Late Labs: what happened? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@elof/what-happened-to-late-labs-eee6bc4c8002

<comment><USER2> Late Labs was a really stellar idea... I followed it pretty closely for awhile (even rocked a sticker on my laptop!). I was sad to see it go, but it's interesting to see this post-mortem.

It does sound super tough, and a scary environment for a VC to get involved. Double taxing sounds pretty bad, and is one more reason for a VC to avoid the risk.

I know Assembly is a somewhat similar idea, and they've raised a bit of funding. I wonder if they got around that limitation somehow.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can someone explain the double taxation part to me?

Could a bounty system with equity have worked? ex: [https://www.bountysource.com/](https://www.bountysource.com/)

<comment><USER4> hey there. Founder of Late Labs here. We could have avoided the double tax problem if we didn't try and keep a small piece of the equity for the company.

Would have to play it like AngelList did for investment (they never actually handled any money or helped with negotiation). Our idea was to keep a very small portion of the equity from each deal to create a big pool of high risk early stage equity... which ended up being our downfall.

Bountysource looks like it can avoid that because they only act as a marketplace for introductions. Make sense?</comment></comment>


Five years after the iPhone, carriers are the biggest threat to innovation - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/5/3138711/five-years-after-the-iphone-carriers-are-the-biggest-threat-to-innovation-editorial

<comment><USER2> Very surprised to read this nugget. I had no idea Verizon was so culpable in Palm's implosion.

>Just look at the tragic story of Palm, which went from darling of CES 2009 to legendary failure in just 31 short months. The company initially wanted to ship its Pre smartphone on Verizon, but the carrier backed out and Palm was forced to languish on Sprint, where it was unable to compete directly against the iPhone. When Verizon finally picked up the Pre Plus the next year, the carrier ordered millions of devices and then flippantly refused shipment and decided to focus on the Motorola Droid, leaving Palm sitting on millions of unsold units that couldn't be used on any other carrier in the world. The decision cost Palm hundreds of million of dollars and led directly to the company selling itself to HP.

</comment><comment><USER3> "When Verizon finally picked up the Pre Plus the next year, the carrier ordered millions of devices and then flippantly refused shipment and decided to focus on the Motorola Droid, leaving Palm sitting on millions of unsold units that couldn't be used on any other carrier in the world."

Was this breach of contract, or not? If Verizon's "flippant" refusal of shipment was permitted by the contract, then this is Palm's mismanagement. They should have negotiated terms that would have mitigated this risk, or insisted on "NO DEAL" precisely because of this risk.

Palm was a large company. They had lawyers - what were they doing and saying about this?

</comment><comment><USER4> Carriers hate to be called as "dumb pipes" but unfortunately they have become the dumb pipes only. Any idea why Verizon blocked Google Wallet? Isn't it illegal?

</comment><comment><USER5> I guess this post by MG Seigler is relevant here: <http://parislemon.com/post/15604811641/why-i-hate-android>

Before anyone makes any Ad Hominem comment, may I please request to focus on the point in that post relevant to the thread here?</comment>


Ask HN: Best HN hiring search app? - <AUTHOR> I recall there is a HN hirng search web app per location, per category, remote or not, but could not find it now. <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10166863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10166863)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10156804](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10156804)</comment>


How to achieve a 94% female contributor ratio on a wiki - <AUTHOR> http://lola-pr.blogspot.com/2011/03/why-women-wikis-do-mix.html

<comment><USER2> Leaving aside the sexist subtext that women appreciate beauty more than men...

While Wikifashion is pretty and, that beauty certainly (I'm sure) helps contribute to it's success: Don't you think your high female contributor ratio has more to do with your subject matter being more interesting to women?

<comment><USER3> I wasn't intending for my article to come across as sexist. I merely wanted to point out that certain elements of our design may appeal more to women than wikipedia's.

<comment><USER2> Ah, re-reading your article, I think I misunderstood your use of "pretty". Where I was reading it to mean "well designed and aesthetically pleasing", retrospectively it seems like you're using it as a catch-all term for "a-look- of-some-kind-that-appeals-to-women"? In which case, I apologize for crying sexist-wolf.

Incidentally; Wikifashion is __genius __. I'm totally going to score points by showing it to my fashion-obsessed-and-wikipedia-contributing girlfriend tonight.

<comment><USER3> Apology accepted :) Glad your girlfriend will like it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Harry Potter fandom is roughly 99% female. Out of several hundred people I knew in the fandom, I can think of 5 (including myself) that were male.

It is not hard to get a heavily biased female contributor ratio...you simply need to talk about things that are of interest to females. Computers and startups, unfortunately, do not seem to be among them.

<comment><USER5> To be fair, most blokes find talk about computers and startups to be dead boring too.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Disclaimer I'm a co-founder of Wikifashion.

Wikipedia Signpost also had a bit to say about it here: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/20...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-03-07/In_the_news)

<comment><USER6> coenhyde of brisbanephp fame?

<comment><AUTHOR> The one and only :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why would you ever want such a skewed and biased ratio? It's not something to be proud of, it's a failure.

<comment><USER8> Indeed, it's still skewed, but the other way around. The ratios should be around 52%/48% to be representative of.the world population (AFAIK).

</comment></comment><comment> can-tank-er I would estimate that the contributors to the Vintage Sewing Pattern wiki Wikia are >95% female, and many of them are older, too.

<http://vintagepatterns.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page>

When it first started, the pages were bare-bones and the UI was not "pretty" in any way, so I don't think it was UI driven; I think it was content-driven. Now there are >35,000 pattern images, with plentiful metadata, including category tagging, and links to reviews and vendors.

</comment><comment><USER6> aha best line... "ergo Wikipedia you're that really smart nerd in high school that all the cool girls secretly wanted to date but wouldn't dare."</comment>


Amoebas Are Smarter Than They Appear - <AUTHOR> https://daily.jstor.org/amoebas-are-smarter-than-they-appear/ <comment><USER2> I have commented elsewhere[0] but I will copy it here:

For anyone interested in looking at this story in depth, here are some of the times it or similar stories have been submitted to HN. Some of these submissions have comments and discussions, and those might be interesting to read too. Note that these are not all the same story, but they are all talking about "solving" things like TSP using slime-moulds or other organisms.

My take is this: No, they're not really doing anything interesting other than search, and no, they're not "solving" the TSP. Not least, given larger instances, they don't always find the minimum path, and they don't even find necessarily good paths. So while they do find a path, it really doesn't have any impact at all on the question of solving NP problems.

None.

If someone disagrees with that then I'd love to have a decent discussion.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18789129](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18789129)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18787254](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18787254)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18784956](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18784956) (1 comment)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18775638](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18775638)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18774656](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18774656)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18771244](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18771244)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18765134](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18765134)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18750018](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18750018)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18746032](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18746032)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18745530](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18745530)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18735903](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18735903) (76 comments)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18729284](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18729284)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18725828](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18725828) (1 comment)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4304427](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4304427)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4303169](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4303169)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3970427](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3970427) (20 comments)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3853748](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3853748)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3757527](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3757527)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3728933](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3728933)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3477746](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3477746)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3406446](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3406446)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1727875](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1727875)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1072876](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1072876) (21 comments)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1071568](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1071568)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1071533](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1071533)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1071093](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1071093)

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>=

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18789221](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18789221)</comment>


Ask HN: Would you use a service that sent you customized spoken information? - <AUTHOR> I'm an American currently on a teaching fellowship at a university in the Philippines. I'm surrounded by people who are sharp and computer savvy with excellent English and pretty accents.
I want to make something for myself, and I'd like to know if it has broader appeal.
An MP3 is recorded in the daytime here, and if you're in the US you receive it at 5am. It runs like this:
"Hi Ken, this is Patti, It's Monday, May 19th. Bitcoin is up a dollar since yesterday, and your blog kind of had a minor spike yesterday when a lot of people shared the "Why God Hates German Words" post on twitter. Ray Kurzweil's Google News share went up because he announced a new book. The Syrian rebels took over an airport. Your mom's birthday is next week, and you have that stupid meeting tomorrow at six. Remember to bring the file for Deogracia. Ani Difranco's new album comes out on Friday. Another Emirati professorship posted on higheredjobs.com, but it doesn't say anything about family housing. It's supposed to be sunny today with a high of 85. Have a good one, dude."
I would kill for this, and it would be easy to configure some web scraping scripts that gave Patti crib notes for making these MP3s so she didn't have to do a lot of manual web browsing. I can imagine holding the phone to my head after my alarm went off an being totally energized and ready to get up after listening to something like this, and my friends over here, even professor friends, think it would be a laughably good deal to get a dollar per recording. I figure I could charge $2 and turn a profit.
Does this sound to the veteran entrepreneurs on HN like something that a wider audience might be interested in? Is there something I haven't thought of that would make it incredibly stupid to try? Any other thoughts or suggestions? <comment><USER2> I would not use something like this. I prefer written information. Easier to refer to again if I want to remind myself of one or two points out of the entire content.

I also don't like the trend of posting programming "how-tos" as videos.

</comment><comment><USER3> See Capsule.fm, <http://capsule.fm> for how one team is doing this.

</comment><comment><USER4> I had the exact same thoughts as thomasbk, although I have to admit that it does sound kind of cool. No way I would pay $2 or even $1 per day for it, though. Roughly $10 per month sounds reasonable.

