How compatible is LibreSSL? - <AUTHOR> http://devsonacid.wordpress.com/2014/07/12/how-compatible-is-libressl/ <comment><USER3> I'm more than surprised about the hostile tone some contributors seem to use when they talk about LibreSSL lately.

LibreSSL is an OpenSSL fork done by the OpenBSD team primarily because they don't think OpenSSL is the right software to include in their OS. That's their decision, if you don't use OpenBSD, you don't have to care. They have done an insane amout of work in pretty short time, and since that work might benefit the larger OS community, they kindly decided to start work on a portable version, which you don't have to use.

Even if you don't use LibreSSL, you might still benefit from their work as there is a healthy collaboration between OpenBSD/LibreSSL and Google/Adam Langley/BoringSSL.

Now, there's a first preview release of portable LibreSSL, and nitpicks are used to demonstrate how supposedly incapable the OpenBSD team must be. They hardcode -Werror, they obviously don't know how to write a configure script. They don't provide a PGP signature for the preview release, they obviously don't know how to distribute software securely. They use Comic Sans, they can't be taken seriously at all.

If you think LibreSSL will benefit you personally, you might consider showing a little gratitude. If you don't think LibreSSL is of any use to you, why do you even bother to write about it?

<comment><USER4> So in your view people with valid criticisms should just shut up and be thankful?

All the points in the blog posts are real problems. Pointing them out just means that fixes can be made and software can be improved.

<comment><USER3> _> So in your view people with valid criticisms should just shut up and be thankful?_

No, sober problem reports (preferably sent to email@example.com or openbsd- tech) are obviously exactly what the preview release is meant for.

As I wrote, I am surprised about the _tone._ Not of any particular comment or blogpost, but there's a tendency that I perceive lately.

<comment><USER5> You are upset that people are using the wrong _tone_ to make criticisms of OpenBSD? The same OpenBSD run by Theo de Raadt?

You reap what you sow, as they say.

<comment><USER6> Where are your patches to improve OpenSSL? Put up or shut up, some may say...

<comment><USER7> I know, some of the commentards here are so whiny!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > -Werror is hardcoded in the configure script, which is a very bad idea, and > the opposite of portable. using -Werror is a guarantueed build break > whenever the build is tried on a system the original developer had no access > to.

I think that is _exactly_ the point; if the thing does not build, people are going to complain loudly and things are going to get fixed. Warnings are usually just run-time problems waiting to happen, so they may as well be considered bugs.

<comment><USER9> C is not the same as other languages. Many possible errors reported by the compiler really are not bugs. You've probably heard of "-Wall" and "-Wextra". Why does -Wextra include even more warnings than -Wall? Because they're more likely to include truly spurious warnings. C is both more simple and more flexible than other languages, and it's very hard for the compiler to tell when the code does something the writer didn't intend.

As a trivial example, -Wunused will warn when a function has a parameter but doesn't use it. But you do this whenever you need to provide a callback that really doesn't care about one of the parameters. Still, -Wunused is helpful to find errors elsewhere in the code, so in these cases you might do something like

unused_param = unused_param;

just to make that one compiler warning go away. (That might work for one version of a compiler, but not another!) In other cases, the error the warning catches is so much more uncommon than the spurious warnings, you might disable that one warning type for your project. The linux kernel does this for a couple of them.

Anyway, the best way is to enable as many warnings as you can, and have the discipline to fix the ones you see, without forcing yourself or anyone with -Werror. In any non-trivial codebase, you guarantee that the next major release of gcc will not be able to build your code if you use -Werror, due to some truly spurious warnings. Again, this isn't because gcc sucks, just because the problem of guessing where what you wanted is different from what you did is extremely difficult in C.

<comment><USER10> While many of these warnings can be annoying during development they are also very useful if the code is kept clean of them. In this case the __bounded__ attribute is a security feature their compiler version has. If another platform can not support this feature then revoking this specific instance of this warning is an active decision someone should make when writing the build scripts. Just ignoring all warnings is certainly not the way to go.

