Patent trolls want $1,000 per employee for using scanners - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/patent-trolls-want-1000-for-using-scanners/ <comment><USER2> I personally hope the patent law abuse gets to the point that it destroys the entire patent system. So go for it. Sue schools, the elderly, whatever.

<comment><USER3> And then what? We'll have nothing at all? I'm certainly not in favour of these patent trolls but you have to have a more nuanced approach to intellectual property than 'Burn down the House'

It's a balance between encouraging innovation by protecting intellectual property, and discouraging it because of patent abuse (etc).

Destroying the patent system completely would most certainly have a negative effect.

<comment><USER4> > _Destroying the patent system completely would most certainly have a > negative effect_

Why are you so sure of this? Government granted monopoly is not the only incentive to create something, but there are definitely countless examples of how patents have been used to squash innovation and disruption.

I grant that patents have had some positive effects, but I would not assume they are net-positive. Also, they were primarily designed in a time when there were fewer ideas and getting things into production was much more expensive (this applies to physical things, let along software with zero marginal cost), and it was much easier for an incumbent to steal an idea and crush a startup simply by the barriers to entry to manufacturing and distribution. Since then lobbying efforts have only pushed intellectual property rights in one direction. Even medical research patents which are often held up as necessary create perverse incentives that tie up R&D dollars in unproven new drugs, and making arbitrary tweaks to existing newish medicines in order to secure patent protection, making research into natural or public domain compounds come to a standstill regardless of efficacy.

Obviously I'm biased since I work in software, but I think we'd be fine without patents. Trademark and copyright address much more important issues in my opinion.

<comment><USER5> Medical treatments, vaccines, and drugs cost enormous amounts of money to bring to market due to all the regulations and requirements we've created ensuring a pill is not fatal. Why would any company in their right mind develop any sort of drug if it cost $100m and anyone after them could take the idea free of cost?

Patents are good/needed to promote the quality of medicine. There they're good.

<comment><USER6> That is exactly what the drug companies say. That's funny at is as if you are just reciting back their propaganda.

It turns out a lot more money is spent on marketing and lobbying that is spent on research. Also a lot of cutting edge research is actually performed by public universities by professors on that state's (or NIH's) dime.

> Patents are good/needed to promote the quality of medicine. There they're > good.

Well that really is the crux of the argument. I would argue that patents make the medicine worse. Medicine I also consider to be the health and well-being of citizens not profitability of drug companies. I can be convinced that the current patent system help the profitability of drug companies I am not sure if it help the sick people.

<comment><USER7> _That is exactly what the drug companies say_

Yeah, there's a reason for that.

 _It turns out a lot more money is spent on marketing and lobbying that is spent on research._

Don't confuse pharmaceutical companies with biotech companies.

 _Also a lot of cutting edge research is actually performed by public universities by professors on that state's (or NIH's) dime._

Often, the same researcher then spins out the company that tries to commercialize the research.

 _I can be convinced that the current patent system help the profitability of drug companies I am not sure if it help the sick people._

Without them you wouldn't have the medicine. Then that won't help the sick people. As it stands, there is a difference between the medicine that rich people can afford and that poor people can afford. That may be morally objectionable- and maybe we should fix it. But at least the medicine exists, and eventually it gets cheaper on average for everybody.

I am _very much_ for patent reform, but we have to do it intelligently. Where patents help- keep them. Modify them maybe. Where they are despicable destroy them.

At least in some cases in medicine-- as in other high barrier-to-entry endeavors-- I am convinced they are useful. In other cases they are infuriating.

<comment><USER8> >Often, the same researcher then spins out the company that tries to commercialize the research.

It seems to me that you imply that there is some added value from the commercialization. But commercialization does not cause added value in itself. Sometimes, commercialization just mean marketing and profit center.

However the real question is, what does commercialization of an already founded and paid invention has to do with patents. Why should research which is paid with tax money (through NIH) be patentable, and how does that benefit society?

<comment><USER7> There is often substantial risk turning a research result (molecule X inhibits virus Y) into a safe medicine. You have to do significant, expensive testing. That is where the money is spent because that is where commercialization fails.

<comment><USER9> Also, pharmaceutical drugs don't just pop out of Wonka-like machines in a manner similar to the Everlasting Gobstopper. The production process has to be efficient. Efficiency is a function of the cost to research, design, construct and operate the production facilities and QA, and the expected returns.

<comment><USER8> Well, if you want efficiency, thats were all the factories with generics lives. They use capitalism, that is competition to produce the best product for the lowest price.

As for testing (the above comment), thats where FDA approved monopolies comes in. FDA want to incentivize testing and producing of products, even once they fall out of patent protection, so FDA themselves gives out limited timed monopolies after a drug gone through all the testing. Thats a monopoly on top of regular patents for most drugs. FDA don't assume patents to cover the cost beyond the initial research. They consider that more incentives are needed, targeted for testing and producing of products.

<comment><USER9> I wasn't disagreeing with the poster above, I was adding additional insight into what it takes to initially commercialize a product (assuming the initial research was publicly funded).

Before a decision to produce can begin, there is additional R&D into: \- scale production design and cost analysis \- analysis of potential market size \- risks and boundaries of treatment identified via clinical trials

If the potential market size and production costs work out to be marginally profitable (to be an attractive investment): \- initial outlay of prototype production facilities \- scale production and distribution processes (some drugs have limited shelf life or require special handling) \- market building (disseminating information about the treatment to health providers, and tracking market penetration) to make sure the market potential is fully used

Production of generics is "efficient" because by the time generic production gets underway (at patent expiration), they can sell as an alternative to a pre-built market with processes already proven by years of practice.

<comment><USER8> What prevents generics to do cost analysis, market research, prototype production facilities, scale production and distribution processes, and market building? Isn't those step normal procedures for any commercial venture. To make the car an analogy, when producing a new car, a company need to do cost analysis to weighing materials, product facilities, prototype building. They also need to do market building to push their product in a market already buzzing with competition. They need to care about the distribution processes. They can't patent this, and even if they could, I doubt the car industry would be helped by it.

Generics, like any other form of commercial entities do prefer a pre-built market. This is same for everyone else too, as everyone is currently making the same pads, laptops, phones and mp3 players as last "hit product". This however doesn't mean that there aren't any new companies trying new things. Same goes for generics. The "putting a product into the market" is't someting patents are needed or even suggested to cover. Its the cost of the invention that is covered by the patents.

Patents cover the cost of inventing. The FDA granted monopoly covers the testing. Everything else rest onto the commercial entity to resolve. This is the order of things, through patents are so far not covering the cost of the invention, as that is taken care by tax dollars distributed to research by NIH.

Thus the logical thing to do is to either cut the budget of NIH and let "patents" take care of the inventing (as intended), or reconsider patents as funding for inventions.

<comment><USER9> Yes, in any normal commercial venture, those are the normal procedures for commercializing something, which are the investment. Re-reading back to the top of this thread, I see this spun out specifically from a one-liner about research by professors at public universities. The funding sources for professors at public universities is varied (depends on what funding they have managed to gather and what strings were attached, and what they were intended for), and the degree that the results of their research is clinically applicable also varies. A researcher may discover that a certain receptor on a cell's surface responds to a specific molecular structure, but this is far from being a treatment. Depending on who funded a particular research study, the results may be pre-assigned to a private entity, or may become public information. It all depends on how the research was commissioned. In any case, university researchers don't _usually_ create new drugs, they discover relationships; they just don't typically have that mandate (as far as I am aware, which admittedly isn't that much).

Incidentally, patents are not to cover "invention" costs, they are so that inventors can get the rewards of invention while at the same time exposing their invention, rewards and costs are not the same thing. For drugs, public exposure is a necessity of the way we require FDA approval; since without such regulation, drug related litigation would ultimately end up in open court anyway to prove liability or negligence, it has been deemed a public good to do this public exposure prior to market introduction, and require a degree of pre-approval (that we assign directly to a government agency).

In the US of A, the FDA grants neither a monopoly, nor a patent. The FDA's purpose in new drug development is the declaratory judgment regarding the safety or applicability of a drug. It is perfectly possible to get a patent, but fail FDA approval. It is also possible that the process to produce a drug at scale is itself a novel application or invention and itself patentable (though that may also need FDA approval separately from the drug treatment).

<comment><USER7> _It is perfectly possible to get a patent, but fail FDA approval._

I believe this happened to Eli Lilly yesterday. EDIT: Not sure it was Lilly- I heard the news on the radio this morning and I can't find the source on the news sites. Annoying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The article mentions that it is hard to invalidate patents with prior art and that the patent holders will say that it is a narrower scope than previous patents. If that is the case, I can't see how this isn't extortion. There is no way that these "companies" could know the kind of network that the companies they are sending letters to use. They may be just guessing that they are even using a scanner. They are just mass mailing threats and hoping for money back.

Also, how is it even legal to target the users of technology in a patent infringement case like this? Wouldn't the manufactures (of hardware AND software) be the ones that would need to license the patent, not end users? I get why you would target the end user but is that legal/valid?

<comment><USER11> I agree that it is extortion in spirit. But I wonder if patent trolls can be prosecuted on current extortion laws, as their defense would be "We're just trying to enforce our lawful patents." If prosecutors would not want to try, then I wonder how we could change extortion laws to include this practice.