I think you'd find that assembling all the right data (which is the true product) is way more work than you imagine. Sure, you could probably do it for yourself with a doable amount of work, but to be able to do it for ANYONE is a massive undertaking. And... yeah, you probably don't want to try to build Google Now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your thoughts. The one thing I'd have over Google Now is that I wouldn't be trying to anticipate people's information needs; they could just give me a list of a hundred things to check. Setting them up might take an hour per customer, and that would be labor that was plainly bet in the hopes of continued business. If people wanted to change things all the time, that would, in fact, be a nightmare. And I don't think anyone, even in a cheap country like the Philippines, would be excited about their share of $10 a month. So it looks like there are a bunch of insurmountable cons.

Maybe this is something I should just pitch to friends. I could handle the scripting load for 30 people, and 30 customers is $900 a month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You might be able to go much cheaper, if you managed to share audio between customers. Very personalised information wouldn't work. But you could e.g. tag your service on something like Pocket (getpocket.com). I already queue up articles on pocket to read later, and I can imagine paying for some of them to be read out to me instead. (I don't know about the legal situation about reading out someone else's content, though.)

<comment><USER6> > Very personalised information wouldn't work.

I have a built and working version of something not far off what the OP describes, only for myself (haven't had time to open source it or add a config interface) but that uses snippets of my own voice (for reminders) as well as Twilio's text-to-speech API to generate these messages (partially due to its providence as an alarm - TTS + avconv + e-mail would work for those who didn't want that).

I've had to custom build the generators (templated text + scraping code using utilities) for each data source, but it's not much of a chore and indeed a one-time task. I write these by hand mainly because I think it's valuable to have audible cues (provided by the surrounding template) when hearing particular information and code + template makes conciseness easy, too (cf. IFTTT).

I've thought in passing about the fact that people might appreciate its use, but I've felt inclined towards open source rather than subscription, at least in part because I haven't necessarily the time to make it configurable for the non-technical.

I suppose throwing humans into the mix, as you suggest, would help with that. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I've got some systems in play for myself too :) There's definitely something in this noospheric vicinity that people want.

<comment><USER5> Have you ever heard of Amazon's Mechanical Turk?

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the thought - good call.

All I'd worry about is proper distribution of tasks to alleviate privacy concerns.

Also, I'm not in the US, but _shrug_ to that. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Be careful what you consider "easy" or a "laughably good deal". Like all ideas of this nature, the hardest part is coing to be getting users. And at $2 per [listen/day?], you've made that challenge significantly more difficult.

Also, have a look at <http://anten.na> which aggregates and organizes short news and other MP3 genres.

</comment><comment><USER8> You'd charge $2/day? I think $60/month would seem quite expensive for an audio version of daily reminder text.

I also think this is a feature, not a product? Unless you perhaps make it a text-to-actual-speech API?

<comment><AUTHOR> Probably a good point. The price point just may not be feasible. Thanks for your input!

<comment><USER9> Totally feasible, but it'd probably have to talk dirty too.

(For you Something Positive fans: "It's like Nerdrotica meets New Relic" )

(oh god thats amazing)

<comment><AUTHOR> Patti would talk dirty to me. And so would Lorna. And they're hot. That, and the fact that I know and love these people, might be the reason I was over- optimistic about the price point.

<comment><USER5> For a thought experiment, think what you could do at much higher price point (e.g. 100$ a day), and who might pay for that. Then scale down from there.

<comment><USER9> I was actually thinking about this.

Basically, do a thing like this for egotistical investors and bankers--how many do you think would pay large amounts of money just to enjoy having somebody read them the closing bell and after-market action on their stocks?

Shit, you could put together a basic portfolio tracker and script generator, and then just farm it out to spare VA talent.

Anybody interested in doing this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> $60 is not worth it. I can get this stuff from my RSS Reader and twitter feed, plus then I would be able to re-read what parts I want.

</comment><comment><USER11> I feel like this is what Siri / Google Now will / should be doing in the next year or so...

</comment><comment><USER12> Somebody has watched Iron Man recently.</comment>


Hacker News stats by domain TLD - <AUTHOR> http://blog.park.io/articles/hacker-news-posts-by-domain-tld/ <comment><USER2> I see there was an earlier submission of this that's been deleted:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10194688](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10194688)

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah I made a few edits to the post and felt it wasn't ready yet</comment></comment>


The Sloppy Battle for the Future of Craft Rye - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-whistlepig-craft-rye/ <comment><USER3> I actually work in this industry[0], with a few of the major brands, and... it's 80% marketing.

Unlike beer, where smaller is often "better" (as in more flavorful, more innovative, more unique, more interesting - but definitely not more consistent);

Most of the new "distilleries" are actually non-distilling bottlers - <USER2> taking (and sometimes ageing) distilled spirits from MGP[2] (the former Seagram Distillery).

Consider - how can a ~5 year old brand have bottled and distributed 15 year old or 25 year old spirits?

This is a real problem in the industry, as 1) it's false marketing, and 2) the equipment needed to make great spirits is not nearly as affordable, and is much more a function of scale, then it is in other industries. So the craft distillery with the 12 foot still and 5 plates really can't compete with the large distillery with a 35 foot still and 15 plates (that's the level of control they have over their process and thus their flavor profile).

And thus, with these "fake" craft spirits - it's the consumers (you and I) that get screwed - we pay extra for a fake premium brand available for much less - the identical spirit, on the same shelf, with the same flavor profile, just under a different name.

<comment><comment><comment><comment><comment>

and in case anyone is interested: my company helps real distilleries, breweries, and coffee / chocolate makers, optimize their flavor profiles and consistency through predictive manufacturing[1]. Feel free to reach out![3]

<comment><comment><comment><comment>~

[0] www.Gastrograph.com

[1] off by one error

[2] [http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/28/your- craft-...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/28/your-craft- whiskey-is-probably-from-a-factory-distillery-in-indiana.html)

[3] jasonceo [at] gastrograph [dot] com

<comment><USER4> Then you have brands like High West, that are doing some interesting things (for instance their "Double Rye" is a blend of a young LDI-sourced rye and a 16 year old Barton sourced rye - also note that they are very open and forthcoming about what they source and from where).

<comment><USER5> High West is _very_ hit-or-miss --- I actually don't like _most_ of what they sell --- but I think they're pretty honest. Midwinter is probably in my top 5 American whiskies. (If you know something in the same style that's better, please correct me).

It's unfortunate that with US whiskey, you really need to know brands. You can tell people how to shop for Scotch with just descriptions --- you like smoke you buy an Islay single malt, you like character you buy something that says "first fill sherry cask". The US market is trickier.

And even more unfortunately, the most important advice you can give someone shopping for US whiskey is: _ignore entirely the concept of "craft" whiskey_. The very best US stuff isn't "craft".

<comment> semi-extrinsic Don't leave us hanging then! Top 5 American whiskies list, please?

<comment><USER5> I haven't really thought hard about it, but Four Roses and Very Old Barton are probably on it too.

<comment><USER6> I haven't tried Very Old Barton... but I will.

Based on your comments here, we may like some of the same whiskies. I'll add a few to the list:

Four Roses Small Batch 90

Blantons 93

Four Roses Single Barrel 100

If I'm making a large batch cocktail.. I go for Old Overholt. Hard to beat for the price.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting business story. Key quote for me: "If potential investors had known Bhakta planned to maintain control of the company in his family in perpetuity," Faessen and Evison state in their filing, "they either would not have invested in WhistlePig at the same price and on the same terms or would have declined to invest at all."

Unrelated, but when did Bloomberg Businessweek decide to start aping Vice? With lines like: "you're likely to see him smirking, with a boarding school- worthy forelock of hair and bow tie that combine to frame a perfect strike zone for your fist" and "some special editions trade for as much as $1,000 among collectors/assholes"

<comment><USER8> > when did Bloomberg Businessweek decide to start aping Vice?

Probably shortly after they realized it brings in eyeballs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Such valuation runs counter to the beverage's history. Unlike single-malt scotches and other liquors, rye has been decidedly anti-aspirational—its most common mixers were failure, disappointment, and regret. But the cyclical nature of the Next Cool Thing to Order at a Bar has put rye in the spotlight (it was a favorite of Don Draper), and WhistlePig is the fanciest you can buy. "_

I mean I don't even know where to start.

I guess I'd start by pointing out that one of the most highly-regarded whiskies in the world, and one of the hardest to get, is the Buffalo Trace antique series Thomas Handy Sazerac rye. And Thomas Handy isn't the only "fancy" rye you can get; besides (obviously) Saz 18, the other Buffalo antique rye, there's also Booker's Limited Edition.

Unlike WP, which is NDP Veblen whiskey, all of those bottles are hard to get because they are legitimately outstanding and coveted not just by assholes (who do abound in whiskeyland) but also by people who are serious about the spirit. They're also traceable (unlike WP and unlike Pappy or Black Maple Hill or any of a number of other high-priced NDP whiskies) and they're gimmick- free.

Don't want to spend $300 on a bottle? Buy Anchor's Old Potrero, which is a _single malt_ rye from San Francisco of unassailable quality and lineage. Or buy Few, down the street from me in Chicago; it costs half as much as Old Potrero, is 70% rye, and is one of the best new spirits on the market --- produced entirely in house, by a tiny operation.

I also call total horseshit on the idea that there's real merit in Beam's rye mashbill being 100% rye. Handy is closer to 50% than 100%, and zero is the number of reasonable people who would take a dram of WhistlePig over half a dram of Handy.

