevents_ the optimizer from generating such code. Here's something[1] I just threw together that (ab)uses constexpr to do just that.

On my machine, building with:

      $ clang++ -std=c++14 fizzbuzz.cpp -O2 -S

Gives code similar to:

      main:                                   # @main
              .cfi_startproc
      # BB#0:
              pushq   %rax
      .Ltmp0:
              .cfi_def_cfa_offset 16
              movl    $1, %edi
              movl    $_ZL6output, %esi
              movl    $413, %edx              # imm = 0x19D
              callq   write
              xorl    %eax, %eax
              popq    %rdx
              retq
      .Ltmp1:
              .size   main, .Ltmp1-main
              .cfi_endproc

              .type   _ZL6output,@object      # @_ZL6output
              .section        .rodata,"a",@progbits
      _ZL6output:
              .ascii  "1\n2\nFizz\n4\nBuzz\nFizz\n7\n8\nFizz\nBuzz\n11\nFizz\n13\n14\nFizzBuzz\n16\n17\nFizz\n19\nBuzz\nFizz\n22\n23\nFizz\nBuzz\n26\nFizz\n28\n29\nFizzBuzz\n31\n32\nFizz\n34\nBuzz\nFizz\n37\n38\nFizz\nBuzz\n41\nFizz\n43\n44\nFizzBuzz\n46\n47\nFizz\n49\nBuzz\nFizz\n52\n53\nFizz\nBuzz\n56\nFizz\n58\n59\nFizzBuzz\n61\n62\nFizz\n64\nBuzz\nFizz\n67\n68\nFizz\nBuzz\n71\nFizz\n73\n74\nFizzBuzz\n76\n77\nFizz\n79\nBuzz\nFizz\n82\n83\nFizz\nBuzz\n86\nFizz\n88\n89\nFizzBuzz\n91\n92\nFizz\n94\nBuzz\nFizz\n97\n98\nFizz\nBuzz\n"

Of course, having now written this I feel like I should retroactively fail my last interview.

[1] [https://gist.github.com/anonymous/7818f902a374a953b274](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/7818f902a374a953b274)

<comment><USER10> This code snippet really made my night. I never thought of using constexpr to write a FizzBuzz that compiles to one of the most "optimal" solutions that I have ever seen. Awesome!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The last time I saw a FizzBuzz post, I wrote a fairly typical mod and if version, and one that used a mod and lookup table both in C.

It turned out the compiler (clang and I think gcc as well) had converted the branchy version into a lookup table, that ran a tiny bit faster then the lookup table by hand. The assembly looked fairly similar so it was something fairly subtle, but I was out of my depth at that point.

</comment><comment><USER12> I tried to reimplement it with less code and data (as x86 instead of x86_64 however).

I stopped at 110 bytes .text and 49 bytes .data: [http://pastebin.com/bPfrB165](http://pastebin.com/bPfrB165)

</comment><comment><USER13> I wonder if CMOVcc instruction on x86 is considered a branch. It is fairly trivial to implement fizzbuz without Jcc but with CMOVcc.

EDIT: Or SETcc, minus 1, and use it as data mask.

</comment><comment><USER14>
      int

      ret

      int

      ret

      ret

      call

      call

      call

      int

      jmp

No _conditional_ branches. As long as you ignore what happens on the other side of those int instructions! Especially that last one...

<comment><USER15> Care to elaborate? Isn't `jmp` just a non-conditional jump? How is that branching?

<comment><USER16> Branch and jump are synonyms in this context.

<comment><USER15> Oh cool! I always thought of a branch as a conditional jump - I guess I was wrong. It appears that even unconditional branches are still branches!

"A branch is an instruction in a computer program that may, when executed by a computer, cause the computer to begin execution of a different instruction sequence. Branch (or branching, branched) may also refer to the act of beginning execution of a different instruction sequence due to executing a branch instruction. A branch instruction can be either an unconditional branch, which always results in branching, or a conditional branch, which may or may not cause branching depending on some condition."

<comment><USER16> I wouldn't be surprised if there was some place that used "branch" to indicate conditional-only. Assembly language terminology seems to be wonderfully inconsistent. But typical usage these days seems to be as you quoted.

<comment><USER17> Intel uses Jcc (Jump conditional) while Motorola uses Bcc (Branch conditional). Additionally, the Motorola 68k has both JMP and BRA (branch unconditionally) and the Motorola 6809 has JMP, BRA and BRN (branch never--- useful for a two or four byte NOP, or for changing a conditional branch when patching code).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't get sites that have moving parts in the background at all - this makes the reading experience very annoying.