<comment><USER12> IANAL but wouldn't it be easier to convict on mail fraud first. Corporate "accounts receivable" type scams have been convicted before of mail fraud. The scammers send an invoice to a corporation, and if it looks routine, it gets paid without a second thought.

Sooner or later, some patent troll is going to be dumb enough to send out "Unpaid License Fee" letters and set a precedence on the extortion charge.

<comment><USER13> Getty Images has been doing this with stock photography license claims for years: <http://www.extortionletterinfo.com/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It would help in cases like this if:

a.) the litigant was not allowed to dismiss the suit without the consent of the defendant, and

b.) there was some mechanism whereby anybody who was subsequently sued on the basis of the same basic claims of infringement of the same patent could use the result of the first case as part of their defense. (E.g., unless the original verdict was overturned on appeal, the plaintiff would have to make some new novel claims that were not part of the original case when suing their next victim.)

This would require changes to the law, but not nearly such drastic change as abolishing the patent system entirely (which I think is scheduled to happen right around the time the USA switches to the metric system).

I was the victim of a very similar shakedown tactic at the hands of DirecTV in 2002. They had hired (sorry, "successfully lobbied to obtain the services of") the US Marshals to raid some small companies that sold smart card programming gear. DirecTV then got their marshal pals to copy the companies' customer databases, and then systematically went after the end users, threatening to sue unless the users paid up $5k to 'settle'.

In my case, our company had indeed bought some smart card programming gear, but I was incensed and inclined to fight (as it sounds like the protagonist of this Ars story was). But the only "fight" we were able to effect was to have our lawyers write a letter (basically, "fuck you, we program smart cards, bring it on") to make them go away _for us_. They abandoned their threat to sue us, but this didn't affect any of the thousands of other people they were going after with the same exact scam.

Our patent system would be better if the law forced the litigant to a conclusion once a patent suit was brought, and _also_ made it much harder to repeat the same shakedown once one victim had successfully fought it and won.

That's not to say it would _fix_ the problem of patent trolls, but since it would weaken the _patent itself_ (once somebody had the balls and money to fight a bullshit patent shakedown and win) we wouldn't have to give a shit how many shell companies Myrvhold and similar parasites have. (We'd only have to give a shit that they have millions of unique B.S. patents.)

<comment><USER15> Until the US courts have a loser pays (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_rule_(attorneys_fees)>) system, this will never happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> $1,000 per employee is the most bogus request I've ever heard in my life. Even if the concept were patentable, I'd say a reasonable demand would be $1 per Internet-capable scanner sold.

The patent trolls should really read Joel Spolsky's guide on pricing enterprise software. Saving $200,000 is worth hiring some lawyers to fuck you up. Saving $75 isn't.

<comment><USER17> I find it extremely dubious that you could actually infringe on a patent merely by _using_ a consumer product. Disregarding this particular patent, is that sort of claim actually grounded in fact?

<comment><USER18> Well, if the product's manufacturer has licensed the patent, then the "exhaustion doctrine" generally keeps the patent holder from taking a second whack from people who bought it. That's what ordinarily shields end-users of consumer products from this kind of nonsense.

If the manufacturer hasn't licensed the product, though, the users may well be fair game, in the eyes of the law.

<comment><USER17> But end users generally don't know and have no way of knowing what technology is inside a product. That seems pretty sketchy. While it's true that unintentionally infringing on a patent is not an excuse, if I'm liable for someone else's infringing without my knowledge my potential liability is completely unlimited.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> One simple reform to the patent system would be to force an _automatic_ review of any patent involved in a lawsuit where the patent might be rendered invalid before the court needs to weigh in on the matter.

Right now the court needs to decide if the patent is enforceable, which seems like it's basically doing the job the patent issuing entity should've done in the first place.

<comment><USER19> Yes! I love this. If we can reduce the cost of defending these we would eliminate them without needing anything else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > the only variations are the six-letter name of the shell company and the > royalty demands

This sounds a lot like the automated, python-scripted corporations in Stross's Accelerando.

<comment><USER21> Would that make these _literal_ shell companies?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Major root cause that could be fixed without hurting anyone other than patent trolls: the relatively anonymous registration of patents. If I'm being threatened with a lawsuit for patent infringement, how can I not find out the owners of the patents? That is crazy.

If you want to leverage a patent, you should have to be registered with the patent office so that you can be held accountable. Anyone using a patent for legit reasons wouldn't be hampered by this, but it would make hunting down patent trolls a whole lot easier.

<comment><USER23> Plus if these patents are so valuable, then it would be nice if their sale from one shell company to another had tax implications. Once a licensing campaign has been initiated for one shell company, that should put some idea of a value on the patent(s).

If you can be assessed taxes for options in a company that isn't public that you have no way to exercise, selling assets from one shell company to another should have tax implications as well.

Maybe that would limit the creation of mazes of ownership of these patent portfolios.

<comment><USER22> I really like the idea of relating the value of a patent to the registration cost. If the patent is giving you $10 million a year in income, you should have to pay more for that right than if it brings you $10,000 a year in income. At least then we would have a list of patent holders and how much they are making from licensing.

<comment><USER24> The registration costs would need to be non-trivial to discourage abuse, which would harm legitimate small-scale innovators. Also, who decides (or validates) the "worth" of a patent? We would be replacing one regulatory nightmare with another.

<comment><USER25> I think it would be awesome but it will never happen.

You claim a value for your patent. It is treated as property and subject to tax if transferred from one entity to the next. The catch is that you can only sue for a certain percent of the claimed value. You can change the claimed value of your patent, but then you must pay a tax as if that was earned income. You would have to be allowed to set your initial claimed value of the patent at whatever you wish. Kinda the same way that when you start a corporation you can decide how many shares you have (like 1.000 or 10,000 or 1,000,000). But once that is set you can't just change them around without registering the change with the state.

In theory it would punish people who transfer patents a lot, but have almost no affect on people who register or hold onto patents. Since trolls thrive on shell companies, it would be very expensive to constantly transfer high-value patents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> In my experience, these places don't actually make any money, so fear not. I did some database consulting work for a company that was in a similar business a few years back. They wound up shutting down after about six weeks because no one bothered paying them. Out of more than $12 million in demands, they received less than $4,000 after sending their first batch. That was when they decided to shut down. I suspect something similar will happen with these guys and anyone that follows them.

</comment><comment><USER27> Why the heck aren't the hardware manufacturers stepping up on this one? Why should I pay HP/Xerox/Canon/Ricoh thousands for using their manufactured hardware when it does not cover the ability to use it?

I realize being a hacker news reader/tech person means I would know better, but wouldn't some of these people think to themselves "Why isn't this cost included into the hardware?". And why aren't the manufacturers that profit from this type of hardware stepping up as it has the chance to discourage people from buying their stuff.

</comment><comment><USER12> Maybe I should do an AMA on my work for a patent attorney. It would get boring because his MO seems to be to only sue companies that negotiate license deals in "bad faith", and nowhere near the frivolous action seen in here. Most of his work is in filing patents.

The last conversation we had was actually about supporting the EFF, so I'm sure that is quite telling to what direction we're heading.

</comment><comment><USER28> It strikes me that one root cause of the patent troll problem, besides unscrupulous trolls and their evil lawyers, is idiot patent examiners who would allow patenting the process of drinking a cup of coffee of morning if there was no prior art on file on the subject.

It all comes down to incentives. Good patent lawyers know they can make big bucks working in private practice (possibly for trolls), whilst mediocre ones happy with a government salary go ... where else? ... the USPTO.

<comment><USER29> Do you have any facts to back this up? The one patent examiner I know is very smart. But he's also part of a rigid system with very clear criteria.

If there's a problem, I suspect it's a systemic problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Could someone (or has someone already tried to) patent the process of patent trolling? I know that such a patent shouldn't be granted because the idea obviously isn't original but it seems as though there are so many bogus patents sneaking through the cracks that it could be possible. It would be nice if there was someone you could call to troll the trolls.

<comment><USER31> Strangely Halliburton seems to have done this:

[http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2008/11/12/halliburton-patenting- pa...](http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2008/11/12/halliburton-patenting-patent- trolling-to-block-patent-trolls/)

<comment><USER32> What did happen to this application? Accepted or dismissed?

<comment><USER33> Surely there's been prior art.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Now we know the format of the letters I'm waiting for anonymous to send a bunch of letters to every member of US legislature.

<comment><USER35> Actually, it should be sent to their re-election campaign committees; legislators themselves are considered members of the government, and would not be considered businesses in their own right. Whereas their campaign comittees are heavily regulated businesses that get lots of financial scrutiny and are very short of cash usually.

Although that is a dangerous precedent to set; once you start using that sort of tactic, it will become yet another way for big business to lock out candidates they don't like and would have an overall chilling effect on participation in the political process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is just disgusting. Well, here's their contact, facebook, and twitter information if anyone wants to get in touch with them for services! Contact: <http://www.hkw-law.com/contact> Facebook: <http://www.facebook.com/hkwlaw> Twitter: <https://twitter.com/atllawfirm>

</comment><comment><USER37> We got hit with one of these letters. I read through it and it was clear that we weren't actually infringing -- it only applied to the use of distribution to employees via the scanner. Luckily that functionality is pretty much impossible to make work on the Brother MFC that we have. We had our lawyer send back a note saying that we weren't infringing and that was the end of it. My guess is that showing that you are actually paying attention and have a competent attorney is a good way to avoid getting victimized (at least some of the time).