"Double barrel". "Any longer and it tastes like sticks". Jiminy. Tell that to the Scots. Woodford Reserve --- another brand you should trust more than WhistlePig any day of the week --- does an experiment edition where they'll sell you the same rye spirit aged in two different barrels, one new oak and one old oak. You get the point just by looking at the two bottles: the old-oak aged whiskey is light and the new oak is dark. Aging in ex-whiskey barrels extracts very little additional flavor, because the first round of aging strips it out. But the bottle aged in new oak is mahogany brown and full of flavor, because there's still flavor there to extract. Switching the whiskey to a new oak barrel halfway through the aging would _increase_ the "sticks" flavor. But odds are, that's not what they're actually doing, because new oak, or any barrel with real character (ask High West where to find them), is expensive.

The rye market is rife with NDP brands marketing other people's spirit as "craft" and somehow unique. Templeton does it do, and their uniqueness is a fucking _chemical flavor additive_. It's all factory whiskey. That's fine! Factories make some of the best whiskey there is. But don't pay a premium for a bullshit marketing story. And don't ever pay extra for WhistlePig.

</comment><comment><USER9> This was a great read about the supply side, despite the wince-worthy factual errors.

Another great read, from the venerable David Driscoll of K&L in San Francisco, has a lot about the demand side: [http://spiritsjournal.klwines.com/klwinescom-spirits- blog/20...](http://spiritsjournal.klwines.com/klwinescom-spirits- blog/2016/8/29/the-basics-of-give-and-take-a-2016-kentucky-primer.html)</comment>


Steganography and Piracy in the Age of Digital Distribution - <AUTHOR> http://www.zacharyburt.com/2010/07/steganography-and-piracy-in-the-age-of-digital-distribution/ <comment><USER2> My vote for encoding a key in a document goes as follows:

Make 3 spelling errors. Anywhere.

Copying all the text from my AgileW/Rails book comes out to 1392025 characters (wc -c). Comes out to being able to make 2,697,367,802,211,997,800 unique copies _by location alone_ [1]. Significantly less data than a SHA key, but _far_ more than necessary. Heck, making _two_ unique errors gives you almost 2 _trillion_ unique copies. Most books have a fair amount of errors already, what's a couple intentional ones? And note that it can be hidden in metadata too, so there's even _more_ room.

[1]: (1392025 * 1392024 * 1392023)

<comment><USER3> Spelling mistakes are better than nothing, but if I can obtain two copies of the document, I can diff them and fix the mistakes.

<comment><USER4> I could diff a dump of all the kerning values too.

<comment><USER2> I picked spelling specifically because copying / OCRing will destroy kerning values, but not (likely) spelling. And if you change words into other words, running a spell check might not clean them out either :)

But yes. Diffing is always an option, and it's an _ideal_ way to reveal steganographic data if you encode more than one thing in the same document.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While steganography may be part of a new kinder, gentler copy-control policy for many content producers, I have my doubts as to whether it will be very effective, for a few reasons.

Even if you assume that the techniques are not discovered before distribution, this doesn't actually impeded copying; it just helps you determine the original source. At that point, you are again faced with an enforcement problem. It's already quite possible to determine the source of pirated files using bittorrent, but even with thousands of lawsuits filed, use is not noticeably diminished.

But steganographic source determination is significantly weaker than bittorrent as far as enforcement and chilling effects go. With bittorrent, if you can make the expected cost of a lawsuit high enough to the users, you might make a dent in the wholescale copying of content. With steganographic techniques, only the original user is at risk. As soon as a single copy is out there, the rest of the sharers take no additional risk in spreading it far and wide.

<comment><USER4> To be fair it's an _additional_ layer. Sharing a stolen PDF is just as illegal whether it's tagged with its purchaser or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Steganography is a misnomer for this kind of message. Steganography is about maximizing data payload while remaining undetectable. E.g., you want to send messages covertly without Big Brother knowing.

Watermarking is about maintaining message integrity in ways that are robust to distortion. E.g., you don't care who knows about the message, but it's impossible to remove the watermark without unacceptable distortion of the media.

</comment><comment><USER3> Under this scheme, if my laptop with hundreds of paid-for documents is stolen, am I then liable for all the copies of these documents that are illicitly distributed?

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure I get the point. OK, so you figured out who bought the copy that was leaked. Then what? Sue them?

<comment><USER7> And who's to say they were the real leaker? It's pretty trivial to copy files, it could have easily been taken from their computer without their knowledge or consent.</comment></comment>


Thousands of Delta passengers delayed by computer outage - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-37009311 <comment><USER2> The most annoying part of bugs like this, is that we rarely get a good post- mortem. To frequently the media just reports it as "a computer glitch". You would think that with computers being so important to modern day life, we should get better answers.

I'm not suggestion that the bug should be explained in details in the evening news, but at least give some indication of the nature of the problem. They could just refer to a website, if people want the technical details.

When a car has a problem, it's not reported as a "glitch". Imagine the stupidity of a media report claiming "A glitch in the latests Ford models cause several drivers to crash". You don't do that, you explain that it's a fault in the steering, breaks, electric systems, or where ever the issue lies. I think we should reasonably expect the same when errors in computer systems hit the news.

<comment><USER3> One of the main reasons that you don't get a good post mortem is that it's often directly related to human error or a severe defect brought about by a decision to cut costs. There have been several huge outages in UK banking over the past few years and management have a convenient excuse in blaming "legacy systems". While I respect private enterprise, for systems of systemic importance I would like to see some legislation to implement a mandatory and detailed post mortem like you propose.

<comment><USER2> >it's often directly related to human error or a severe defect brought about by a decision to cut costs

I wonder if companies do cost-benefit analysis on those kinds of situation. "We saved X amount of £ on cutting costs. Outages as a result of cost cutting Y amount of £". You would think that at least stock holders would insist.

<comment><USER4> No because doing that would mean knowing what happened and spending time doing a post mortem.

<comment><USER5> This may come as a shock but _most_ people want to do a good job, even if they work for Citi or Delta or Comcast or where ever.

Okay, maybe not Comcast.

<comment><USER4> I never said the contrary. But a tons of these systems are old, and people knowing how they work are long gone.

Plus doing a proper post mortem and understanding how it works woudl take a lot of time and money. Things they most of the time to not have budget for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's not software _or_ hardware this time: there's a crippling power outage at ATL, which is Delta's main hub (and presumably where their mainframe herd is based):

[http://fox61.com/2016/08/08/delta-airline-reports-outage- eve...](http://fox61.com/2016/08/08/delta-airline-reports-outage-everywhere- systems-down-and-flights-grounded/)

The outage began at 0230 and is presumably ongoing and beyond the capacity of their backup generators to cope with.

<comment><USER7> I find that pretty odd. A decade and a half ago now I rented part of a rack in a not particularly high end co-lo facility. They had battery backup for an hour and then generators that could be fired up in twenty minutes with 3 days worth of diesel.

Delta airlines, with $40B of revenue last year, has less than 8 hours of backup power for their mission critical computers?

<comment><USER8> > They had battery backup for an hour and then generators that could be fired > up in twenty minutes with 3 days worth of diesel.

How often did you test that?

> has less than 8 hours of backup power for their mission critical computers?

It's plausible that they thought they had that, but some part of it failed.

<comment><USER7> I don't remember, but when we were taking the tour the guide did mention that the tested the batteries and generators on some schedule. I bet there's some industry standard that has a minimum testing frequency.

<comment><USER9> In my experience (radio repeater and cell sites on mountain tops) an auto- start timer runs the generator once per week for 30 minutes or so. Diesels dont like to sit too long without being run. And these are 30-50 Kw generators, relatively small in comparison to a data center. I expect a weekly schedule is common practice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm sure a lot of people are asking how this is possible.

\- Legacy systems: the thing is probably old and has had a lot of patchwork done to it by various people, many of whom are retired by now.

\- The thing is also large and distributed, which makes noticing potential failures quite hard. There are loads of postmortems on the web about how some minor issue like a line going down caused some cascade of unforeseen problems. There's a lot of lessons being learned about how to solve this problem though, so I suppose there's hope.

\- Always on: it's hard to change something once the business is relying on it. Loads of staff need to be shown how it works, which makes it hard to incrementally improve the thing because "how it works" would be something that people would have to be updated on.

\- Never finished: large organisations will always have loads of feature requests and bug fixes. If you start responding to some of them, you might find yourself swamped. Either you work on the next item, or you spend valuable time making sure fewer items are fixed. It's a balancing act.

<comment><USER11> Also hardware. Likely older and expensive mainframes, which while generally reliable do have a finite lifespan.

I'm guessing a critical hardware problem affecting some central part of their flight dispatching system.

<comment><USER12> Back in the 2000's Sabre purchased spare parts from the soviets to keep their ancient mainframes running.. I can't imagine how hard it must be now.

<comment><USER13> Not that hard if you're willing to part with lots of cash for IBM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Power failure, clearly their back power systems are inadequate. I believe some of Delta's systems are also backed by SABRE which while ancient is generally rock solid (it lives in a nuclear hardened bunker in Tulsa). This problem is in Delta's own systems not SABRE.

<comment><USER15> the main host of delta is not sabre, it is deltamatic, a homebrew system that is run by delta. Most other airline systems like sabre communicate via teletype to one another

<comment><USER14> I think the reservation system is SABRE, and likely they contract for some of SABRE's other services like crew scheduling, but other parts are pure Delta.