<comment><USER18> If there's one thing I love while reading, it's animation! Really makes it easy to focus on the text!</comment></comment>


Trekking the Road from SPDY to HTTP/2 in Firefox - <AUTHOR> http://bitsup.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-road-to-http2.html

<comment><USER2> One thing this doesn't seem to answer... Why bother when we already have SPDY?

<comment><USER3> Because SPDY has well known flaws (let's call them design choices) for example in caching. There have been many discussions in HN about these topics.

Also, because there is no such a thing as "SPDY" what you are referring to is "SPDY 2 as implemented by Google Chrome and almost fully documented by Google". SPDY is a work in progress. If you want a real deployment to be possible, you need to have at least a fully documented basic core that has been discussed openly, not just an implementation from a corporation subject to changes whenever internal pressures require it.

<comment><USER4> SPDY is an IETF draft, working toward a ratified standard. <https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-mbelshe-httpbis-spdy-00>

<comment><USER3> > SPDY is an IETF draft, working toward a ratified standard. > <https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-mbelshe-httpbis-spdy-00>

Now it is, before it was not. And that is exactly my point in my reply: you cannot take whatever you call "SPDY" at the moment (implementations + wiki pages) and call it "HTTP 2". You need to document it, propose it, discuss it openly, accept criticism, fixes and, if needed, radical changes. This is what is happening now in the HTTPbis working group and is a good thing, but it is not going to be a rubber-stamping process for SPDY as it is now, I hope.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: your feedback applied to blurrypeople.com. Is it better? - <AUTHOR>

A week ago I asked the HN-community for feedback on our website (BlurryPeople: a site that lets you meet strangers via your webcam, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1626783). And feedback I got! Thoughtful, honest and just very useful feedback. I was really, really, impressed: HN truly is a unique community.
Of course, we acted on just about all of the feedback:
- You said the dark color scheme wouldn't appeal to women. So we changed the colors.
- You said the tagline didn't try enough to explain the purpose. We changed it to: "meet awesome strangers".
- Many of you were lost on first visit - "what are we supposed to do here?". So we introduced an introduction.
- And most importantly: nobody seemed to understand the feedback system. Neither did we, actually. We replaced it with something that is -or so we hope- both more intuitive and more powerfull. It's based on users collecting 'awesomeness'. You get it when people rate you as 1) friendly, 2) interesting, or 3) good looking. The more awesome you are, the more the system allows you to apply filtering when searching for (awesome!) strangers. More control.
So, what do you think? Is it better this way, or did we mess it up even worse? ;)
Again, thanks a lot for all of your feedback! It is much appreciated.
http://www.blurrypeople.com <comment><USER2> <http://www.blurrypeople.com></comment>


Timelapse video with an iPhone and CLI - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rocktronica/timelapse <comment><AUTHOR> I was surprised this didn't already exist, so I made it... even though it's honestly just a wrapper around curl and ffmpeg!</comment>


Zero notifications - <AUTHOR> http://joel.is/post/39927202947/zero-notifications <comment><USER2> I did this and found it was as good as Joel says it is. But I was constantly missing meetings and forgetting to pick up the groceries.

So now now I let: Phone, Messages, Reminders, Calendar, and a couple other job or relationship apps through.

The world is a better place when Facebook isn't constantly intruding. But a worse place when you miss things you need to know about.

Paying attention to which notifications I let through really impacted my life.</comment>


As Freelancers' Ranks Grow, New York Moves to See They Get What They're Due - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/28/nyregion/freelancers-city-council-wage-theft.html?em_pos=small&emc=edit_dk_20161028&nl=dealbook&nl_art=12&nlid=65508833&ref=headline&te=1 <comment><USER2> Just FYI: The net effect of this will be to make it more costly (both in terms of actual money/time spent and potential risks) to hire freelancers, and thus serve to protect existing regular employees from competition.

<comment><USER3> Anything that reduces non-payment to free lancers will have the net effect of making it more costly to hire freelancers.</comment></comment>


Perceptual Illusions - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/12-mind_bending-perceptual-illusions <comment><USER2> Here are some more good ones:

[https://www.sciencealert.com/this-3d-optical-illusion- will-m...](https://www.sciencealert.com/this-3d-optical-illusion-will-make- you-question-the-shape-of-known-reality-kokichi-sugihara)

... which embeds my all-time favorite ("Ambiguous Cylinder")

[https://youtu.be/oWfFco7K9v8](https://youtu.be/oWfFco7K9v8)

</comment><comment><USER3> Those are particularly good examples of optical illusions. Normally these sort of articles are disappointing, but I'd not seen many of those before. Very tempted to order one of those mugs.