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm not fully certain and I would love some verification/counter-argument, but wouldn't the new Public Use Anywhere in the World aspect invalidate atleast some of the garbage patents like the one discussed in the article? [http://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesleadershipforum/2012/11/15...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesleadershipforum/2012/11/15/a-powerful- new-weapon-against-patent-trolls/)

<comment><USER38> Not really. The difficulty of invalidating the patent isn't the real barrier to standing up to these sorts of legal threats. The real barrier is that _whether you win or not_ , it costs $100,000 or more to be sued in a patent lawsuit.

Here are your choices:

(A) Pay up. The extorting patentholder charges you $80,000.

(B) Hire a lawyer to defend you in court. The lawyer charges you $100,000. You also might lose and have to pay damages.

(C) Defend yourself in court without a specialist patent lawyer. Unless you ARE a specialist patent lawyer, you are guaranteed to lose. Pay triple damages plus lawyer fees -- actually, just pay everything you own and go live on the street.

Which would you choose?

<comment><USER19> And note that C is only an option if you are being sued as an individual, if you are being sued as a corporate entity you cannot defend your company pro se, you must retain a licensed attorney.

<comment><USER38> Right... good point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I don't know about the different kinds of patents, but shouldn't the printer manufacturers be paying up licensing fees?

<comment><USER40> The letter from the patent trolls actually explains why they don't do that (the real reason is probably because it's easier to get a 30 person small business to pay up instead of a giant corporation with a retainer of lawyers).

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The clock is ticking for these patent trolls, scanners will soon become completely useless (posted on HN yesterday) [http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/02/google-expensify- paperless-...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/02/google-expensify- paperless-2013/)

</comment><comment><USER42> Couldn't someone end this by gettingt a business process patent on patent trolling?

<comment><USER38> Doesn't help if you can't find the correct shell company to serve with the lawsuit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'm on the edge of my seat waiting for them to send one of these extortion notices to the wrong guy who will get enraged enough to shoot up their office.

I wonder if a chain of such shootings would set a precedent for change.

<comment><USER44> It is amazing how much rage a story like this can produce in people who work in non-legal professions. The law-firms involved, of course, don't see it that way. This is just work for them-- although I can't fathom how they can sleep at night making a living by being what amounts to a parasite.

<comment><USER20> I've worked in a situation where I believed that what I was doing was fairly unethical. I wasn't sending out bogus legal threats, but I was doing development work for a company I consider flat-out evil.

I dealt with it by donating all the money I made during those hours to a relevant charity. It helped.

<comment><USER45> Might need to donate more - for every $1 you got paid, the evil company received more than $1 of benefit. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Yet another patent troll nonsense. Who needs scanners anyway... maybe people will come to their senses and stop printing signing & scanning... a waste of paper, energy and precision!

</comment><comment><USER46> It would be interesting to see if you could pursue a case of legal malpractice against the firm which took this case to the patent office in the first place.

<comment><USER38> On what grounds? That law firm successfully obtained a patent which (even if later invalidated) resulted in revenues for their client (the extortion money). That is not malpractice, it is SUCCESSFUL practice -- and more so if the patent is highly questionable, as it may have been the legal firm's skill that resulted in the patent being issued.

<comment><USER46> On the same grounds that lawyers are sanctioned for bringing frivolous or extortionate lawsuits.

I think you bring a poor strawman to the debate, its not a question of whether or not the lawyer was successful, its a question of whether they were working toward the betterment of the system. For example. doctors may be sued for malpractice for performing surgeries that are unneeded even though the surgery is completely successful. They violate the terms of their licensing in the state where they practice by doing so.

My point is that there are many ways to mitigate the perils of the patent system without destroying it. One is to make abuse of it to have some cost.

So a proposal might be like this [1]:

To prosecute a patent (represent an inventor as their attorney in the application process) requires licensing by the patent licensing bar. That license states that willfully bringing a patent before the commission that is found later to be invalidated, and such invalidation shows negligence on the part of the prosecuting attorney, that attorney or their firm, is co-liable for any charges or court costs incurred by the folks who invalidated the patent.

It would also be interesting in public shaming of people who claim to have 'invented' such preposterous things. That is a much more social thing though.

[1] I'm not a lawyer, and I know it doesn't work like this today, its a proposal to make it 'painful' to try to game the system as a lawyer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Ob. SMBC

[http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2761#c...](http://www.smbc- comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2761#comic)

</comment><comment><USER48> Politicians aren't going to do anything about patent trolls until politicians start getting threatened and/or sued by patent trolls.

</comment><comment><USER49> honest question - does the united states not have barratry laws? why do they not cover cases like this?

</comment><comment><USER50> So who has the patent on patent trolling?

<comment><USER51> IBM: [http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Se...](http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch- bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=20100332285.PGNR.&OS=DN/20100332285RS=DN/20100332285)</comment></comment>


Do you take time to develop schema/ requirement before programming? - <AUTHOR>

Creating big applications obviously requires planning but do you guys plan for small applications? For example, creating a small application to record baseball games.... I finished creating DB schema in an hour but I'm not sure if I should move ahead and make changes as I write code or should I think for a day or two about it in depth..... <comment><USER2> Absolutely. I delay coding for as long as humanly possible. Mostly because I hate having to re-do work. So I'll usually spec out my schema, sitemaps, full mockups of everything, etc. Then I write my tests, and finally my code dead last.

The point for me is to make all the creative decisions (and to do all the creative waffling and do-overs) very early on in the process, on the whiteboard instead of in the IDE (because it's faster to change functionality during the mockup stage than it is to rip out your code). Once I start coding everything should be spec'd in detail.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thumbs Up ! I prefer the same but in the office I work in, they focus in getting the product to client as soon as possible and it's just getting tough for developers (ones who care about good practice). However, company is just getting lot of clients and earning very well. It got me thinking whether I'm not being quick to develop.....

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Yes, I do. Even if it's not final, at least you have an idea of the direction you're taking. You'll find out quickly if it's the right direction or not. That's the fun about development!

<comment><AUTHOR> So you start coding even if the schema is not finalised?

<comment><USER3> Yep. If there is an issue in the schema I go back, make changes to the db and my code, and continue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Are you using an ORM? If you're writing a web app (at least in Rails, Django or Flask) you can start once you have a rough idea about your objects and properties (~= schema) and then use database migrations (e.g. with alembic) as you make changes.

If you don't care about your test data, just have your ORM create a fresh set of empty tables for you, each time you change the schema.

<comment><USER5> >then use database migrations (e.g. with alembic)

+1 for Alembic, it makes database schema changes a lot less painful. It's definitely good to sit down and figure out high level architecture before building, but for small one-off projects code that works today is usually worth more than better code tomorrow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I usually not draw it in any tool but always have a sketch in my mind or paper</comment>


Exclusive Video And Screenshots Of Digg Version 4 - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/28/exclusive-video-and-screenshots-of-digg-version-4/ <comment><USER2> I don't understand the reasoning behind this move. Sure, I get that it's 'cool'- Digg just has Twitter/Facebook/etc envy.

Digg used to be a place for finding crowd sourced news (or, more recently, lolcats). Now, it will be merely yet another way to share links with your friends. I get that enough on other sites (Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Buzz, etc). In order to get any value, you will need to be following a large number of diverse and interesting people who post cool and relevant links. Prior to the changes, you merely had to type in digg.com in order to see what the "world" found interesting.

Digg had a brilliant concept- make the users the editors. When it started, it was great- it had relevant and timely tech and political news. As it grew, they found themselves victims of catering to the lowest common denominator (which equates to funny pictures, it seems). Rather than use v4 to figure out a way to change this (maybe similar to Reddits' subreddits?), they created a Digg-styled Facebook clone.

Yes, Top News is still there. However, it's been relegated to a tab.

I wish Digg the best, however I don't see myself using it if I need to follow and share in order to derive value from the site. It's unfortunately- Digg has always been a quality site (in terms of software and vision, if not content).

<comment><USER3> 1\. Digg is still a place for finding crowd sourced news. It simply is recognizing user demand seen across the web for social features and adding that into its product.

2\. You say you get enough sharing on Facebook, etc. but what's funny is every time a new sharing/social site launches, over time, we've all grown to begin using it anyway. First we had Delicious (2003), then we added Facebook (2004), then we added Twitter (2006), then we added Google Buzz (2010). Clearly folks ARENT getting enough of it on any one of those sites, since each site has been able to build sufficient user bases. The Internet's a huge world, and different products will appeal to different groups; many can survive. Besides, if we only had one platform, all the privacy folks would be up in arms (as they get from time to time about Google or more recently Facebook) that X company controls too much of our information. Ultimately, competition/multiple platforms is a good thing. Digg entering this space only adds to that.

3\. You can still type in Digg.com and see what the "world" finds interesting, however now you'll get to see what your friends/followers/"tastemakers" find interesting too. Think of it as a USA Today adding a "local" section.

4\. At first, I agreed with your point that v4 does not appear to show a solution to Digg's lowest common denominator problem. However, upon further thought, it does. Digg has given the power to the user. During the "onboarding process" you select who you follow, friend, etc. and decide what your stream of "My News" will look like. Follow all brilliant people and you'll get interesting, valuable content. Follow idiots and you'll get great funny pictures of cats. Follow a mix and you'll get both.

5\. Ultimately I can see myself using the new Digg, but it will take time to see how it fits into my arsenal of social websites. If it doesn't do enough to differentiate itself, it'll go by the wayside. However, as history has shown us, we seem to have no problem adding another site to the mix.