The language often (always?) has facilities to remove those warnings on a case by case basis. For example when you don't want to use a parameter you can actively let the compiler know without assigning the variable to itself: you can only include the type and not the name:

        int fn(int, void*);

        int fn(int num, void* /*extra*/) {
            // If the name extra is commented out the compiler will
            // not warn that you are not using it. Now it is very
            // clear that not using this variable was an active choice
            // and not a mistake.
            return num;
        }

edit: as pbsd pointed out commenting out extra is not portable C code, though I believe the wider point still stands. These warnings can be very useful and should be be reviewed before ignoring them.

<comment><USER11> Omitting `extra` is only valid in C++, not C. In C you have to get by with things like

        (void)extra;

to shut the compiler up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _so if the libressl developers rip out all their dubious entropy generation methods in favor of /dev/urandom on linux it might be well worth switching to it._

/dev/urandom _is_ the favored entropy gathering method. But if you can't open it (not there, rlimit restriction, etc.) it falls back to the bobo code. If the linux kernel provided a random number source that was reliable and could not fail, this wouldn't be an issue.

<comment><USER13> How is it a good thing to fall back to non sufficient security? The only good fallback is falling back to crash and clean up. If libressl can't find enough entropy then it should give up on it.

<comment><USER12> I won't argue that point since I generally agree, but ask yourself this:

0\. sshd will fork() and chroot() into /var/empty. After the fork(), you can't use the entropy you have because it's shared with the parent (i.e., it's not "entropic").

1\. Where should it get entropy from?

2\. Where does OpenSSL get entropy from in this case?

Anyway, I don't even work on portable libressl because I don't want to deal with shit like this, but I think the quoted text erroneously gives the impression that /dev/urandom isn't used. I wanted to correct that impression.

<comment><USER14> With OpenSSL, if you know you're going be chrooting, you can explicitly seed the internal PRNG with a call to RAND_poll() before you chroot, avoiding the need to open /dev/urandom once you've chrooted. (Similarly, you're supposed to call RAND_poll() to re-seed after forking because there's no safe way to detect that you've forked. Of course, if you fork while in a chroot you're screwed.)

I really think that LibreSSL's RAND_poll() should have similar behavior to ensure maximum compatibility with OpenSSL and to provide a means to use chroot() safely without the risk of falling back to the "bobo" code. (Also, a means of safely reseeding after a fork on systems without minherit(MAP_INHERIT_ZERO)).

(Incidentally, libsodium has a similar API: you can explicitly call randombytes_stir() to cause the library to open (and keep open) a file descriptor to /dev/urandom, so subsequent calls to the PRNG work in a chroot.)

<comment><USER12> Yes, that's what you're supposed to do, and it sucks. A good library should provide you with more than a box full of hammers and thumbs; it should actually help you and not just punt whenever a hard decision shows up. The RAND interface was one of the first things gutted.

The presence or need for a stir() function should be considered a serious design flaw.

(forks are detected by calling getpid() if you don't have inheritzero.)

<comment><USER14> Agreed, but the lack of a random syscall on Linux makes an API like stir necessary.

Also, getpid() isn't airtight - if you fork and fork again there's a risk of PID wraparound.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> LibreSSL is lacking features such as ALPN and they've removed many constants, changed function definitions in subtle ways and modified header include dependencies. The result of this is that it definitely isn't a drop in replacement for OpenSSL. Then again OpenSSL usually isn't a drop in replacement for OpenSSL between versions either so they aren't doing a terrible job.

Most of these could be easily worked around with a few #ifdefs but they've also managed to make that a bit problematic by reusing the OPENSSL_VERSION_NUMBER macro without providing some sort of complementary IS_LIBRESSL flag. Fortunately OpenSSL hasn't hit version 2 yet so the version numbers don't overlap at all.