<comment><USER16> Delta uses Worldspan as its GDS, not Sabre.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A post in the ongoing outage thread on FlyerTalk mentions a fire in the datacenter.

> According to the flight captain of JFK-SLC this morning, a routine scheduled > switch to the backup generator this morning at 2:30am caused a fire that > destroyed both the backup and the primary. Firefighters took a while to > extinguish the fire. Power is now back up and 400 out of the 500 servers > rebooted, still waiting for the last 100 to have the whole system fully > functional.

[http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/27032000-post135.html](http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/27032000-post135.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> Why is it reported as a bug rather than a power outage?? There is a huge difference.

<comment><USER17> It seems a bug in the infrastructure when they switched generators is what caused the power outage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Official post from Delta Operations - [http://news.delta.com/more-flights- resume-delays-cancels-con...](http://news.delta.com/more-flights-resume- delays-cancels-continue-after-power-outage)

</comment><comment><USER19> Part of me, thinks that their systems were attacked, but being into security, I've though a lot about how to attack a large computer system like this. Since server failiures are so common, the system should be able to handle N failiures before anything bad happens. If this was an attack, I guess the attacker must have found a flaw that allowed them to instantly compromise any server. But it actually seems more likely that this was caused, merely, by incompetence.

If the attack was possible, than it was just as likely, if not more, that Delta managed to merely shoot itself in the foot.

<comment><USER20> I'm one of the lucky people who have to wait. The airport personnel tells us it's the system that prints out weather information that's out. Not sure why one would want to attack that.

<comment><USER21> Considering check-in and reservation status in general appears to be down I'm guessing this outage is relatively widespread.

Assuming what you've heard is correct this seems to span multiple Delta systems.

<comment><USER22> If it is power issues and some bit of infrastructure deep in the back end took a nosedive, wouldn't be surprised if it effects multiple front end systems.

<comment><USER23> Considering it's an airline, it's likely either a IBM i or a IBM Z System where they track _everything_ relating to their flights (schedules, reservations, checked luggage, etc). A lot of companies (mine included) seem to thing these devices are high-availability giants and never test what happens should they go down. I know if ours ever took a dump we would be in some big trouble (though we could function for at least 24 hours).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Strangely, their stock price was not affected by the outage and this news at all. Honestly, I don't get it.

[https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ADAL&ei=ncSpV_m8MsG9i...](https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ADAL&ei=ncSpV_m8MsG9iwKpnrSQCQ)

</comment><comment><USER25> Tough day for them. Moving to 'cloud' hosting... it doesn't just make it someone else's problem. It encourages good architecture.

</comment><comment><USER26> I just don't understand how a large carrier such as Delta can get so much wrong. What's the DR plan? Are they using ASNs? A company is product, people, and computers. This is not the 20th century, flight plans aren't filed by telephone calls for these guys.

I've tested our DR plans and we were operational after 4.5hours, optimally. And we were 3 people.

This outage reeks of PHBs doing lots of kicking the can and not a whole of implementing.

<comment><USER27> Sounds like your DR plan or your network don't require power. Care to share?

<comment><USER26> Yes, 2 datacentres, Microsoft's DFS, cloud backups, and staff trained to know what to do.

For the datacentre I have a friend that we worked out a mutually beneficial arrangement. I keep a few spare servers in his racks and he has a few in ours. Just enough to run the essentials.

Testing was literally walking up to the rack and switching off the power. Then documenting what happens next. If you've configured the ASN just right the domain should roll right over to the backup servers. Offsite DR servers needed a little kick to bring up to speed (I can't remember why this wasn't fully automated).

Most of the time was waiting for backup files to restore and verify. Since we were using someone else's network we were shaped down to a small percentage of their bandwidth.

After that we had a debriefing to see what worked, what didn't work. The usual IT stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I was expecting a "computer bug" story on the front page of HN to actually have some interesting content.

</comment><comment><USER29> It sounds like some kind of single point of failure in the Delta architecture was uncovered.

</comment><comment><USER30> Southwest had an outage two weeks ago. Its starting to feel fishy.

<comment><USER16> Would you mind elaborating on what is starting to feel fishy to you and how whatever that is is starting to feel fishy?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Time for Delta to move to AWS

<comment><USER29> AWS has outages too. There might be some perceived attraction to transferring the operational risk to AWS, but Amazon's agreements limit their liability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> should be on AWS... all the cool kids are doing it

<comment><USER33> Merged airlines with multiple legacy systems from 1980s. The legacy systems are well battle tested over the decades, but brittle to add new capabilities like mobile.

Only about a third of of from-scratch large corporate and government software systems succeed. Having to hire the cheapest contractor doesnt always work.

<comment><USER32> finance industry as well... They're sunsetting legacy systems from many years of M&A, refactoring apps, adding API tiers, using novel tech stacks, building in true-HA and cross-region active-active.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Interestingly, 10 flights were canceled on Allegiant today. Including one I'm booked on.

But apparently it is a normal mode of operations for Allegiant. Absolutely horrid airline. [https://www.allegiantair.com/travel- alerts](https://www.allegiantair.com/travel-alerts)

<comment><USER17> Allegiant a budget airline that's okay when it works and a pile of junk when it doesn't. They fly routes a few days per week out of my city. In a recent cancellation (by choice), they told customers that they could rebook them on the same day next week. Somehow they managed to do this without offering refunds or alternative flights back that day, the next, etc.

I've only flown with them once, but it was a popular route to Vegas. It was fine for the price, especially since they don't surge as much as normal domestic airlines when you book with less than 2 weeks notice.</comment></comment>


Amazon May Have Misled Congress, House Judiciary Chair Says - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-23/amazon-may-have-misled-congress-house-judiciary-chair-says <comment><USER2> Massive related thread from yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22956182](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22956182)

</comment><comment><USER3> > _"We strictly prohibit employees from using non-public, seller-specific data > to determine which private label products to launch," a company spokesperson > said in a statement._

So employees can use non-public, aggregate seller data? Or non-public manufacturer data?

Yeah. The "seller-specific" part makes the statement meaningless.

<comment> huy-nguyen The distinction between aggregated and non-aggregated data is moot. From the WSJ article:

> Some executives had access to data containing proprietary information that > they used to research bestselling items they might want to compete against, > including on individual sellers on Amazon's website. If access was > restricted, managers sometimes would ask an Amazon business analyst to > create reports featuring the information, according to former workers, > including one who called the practice "going over the fence." In other > cases, supposedly aggregated data was derived exclusively or almost entirely > from one seller, former employees said.

> Amazon draws a distinction between the data of an individual third-party > seller and what it calls aggregated data, which it defines as the data of > products with two or more sellers. Because of the size of Amazon's > marketplace, most products have many sellers. Viewing the data of a product > with a number of sellers wouldn't give it insight into proprietary seller > information because the figures would show lots of different seller > behavior.

> Amazon said that if there is only one seller of an item, and Amazon is > selling returned or damaged versions of that item through its Amazon > Warehouse Deals clearance account, Amazon considers that "aggregate" > data—and hence is permissible for its employees to review.

<comment><USER4> It's not moot at all.

Uber employees (and some cities) can get access to aggregated data showing where uber is driving.

The same employees should not be able to have access to where YOU are driving (rider specific).

This is particularly key for sellers with a unique product. Chairs are selling well? No problem. But detailed transaction detail for a specific seller and product and their decisions there - a problem.

<comment><USER5> If I'm not misinterpreting, the post you're replying to wasn't claiming that a general aggregation in principle was the same as individualized statistics, but rather saying that Amazon's definition of "aggregation" effectively mooted the normal argument for it. In particular that last bit, where Amazon would count it as "aggregated" even if the only "other seller" were _Amazon themselves_ in the form of reselling returned/damaged/refurbed goods. In practice that would probably be pretty close to having individualized analysis generally available, if not identical (because employees could separately get Amazon Warehouse Deals alone, since that's "in house", and then simply delete it from the "aggregated" sales and have both).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If your product is actually new, patent it. If its actually better quality, trade mark it. If its that complicated to make, use trade secrets.

But if its not, you don't get to own the market just because you got there first. Otherwise the only cars allowed would be Ford and we'd all be eating hydrox cookies and wearing Wellington boots.

<comment><USER7> What Amazon is doing is more akin to your landlord breaking into your apartment and using source code they found on your flash drives to build new applications.

Yes, your landlord owns the building you live in, but they promise not to go through your door as long as you pay rent. Similarly, yes, Amazon owns the platform you sell stuff on, but they publicly promise not to use your sales against you. It's not fair competition if one of your competitors can view all of your sales and related metadata while you can't view any of theirs.

<comment><USER6> >It's not fair competition if one of your competitors can view all of your sales and related metadata while you can't view any of theirs.

Why not?

I can get a pretty good idea of my competitors sales figures just by reading their accounts if they are public companies. I can get a good estimate of the sales if they use amazon by using reviews as a proxy for sales numbers. Amazon are doing nothing that retailers have not done for 100s of years. Walmart were pulling the same thing when amazing was a twinkle in Jeff B's eye.

Also, sorry to be a dick but... "fair" is a very hard arguement for you to make.

Fair is entirely subjective. And fair isn't actually what markets are about (markets are meant to be efficient companies are meant to be profitable, industries are meant to be productive). If you think this behaviour is a bad thing, you sort of have to explain why it's harming innovation or making markets inefficient or some other way it hurts consumers. Companies aren't people, and even people don't have to be "fair"...