<comment><USER4> Re: 2. Two social sites are clear winners: Facebook and Twitter. Delicious initially had strong adoption, hence they were acquired, but it's been downhill since then. Google Buzz can be considered a failure; Google forced their social graph upon users and they weren't happy.

For the two successful sharing sites out there, hundreds are struggling (Digg included) or dead.

In regards to the rest of your points, there's no telling how the product will exactly play out until we have access to play with it for ourselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's rather telling that they're marketing Digg as a way to get traffic. Yes, it's good for that that, but that's not what it's _for_. It's (well, used to be) for finding interesting news, articles, links, etc. Getting more people to post their own blogspam probably won't help the site much. And for the actual users, I think it'd be a little disheartening to see Rose trying to appeal to publishers rather than the community.

<comment><USER6> Well, he does start the video saying this preview is for publishers -- just as Google has done outreach to advertisers -- that's fine.

When you compare this to FaceBook who wants publishers to put stupid like buttons on everything everywhere, I like this new Digg approach better. It's easier for publishers, and keeps the web from being overridden with "like me follow me save me" spam.

However, FaceBook's strategy is much more conniving because by spreading widgets all over the web, they're collecting a lot of data about your browsing habits on third party sites. Digg won't get that from simple RSS feeds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hmm, so the idea is basically a mashup of current Digg, plus some ideas from Twitter and Delicious

Not all that shoddy, though it strikes me that finding people to follow might be difficult if you don't have a Twitter or Facebook presence.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm going to toot my own horn, here. Almost three years ago to the day I wrote an article outlining what Digg should do in light of the launch of the Facebook Platform:

1\. Digg should become the default way people like and share things on the web and, in particular, Facebook.

2\. Digg should reflect shared content through the social graph, vs. showing me an aggregate view of all activity in the world. The former is social, the latter is not.

3\. Digg should have a concerted Facebook strategy to accelerate their growth, focusing particularly on the Facebook feed (which was less than a year old at the time).

Three years later Digg is just getting around to this, but Facebook has already gotten to (1) and (2) with their "like" button and their new connect implementation.

Ho hum. To little too late? Sites like <http://likebutton.me/> are in many ways more compelling than digg, which is still dominated by stories that appeal to a very narrow demographic.

<http://20bits.com/articles/5-ways-to-improve-the-digg-app/>

Also, FWIW, Eli White from Digg responded to my article noting the technical difficulty in implementing some of my suggestions -- difficulties which were shortly eliminated by changes to the Facebook platform. So I know at least someone at Digg read it.

</comment><comment><USER4> If I'm understanding the video correctly, I'll have the same problem that I have with Facebook and Twitter: interesting things are either getting drowned out or not being posted at all. I agree with a few of the other posts; this feels like more of a half-hearted attempt to mimic existing sites, instead of delivering something completely new, the way Digg did in December 2004.

</comment><comment><USER9> Regardless of what the haters are saying, this looks cool.

I was an early digg user, and have stopped using it recently because I migrated to other communities like HN.

But this could get me interested again.

This could potentially be very major.

It could almost replace twitter for me, because the #1 reason I use it is for link discovery and propagation. This looks like it is built to handle it that very function from the ground-up.

As a publisher, I am really excited about that.

Edit: As an aside, I am glad that Digg kinda lost it's way - otherwise I wouldn't have migrated to HN (which I am glad I did). But now it would be cool to have both.

</comment><comment><USER10> I see the value in forcing users to self-curate since it allows you to disconnect from the chaff, and it's an interesting play to capture the value of interest-based link sharing in theory. However, like TC, I don't even need to say why it will fail.

</comment><comment><USER11> I hope there's more, because this just looks like minor refinements. Hardly worth the 2 years and umpteen millions of dollars that went into it. "My News" isn't all that different from the existing user profile.

</comment><comment><USER12> fuck, who cares?! hasn't twitter made digg completely irrelevant? (well, i guess all the idiots posting consistently useless bullshit helped too... yay mob voting!)

democracy works, unless half the country is texan.</comment>


Things I've Learned from Reading IndieHackers - <AUTHOR> http://www.toomas.net/2017/07/18/reverse-engineering-a-successful-lifestyle-business-heres-everything-ive-learned-from-reading-indiehackers-com/ <comment><USER2> What I find interesting with Indie Hackers is that it covers a wide range a personal/business situations. It goes from real lifestyle business, to beer- money-making side-projects.

I feel that there is a world of difference between a side-project that is free, to one where you ask customers for their credit cards. Of all professional experiences, I have never learnt as much as I did taking a side- project idea from idea to MVP, then to beta users, then to paying customers, scaling server issues, and marketing strategies. It's not so much about the money, than the fact that you learn so much on so many dimensions.

Sincere thanks + shameless plug, the interview about Smooz was fun, a good self-reflection exercise, and a good source of traffic too ([https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/smooz](https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/smooz))

<comment><USER3> Exactly! What I love about IH is that it doesn't define success as 6+ figures revenue streams, many of them are in early stages or making <$1k/month and are people happy with what they are building even if it is not their main job yet. Which is good to divert from the nonsensical thinking that only unicorn status/IPOs/acquisition equate to success often spoken in the startup world.

<comment><USER2> Me too :-) Lots of people around me were dismissive of the early days of Smooz, that it would never be a "real business". My big goal is 1000€ / months. Not a billion-dollar company : just a life step I'd be really proud of

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In other words. Reading about success to become successful is like reading the autobiography of lotterywinners. There are no secrets to success other than luck, timing and actually shipping your product (or play the lottery).

Contrary to the lottery though much fewer people ship and there are much more winning lottery coupons.

There is nothing to learn about how to build a successful product.

If you want to read anything read about specific obstacles you get into.

Great read!

<comment><USER5> Reading about success _might_ create a feedback loop to yourself so that you feel more motivated and possibly more guided to get to success. Kinda like hanging out with games enthusiasts, and you gradually become one yourself?

<comment><USER6> I have definitely read in one of those exact type of books that surrounding yourself with successful people helps you become successful. Same for surrounding yourself with the rich. Something about feedback loops, and greater access to opportunities through networking.

<comment><USER5> On the other hand you could start experiencing imposter's syndrome. In any case, it's not easy to get that golden ticket for such circles, let alone maintain your rep once there!

<comment><USER6> >Imposter's syndrome

To be fair, there's about sixteen million articles on how to eliminate this.

>it's not easy to get that golden ticket for such circles

Not sure I agree. I want to remember the book I read this in but I can't, but in this case the dude just rented in an super expensive apartment complex. I guess he was able to do that because he had a job, sure, but the point was he rented higher than he was comfortable doing, yet it paid off in the end.

Most of the ways I'm thinking of involve money (get VIP badges at conferences, clubs, whatever), but a simple and free way is to go to shitloads of meetups and other "people gathering" events, being gregarious and meeting everyone you can. No reason you couldn't bump into a high falutin CEO at a motorcycle ride day or on the Frisbee golf course or something.

<comment><USER5> Well, I'm not sure if I'll ever have the wit and guts to hustle my way to that circle, dunno if I even want to in the first place. But there's truth in "it's who you know, not what you know" so ya, feedback-looped, thanks ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The 4-Hour Workweek is the first book listed and I have heard of it so many times I finally decided to read it. I picked up an old copy from the local library and I'm a little over 1/2 way through.

So far I have not been all that impressed. Just in general it seems so light on anything really concrete and more just a motivational book. Where it does have concrete things though they are just really out of date (One example is that they recommend Yahoo Stores where today someone would probably use Shopify or another alternative. Another example is there is a LOT of talk about using magazine ads, but how many people are actually still reading/buying print mags today?).

What are other people's thoughts on this particular book, and what about the updates in the latest edition? Has it changed enough to be somewhat current when the realities of today?

<comment><USER8> It was a groundbreaking book _at the time_. For me, certainly. But I hear it mentioned in nearly every SMB interview podcast I listen to.

Many things are outdated now or simply more mainstream, as it's been read by almost everyone and part of the culture of many.

I consider it a book marking an "era", at least to myself, much like "The Web Startup Success Guide" or "Micro-ISV" by Bob Walsh.

You can't ask Tim to "update" the concrete steps, as those are the ones that worked for him at the time, and now he's doing very different things and he's a very different person.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've always wondered what the advice would look like if you compiled a list of what not to do from failed companies. TFA is a list of the successful ones who got it right, so we know what they did to make it. Yet I'm sure many people follow this advice and still fail.

You can find wildly varying statistics, but somewhere between 50% and 90% of startups will fail within 2 years. What did those companies do (or failed to do) that made them close up shop?

<comment><USER10> Virtually all of them ran out of money because they didn't have enough customers to cover their expenses. It seems silly but if you put it in basic terms, this usually maps to something very concrete in your domain.

<comment><USER11> _if you put it in basic terms, this usually maps to something very concrete in your domain._

For those of us who didn't go to college, can you translate "maps to something very concrete in your domain" into concrete terms? It's pretty abstract.

<comment><USER12> It means that in the area in which a (failed) business tried to operate, the failure can be more specific than "couldn't cover expenses". For example, a shoe company that makes very cheap shoes. Costs 5 dollars to make, sells them for 10 dollars. They have basic operating expenses of 50 dollars a day. They need to sell 10 shoes a day to stay in business by the skin of their teeth. If they don't, they 'failed to attract enough customers to cover expenses'. But they could have a more specific view:

1) We didn't have any advertising since we were operating on a shoestring (hehe) budget - losing customers

2) Our low prices actually made us seem like a low quality entry in the market, and hurt our sales.