<comment><USER3> _> without providing some sort of complementary IS_LIBRESSL flag._

Seems like this is already fixed: [http://marc.info/?l=openbsd- tech&m=140511451408331&w=2](http://marc.info/?l=openbsd- tech&m=140511451408331&w=2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The author tried building the first release on Sabotage Linux, an experimental distro, and reported on what broke. That may be valid; I hadn't heard of the distro before. They also talked about how entropy was being gathered incorrectly; this is _possible,_ as I thought it's kind of a preview release, but I'm inclined to listen to the OpenBSD guys first.

</comment><comment><USER17> re: hard-coding -Werror into the build process

Yes, -Werror is normally going to break things badly and cause far too much unnecessary work... _for most projects_. There are a handful of projects, on the other hand, that I would argue -Werror is absolutely necessary. Crypto libraries such as openssl/libressl/gnutls and tools like gnupg are at the top of that list. This list _might_ also include key-handling utils such as {gpg,ssh}-agent and maybe pinentry.

Breaking on new GCC features is a good thing, because for these important packages you _shouldn 't ever_ be guessing about the programmer intention or _assuming_ that some new warning is safe.

Several people brought up -Wunused. We already know about that warning, and so libressl should expect it and compile cleanly. Yes, this might be annoying at times, but cleaning up the code was the goal anyway. What about future versions of GCC? There are only a few possibilities:

       0) The warning actually is about an important bug.

Obviously you don't want the build in this case.

       1) Some new -W flag was added.

Broken build are important here. The GCC authors probably added that flag for a reason, and you can't _guarantee_ [1] the warning is a false-positive.

       2) No flags have changed, but some other component has caused
          a warning where there wasn't one previously.

This means something else changed:

          2a) A function prototype changed. (does it even compile properly?)
          2b) Some defined type or macro changed. (could easily be a new bug)

Yes, in many cases, these are probably trivial. The point is that for some software, forcing someone to actually check is _the goal_. The problems with openssl that were recently exposed by heartbleed was that _nobody was actually checking_ security-critical components, and simply assuming those checks were being done by somebody else.

With -Werror, the fact that it doesn't compile will force someone to either fix some bug or silence the warning by adding the necessary cast or #ifdef or whatever. Really, I have to wonder about anybody who advocates for allowing unchecked builds: why are you ok with the kind of unchecked code that lead to heartbleed and many other security problems? As DJB[2] and PHK[3] both warned: are you _trying_ to prevent a high-security environment?

[1] Why can't we guarantee such things? Because answering that would req1uire solving the Halting Problem.

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8023812](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8023812)

[3] [http://ftp.belnet.be/FOSDEM/2014/Janson/Sunday/NSA_operation...](http://ftp.belnet.be/FOSDEM/2014/Janson/Sunday/NSA_operation_ORCHESTRA_Annual_Status_Report.webm)

</comment><comment><USER18> Here's the experience of a Gentoo developer: [https://blog.hboeck.de/archives/851-LibreSSL-on- Gentoo.html](https://blog.hboeck.de/archives/851-LibreSSL-on-Gentoo.html)

</comment><comment><USER19> "Werror is a guarantueed build break whenever the build is tried on a system the original developer had no access to."

Yeah, if your program uses undefined behaviour or your cc is crazy. I think the point is to catch undefined behaviour and make sure it isn't ignored.

<comment><USER20> gcc routinely introduced new warnings that break correctly working software's build if they use -Werror. For example, Gentoo had a lot of problems with this in the past, as do other packagers, it's just that Gentoo users are more exposed to build failures (upgrade gcc, rebuild tree, watch the fun).

<comment><USER19> I still don't see the problem, warnings usually indicate problems with the code, even if that particular sort of warning was added in a new version of the cc. If they don't indicate actual problems then the compiler is broken, but I still don't think that's a problem since they can usually be silenced in some non-intrusive way. Also you shouldn't be trying to build software if you don't know how to report a bug or have a buggy toolchain (so maybe a lot of Gentoo users shouldn't be using Gentoo).