Personally, as I said above, companies already have a lot (maybe too much) control of interlectual property. If you are inovating, you have nothing to fear from people copying you. If you're not inovating then you don't get a monopoly just because you really really like making easy profits and gouging consumers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You're telling me employees who are compensated based on relative performance and have access to a massive central data warehouse wrote queries that went against something buried in a policy document? Shocked, shocked I say.

</comment><comment><USER9> Are anti-trust laws strong enough / enforced to prevent market operators from competing with vendors?

Why should Amazon be penalized when Costco, Target, Safeway etc.. get a pass?

<comment><USER10> People in the US seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding on what constitutes a monopoly. I have seen numerous people say that Apple is a monopoly despite having less than 20% market share.

Amazon isn't anywhere near a monopoly. There are many HUGE competitors in the retail and online retail space. Walmart, Costco, Shopify, Target, Best Buy, Newegg, Home Depot, Lowes, Macy's, Staples, Alibaba, CVS, and dozens more.

<comment><USER11> The argument isnt that they are a monopoly, its that they are either violating antitrust law, or antitrust law is currently unsuited to handle what amazon is doing. People just mistakenly use the word monopoly to mean antitrust or anticompetitive. It's also less about amazon just being an ecommerce box store, and more about having captured aspects of horizontal and vertical integration across many markets.

[https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust- parado...](https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox)

>Amazon is the titan of twenty-first century commerce. In addition to being a retailer, it is now a marketing platform, a delivery and logistics network, a payment service, a credit lender, an auction house, a major book publisher, a producer of television and films, a fashion designer, a hardware manufacturer, and a leading host of cloud server space.

Amazon is Microsoft, Sony, Visa, Fedex/UPS, Disney, GAP, and Walmart rolled into one.

<comment><USER10> Amazon isn't even as large as Microsoft. What an absurd statement.

<comment><USER11> The comparison was by product offering, not market cap.

<comment><USER10> The fact that they are ankle deep in many different industries doesn't help your antitrust argument. They aren't dominant in any single industry they are in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's ridiculous to me that the assumption would ever be that a company would not exploit data it has. Oh, there's clearly a market for this product, we know its price, and we know all of the competitors' pricing?

It could be an argument that you should not be able to operate as a marketplace and a producer of the goods your marketplace enables buying and selling of, but this would mess with a lot of things - particularly in tech.

<comment><USER13> I see a lot of furious arguing and talking points about domains as "should be separate" but no real answers as to what harm it would prevent or even precedents of it ever working "the way it should". It seems more like a religious dogma at this point than anything as instead of answers or logic you just get increasingly furious repeated assertions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have a really hard time understanding what the problem is, even if Amazon is prioritizing themselves over the sellers.

Who are the losers? Is it the brands & manufacturers that are losing sales to Amazon Basics brand items? I don't really see how this is different than the way any type of commerce works. If their brand is not differentiated and valuable to people, it won't outsell competitors. For brands that are differentiated, it doesn't seem like a problem at all. I can still easily buy an iPad or Surface Pro on Amazon even though they constantly promote their Fire Tablets to me.

Where I get the most value from Amazon Basics is for things like usb cables or batteries - undifferentiated products where the brand is meaningless because there are a dozen versions of the same cheap crap labeled under different brand names. I really, really don't care if some of those brands go out of business.

Is it a slippery slope argument? What if Amazon eventually stops just putting the Fire Tablet banner at the top but stops showing any iPads altogether, and I can only buy the Fire tablet? I don't really care about that either, I would buy it from a different retailer.

Is the argument that it hurts the middlemen suppliers of these other brands? In the last 5 or 10 years, there has apparently been a big market that has developed for people to drive around to big box stores and buy stuff to resell on Amazon. It's hard to argue that these business are anything other than workarounds for inefficient distribution, I don't really care if the underlying distribution is improved and they're no longer necessary.

Basically, what is even one practical thing I should care about with regards to this issue?

<comment><USER15> >>> Basically, what is even one practical thing I should care about with regards to this issue? >>> I really, really don't care if some of those brands go out of business.

There is an immediate positive impact to the consumer, that you're getting a good, cheap thing possible from a well-known brand on their own site - Amazon. However, there are second-order effects to this.

How did those dozen-version-products actually come into being? Amazon didn't discover in the beginning that, usb cables were high-demand products. Those no-name-brands 'seeded' that idea. Amazon noticed that there was demand _and_ supply for something that they could easily scale; they discovered it without being in the usb-cable-selling-business. Going forward, those no-name-brands could either:

\- not risk coming up with such products (dont think this will happen, but bad for consumer) \- move away from Amazon (they could, but at a huge loss of eyeballs) \- continue operating at lower margins by making cheaper products (bad for consumer) \- compete amongst themselves for being the Amazon producer for rebranded product. (all your products are now mine)

>>> but stops showing any iPads altogether, and I can only buy the Fire tablet? I don't really care about that either, I would buy it from a different retailer.

You are comparing 2 known big giants (Amazon, Apple) in your example. What if it was an unknown company that didn't have the budget to get ad space on your Search results for 'best tablet'. (reviewers would look at amazon for 'best tablets', those perpetuating the best-tablet-cycle)?

I guess my point is - if a single company 'runs' a marketplace, and wants to win top products on it as well, its not a marketplace, its a casino from the sellers POV - the house always wins. The game is skewed.

You, as, the consumer (and spectator in the casino), will, I guess, win?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > May have misled

...and sure have plausible deniability set up!

</comment><comment><USER17> Surely this will begin a criminal investigation into the richest man in the world, the US being a country with equal application of the laws to all.

People in sports that compete at a high level are shamed and ridiculed for being unsporting. There is no honor in winning at all costs; glory only comes from winning a fair fight. Not so when it comes to business pursuits! Many of the largest companies actively engage in anticompetetive behaviors, trying to engineer the most unfair fight possible, as if their additional billions are at that point in any way an accolade or achievement. Is it simple unrestrained greed and lust for power that makes them seek an unfair fight? This isn't rhetoric, I'm actually asking this question and would like answers.

This is a mentality and mindset that I think I may never understand.

Why cheat when you can compete directly, and actually be proud of your accomplishments?</comment>


Billionaire Elon Musk: How I Became the Real 'Iron Man' - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh45igK4Esw

<comment><USER2> Is this youtube comment true?

"None of his ventures are profitable.

His net worth is a joke, and he has been bailed out on multiple occasions."</comment>


Ask HN: Privacy vs. benefits of social media etc. - <AUTHOR> Where do you draw the line between wanting privacy/anonymity and wanting to reap the benefits of social media, dating sites etc? <comment><USER2> Privacy is not the only tradeoff.

Facebook seems to be about as good for your mental health as smoking cigarettes is for your lungs.

</comment><comment><USER3> {caveat: I don't use dating sites}

Mostly, I try to minimize advertizer tracking. Social media get bespoke identities using Chromium (not Chrome). General browsing uses Firefox that wipes history and cookies on restart and "shopping" type browsing uses a 'private' window from that. It doesn't eliminate cross site tracking but it seems to bring it down to a less obnoxious level.

All with the caveat that I assume that nothing that happens on the internet (or tor) is private or anonymous against a modestly funded mildly determined actor.

The benefit of social media is that it makes the maintenance of loose social connections easier. No holiday cards, no email, no maintaining a written address book. When I wonder what someone I know is doing, I can just look. That includes across political divides and strained family relationships...i.e. connections with complicated meat space dynamics.

Good luck.</comment>


Puerto Rico's solar energy insurrection - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ekFQ0xOwDw <comment><AUTHOR> I hope they are successful in building a localized grid that supports solar and other renewable sources.

What I don't understand is why towns and cities can't lead the way forward?</comment>


Bio-Fuel Powered Electric Triplane Launches on Kickstarter - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/27/bio-fuel-powered-electric-triplane-launches-on-kickstarter/

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with most of the TC commenters. They're raising money for R&D yet there are so many things about the engineering behind this that are fundamentally flawed.</comment>


SEC Launches Cryptocurrency Probe - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/sec-launches-cryptocurrency-probe-1519856266 <comment><USER2> Why are they specifically targeting SAFTs? Aren't those only available to accredited investors?</comment>


Is This the End of Yahoo and Employee Stack Ranking? - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/end-yahoo-employee-stack-ranking-steffen-maier?trk=pulse_spock-articles <comment><USER2> Yes, stack ranking is poison to a company's morale, but the author makes a mistake be leading with the lawsuit. There's nothing in Anderson's lawsuit that attacks stack ranking directly - what he's alleging is managers aren't following the written policy and that giving preferential treatment to women is illegal.</comment>


The town of Gujo Hachiman is the centre of Japan's replica food industry - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/03/looks-good-enough-to-eat-inside-the-home-of-japans-fake-food-industry <comment><USER2> I was in Japan a month ago and these are everywhere! Pretty much every where I went (esp in Tokyo), they're in front of the restaurant.

After awhile, you'll notice they don't vary too much one to the other. But it's still a fascinating UX. I'm used to looking up photos on Yelp and yet I still found myself looking closely at...plastic!

<comment><USER3> It's basically the equivalent of clothed mannequin displays for boutiques and shops.

People are window shopping a lot of Japan for their food options, oweing to the very high walkability, density of shops esp inside department stores and airports and the like, and high overall average quality of shops where very rarely will you have a terrible experience, making people more willing to step into ships with very little prior vetting. So when your customers are window shopping, these serve to tempt and posture their interest to step foot in the store. When you see the udon bowl you might think "oh I didn't realize it until now, but I'm in the mood for udon today".