3) We could have invested more into our production line to reduce recurrent costs.

Or any number of things. But it ultimately comes down to "we didn't have enough money"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Heh, something I read earlier on indiehackers made me chuckle.

"Honestly, negativity about my business model is more likely to come from a community like Hacker News than it is from my readers."[1]

He's not wrong.

[1]: [https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/site-builder- report](https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/site-builder-report)

</comment><comment><USER14> Yeah this is the best for me:

> Ship. Ship. SHIP. The overwhelming failure case among people who read > interviews like this one is that they spend 98 units of effort reading about > running a business for every 2 units of effort running a business. Flip that > on its head.

I wonder how many successful entrepreneurs actually spent time reading advice blogs when they were starting.

<comment><USER15> Haha, I've read 4 books on writing by famous authors but have written 0 books.

I think I enjoy reading about writing more than actual writing.

<comment><USER16> Finished writing my first novel, waiting on cover art now, and yeah. Reading about writing is a lot more pleasant than the actual writing. Rather, it's editing that sucks.

<comment><USER17> Good writing is great editing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> All good advice, but I'm going to propose something that may be a bit contrary to current wisdom: if you really want a decent lifestyle/work-life balance _don 't start a business!_

So what's the alternative?

Go contracting. Reduce your expenses to the bone, and limit the contracts you do. I now only take 3 month contracts and I do one a year. I make about £24K from that - I know many developers making double my rate. That £24K is more than double my expenses though. If there's a 6 month contract I really like the look of I will do it (especially if it's remote working) - but then I'll take at least a year off.

The great thing about a contract is you go in, do your thing, get out. Job done. No stress. No worry. No customers giving you grief and wanting their money back. No infrastructure going down with admin alerts at 3.00am. No hassle. I don't even have my own limited company. I use an umbrella company and while not as tax efficient I have no dealing with accountants, HMRC, tax returns and all that nonsense.

I think there are many good reasons to start a 'lifestyle' business. I'm just not convinced it's the way to go if work-life balance is what you are looking for.

<comment><USER19> Second that.

My way was to find maintenance contract where I do programming few hours a week that pays my bills and mortgage + occasionally taking some contract work (about once a year, month - three months long).

Contracts could be very stressful (as I am usually picking on some VC type of startup as they use to pay more), but I know it is going to be over soon so it is easy to just go through it.

I am doing that for more then a decade and it works, the only thing is to figure out what you are going to do with your off time: I used to start startups, side projects, travel the world, but for past few years I am just farming and spending time with my kid.

More people should really think about this alternative.

<comment><USER20> Where/how do you find those types of contracts?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> A lot of this seems to reflect the consensus among experienced HN posters as well: you have to actually ship something and charge for it, it has to be something people actually want instead of just what you enjoy making, and so on. Arguably much of this is just common sense, but maybe that's just hindsight talking.

The only one I strongly disagree with is "raise your prices". While this is common advice on HN as well, I think it should come with a caveat that it mostly applies to B2B businesses. If you're running a B2C business, your customers are spending their own money, and possibly on something that isn't a necessity and isn't immediately going to make or save them a greater amount of money in return. Customers in this situation may well be extremely price- sensitive, and even small adjustments in pricing can have dramatic effects on conversion rates. As a counter-example showing that a big price cut can be effective, look at the way that games suppliers like Steam and GoG run their sales.

</comment><comment><USER22> Very interesting post. I think the author can head his own advice and could have hosted it on a domain like startuptools.com or something, because this blog post is going to be backlinked heavily and with a touch of SEO this can be a regular source of targeted traffic.

Just add a pdf checklist at the bottom that needs an opt-in (anybody who reads this will have a very conversion rate) and soon you've got a small list. Pitch them the startup tools or whatever you think is best for the list (using affiliate links) and soon you have a site that is making a passive income. It's easier said than done, but creating a passive income is really that easy and if you're doing the effort you may as well reap the rewards.

</comment><comment><USER23> One other thing not mentioned in the article is the community on Indie Hackers. If you are working on a side project, the majority of the people in the forum are there to help you. They have given me great feedback and ideas for my project.

</comment><comment><USER24> I believe this list is missing what I consider to be the most important factor for success, an underlying strength that the most successful business I read on IndieHackers (and elsewhere) have that is systematically underestimated as a reason for success: _previously acquired audience_.

I believe audience is the most important currency in today's world, especially for digital products. Audience may be followers on Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, etc. Audience may be an email list. Audience may be traditional networking (as if you are in a B2B niche business). If you do not have audience, you can buy one with ads (even so it is easier said than done); or you can borrow the audience from _someone_ else, an influencer (I know there are ways to pay for influencer's audiences, but I do not believe it is very effective, to get some influencer to legitimately love your product and act as your referrer seems to me to be more effective, if harder). Or you can borrow the audience from _something_ else, like HN, Reddit, PH.

All of the steps of launching and building a business, especially the very first ones are enormously easier if you have an audience. And enormously - some times impossibly - harder if you do not have one. This is derived from the adage that your first idea is always wrong. You have to learn everything by shipping early and talking to customers, but if you ship early to 20 eyeballs and talks to luckily one or two potential users, this feedback loop just doesn't count. But if you launch to thousands to eyeballs, even if you are making the mistake of no shipping early or not focused on talking to customers, you will receive unsolicited feedback from some of them.

And a previously built audience of people who trust you at a basic level will be much more responsive and engaged in rationalizing and vocalizing their opinions about your product. They will be "early adopters" type (hard to get that when you buy an audience). And they also will (likely) be people that are your target audience (hard to get that when you borrow an audience from HN and similar).

Some of the most impressive successful business in IndieHackers (according to my own criteria) are the ones who had _years_ of building an audience. Through foruns, email lists, blogs.

A genuine audience is hard to plan ahead. Does not seem plausible to have the vision, the will, and the diligence to think about the industry/niche where I want to launch a business years ahead. So it is good to launch a business where you have genuine passion, somehow you will have the network (even so, not necessarily a large audience).

If you are in that position of having a large audience, seriously consider launching a business because you have a very big unfair advantage (and follow all the advice on this list). If you are not, pay a lot of attention on how to reach your target audience. It is a very tough problem to crack.

<comment><USER25> This is an underrated comment. Breaking through the public's indifference for the first time is mostly luck, snowballing with some existing audience is much easier.

Here's another great comment about the "minimum amount of attention": [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7207943](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7207943)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Nice article, I would add:

1\. "Be patient" as success does not appear overnight. 2\. "Don't be afraid to fail". It's hard to get it right from first time.

I guess second point is covered in ship,ship,SHIP :)

<comment><USER21> Indeed. A remarkable number of overnight successes take ten years to reach that night.

(Apologies for the absence of credit; this isn't original, but I can't remember where I first saw it.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> this is a great resource, a lot more stuff in here than a typical blog post

</comment><comment><USER28> digital nomadism doesn't mean anything.

</comment><comment><USER29> I work one hour a morning. W00t!

<comment><USER29> Actually I should rephrase thatand say, the way I make money, my profession, takes up 3 hours of my day, counting commute time. I can live off that money. The rest of the time I just do what I want, which is what I generally consider to be 'the work.'

<comment><USER30> Your comment would add more value if you actually explained what you do and something related to the link. Right now I only know someone, somewhere, can work for 3 hours a day and play for the rest of time.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to learn Computer Architecture design? - <AUTHOR> Hello! Long time lurker here.
I have a question, as a first year EE student who is not in a top university (and in a third world country), how could I prepare for a Computer Architecture design position in the far future? What are the best resources to learn? What should I focus on? I realize that I will need a PhD and a lot of experience; I am asking for the things that I should do now to begin the journey.
I tried to search the web, however I could not find much.
Thank you in advance. <comment><USER2> If I were in your shoes, I'd search for books and online courses. Here's a couple I found on GitHub:

Modern Computer Architecture and Organization - [https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Modern-Computer- Architect...](https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Modern-Computer-Architecture- and-Organization)

Introduction To 80x86 Assembly Language And Computer Architecture - Richard C. Detmer - [https://github.com/abhinavkorpal/awesome-computer-science- EB...](https://github.com/abhinavkorpal/awesome-computer-science- EBook/raw/master/AssemblyLanguages/Introduction%20To%2080x86%20Assembly%20Language%20And%20Computer%20Architecture%20-%20Richard%20C.%20Detmer.pdf) (PDF)

Some video courses:

[https://github.com/Developer-Y/cs-video-courses#computer- org...](https://github.com/Developer-Y/cs-video-courses#computer-organization- and-architecture)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much! These books are great.

I found some well-regarded online courses, but they had some prerequisites that I needed to study, so I am working on that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Look at fabien sanglards website.

[https://fabiensanglard.net/](https://fabiensanglard.net/) he talks very informatively about a lot of different computer stuff. A lot from the 16 bit era. I would imagine you'd fine it interesting and informative

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that's a great resource. Thank you very much!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am a SWE so I don't do computer architecture design professionally but I have found Professor Onur Mutlu's lectures on Youtube very interesting and helpful.