<comment><USER4> LOL, that mug may win "best illusion of 2018" but definitely would also win "things not to bring to the office in 2018"

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I used to have a printout of [https://www.michaelbach.de/ot/mot- snakes/index.html](https://www.michaelbach.de/ot/mot-snakes/index.html) over my desk. People got so freaked out by a piece of paper "moving" that there were people who literally refused to go to my desk. :-)

<comment><USER6> I'm not clicking the link, but I'm assuming it's "rotating snakes". If other people are like me, they may have avoided it because it literally nauseates them.

<comment><USER5> It is. I've never heard of that reaction.

People just being freaked out was fine with me. Making them actually sick would not have been.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was recently investigating a CSS shadow issue that looked like an uneven shadow across the bottom of an element that had a lighter section and a darker section, but it turned out to be illusion #6! I had to do the color picker method on the shadow to convince myself, and even after I had convinced myself by drawing a single color line in between, my eyes were still fooled. Very tricky!

</comment><comment><USER8> Studying electrical engineering I've learned an important concept: Everything is relative. Ex: to measure the voltage, we need a reference to measure it against. I think the brain works very much the same way. Every perception of reality is processed with respect to some reference.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've often described colour blindness as an optical illusion, and that confetti illusion is exactly what I have in mind. Peanut better has a green lid and green label which makes the slightly ambiguous brown look green. Or the walk symbol at a cross walk - usually a light is white so I just assume that walk symbol is also white (even though I now know it's green). Or the statue of liberty - it's a big rock so I assume grey, even though I know it's green. However when any of these are looked at in isolation, it's clear what their correct colours are.

<comment><USER10> So, the statue of liberty isn't made of rock, it's made of Bronze, the Copper oxidised (amongst other things) eventually leaving it a bluey-green: [https://www.iflscience.com/chemistry/the-true-color-of- the-s...](https://www.iflscience.com/chemistry/the-true-color-of-the-statue- of-liberty-and-it-isnt-bluegreen/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> These are great and many were new to me.

Instead of #6, the one involving moving the square from the light to dark side, I prefer the static Checker Shadow illusion[1], using the same priciple. The problem with involving electronics in it is that there always is suspicion that the machine is playing the trick instead of just your visual system.

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

<comment><USER12> There are no electronics in #6. That's just a piece of paper sliding back and forth over another piece of paper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> These are cool. FYI some of the images are displayed at the wrong aspect ratio. The final example in particular is pretty squished, I recommend opening the image in its own tab.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm always annoyed by the arrow length trick. This article calls it the "Müller-Lyer" illusion. The problem is inconsistent line caps and the joints overlapping means that the size of the line actually is changing a little. As a result, I'm not sure whether there's an optical illusion involved or not, and, if there is, this is a poor way of demonstrating it.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a timely post, considering the 2018 Best Illusion of the Year Contest has just posted [http://illusionoftheyear.com/cat/top-10-finalists/2018/](http://illusionoftheyear.com/cat/top-10-finalists/2018/) .

</comment><comment><USER2> These are awesome! I studied cognitive psych and psychobiology at UVA in the mid 90's, and my favorite class was a seminar on perception. Illusions are a great tool for learning how our visual system works. Also, they're really cool.

</comment><comment><USER15> Seems like the human perceptual system is easily hacked. I wonder how close we can get to an actual Snow Crash bitmap?

</comment><comment><USER16> whoa, turns out some people with autism, schizophrenia and transgenderism aren't affected as much by these illusions if at all.

<comment><USER17> source pls?

<comment><USER16> [http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/28/why-are-transgender- peo...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/28/why-are-transgender-people- immune-to-optical-illusions/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Still can't subscribe to the print edition!</comment>


Twitter CEO Dorsey to 'Reevaluate' Plan to Live in Africa - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/05/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-reconsidering-africa-move-on-coronavirus-fears.html <comment><USER2> He was let go from Twitter the first time for taking to many art and yoga classes and not doing his job.

Why they brought him back again is the real mystery.</comment>


Arrest of Senior Adviser to the Operator of the "Silk Road" Website - <AUTHOR> http://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/manhattan-us-attorney-announces-arrest-and-unsealing-charges-against-senior-adviser <comment><USER2> It seems an independent researcher who goes by the name "La Moustache" on Twitter managed to correctly ID Variety Jones.