<comment><USER4> > making people more willing to step into shops with very little prior vetting

After eleven years in Japan, it works the other way around for me too; if there are no plastic samples out front, I'll just mentally dismiss restaurant and keep looking for somewhere else.

Even the restaurants that can't afford plastic samples for whatever reason will often make popular/common dishes and just saran wrap them to put them outside to show what's on the menu.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is an excellent scene in Wim Wenders Tokyo Ga[0] showing wax food being made in Tokyo in the 80's. The scene itself is incredibly therapeutic to watch for some reason. But that could be Wim's filming style.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9y2Ej3AZ4c0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9y2Ej3AZ4c0)

</comment><comment><USER6> Nothing to do with Japan, but there is a very fun Wonderfood museum in Penang, Malaysia. It has lots of incredibly realistic fake food. I was looking at the plastic things up close and still found it difficult to believe it was fake. :)

[https://www.facebook.com/pg/Wonderfoodmuseum/photos/](https://www.facebook.com/pg/Wonderfoodmuseum/photos/)

<comment><USER7> Ended up in there by chance when I looked for a escape on a brutally hot day. Wonderful unique experience. And the staff is eager to explain every little detail which was a nice add on as lost solo traveller.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Japanology had a great episode on this. I highly recommend the whole series. [https://youtu.be/YULgJf_48FQ](https://youtu.be/YULgJf_48FQ)

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm reminded of this scene from the Wim Wenders documentary Tokyo-Ga on the same subject: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9y2Ej3AZ4c0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9y2Ej3AZ4c0)

</comment><comment><USER10> I always wondered if it is possible to buy some of those waxes somewhere online, I would like to try it at home

<comment><USER11> I am in Japan and I was wondering the opposite; whether there is a market big enough to sell those online!

Curious, what are you interested on and how much would you pay for it including everything? (Item+transportation+fees+labour).</comment></comment>


Demystifying Radix Trees: How Radix trees made blocking IPs 5000 times faster - <AUTHOR> https://blog.sqreen.io/demystifying-radix-trees/ <comment><USER2> I gave a talk at GoSF about Radix trees, and how they are used heavily in HashiCorp products (Terraform, Consul, Vault, Nomad, etc). The slides are available here for those interested: [https://speakerdeck.com/armon/radix- trees-transactions-and-m...](https://speakerdeck.com/armon/radix-trees- transactions-and-memdb)

Radix trees are one of my favorite data structures, and widely under used. For many "dictionary" type lookups, they can be faster and more efficient than hash tables. While hash tables are commonly described as being O(1) for lookup, this ignores the need to first hash the input, which is typically an O(K) operation, where K is the length of the input string. Radix trees do lookups in O(K), without needing to first hash and have much better cache locality. They also preserve ordering allowing you to do ordered scans, get min/max values, scan by shared prefix, and more.

If you combine them with an immutable approach (such as [https://github.com/hashicorp/go-immutable- radix](https://github.com/hashicorp/go-immutable-radix)), you can support more advanced concurrency, such as lock free reads. This is important for highly concurrent systems to allow scalable reads against shared memory.

<comment><USER3> I'll plug a shout out to your C [https://github.com/armon/libart](https://github.com/armon/libart) as well. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Radix trees are extensively used inside Redis. The new Stream data type is completely backed by radix trees, also Redis Cluster tracks keys using a radix tree and so forth. We have an implementation that is not Redis-specific and can be used for many other applications here: [https://github.com/antirez/rax](https://github.com/antirez/rax).

<comment><USER5> Many thanks for that and for all your other contributions to the world of open source!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Cool radix trie trick:

Set a fixed-size binary radix trie of 32-bit IP addresses, say 1000 entries. Track the nodes of the trie in a list, LRU order; insert an IP, its node goes to the top of the list.

When you exhaust the available nodes, reclaim from the bottom of the LRU list --- but first, find either a sibling for the node already in the trie, or a parent, or a sibling of what that parent would be, and "merge" the IP address you're losing.

(So in reclaiming 10.0.0.1/32, merge with 10.0.0.0/32 to make 10.0.0.0/31, etc).

Over time, "important" /32s --- really, important prefixes, period, not just /32s --- will "defend" their position towards the top of the LRU, while the noise will get aggregated up, into /16s, /15s, /4s, whatever.

What you're doing here is inferring prefix lengths (netmasks), which is kind of magical.

You can do the same thing with memory addresses in a debugger to infer (course-grained, but without much effort) data structures and allocation patterns. There are probably other integers you can do this with that nobody's thought of.

(The data structure is called Aguri).

</comment><comment><USER7> By reading the OP's comment here, I think it'd be better to update the article with some description on the requirement and why you choose a linear scan initially. Without this understanding, it's really easy to say "why not hash table?".

<comment><USER8> Not certain but there are two advantages of using a trie in this case, 1) you don't have to hash the IP address (that takes time too, and is for every packet remember), and 2) you can easily represent whole IP subnets in a trie as one node (though it doesn't say in the article if they do this, it's common to block a subnet in a blacklist).

<comment><USER9> > you don't have to hash the IP address

That's not necessarily slow. Or at least not as slow as multiple potential cache misses while traversing a tree. Once you know how many addresses you're expecting to have, you can make a hash indexing into a preallocated array which will never get smaller - if it fits into a few cache lines, it's great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I mean, compared to _sequentially comparing thousands of IP addresses_ (really???), _anything_ would be fast.

<comment><USER11> People here dismiss the linear search, but for a small number of items (and yes, even thousands can be a small number), I wouldn't be so fast without testing it. Cache locality also has a say here, and depending on the exact circumstances, a linear search might make sense (even more so as a first version).

<comment><USER12> I think the only time it makes sense to use a linear search is if you think the number of items on your list is low enough that it doesn't even matter what data structure you are using. But I would probably use a set rather than a list anyway if only because that more accurately reflects the nature of the data.

<comment><USER13> IIRC MySQL just skips using indices and does a linear search when a table size is small enough.

<comment><USER14> Probably a lot of DB Servers do that - which is why the plan for a query can change as the amount of data per table increases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Whenever a threat is detected and blocked, our [software] insert the blocked > IP address in a list. This list was then sequentially checked every time a > request was evaluated by an agent, thus increasing the latency of our > customer's application. This was a O(n) operation

Right, any database where you just go ALTER TABLE blocklist ADD INDEX ('ip'); is faster than that homebrew O(n) solution. No need for another homebrew solution.

Ended up reading the whole post anyway because now I'm curious if this radix tree might be better than a tree a database would use, but they never compared the performance between any old index and their radix tree.

<comment><USER16> The CPU time and memory bandwidth needed to search a 5000-entry radix tree does not leave you with a lot of budget to beat it by making any sort of network query to a database, not even one on the same machine. Even in the worst case the radix tree is likely to be done with its lookup before you even get memory allocated to start building the query, you might just barely win if the radix tree has to go all the way down and do all of its memory accesses, but you'll still lose overall. Advantageous early bailouts also mean that the radix tree is often done after just three or four pointer hops, with all of those three or four lookups having a decent chance of being in L1 and almost certain to be in L2, if this is the primary thing the CPU is doing on that machine.

<comment><USER17> and that is basically what happens in database software when the query executed 2nd and all the other following times. The mildly interesting difference is just radix tree vs. various [usually highly optimized] types of indexes and index/search optimized storage types available in a DB engine.

While correctly implemented embedded radix tree would probably be faster on smallish/medium datasets, the gain may be not worth the costs associated with basically implementing your own DB engine when it comes to datasets which wouldn't in its entirety normally sit in memory all the time and/or when complexity of the queries to run against a dataset makes you to implement your own full blown query language/API and/or when updates of the dataset by downloading/reloading the whole dataset become infeasible and you need to implement your own partial update machinery.

<comment><USER16> Yes, even if I assume the happy path here, once the prepared query is looked up on the client side, the parameters filled out, the packet constructed to send to the database, the OS kernel switched in to send the packet to the DB process, the DB switched in to select on it, the DB reads the packet, the DB parses the packet to determine what prepared query it's running, the DB finds the correct bytecode (or whatever) to run and passes it to an execution engine to run, yes, at that point the DB will make a highly optimized radix tree or similar lookup itself.

Additional non-"happy path" things the DB may encounter includes using a library or DB that doesn't support prepared queries so you're starting from scratch to construct a query, the DB being across any sort of actual network, and the DB library being thread-safe and having to deal with thread-safe primitives, any one of which is expensive enough to cover a radix tree's entire lookup operation, honestly, because even 50ns is likely to be longer than the entire radix operation.

My point is that the in-process radix tree is done before "the packet is constructed" and long before it can be sent. Depending on the details the radix tree might very well outrace "the prepared query is looked up on the client side" if that involves retrieving it from any sort of structure because you don't just have it in a variable, though under the circumstances assuming that it's just on hand is reasonable.

This is one of those things where you have to be thinking about those "order of magnitude" maps that are often posted about memory access operations, because computers span so many orders of magnitude that our intuition breaks down. Assuming L1 or L2 cache, the radix tree is made of almost entirely of single-digit-order nanosecondd instructions, and not even all that many of them, whereas reaching a database is going to involve microsecond-scale interactions. (To the extent that the radix tree may have to hit real RAM, well, so might we have to hit it for the DB interaction, and the DB is certainly bringing in a _lot_ more code for the code cache, so even then, it's not a win for the DB-based code.)