<comment><AUTHOR> They look really interesting. Thanks a lot, I hadn't came across them in my search.</comment></comment>


"Rust does not have a stable ABI" - <AUTHOR> https://people.gnome.org/~federico/blog/rust-stable-abi.html <comment><USER2> This whole ideology of "the user should get all their software from their Linux distribution" and it's implicit consequence: there's no clear difference between system software (internal tooling) and application software installed by the user (Audacity and friends) should just die already.

I want my OS to just provide a decent interface over which I can install application packages myself, packages that I get from my own sources, just like on Windows. if those packages are statically linked, fine. I know most Linux users disagree, but I don't want the relationship between software vendor and user to be distorted by some distro maintainer, or having to be limited to a package manager. I want to be able to store application installers in my filesystem.

I also want my distribution to hide it's Python binary from me so I can install my own Python without breaking the OS.

Basically: stop assuming that I want to live under your wing. I just want you to give me a nice desktop environment, a terminal and a well docomented way to install third party software.

I know distro developers don't owe me anything, and it's fine if they do something else, but this is the actual reason why Linux isn't used in the desktop.

<comment><USER3> I think the original reason for shared libraries, and the only true one is that it's meant to save hard drive (and maybe memory) space. But the ratio between assets vs code is now so big (media files, or data in data intensive algorithms) with code representing nothing, i don't think any optimisation is really worth it anymore.

<comment><USER4> There are also security implications. Update one shared lib with a security patch and all applications that use it are now using a patched version.

<comment><USER5> This is very often repeated argument in favor of giving control over shared libraries to the distribution, but it is mostly distribution's marketing. In practice, most users don't _really_ care about security. That very small portion of users who do care about security, don't wait 2 weeks or more for distribution to make fixes available, they fix it/mitigate it themselves as soon as possible.

It is true that it is easier to fix one version of a library than 10 different versions. But if you need 10 different versions for different applications, you probably do not need to patch all 10 of them.

<comment><USER6> Most people don't care about security ... until they do.

Most people don't understand security and are not equipped with the necessary knowledge to correctly judge risk. As long as security is just something that gets in the way to get some job done, most people will just plow ahead, since not getting the job done right now has a high and easy to understand cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article is pretty interesting and I learned quite a few things, but it looks like the author is knowingly not answering the issue they raise by themselves.

In my opinion, the most important thing distros does that is incompatible with how rust currently works, is handling security/bug updates.

The one libjpeg.so for everyone is meant to fix libjpeg flaws for everyone. And it has many security flaws. And it has many users. There is no denying the way this is done by distros is good.

Now, to pick author's code, one of its dependency is a CSS parsing, which is prone to flaws. (Maybe not /security/ flaws, but still) The question is, how is the distro supposed to handle that?

I know rust has tooling for that, but it seems to me that with the perfect version match crate build system, every dependency will happily break API. So let's say author no longer has time to develop rust librsvg, and cssparser crate has a major flaw, which is fixed only in a new API rewrite branch, then what? Distro are supposed to fix that themselves? Sounds like much more work for them.

<comment><USER5> > There is no denying the way this is done by distros is good.

Let me tell you, the way it is done by distros (Centos, Debian) is far from being good. You will get the fix a long time after the bug is published. And you only get it if your system is recent enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a bunch of nonsense. Rust prefers static linking because it is predictable. These supposedly "huge" binaries are laughably small on a modern >1TB hard drive. If you're building a tiny embedded system, by all means optimize your builds system-wide, you have total control! But for a desktop, is this really a concern?

<comment><USER9> Yes, it's a concern. Firstly, hard drive space isn't the only reason to make binaries small - you have RAM pressure, cache pressure, and bandwidth to save. Secondly and more importantly, waste adds up. If you replaced every binary on the system with a Rust equivalent - which, to listen to some advocates, is the eventual goal - you could end up with a base system that's many times larger.

In a larger sense, something that sets out to be a "systems programming language" needs to be exactly the sort of thing suitable for a tiny embedded system, even if it isn't running on one, because everything else builds on top of it. The attitude that "we have tons of power, why not waste it" just doesn't fly at the very lowest levels. You can write a desktop application in Python, and it's broadly fine - but try writing an OS kernel!

<comment><USER10> There are patches that let Rust run on ESP32 systems, so think it's entirely suitable for tiny embedded things. What makes it bloaty is the linked in standard library, but it's not an unsolvable crisis; you can dynlink against glibc, there is a crate for core rust IIRC. That'll get you reasonably sized rust applications.

And for writing kernels the same applies; without the stdlib, it gets a lot smaller very fast. I've done it, so I think I can count myself on having some experience there. The biggest part of my kernel is a 128KB scratch space variable it uses during boot as temporary memory until it has read the memory mappings from the firmware and bootstrapped memory management on a basic level. The remainder of the kernel (minus initramfs) is then about 1MB large, the largest part after the 128KB scratch space using about 96KB.

<comment><USER11> Regarding embedded, you generally only have one program. So dynamic linking buys you precisely nothing in that space.

<comment><USER10> Depends on if embedded refers to microcontrollers or just single board computers in various devices, but it wouldn't buy you much either way, yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wouldn't it be possible to have a C-like language that is somewhat backward compatible with C, and have the nice security features of Rust?

I get that Rust is awesome, but I'm not certain you need to make an entire new language just to have the security stuff.

Of course it might be complicated to do, but in the end, aren't there linters or other validators that can give the same security results rust has, but with C or even C++?

<comment><USER13> There is Cyclone, Checked C, Deputy. Such "C-but-weird" languages have an "uncanny valley" problem:

• "C, but safer" on its own is not very enticing. With no other benefits, it's easy not to switch, and instead promise to try harder writing standard C safely, or settle for analysis tools or sandboxes.

• People who use C often have backwards compatibility constraints. Switching to another compiler and a dialect that isn't standard C is a tough sell. You can still find C programmers who think adopting C99 is too radical.

• Programming patterns commonly used in C (rich in pointer juggling, casts, and textual macros) are inherently risky, but if you try to replace them (e.g. with generics, iterators), it stops looking like C anyway.

So "safer C" is unattractive to people who are tied to C implementations or don't want to learn a new language.

But people who do want to learn a new language and use modern tooling, don't want all the unfixable legacy baggage of C.

Rust dodges these problems by not being a "weird C". It's a clean design, with enough features to be attractive on its own, and safety is just a cherry on top.

<comment><USER14> Cyclone was not fully realized though.

And there are languages that try to keep to C and add some minor safety improvements, eg my language C3 (subarrays/slices, contracts, all UB has runtime checks in debug builds and more)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not an expert, but if you want a stable Rust-to-non-rust ABI, you can use the C ABI as the article mentions. If you want a stable rust-to-rust ABI for FFI there's a crate for that [https://crates.io/crates/abi_stable](https://crates.io/crates/abi_stable)

It seems somewhat unrealistic to expect a really new language commit across the board to the same sort of ABI stablility as a decades-old language such as C.

</comment><comment><USER16> With everything slowly( or sometimes rapidly) moving into containers (docker, systemd portable services, flatpak, snaps) I think the concept of system library will probably become irrelevant at some point not that far into the future.

<comment><USER17> I don't think we're anywhere near a future where "ls" will be run in a container.

<comment><USER18> I used to think that we're not anywhere near a future where most applications came bundled with an entire browser, yet here we are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > While C++ had the problem of "lots of template code in header files", Rust > has the problem that monomorphization of generics creates a lot of compiled > code. There are tricks to avoid this and they are all the decision of the > library/crate author.

Is there any research on having compilers do some of these tricks automatically? A compiler should, at least in principle, be able to tell what aspects of a type parameter are used in a given piece of code. Such a compiler could plausibly produce code that is partially or fully type-erased automatically without losing efficiency. In some cases, I would believe that code size, runtime performance (due to improved cache behavior), and compile times would all improve.

<comment><USER20> Implementing type erasure for Rust compiler is a research problem. In principle it ought to be possible, but I am not aware of any prior work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> In a way I'm happy rust does not have a stable abi. Swift does, but the stability is 'whatever apple swift emit'. Very little documentation, that what's there is out of date, so the only practical language that can interact with swift is swift. To be able to interact from another language, one would have to parse swift, make the semantics of all types and generics match exactly to be able to do the simplest things. (For example array and string, two core types are stock full of generics and protocols)

I'd hate to have the same happening for rust.

</comment><comment><USER22> I didn't know that it was possible to export Rust enums with a C ABI like that, that's nifty!

</comment><comment><USER23> It might simply be the time to invent a more modern ABI.

If for some reason modern languages insist on monomorphization, we should be able to design an ABI that suits that need.

Rough sketch:

A modern shared library is code that generates code (very much like a dynamic linker is actually code that links code).

The interface of the library would consist of:

a) a description language for the shape of data types (not types themselves, mind you)

b) a list of generators for functions

c) a list of function applied to shapes as a requirement

The job of the modern dynamic linker would then be to invoke all the functions to the necessary shapes, put the resulting code into memory and link it. It might be useful to support this with some kind of caching mechanism.

</comment><comment><USER24> There's a lot of either/or false dichotomy being discussed in here. Distro packaging (or not) comes with various tradeoffs of course, some good or bad depending on perspective.

To get to the point, I quite prefer the package manager way of installing software to "hunt down a single release" app installers of Windows/Mac. The only issue is that sometimes software is a bit out of date. That's what the snap/flat pack/appimage projects are trying to solve.