<comment><USER21> Compiler warnings can come down to things that are purely style, like unused variables. It's more than likely that an unused variable could sneak itself into a program, not be found for a few years, then suddenly trigger a warning when a compiler added the check (of course, compilers have been checking for this for a long time, but this is just an example).

In the case of Gentoo, this would manifest itself as packages compiling cleanly with one compiler version, then suddenly lots of packages failing to compile because the build processes were stopped due to the, now reported, unused variable. If these were just warnings, then the packages would still compile, someone would notice (or even the original dev), and the problem can be fixed. Note that before the compiler upgrade, there was no bug - <USER2> program worked fine.

Except for a case such as libressl (preview release so they can get comments), having -Werror hardcoded in the build process clearly makes no sense.

<comment><USER19> Sorry, I still don't believe that's a problem. Unused variable warnings can be silenced easily if they aren't real bugs (for example an unused parameter in a callback). Most people don't have to deal with this stuff because they use precompiled binaries. The people that _do_ deal with this should know how to fix it properly.

<comment><USER22> It's already necessary far too much of the time to manually back and slash C code to get it to build in an untested or newer environment, without adding additional cases over purely stylistic compiler complaints. Precompiled binaries aren't available for every system for which one might want to use portable software.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Europe eyes new rules for online platforms - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/25/europe-eyes-new-rules-for-online-platforms/ <comment><USER2> I'm usually defending European regulations on this site, but that doesn't seem sensible and very much French (France's "you have to play x% songs in French on the radio", applied to Internet services).

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a good way to keep content out of Europe permenantly.</comment>


CBS Bans SodaStream Ad - jack-r-abbit http://www.forbes.com/sites/willburns/2013/01/31/cbs-bans-sodastream-ad-wheres-the-outrage/ <comment><USER2> This all feels very hollow.

The entire tone of this op-ed strikes me as either impossibly naive or full of manufactured outrage. How a Forbes contributor is somehow oblivious to the nature of entrenched (and lucrative) corporate relationships is beyond me.

Not to mention that beneath all the free-market rah-rah chest thumping, he entirely disregards the fact that a private company is quite within their right, laws permitting, to decide with whom they wish to do business.

<comment><USER3> Forbes.com is essentially all crowd sourced 'contributors' at this point, each running their own separate blog. There's very little oversight/screening of contributors. There's been a pretty noticeable drop in quality since they started doing this, I'm curious how long they have before the brand is entirely diluted.

Source: [http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top- stories/173743/what-t...](http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top- stories/173743/what-the-forbes-model-of-contributed-content-means-for- journalism/) [http://www.forbes.com/sites/deborahljacobs/2012/10/06/how- to...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/deborahljacobs/2012/10/06/how-to-submit-a- guest-post/)

<comment><USER4> I'm immediately skeptical of anything from Forbes these days. They have about as much publisher credibility as Tumblr.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >SodaStream has a product that could be wildly disruptive to the soda industry, if successful.

Not really. Maybe with a different business model, but from the cost analysis I've seen, SodaStream comes in at about $0.40/L, which is a little over half of what Coke and Pepsi cost, but the cost of Coke and Pepsi is about 50% branding anyway. A fair comparison would be generic sodas, which are are closer to $0.50/L. So you're only saving about 20%, even though you've cut out the cost of bottling water, warehousing it, and shipping it around the country (aka, most of the actual cost of soda).

Which is to say that the SodaStream is a rip-off. They lock you into buying their proprietary CO2 tanks (which are specially threaded so you can't shop around), so it's sort of a similar business model to printers or razors. Except, of course, that you can actually build a DIY carbonation system for not much more than the cost of the SodaStream fountain itself (and it's not a difficult build; you just have to connect some hoses to some off-the-shelf parts, and you can find plenty of guides on the internet).