> The research conducted by an independent researcher by the name of "La > Moustache" determined that Variety Jones is likely Roger or Thomas Clark.

> [...] The posts, some containing as much as 3,000 words, explain how "Plural > of Mongoose" was arrested after being found running an underground cannabis > business in UK, amongst other related crimes. At one point, Jones even > identifies himself as "Roger Thomas Clark," which were the same names > uncovered by researcher La Moustache. Despite these revelations the FBI have > not yet given any response as to their next course of action.

[http://silkroaddrugs.org/dpr-mentor-to-be-back- online/](http://silkroaddrugs.org/dpr-mentor-to-be-back-online/)

I'm curious if the FBI pieced this together themselves or was it La Moustache who figured it out?

Edit: Also of note...in the criminal complaint they said he is a Canadian national born in 1961... making him 54 years old.

[http://www.scribd.com/doc/292196413/US-v-Roger-Thomas- Clark-...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/292196413/US-v-Roger-Thomas-Clark- Complaint#scribd)

<comment><USER3> Wow the complaint has some bombshells:

In particular I'd highlight this as pretty crazy: (screenshot from scribd because I don't have a plaintext copy) [http://imgur.com/kaFSSzl](http://imgur.com/kaFSSzl)

One of the Customer Support Staff Members on the Silk Road was a homeland security investigator. Wow.

<comment><USER4> What's crazy about undercover agents ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Finally, CLARK also advised Ulbricht on tactics to thwart efforts by law enforcement to investigate Silk Road. In that vein, CLARK repeatedly advocated the use of intimidation and violence to keep members of the Silk Road support staff from cooperating with law enforcement. In one such conversation, in which CLARK and Ulbricht discussed "track[ing] down" a certain Silk Road employee to ensure that he had not gone "[o]ff the rails," CLARK commented, "[D]ude, we're criminal drug dealers – what line shouldn't we cross?"_

Friendly fellow. I've heard that the site's community felt like they were a part of a movement. Did they know the operators felt this way?

Analysis of the community in general seems interesting. I wonder if their forums were archived anywhere.

<comment><USER6> I know HN user gwern did some work partially documenting the forums.

It was an interesting place to be, especially towards the beginning. I feel that most of us would've supported violence against those cooperating with law enforcement.

<comment><USER5> Setting aside personal bias: Kudos for admitting that. It takes a lot of courage to put your beliefs out in the open, or even to talk about the beliefs of a group you once identified with.

 _I feel that most of us would 've supported violence against those cooperating with law enforcement._

Could you help me understand that mindset?

It seems like violence is one reason we as a species took hundreds of thousands of years to discover (or at least to harness) the scientific method. For the first time, we're now in a position to detect a big rock headed straight for Earth, and then actually have any nonzero chance of doing something to change the situation. Studying history, one plausible hypothesis we're in this situation might be: Funnel all of the smartest people together, and figure out a way to let them work together for a very long time on the same kinds of problems.

And to let smart people work together, it's necessary to have systems in place to suppress violence. In short, law enforcement. There have been abuses of power, but on the whole, law enforcement seems like one of the main reasons we're well-off today.

So that's where I'm coming from. I'm not trying to be overbearing or say X is bad and Y is good -- I apologize if I'm failing.

It's just the opposite: I'm interested, and open-minded, to understand how various intelligent people could conclude "It's us or them, and if you're cooperating with law enforcement, you deserve violence." Would you help me to understand the community's viewpoint? Was there any nuance, or is it as simple as "they are traitors, therefore X" mindset? There must be _something_ if so many intelligent people somehow started to believe this, right?

If someone reading this feels like replying anonymously, make a new HN account using Tor. Your reply will be marked [dead] to begin with, but those of us with showdead enabled will see them. The community can now vouch for dead-but- thoughtful comments, which makes them visible to everyone.

This is the type of topic that usually devolves into a flamewar, but maybe thoughtful conversation has a chance.

<comment><USER7> I can try to give a reply. You have to remember what SR was for. These were people who were not only using SR, but active in the community as well. They were mostly engaged in illegal activities, a good deal of whom were active offline as well taking part in illegal activities.

Law enforcement is a constant point of anxiety for every single person involved in this process. If someone who you thought you could trust is now actively threatening your freedom (or access to a substance, which is also a form of freedom), you take action to prevent this. In general, I don't remember the mindset actually being "pro violence" in an abstract sense, but it was hostile to law enforcement because law enforcement represented the end of ones freedom.