<comment><USER17> i'm not arguing about the performance cost of network. Comparing apples to apples would be more about embedded db engines or a db engine on the same machine using a "local mode", not a network mode, driver.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I would atleast use a hashmap rather than a linear scan for lookup. My guess is you would be utmost 10x faster in that case

<comment><USER19> If the list doesn't change that often, then sort the list and do a binary search for a worst case of O(log n) time.

<comment><USER3> Binary search is cache and branch-predictor inefficient, although certainly not as bad as linear scan (over large datasets).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Try adding following optimizations to your binary radix tree code:

1) Path compression: avoid having intermediate empty nodes, when possible. E.g. replace root-left(void)-left(void)-left(void)-left(item) with root-[000]left(item). Because of the node reduction, you'll get better data cache usage.

2) Use a memory pool for the nodes: you'll save because of avoiding malloc() overhead, plus the possibility of using e.g. 32-bit indexes instead of pointers. Like in (1), this would help you reduce the memory usage, being able to put more nodes in the data cache.

3) Nth level lookup table, so you can jump e.g. instead of starting from the root node, you could go directly to the Nth level. For a minor cost in the insertion, for updating the LUT, you could get an important speed-up (2x-3x, more, or less, depending on your data and how you tune the LUT -fixed level LUT, adaptative-level LUT, etc.-).

<comment><USER3> Or start here: [https://github.com/armon/libart](https://github.com/armon/libart)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Radix Trees are used extensively at Akamai. They are very useful in dealing with blocks of network addresses. When I was there, they had 2 libraries which shared the on disk format. One was mutable and had all sorts of operations you could do on them. The other was immutable and optimized for very fast lookups.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can someone summarize the tradeoffs between radix trees and (various kinds of) B-tree? (I.e., LSM-trees, B-epsilon trees, classic B(+)-trees.)

For something like this application, which seems heavily read-biased, it seems like a classic B-tree would be great. Or even a bloom filter, although the tradeoff there for false positives is maybe not suitable.

<comment><USER22> Most search trees only need a total ordering on the elements. A radix tree has stricter requirements: the data can be split in parts (e.g. x in x[0]..x[n] and y in y[0]..y[n]) such that each part has a total order and the original order is the prefix order of the parts.

Now you can already save a small constant by putting at each radix level a B-tree again. Then you won't compare x[0] to y[0] again at level (1...n) when you know they are equal (for example a database of all sentences starting with 'The')

True radix trees go further: when every part is finite with a small continuous domain (say 256 elements) you can build a jump table (1 index instead of 8 comparisons and 1 index). Additionally: no balancing needed, less memory needed than a B-tree.

Problems with radix trees: normally you don't store the elements, only rebuild them so no referencing. Extra constraints on your datatype result in higher coupling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Wish everyone knew this. I still work with vendors who do this sequentially. My company has a consecutive 64 block of IPs and many vendors insist it is too many to whitelist.

</comment><comment><USER24> Fascinating use of a data structure... but why are they blocking by ip address is the better question.

</comment><comment><USER25> Radix trees are great, they are used extensively in GUN and give us incredible storage and routing performance even in decentralized networks: [https://github.com/amark/gun/blob/master/lib/radisk.js#L87](https://github.com/amark/gun/blob/master/lib/radisk.js#L87)

</comment><comment><USER26> I am appalled that the understanding of basic complexity theory is missing in a company like this, and that people apparently think this is worth reading.

This SHOULD NOT be news.

Maybe you guys should revisit your school books.

No, this comment is not "too harsh" or elitistic.

<comment><USER11> The first part of your comment might be true, but regarding the newsworthiness of the post: there is always someone reading this from today's lucky 10000 [0]. It's generally great if complexity theory gets more coverage, here and on company's blog posts. Even if you know this inside out, your colleague might just hear it for the first time, or they might just want to read it up again because they didn't pay attention in class. Which is good for you too. Also, tomorrow you might be one of those lucky 10k.

[0] [https://xkcd.com/1053/](https://xkcd.com/1053/)

<comment><USER27> I think it's great to put out an article like this, for the reader. But it's terribly embarrassing for the company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> My education is equivalent to sophomore in CS with a couple years professional experience tacked on.

I'm pretty disappointed in your explanation of a radix tree, since I'd only had a very cursory exposure to one before. I don't think it's a good or even decent explanation. The point you try to make about how the tree only stores the end node is pretty incomprehensible when you are coming from a single digit BST to this. You should have sorted something that at least made sense to sort with a radix tree in your example.

</comment><comment><USER29> Please do not engage in IP blocking, this is one of the most evil things that you can do on a site, along with displaying a white page when the user has JS disabled and using Google reCAPTCHA.

<comment><USER30> As long as the blocks are _temporary_ , and of course there is a good reason for the block, I actually think it makes a lot of sense.

<comment><USER29> I agree with you, sadly it seems that most that do ban IPs tend to do it permanently and without a good reason (I do not think that banning all the IPs of all dedicated servers and tor nodes in the world has a good reason)</comment></comment></comment>


Video Startup Can't Outspend YouTube, So It Created New Currency to Pay Creators - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-27/video-startup-can-t-outspend-youtube-so-it-created-a-new-currency-to-pay-creators <comment><USER2> This is really just the same as saying they raised money to pay creators, but that wouldn't sound so innovative. One way or the other, it's people investing in this startup (or currency if that's what you want to call it) that pay the content creators.

What I wonder what will happen as more content creators join the pool, thus diluting the value of a "prop". Is the idea that this will also draw more consumers, thus balancing out the value of the prop ? How is the total market cap determined ? How will it grow ?

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I was going to say: this sounds like a bond issuance lol. How boring is _that_!

That said, how cool would it be for companies that make products to issue you a portion of the company with every purchase, so that you could actually support them _and_ be supported by them?

<comment><USER4> I am not sure about the exact structure but REI is set up as a coop.

<comment><USER5> Coops pay out a patronage dividend to members. Coop accounting is a wierd and special beast, and I won't claim any expertise. Typically a member pays something to belong, that is how ag coops raise some of their capital, for instance.

In the REI case, the dividend amounts to a discount on purchases for members. Others pay the full freight. Same goes for ag coops, but the stakes are much larger and the accounting more complicated.

There is no reason other businesses can't be structured as coops, but trying to find someone who understands the structure probably requires visiting a land grant university in fly-over land and looking up the business school.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is something I expected to come from a company like Medium. Basically a 'build your own content' portfolio using a block chain type currency to make the market.

User's pay $x per period (or merely periodically) in exchange for some amount of currency, which they 'spend' by consuming (viewing/reading/listening too) content offered by people creating things for them to view/read/listen to. Each month the artist can convert their accumulated currency in a $y payment. The platform lives off the difference between the $x -> C -> $y ratios.

If you can reach critical mass it makes for a very interesting twist on the existing model, sort of kickstarter meets bitcoin meets ebay. One way to finesse it would be for users to 'bid' on creative projects as well so a creator could say "I can do a video about kittens, free for anyone who contributes $.5C or more to the campaign, it will cost $C for non-backers to view it once it is complete."

You set up a virtuous loop where people willing to spend are advising the creators to the things they should work on, reducing risk on the creators part, increasing satisfaction on the users part, and overall creation/consumption overall.

<comment><USER7> Why does this need to have anything to do with blockchain technology? What do you gain over a central intermediary?

<comment><USER8> Free marketing , ability to sound hip, and also a way to cheat and steal from your users . Also an completely automated bug bounty system

<comment><USER9> > a way to cheat and steal from your users

So using a distributed blockchain database makes it easier for you to steal from your users than if you had a centrally controlled database. Really?

<comment><USER8> New tech always has security problems especially when it first comes out and the blockchain is no different.

Then you can claim you had a security problem and act like you have been hacked. Wait for your "company" to die. Then run with the money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > YouNow's ICO is hardly huge by current standards; the largest sales have > brought in upwards of $200 million. But it's notable for other reasons. > YouNow is already a profitable company with 40 employees, name-brand > investors and 40 million registered users, a rarity in a world dominated by > brand-new projects. People who work with cryptocurrencies say they're > fielding an increasing number of calls from established companies and > predict that's where the next wave of notable cryptocurrency projects will > come from. The Props project is an early illustration of what that process > could look like.

How are they profitable? What's their revenue stream? Selling coins to speculators? How on Earth does that definition of 'profitability' currently justify the value of the coins? "This is not like those _other_ ICOs, because we made 200 million dollars selling coins!" is a huge stretch of reasoning for "So you should buy coins!"

I'm not saying the business sucks, or is a fraud, but that is an incredibly sketchy line of reasoning. I expect better from Bloomberg.

<comment><USER11> They are top 5th grossing app on android in social category. I think they have decent revenue from app.

<comment><USER10> Okay, that's a bit more reasonable. Even then, though, the token is not a share in the company. I suppose it is a signal that the company is not some fly-by-night operation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> See also LBRY ([https://lbry.io](https://lbry.io)), which is basically blockchain-powered video hosting (though technically it can host other types of files too) with cryptocurrency functionality. It is to YouTube as Steemit ([https://steemit.com](https://steemit.com)) is to WordPress.

<comment><USER13> This whole comment ([https://cmt.io](https://cmt.io)) sounds like air leaking out of the current tech bubble ([https://tech.bbl](https://tech.bbl)) on its last days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> See also:

Chat startup can't outspend Facebook, so it created a new currency to scam gullible "investors": [https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/kin/](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/kin/)

Look what these guys did (funded by the same VCs), and you'll see why this is more unethical than even some of the shadiest ICOs.