As soon as one of those three get their user-hostile issues fixed, it will be a software paradise. :D

</comment><comment><USER25> The optimized and stripped library in rust was about 8 times the size of the C version. While 9MB is not a lot by itself, if a significant portion of libraries decide they want to switch to rust that would explode disk usage!

Though I think my problem with rust is that they make breaking changes in their compiler and spec every release. People regularly building on rust unstable to get features not yet released. This all makes things complicated for a distro.

But the points at about making breaking changes at the bottom resonated with me. Stability is what has allowed the Linux ecosystem to grow so well. Many interconnected parts all moving in unison. Not being able to fix a bad design decision because of this does suck. Still, having everything work and sadly is more important than perfect design.

<comment><USER26> > Though I think my problem with rust is that they make breaking changes in > their compiler and spec every release

That's not accurate.

Rust is backwards compatible. Most 1.0 code would still compile perfectly fine today. There have been some minor breaking changes for soundness reasons, if I remember correctly. There also has been one edition upgrade (2018 edition), but every new compiler still supports the old edition, and most new stuff actually works in the old edition as well.

There are experimental features, which are only available on the nightly compiler and have to be opted in to with a "#[feature(X)]" attribute. But those are very clearly labelled as experimental, unstable, and evolving, with no stability guarantees whatsoever.

The criticism I would share is that while Rust is backwards compatible, it is obviously not forwards compatible. Rust evolved dramatically since 1.0, and many developers jump on new features once available. So compiling actively maintained projects with a older compiler in distros like Debian is not fun.

But the rate of change has slowed down _a lot_ over the past year or so.

<comment><USER27> I think the concerns are more towards the ecosystem and community, which are very curiosity-driven. I tried Rust about one year ago and _nothing_ would compile without the nightly toolchain. After reading the Rust book there was this realization that I now have to go and read all the new language proposals, because everybody is using them already. This and the excessive use of metaprogramming by some users drove me away from the language.

<comment><USER28> You might want to try again, one year is a _very_ long time in rust land. We've seen some very high profile stabilizations quite recently.

<comment><USER27> > one year is a very long time in rust land

That's the problem and stabilization doesn't solve it. Only rejecting language changes will.

<comment><USER29> > nothing would compile without the nightly toolchain.

This problem is solved though. Almost all nightly users shifted to stable after async-await was stabilized. The last holdout (IIRC) was Rocket, which also compiles on stable now. I can't think of any popular libraries or frameworks that require nightly. I can't think of any popular feature that people would want to use nightly for.

I think you could learn Rust now, write your code and then not worry about any new features that are added, ever. Your code will work without breaking. Keep upgrading the compiler every 6 weeks and your code still won't break. That's a guarantee.

<comment><USER30> Rocket should _soon_ not need nightly, but the documentation for currently available releases from github states that it still does[1]. (The compiler is ready, but the code/cargo.toml hasn't yet caught up)

[1][https://rocket.rs/v0.4/guide/getting-started/#installing- rus...](https://rocket.rs/v0.4/guide/getting-started/#installing-rust)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I really don't see the problem with just statically linking everything.

</comment><comment><USER32> Why are people even using Rust and Go, aside from employer say-so? They're not formally defined, there aren't multiple functioning implementations, it's just not a good idea.

<comment><USER20> Go has a supported alternative implementation, gccgo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Two issues with the post:

\- An ABI is not a PL feature, but a platform feature, I.e., it is not that Rust does not have a stable ABI, but that eg Linux does not have a stable ABI for Rust (it has one for C and you can use this ABI from Rust).

\- You can export generic Rust APIs with a stable C ABI by using trait objects, and it is often very easy to do this. So the claim that Rust and C++ are on the same boat wrt generics / instantiations is not true.

<comment><USER34> > An ABI is not a PL feature, but a platform feature, I.e., it is not that > Rust does not have a stable ABI, but that eg Linux does not have a stable > ABI for Rust (it has one for C and you can use this ABI from Rust).

This is somewhat of a disingenuous thing to say, because it implies that the fault lies with linux for not providing a stable abi to rust. An ABI comprises various conventions wrt calling convention, name mangling, data layout, etc.; these are provided variably by the operating system, language specification, and language compiler. And, as TFA mentions, the rust compiler explicitly does not provide a stable ABI.

<comment><USER33> I don't agree.

The C ABI is specified in a spec that Linux adopts (eg the x86-psabi), and it is what allows all software using this abi (from assembly to C to Rust) to eg Interface with each other. Linux could write an ABI spec for Rust on its platform today and add a patch to the Rust compiler (or to a C++ comoiler) to adhere to this ABI.

Nobody has done this, and from many povs this is something that does not make much sense doing, but it's up to the platform to specify how binary software communicates with each other. Linux only specifies this for C, and that's what Rust software currently does and has to use on Linux.

<comment><USER35> In GNU/Linux it's the GNU part that supplies the C ABI. The GNU compiler collection provides it, and the GNU libc uses it talk with the Linux kernel, usually through traps appropriate to the CPU. The LLVM toolchain (and other alternatives, like ICC) conform to this de facto standard. The GNU devs designed their ABI long before Linux came along and it is mostly inherited from even older OSes like BSD and SVr4 and developed refined and adapted over decades by a common community of interests.

If you're going to criticise GNU/Linux for not providing a Rust ABI, make sure you're aiming at the GNU part. The Linux part doesn't care.

<comment><USER36> At the same time the C ABI is not part of the C standard. It's a GNU thing (or a Microsoft thing for Windows, or an Apple thing for Mac, or...). While they require the compiler to provide a stable ABI there's nothing preventing C20 (or future versions) from breaking existing C ABIs. It's not really right to talk about "the" C ABI, rather there's the x86 GCC ABI and the x86_64 GCC ABI and the x86 MSVC ABI and the MIPS GCC ABI and the...

That's why compilers have target "triples" (now more than 3 items): <CPU architecture><subarchitecture>-<vendor>-<os/system>-<abi>. So you might have ARMv7m-st-none-eabi for some embedded STM32 bare-metal code and x86_64-pc- linux-gnu for Linux. All C, all different ABIs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Off-topic but it seems the quotes around the title don't render on the front page, but they do render on this page? It flips the entire tone of this article.

Initially on reading the title I just eye-rolled, but clicking through and seeing it was a response to that, and was actually the quote in quote marks made much more sense!!

<comment><USER38> I see quotes on both pages on Firefox 79 on Windows

<comment><USER39> The submitter might have edited the title.

HN fixes a number of things in titles on submission but allows to undo these automatic changes manually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> "Why do distros expect all the living organisms on your machine to share The World's Single Lungs Service, and The World's Single Stomach Service, and The World's Single Liver Service?"

This has been debated for years, and parts of the answers is right above. Also, software is not a collection of biological organisms. And the local variables are not shared, so WTF anyway. The analogy makes no sense. Everybody is already neatly separated.

Proponent of everything static have yet to show non toy / very specialized systems where everything is actually static.

Let's avoid the strawman anyway and in this case, yes, some static linking can have its use, especially for some small utility / metaprog / etc. packages, although it has and will always have drawbacks to, especially for higher level feature support (e.g. a codec). You have to go into the specifics to understand which are more important depending on the context. Probably a mix is needed.

For a Linux distro, I suspect some people will go crazy if the fix for a security vuln of a small piece of code ends up downloading hundreds of MB, but maybe there are advantages so great that this is something we can live with. The net perf impact is extremely hard to predict and measure. You will duplicate tons of code, but arguably e.g. the cache overhead might not be extremely bad, we now have tons of memory, so maybe we can waste some, etc.

Note however that if a Linux distro is competing with other kind of plateforms, there is the risk to put the Linux distro at a disadvantage if the static vs. dynamic (maybe on a package per package basis) is chosen improperly, because other platforms make the distinction between platform and application, their platform typically provides a very large API, and they won't go the insane way and switch to static.

The lack of proper dynamic linkage story for Rust is a problem that needs to be fixed to enable some kind of usages. Not something that can always be worked-around (sometimes it can, and for some crate you really want static to begin with anyway)

<comment><USER41> > For a Linux distro, I suspect some people will go crazy if the fix for a > security vuln of a small piece of code ends up downloading hundreds of MB > [...].

I always wondered about this problem; you could distribute the .o/.a's the same way you currently distribute the .so's, and integrate the linker with the package manager. This theoretically seems to share most of the benefits of both static and dynamic linking: push complexity away from the kernel/dynamic loader, smaller updates = easier patching (compared to fully static binaries), etc. And it works for closed source.

OpenBSD does something similar already for libc and kernel (for boot-time address layout randomisation) and it works great.

<comment><USER42> Except that shares all the same ABI issues as shared libraries. If they wouldn't link at runtime they won't link at package-install-time either.</comment></comment></comment>


Why Mark Zuckerberg is a bad role model for aspiring tech execs - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/070212-tech-ceo-college-260546.html

<comment><USER2> They're conflating "CEO of a legacy company" with "startup founder".

</comment><comment><USER3> This is why my role model is the Dos Equis guy.