And they weren't wrong. The drug war was (and is) a very real thing. I think it goes without saying that most were for the freedom to consume, produce, distribute, and use any drugs they see fit. Law enforcement were encroaching on that freedom. They were the aggressors coming in and disrupting a pretty peaceful process. In many cases, unprovoked. I don't think that's much of a misrepresentation.

<comment><USER5> (Trying to figure out how to reply without sounding like I'm challenging an idea or putting someone on the defensive... All I can think of is: Thank you for the reply. Know that I respect everyone's viewpoint, and that we're only trying to chase a mystery.)

 _If someone who you thought you could trust is now actively threatening your freedom (or access to a substance, which is also a form of freedom), you take action to prevent this._

So I've spent five minutes mentally putting myself in that situation, and... I don't know. Am I just a coward? It's important in the abstract sense to fight for freedoms, and perhaps in the literal sense when one system (i.e. country) is at war with another.

But the idea of taking a bat to someone's head for betraying my trust in them is... Well, that's really the question to explore, right? How could someone actually do that, let alone approve of someone else doing that? The question is far too pointed, though. Just trying to understand.

<comment><USER8> >But the idea of taking a bat to someone's head for betraying my trust in them is... Well, that's really the question to explore, right? How could someone actually do that, let alone approve of someone else doing that?

But, implicitly, you already _do_ approve of that. Your government commits various forms of violence in your name, as all governments do - most notably in the form of military and police actions, some of which you may not agree with.

<comment><USER9> > Your government commits various forms of violence in your name, as all > governments do

That's why we have separate systems to keep the violence in check. Granted, it may not always work that well in practice, but it is important to the system that there are checks and balances in place. The question here regarded the moral system where someone can unilaterally decide someone else deserves to be murdered, and what makes people voluntarily choose this system.

<comment><USER10> If you are being targeted by the "checked and balanced" system for doing what you believe to be an harmless activity, isn't that enough to lose your faith in it?

<comment><USER9> I suspect that much is true. It does not follow that it would make you prefer a completely arbitrary system, where the leader could decide you dead at any time. Murdering people without process also pretty much rules out the "harmless activity" part, by every possible meaning of the word.

<comment><USER10> I think this is mixing up the timelines. He was threatened by LE to life imprisonment for the things he did _before_ he allegedly procured murder. So that can't rule out the "harmless activity" part, because _it hadn 't happened yet_.

As for not preferring a system where one person can decide you dead at any time, well: [http://www.killedbypolice.net/](http://www.killedbypolice.net/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> No mention of the extortion/blackmail VJ claimed to be facing from some rogue FBI agent?

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm surprised to see that Ulbricht thought government issued id was the viable solution to the spam/troll/infiltrator problem on the dark web. I would have expected more experiments with reputation based systems and blockchain based identity (such as namecoin). But identity is hard, I get that. Probably the hardest problem these sites face. (Just for curiosity's sake, does anyone with a bit more insight know if collecting passports is a common occurrence in other dark markets?)

</comment><comment><USER12> Other articles: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10680330](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10680330), [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10680175](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10680175).

</comment><comment><USER13> Mega facepalm after I click through and read "Preet Bharara". Can we just make this guy a Senator already?

<comment><USER14> ...because justice and politics mix oh so well... the results are astounding!</comment></comment>


Show HN: 3D Product Photography for Everyone - <AUTHOR> We are a startup and would love to receive feedback for our 360 photography App.
Here is the link to download the app.

          https://kpb5k.app.goo.gl/Glo3d-app

 It basically helps capture, edit and share/embed products in 360 spin image format. Would love to hear feedback. <comment><AUTHOR> The title says 3D because I could NOT use the word "360" on the title for some reason. the platform automatically removes it. We are also looking to work with someone that is active in Drone programming systems. The idea is that users use a drone to go around a building in the circle and take 48 images to create a 360 spin image. If you know of any one that is interested, please let me know . email@example.com</comment>


EU countries agree on copyright reforms, deal in sight next week - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-tech-ip/eu-countries-agree-on-copyright-reforms-deal-in-sight-next-week-idUSKCN1PX2FT <comment><USER2> Search engines could just wipe any publisher that insists on being paid from the results. When publishers realize people no longer find their physical newspaper subscription site, I think they would soon reconsider supporting this legislation.

And if I was a search engine I'd remove the summary from the result but link the the title to a cached snapshot such as internet archive whenever possible.