I can understand why they're doing this, but the founders and the VCs should just step back and think about it for a bit. Do they really think they can make a comeback because they raise dumb money?

I'm sure the answer will be a No, if they really think about it. The problem is they're probably past that point and can't think rationally. (And the VCs have nothing to lose by letting them go ahead with this because it's better than losing all their money)

<comment><USER15> > Do they really think they can make a comeback because they raise dumb money?

Maybe, maybe not, either way they'll probably walk away with a lot of money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> [https://d.tube/](https://d.tube/) already did this and so far it seems to be working. Although they based it on Steem, an exisiting crytptocurrency.

You can read more about dTube here: [https://steemit.com/science/@ms007/dtube- all-about-it](https://steemit.com/science/@ms007/dtube-all-about-it)

<comment> aaron-lebo Everything that originates out of steem seems to be a lame attempt at making money and then pyramid scheming that through the rest of the steem community.

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure if props is any different yet TBH. Give us money for tokens we promise you will give you access to content you want at a later date? Depending on how much of that money goes towards content creation or attracting content creators really determines if this is some sort of pump and dump or something more complex.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What people just don't seem to understand is that a cryptocurrency has to be tightly intertwined with the service it offers in a completely trustless manner. Merely having a company which has the same name as a cryptocurrency or made by the same people just doesn't cut the mustard. The service and the currency need to be logically and inseparably intertwined.

</comment><comment><USER19> I can't pay you in real dollars, so here's some nwah1-bucks

</comment><comment><USER20> This is a pretty good idea. Google has been aggressively anti-competitive in the video space and the US government has made it abundantly clear that they don't care. Losing hundreds of millions a year for a decade just so no competitor could ever even hope to begin building infrastructure for a competitor has been very effective at shutting out all competitors. When traditional means are cut off through bad faith dealing like that, people have to get creative. And after reading 'The New Digital Age' where Schmidt makes his case for Google taking control of all of human culture with no more justification than 'we are rich, therefore better', I more than welcome anyone who stands even a faint chance of taking them down a thousand notches or so.

<comment><USER21> Losing money to get to scale isn't anti-competitive, it's basically how any business with economies of scale gets started.

<comment><USER22> It absolutely is

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_\(pricing_policy\))

<comment><USER17> Or maybe not?

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

Loose money to attract users/creators who put more money into the system.

I don't see how this would qualify as dumping in any way.

<comment><USER22> I don't think loss leader is the correct term either.

YouTube doesn't make money, nor intends to make money in the near future[1]. The key here is to get entrenched in the market, then assert their monopoly.

On surface this might seem okay, but it definitely is anti-competitive. We've just gotten used to it. Dumping isn't the proper term, but was the closest I could find. It comes under predatory pricing, but the problem is, this business practice is so different from what the current literature consists of, I don't think there even is a proper term.

[1]: [http://fortune.com/2016/10/18/youtube-profits-ceo-susan- wojc...](http://fortune.com/2016/10/18/youtube-profits-ceo-susan-wojcicki/)

<comment><USER23> From your link:

"That doesn't necessarily mean YouTube isn't profitable, but it just means it's not a focus at the moment. YouTube, which primarily makes money from advertising within its videos, doesn't release revenue numbers (it is not separated in financial statements by parent company Alphabet). But some reports put revenue in the billions."

<comment><USER22> That sounds like corporate talk. It's been 11 years since YouTube has been acquired by Google. Insane amounts of money has been poured into YouTube.

Sure, it gets revenue, but I bet it's not close enough to justify the expenditure, and there's no clear path either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> As other people in the thread have pointed out, "Creators" is not the right term. I visited the site once awhile back and not only is it just a livestreaming service, but it seems like 90% of the users are high school kids, so it's not a pleasant thought to think about who among their viewers has money to spend on "Props"...

</comment><comment><USER25> Why not create a blockchain where ACTIONS online = PROFITS. The bigger actions would payout more, but coin is actually minted through online content creation, where you the creator of that content get compensated based on an algorithm.

Could even have that algorithm take in external things and re-calibrate the coins you were paid (i.e. give a bonus) for social media reach, or number of views...

E.g. : You post a video. -- You get 10 props. User B submits a comment. They have 500 comment karma so they get .01 props. User C submits a comment. They have 0 karma.. they don't get any props. User D has negative karma -- they actually have to pay props to comment till they're out of the hole.

Over a month you get 10k views, so the algorithm looks at all views across all videos for the month, and pays out a bonus where each view = 1 share out of the bonus pool of newly minted coins. Say there were 10 other users all w/ 10k and 100 props for grab you could basically give each 10 props as a bonus.

Obviously comments/etc isn't a huge time taking thing like creating a video, so video creator should get more.

I'm imagining something like Reddit + Steemit combined with some added rewards systems to keep users involved and providing QUALITY content, the karma system would be setup to basically try and ensure better quality.

<comment><USER26> Why do you need blockchains for that? It's effectively a token system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Surprised nobody here has mentioned Brendan Eich's Basic Attention Token (BAT). It ostensibly solves a problem that I see mentioned often on HN (micropayments for online publishers), and the plan is also to pay users who opt in to seeing ads. Brilliant!

It's integrated into the Brave browser already.

</comment><comment><USER28> I would put my content (development tutorials) on YouNow if it paid less than YouTube but didn't engage in the crazy shenanigans YT does. Meaning a real due process for DMCA including punishment for false claims, and truly specific and regularly enforced content restrictions for monetization.

<comment><USER17> >including punishment for false claims

I don't see that happening any time soon. The automated nature of the takedown system (which is really required due to volume) is going to have a set false positive rate. the very same companies/groups that will invest in these media type things are the same groups that will never accept that type of penalty.

the question is does this actually managed to side channel the investment around the major players and allow it to actually go against the market without penalty, or is this just another way to pump up an ICO on the promise of an ecosystem that will ultimately fail, but leave a lot of money out of investors hands and conveniently into those marketing it right now... I'm leaning towards the latter, but I might be wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Has any company in history taken "inspiration" from it's competitors name and then supplanted them? "YouNow" just sounds like a typical YouTube-Without-The- Google type of app.

<comment> aaron-lebo It's so horribly uncreative. Why not WeTube?

<comment><USER30> It's enough to remind one of Captain Slow:

[http://www.wheels24.co.za/News/Capn-Slow-slams-Twitbook- Face...](http://www.wheels24.co.za/News/Capn-Slow-slams-Twitbook- FaceTube-20130111)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> They called it "Props".

The back of my head kept on trying to read that as "Beenz" instead.

(beenz: "the web's currency", also "one of the greatest dotcom disasters".)

</comment><comment><USER32> 1) start an ad based website;

2) pay content creators with a new cryptocurrency;

3) require advertisers to use the cryptocurrency in order to buy ads.

If YouNow implements step 3, then they might have something.

<comment><USER33> Who knows, maybe they'll end up doing a different #3, put the cash in their pocket, while creators get paid with funny money. Lotsa scams as people try to catch the next bitcoin

<comment><USER32> After reading the YouNow whitepaper, I am unsure how to argue that they are not doing exactly that

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truck_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truck_system)

</comment><comment><USER35> Just as an aisde: One needs an account from G.I.F.T. (goog, Inst, fb, twit) to use YouNow. No email option.

</comment><comment><USER36> younow is very creepy. a lot of it is middle school and high school aged kids dancing around in their bedrooms or entertaining teen talk for thousands of viewers. I just get a really bad creepy vibe from the site in general

</comment><comment><USER8> This is yet another block chain tipping product that is needlessly complex . Why not just give a set conversion table (one bit equals one dollar) like twitch? Also figure out your cut and fees and put that in the table.

</comment><comment><USER37> YouNow is actually a live-streaming service so I wouldn't call it a direct competitor to YouTube. It's more like a competitor to Livestream.com or Justin.tv (previously)

<comment><USER38> YouTube is a live-streaming service.

<comment><USER39> YouTube _includes_ , among other things, livestreaming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> It's noteworthy that this is an ERC20 compliant token. A pretty significant market of tokens is developing around the ERC20 standard, which should generate significant returns to scale (a high level of compatibility between applications supporting individual tokens means less duplication of work and more complementary development).

</comment><comment><USER41> I have a feeling jobs on craigslist will say "paid in props" now rather than "paid in exposure".

</comment><comment><USER42> Reading this, all I can think of is that South Park episode and "Theoretical Internet Dollars."

</comment><comment><USER43> A potential value here is that you now support micro-transactions or can pay for an ad free experience.. but then I don't know why you don't just use bitcoin for this. Or maybe you can exchange to bitcoin.

</comment><comment><USER44> Thought this would be about Viuly ([https://viuly.com](https://viuly.com)) but I guess there's a few cryptotokens trying to compete in this space.

</comment><comment><USER45> It's probably just me but this website is in no way in competition with YouTube, it kinda sucks.

</comment><comment><USER46> Blockchain: The new thing to revitalize your stagnant growth startup.

</comment><comment><USER47> I have been burned too much in trying to get into ALTs because Bitcoin is still rocketing. As long as bitcoin is rocketing, you lose money by trading BTC in for anything else.

<comment><USER48> Most alts in the top 10 market caps just follow the swings of bitcoin anyway

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> How is this different from paying in scrip?

</comment><comment><USER50> How does younow compare to twitch?</comment>