<comment><USER4> Stay thirsty my friend.</comment></comment>


My Experiment Opting Out of Big Data Made Me Look Like a Criminal - <AUTHOR> http://time.com/83200/privacy-internet-big-data-opt-out/?n=1

<comment><USER2> This is a duplicate of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7680828](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7680828) from three days ago, except with a ?n=1 to the URL. The previous posting had 174 comments.</comment>


Sockey – A P2P multiplayer soccer game based on WebRTC - <AUTHOR> http://sockey.eu/ <comment><USER2> I'm surprised it's taken this long for me to see a WebRTC game on hacker news. I think that's a very promising technology for realtime games in the browser. When more websites can hide source code with web assembly, I wonder if that's what it'll take for more to come out.

<comment><USER3> That's because WebRTC really isn't a great fit. It doesn't guarantee a UDP pipe so it can fallback to TCP with disastrous results and the dependency chain on the server side makes it really painful to integrate.

<comment><USER4> You can cause effectively force UDP by doing two things:

1\. Don't signal TCP ICE candidates. 2\. Don't provide TCP TURN servers.

If you do those two things, it's impossible to get a TCP connection. In fact, just doing #2 will nearly guarantee it (since a TCP connection outside of TURN is so rare).

But ICE will almost always prefer UDP over TCP, so if it's using TCP it's because otherwise you simply wouldn't be connected at all. And if you'd prefer not to be connected, you could simply close the connection when you observe it's over TCP.

<comment><USER3> Okay so you can force a UDP connection, still doesn't solve the second point which is that it's a _royal pain_ to use the Google library.

Last time I tried to get the chromium builds going on win32 was 3 hours of complete failure and obscure error messages because of various "non-googler" flags. The WebRTC page basically says you can't do Android development if you don't have a Linux machine [1].

There's been a bunch of game studios that started down the path of WebRTC and basically gave up since it's so hard to integrate. Compare that with 2-3 C files and a couple headers + libsodium for something like Netcode.io.

Also game servers don't really care about congestion control. They rarely break ~15kbps of continuous data per client versus something that scales up with bandwidth like a file transfer. Any case where congestion control is an issue should be something that needs to negotiated over a TCP stream anyway(otherwise you're just reinventing TCP over UDP).

[1] [https://webrtc.org/native-code/development/prerequisite- sw/](https://webrtc.org/native-code/development/prerequisite-sw/)

<comment> TD-Linux Congestion control is required to be enforced at the browser level as an anti- DoS measure. You could just have the browser API limited to 15kbps, but that seems like a silly limitation when the way around it has already been implemented...

<comment><USER3> Take a look at Netcode.io, all clients are auth'd with a token and any client that doesn't have the token gets ignored. The token also mandates what IP/hostnames are a valid destination. That way someone trying to DoS just gets their account blacklisted.

Congestion control isn't going to help when a bad actor spoofs your protocol and dump GBs of data on you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks like a remake of Haxball (haxball.com) that doesn't require Flash.

</comment><comment><USER6> I spawned in the upper left corner outside of the field and couldn't get inside the wall of the field.

<comment><USER7> That means you're the coach

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hello I'm the dev of this game ask me anything you want, we are working on an updated version of the game stay tuned on our official page [https://www.facebook.com/SockeyGame/](https://www.facebook.com/SockeyGame/).

</comment><comment><USER9> Love it! The tempo and physics feel really good and you can do a lot of cool fun goals! I didn't have any noticeable lag.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for your feedback, stay tuned on @SockeyGame for our 2.0 version of the game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Had problems with Firefox 55.0.2 on Linux. Typing WASD would just open the search dialogue, not move the player.

</comment><comment><USER11> Failed to register service worker: DOMException: Only secure origins are allowed

</comment><comment><USER12> congrats, but it I got too much lag while playing

<comment><AUTHOR> It definitely lacks some feature indicating where the room is hosted. This would make it easier to find rooms with a lower latency.

Disclaimer: I am not related to the game creator.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Unfortunately, as many game creators, they seem to believe that everybody in the world has qwerty keyboards, which is not the case. Using the A, W, S and D letters does not make sense on azerty keyboards (up and down reversed). Why can't we use keyboard arrows to move?

Too bad, the game would have been really fun to play if controls were usable for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is a button to select the input keys when logging in.

<comment><USER13> Oh you're right! I searched for something after the login screen but I missed this before. Thank you.</comment></comment></comment>


Comcast executives appear to share cozy relationships with regulators - <AUTHOR> https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2014/jul/01/comcast-executives-share-cozy-relationships-regula/ <comment><USER2> As much as I hate Comcast and occasionally say prayers that a cement truck accidentally crashes into Tom Wheeler's house, and I'd love to see a massive scandal here - these emails don't seem incriminating at all.

A high level official got invited to a party, and declined because "the rules folks over here tell me I can't". They know each other (makes sense, they're both working at a high level in the same industry) and they have people watching their backs to make sure they don't do anything that can legally be considered corrupt (again, makes sense, shit's a minefield and an ill-defined one at that. If I were in that position I would have people keeping an eye on that whether I was corrupt or pious as a lamb)

Am I missing something? I clicked on that link salivating for the political blood of Comcast executives and all I got was a polite grownup email version of "sry bro can't come, rules n shyt, sounds bumpin tho"

<comment><USER3> You're missing that this person is trying to satisfy the _letter of the law_ , instead of the _intent_.

Basically, if your reaction to such an invitation is to ask legal "how can I go to this rad absolutely not work related party without giving the impression of impropriety?" instead of telling the other person "this is unacceptable and you know it".. you're not out for the publics best interest.

<comment><USER4> I work in a regulatory environment (much lower level) and have turned down stuff (cheap stuff, like a reception where I might get comped a drink).

Out of sheer politeness, I sometimes respond with a "those stuffed shirts say I can't". It's a handy non-confrontational excuse that can't really be argued against, and doesn't make you sound like a prig.

<comment><USER3> Did you then continue to casually extend a dinner invitation? I get it, people don't want to seem like cold assholes. But I think we should be very wary of a regulatory environment where high-level executives give heartfelt apologies intermixed with personal stories and backup plans instead of clearly rejecting such obviously inappropiate offers.

<comment><USER5> If you're a decent regulator, it's _your job_ to be a cold. That's basically the whole point. You don't need to be an asshole, but you should damn well insist on deference and distance.

By way of analogy, can you imagine a judge dispensing with formalities and telling the people facing him in court "Relax! Call me Jim." Obviously not. Because when it comes to the law, conspicuously arms-lengths relationships are essential.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The CEO of Comcast plays golf with the President. How much cozier can you get exactly?

[http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2013/08/obama-golfs- with...](http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2013/08/obama-golfs-with-comcast- ceo-170524.html)

<comment><USER5> Believe it or not, regulators actually maintain some independence from the Executive. Were that not that case, this would be more of a scandal, as opposed to the standard sleaze that has become (ahem) par for the course in DC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A certain level of corruption is perhaps expected in any large bureaucracy. People are, after all, only human.

What really galls me, however, is the circumstances. This isn't some low-level flunky taking a bribe under the table to move things along. This is a ranking official tasked specifically with overseeing the Comcast merger work, who should have known that they'd be subjected to extra scrutiny.

Also, interestingly, the FOIA response appears not to have redacted the e-mail addresses of a number of very high-ranking public officials in the FTC and FCC.

<comment><USER8> I have to agree with Alex here - I see no evidence of wrong doing and no evidence of making sure there is no evidence.

I mean she asked, she said no. Regulators are there primarily to prevent abuse, not to replace either vicious competition or political oversight. So it's going to be cozy.

<comment><USER7> I agree that there's no actual wrongdoing present, looking only at the content of the e-mails.

However, the tone of the e-mail suggests that this is one event in a pattern, and that the size and unusual nature of the particular gift (how many times are you going to get to go to the Olympics?) is what prompted a discussion with "the rules folks".

Wouldn't you expect a good regulator with a "cozy" relationship to already know what's in and out of bounds? That seems like it would be part of their job, without needing to consult the rules people.

But perhaps I'm being too uncharitable, and both sides should get the benefit of the doubt. I'm willing to concede I might be reading in between the lines too much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Regulators and industry have always had somewhat of an incestuous relationship. Often the experts in fields like telecom have to come from industry and often times they have an eye on their future career. The FCC, FAA, FDA, Defense, all are plagued with this problem. Unless we are willing to pay comparable to industry, the regulators will be a revolving door.

<comment><USER10> > Regulators and industry have always had somewhat of an incestuous > relationship. Often the experts in fields like telecom have to come from > industry and often times they have an eye on their future career.

It's kind of hard to see how it could work any other way. Suppose, for example, we want someone to head the FAA. It seems obvious you want someone with a vast knowledge of the aviation industry.

Are there really many people who have that vast knowledge and are NOT working in the aviation industry? We're basically supposed to look for someone whose career has nothing to do with aviation, but has somehow, perhaps as a hobby, become one of the country's top aviation industry experts?

<comment><USER9> Yes, it is kind of a conundrum in a way, in a lot of ways you really need the real world experience of the industry people but that implies a little bit of a conflict of interest. I guess if there was a way to have someone have a career as a regulator, but again, perhaps that limits their experience and knowledge....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder what would the meeting be like if there was no anti-corruption rules and this was allowed.

</comment><comment><USER12> Cozy? Hardly, do you know how much that relationship cost comcast?

</comment><comment><USER13> "appear"?

</comment><comment><USER14> And in other breaking news, the sky is blue, things fall down, and water is wet. Please stay tuned for further developments as these exciting stories continue to unfold.

<comment><USER15> Yes, solid evidence of inferred corruption is such old and boring news, hardly worthy of our time and attention.</comment></comment>