I doubt the reform will be a reality in its current form however.

<comment><USER3> That is exactly what happened the last few times this was tried.

[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/link-tax-experiences- germany-...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/link-tax-experiences-germany- spain-article-11-ec-proposal-tani/)

Germany's experience: Google did not display news snippets from publishers unless they waived their right to be paid. They all eventually capitulated. Spain's experience: the Spanish version of this law did not have an opt out provision. Thus, Google News simply closed shop in Spain.

For some reason, the regulators do not believe Google when Google says they do not make money on Google News. But it is true. Google News is a "halo" property. Like Google Keep, it isn't itself a money-making endeavor. Google pays for it on the theory that providing that service will make the overall suite of services more compelling to users. But it's not worth much to Google, and you can see this by the paucity of Google's investment in the property compared to almost anything else.

Maybe the theory is that Google will stay in business and pay because they're worried about competitors filling the gap? But if this service is not economically viable for Google to run, how could it possibly be more viable for a competitor to step into this space? The outcome of a link tax will simply be that Google News ceases to operate in the EU, is my bet. That's a fine result for some people, although I doubt it's the intended one. But I guess that the EU politicians and bureaucrats will delude themselves into believing some other outcome is possible until the very moment it happens.

Thing that really makes this puzzling is Google News barely shows snippets any more. At least when I load the page, it only shows article titles.

The publishers and regulators are such fools on this topic. They think people need the news. The opposite is the truth. The news needs viewers. If it's harder to find interesting news, people spend their time on something else.

<comment><USER4> EU politicians never care about collateral damage. Think about the cookie law or when they changed how VAT works for digital purchases. It took them years to hear the complaint from small and micro businesses about how the change is killing their business.

<comment><USER5> Is that sales tax thing still a major problem? All you need to do is determine location (through IP, credit card etc) then do a lookup in a library, then add the relevant amount to the price.

In principle it's an important idea, otherwise all online retailers will set themselves up in a zero tax domicile and get an unjustified 5-20% advantage over local retailers.

<comment><USER6> > determine location through credit card

Displaying the final price _after_ the user has put the CC number is not the most trustworthy experience :)

I don't know how this is done in the wild, but some large companies often have TLDs per country and only accept CCs from a given country on a given site version, for example (and they redirect you by IP).

<comment><USER7> Another way to deal with that (which e.g. Amazon uses in Europe for international Prime Video and Music Unlimited) is to use a fixed inc.VAT price and then just have the exc.VAT price vary by country.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> No, they didn't "agree" it. A majority passed this stage, but the divisiveness is showing

There is still a trilogue next week plus the vote if I understand correctly

Not to mention other institutions have come against it, like the International Federation of Journalists [https://www.ifj.org/media- centre/news/detail/category/author...](https://www.ifj.org/media- centre/news/detail/category/authors-rights/article/copyright-directive-ifjefj- reject-the-romanian-compromise.html) who discovered they are going to get the short end of the deal and Bertelsmann (though probably for bad reasons)

One good comment I read somewhere: at some point, politicians are thinking that a proposal being hated by all sides means it's "fair"

<comment><USER9> What is a "trilogue"?

<comment><USER7> An informal meeting between negotiators from the European Commission (executive/cabinet), the Council of the European Union (representatives of member governments), and the European Parliament. The target as I understand it is to reach a preliminary agreement that is acceptable enough to be able to pass the following formal procedures.

[http://www.europarl.europa.eu/ordinary-legislative- procedure...](http://www.europarl.europa.eu/ordinary-legislative- procedure/en/interinstitutional-negotiations.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Once again, a much better take on what's going on here: [https://juliareda.eu/2019/02/council-worst- article-13/](https://juliareda.eu/2019/02/council-worst-article-13/)

(And previously, [https://juliareda.eu/2019/02/article-13-worse/](https://juliareda.eu/2019/02/article-13-worse/))

</comment><comment><USER4> This one "reform" made me go from being pro-EU to anti-EU. And if this passes then I don't think there's anything the EU could ever do that would change my mind on the EU project.

<comment><USER11> If only this was the worst problem with EU. The worst problem is the very existence of the Euro in the absence of a financial policy -- and Germany explicitly forbade this from happening. Therefore the Euro will explode sooner or later. For reminders, the situation is so bad that France recalled its ambassador in Italy friday. Something that AFAIK didn't happen since WWII. EU isn't peace; obviously, it's tearing countries apart. In a few years, Brexit will be seen as the most prescient, great political act of the decade.

<comment><USER12> Unfortunately the macroeconomic aspect is a total taboo in Germany. Even "solidary" leftists claim we profit so much from the Euro... The ones on the very left get it, but they barely talk about it. Germany will never give up on the cheated export surplus until the whole thing goes bust.

Hell, barely anyone gets it anyway. Germany is certainly not alone to blame. How can the competitiveness of Germany increase for more than a decade without any other EU country caring? In the past they devalued their currencies, so why didn't they act now? Also Germany violates the 6% export surplus limit, no one cares!

<comment><USER13> Germany (and France!) violating the same budget rules it insists everyone else follows is indeed a damning indictment of what the EU truly is. But Germany isn't a winner from the Eurozone. I don't understand why everyone keeps thinking that. Germans are suffering under it and allow themselves to suffer because they see unifying Europe as a form of penance for World War 2.

Think about it - German "competitiveness" is just another way to say that they work harder than everyone else. They save money that the ECB then gives to foreign governments through QE. They make things and send them to other parts of Europe. In return they get what are effectively IOUs from the other countries - TARGET2 balances that are supposed to imply a transfer of "real" euros (i.e. paper money) one day, but which are so huge those transfers will never actually happen. There are no realistic scenarios in which an equally sized flow of goods or services ever comes back to the poor Germans in return for their efforts: the only plausible outcome is that either the internal imbalances are written off for good by the EU authorities, or that other countries exit the Eurozone and the imbalances are written off amidst acrimony and bitterness. I cannot see any realistic path to Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, eastern Europe etc ever becoming as productive as the Germans are, let alone _more_ productive as would be required to restore balance to the system, if only because the Germans never seem to give themselves pay rises.

In the end Germany will be the biggest loser of the EU project, simply because they put the most into it to start with.

<comment><USER12> > But Germany isn't a winner from the Eurozone

Well our politicians see it different. Germany was able to have government surpluses and decrease the countries debt. We have low unemployment. Relative to other EU countries, especially France, we look pretty healthy. Despite the domestic market being a mess and the average worker being stripped of normal wage increases, it's hard to argument against these "successes" without explaining in detail the macroeconomic aspects and the consequences in the long run.

> German "competitiveness" is just another way to say that they work harder > than everyone else.

Actually France has about the same productivity as Germany, always had since introduction of the Euro. I think what you mean is productivity in relation to wages, namely unit labor cost. Meaning germans get way too low wages for their productivity.

And yes Germany will be the biggest loser: The government and export industry gained the most, they will lose the most. Millions of additional unemployed people, hatred from the other (former) Euro countries, far right/left parties may have a shot of getting to power, etc..

<comment><USER13> Yes, but the UK is outside the eurozone. It also has very low unemployment and although the deficit exploded under a left wing government and due to the financial crisis, it's been falling since 2010 and is now at its lowest level in a very long time. There's still more work to do to reach surpluses (last achieved in 2000) but the UK wasn't a part of the eurozone then either.

And of course Switzerland also doesn't use the euro and has a balanced budget, and a strong economy.

So to me the domestic German narrative that these sorts of economic success are to do with the eurozone seem wrong. Countries in Europe and which are not using the Euro have been able to obtain these results too. Probably if the euro had never happened Germany would be doing just as well today, and their purchasing power would have effectively gone up even if the wages hadn't because imports would have become so much cheaper.

Good point about productivity vs unit labor cost. That's indeed what I meant.

<comment><USER12> What you have to know or realize: ALL finacial sectors in Germany are net savers. Private households, companies and now also the government. When there are savings, someone else has to have debt. It's a zero sum game, meaning all savings have a debt counterpart. Now where is the debt counterpart for Germany? Look at this picture: [http://www.flassbeck-economics.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/0...](http://www.flassbeck-economics.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/04/Deflation-3.png) On top, private households. Below, companies. Below that, the government. And finally, THE REST OF THE WORLD. As you can see, from the start of the Euro, the debter position in Germany shifted from being the government or the companies, to foreign countries. Every year Germany needs 280€ billion or so new debt IN OTHER COUNTRIES to have these savings. Other eurozone countries continuously lose market share against Germany: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Balance_...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Balance_of_trade_in_goods_and_services_%28Eurozone_countries%29.gif)

But it affects non-eurozone countries as well of course. For example the US basically critized Germany (long before Trump) as a currency manipulator, Trump just speaks it out loud. Because again, without the Euro, Germanys own currency would value up and the massive exports would be impossible.

So I think you can't deny that some dramatic change happend when the Euro was introduced and that it's still happening today.

Now if you assume Germany did not do wage dumping and the Euro wasn't introduced, could Germany be in the same position as it is now? No. Look at the graphic again and pin the red line (foreign countries) to the zero position. That in turn means, you now have to pull another line down! Because remember, all lines have to sum up to zero. Which line would you pull down? Ask private households to stop saving and spend much more money? Or increase company tax (while every other country is decreasing it)? The only solution left would be for the government to make deficits.

Currently, other countries make deficits for Germany. This is not sustainable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The EU has no internet "champions" so they have few reservations about burning the whole thing to the ground, and that is the lens through which all their internet regulations should be seen.

<comment><USER15> That is at least more straightforward than the US which has a similar lack of Internet champions, but plenty of Web champions. Silicon Valley essentially only cares about _the Internet_ insofar as it's the communications conduit over which it delivers proprietary services.

We're essentially arguing sides in a _commercial dispute_ , because we've been led to think that using Google is akin to running software under our control.

<comment><USER16> Check out the net neutrality battle in the US. Not only did many corporations have opinions about this _Internet_ argument, but a lot of passionate individual people had opinions. Including a ton of my friends in the Silicon Valley.

<comment><USER17> _Check out the net neutrality battle in the US. Not only did many corporations have opinions about this Internet argument, but a lot of passionate individual people had opinions. Including a ton of my friends in the Silicon Valley._

How did that end up working out? What does passion and experience matter if the only real voice is a pile of money and favors in the hands of a lobbyist? The FCC is so corrupt/captures that it didn't make a bit of difference, unless you count catharsis from speaking against it as a positive result.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think they will just make Google into a true monopoly. By true monopoly I mean a monopoly where barrier to entry is so high that there is not only no competition, but it is impossible to enter the market.

For example, I don't think anyone will care to sign contracts with DuckDuckGo or any other small competitor. This means that they will not be able to compete with Google in EU market.

Currently we have also Bing. But Bing AFAIK is bleeding money from Microsoft already, so they may end up just cutting it off from the EU.

So, Google will end with a total, true monopoly.

Funny thing is that even now everyone want to be on Google. Literally all the money that Google is making is because people want to be visible on Google. Media companies will sign anything to get there. If Google offers them "we will pay you nothing", they will have to agree. If EU forces media to ask for payment (like Spain did) they will ask for 0.01 euro for a year of being indexed by Google. If EU forces media to ask for some "reasonable" price, then Google will refuse with knowledge that no one else will be able to afford that anyway.

Similar process will happen with media. Google will not bother to sign deals with small media companies. The biggest media companies will benefit. Actually, this is may be the actual reason behind this whole shit show. Cutting of small media competition. But if I had to bet, I would bet on media ad politicians being just stupid.

</comment><comment><USER19> 'Reform' always means expanding copyright restrictions even further...

</comment><comment><USER20> > will protect Europe's cultural heritage

What does that mean? A free and open internet means history will be erased or something?

</comment><comment><USER21> We are outside Europe. Actually, I see this as an opportunity to buy assets of countless condamned European small and medium companies/start ups. Sad day for the entrepreneurs in EU.

</comment><comment><USER21> It would be interesting to see a list of pro-lobbyist. Who is pushing for this to pass? (not speaking about a list industries, but actual company names, association names, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER22> >Italy, Poland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Luxembourg, Malta and Slovakia did not agree to the draft, however.

Can they veto it, or do they have to take it whether they like it or not?

<comment><USER23> The European Council needs the approval of 16 out of 28 member states, representing at least 65% of the total EU population, to pass the legislation to the directly elected European Parliament, which will vote on it by a simple majority.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Well Donald Trump wants more immigrants from EU and most tech companies are always hiring. So I guess on to the US because no more internet companies will be created here for sure.

<comment><USER20> There's a good reason all the major internet companies were founded and grew in the US.

<comment><USER24> Yeah. The reason is that its a large country with a homogeneous population (language-wise). But as long as they have a EU leaning immigration policy I don't care what story of entrepreneurship people want to sell.

Edit: In response to one of the comments, which points out that US is not homogeneous in the full sense of the word.

<comment><USER20> > homogeneous population

Note that more than half of American's top tech companies were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants.

[https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/30/us-tech-companies-founded- by...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/30/us-tech-companies-founded-by- immigrants-or-the-children-of-immigrants.html)</comment></comment></comment></comment>