<comment><USER6> If you really want the Soda Stream, you can get an adapter for a paintball CO2 cartridge. [http://palmer-pursuit.com/cart/soda-stream-course-thread- bot...](http://palmer-pursuit.com/cart/soda-stream-course-thread-bottle- adapter-p-1102.html?zenid=2c6duq2slvqeft8r0qm6qqod73) for example.

<comment><USER7> Is that food-safe? And is it taking Airsoft containers to use for sodastream, or is it taking sodastream containers to use for airsoft?

An initial web search shows this, but I have no idea how accurate it is.

([http://www.micromatic.com/forum/us-en/trouble-shooting- beer-...](http://www.micromatic.com/forum/us-en/trouble-shooting-beer-quality- home/3180-food-grade-co2-vs-regular-co2.html))

<comment><USER6> One of the reviews that I linked to talked about this. According to them, they talked to several suppliers who said the food-grade difference was make by turning the (source! I think) canister over and running it for a couple seconds.

Take that with a big grain of salt. I'd certainly look into it more before I used it. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The hilarious part is SodaStream costs as much if not more than brand name soda.

Unless you just always pay full price for soda and are too lazy to wait for a sale or think you are above coupons.

Maybe they made a deal with CBS to purposely reject the ad, because that seems like a growing trend - to purposely get rejected so you get attention.

<comment><USER9> They make it a publicity point when their ads are banned. It creates an aura of forbidden fruit. And by god do people love to feel sanctimonious about their consumer choices as political speech.

The genius move to me is the fact that after 100 years of marketing by PepsiCo and Coca-Cola to create a multi billion dollar global market, here comes these guys that just piggy back on all that to sell the same sugar water but delivered in in shiny metal/plastics proprietary gadgets.

John Sculley should have jumped on board with these guys instead.

<comment><USER10> To be fair, the sodastream is pretty awesome even without the cola syrup. I usually skip the sugar water (or make my own) and it's still worth while.

And you can always hack the CO2 cartridges for DIY refill.

<comment><USER5> Yes, but for less than the cost of the SodaStream, not even counting the adapter to attach it to arbitrary tanks, you can build your own DIY setup [1] (which involves screwing some parts together) which you can attach a standard tank to _and_ which you can adjust the pressure on.

[1] [http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2012-06/how-make-your- own-...](http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2012-06/how-make-your-own-home- carbonation-system)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ad firm makes ad they already know CBS wouldn't allow. Ad gets rejected. The outrage! The controversy! Ad then gets 10x more exposure and they can resell the spot.

SodaStream, like Godaddy, Peta, many others before. Pretty smart.

<comment><USER12> This wasn't an advertisement that was going to shock value, but crossed the line. This is an advertisement that was 'too competitive' with entrenched interests. CBS saying that its advertisement sales are not a 'free market.'

It's less disturbing then the issue with CBS + CNET + CES2013, but it shows a pattern.

<comment><USER13> Free (market) cuts both ways. Why shouldn't CBS be free to reject whatever they want?

<comment><USER12> I'm referring to CBS advertising sales as a 'free market' microcosm. (The 'market' being adverts on CBS)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Companies regularly do things to keep good relations with their sponsors. Isn't that assumed? I'm not in the ad space in any way, shape or form - <AUTHOR> maybe I am jaded - but this seems like something I would expect from a multinational corporation

</comment><comment><USER15> PornHub.com also submitted an offer to buy a Super Bowl ad, but was rejected by CBS. Without a doubt, they knew it would be rejected, and were hoping for the free publicity. Based on the proposed ad, I think they got their money's worth.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/why-pornhubs-rejected- super-b...](http://www.businessinsider.com/why-pornhubs-rejected-super-bowl- ad-is-a-bogus-stunt-2013-1)

</comment><comment><USER16> SodaStream puts a deliberately incompatible and patented connector on their CO2 bottles just to charge a huge markup on refills. They sort of deserve to face someone else's anticompetitive shady deal.

<comment><USER17> I fill up my SodaStream with bottles from AGA here in Denmark (they have a "get the 6th one free" special so the effective refill cost is about 15 USD). There's also this system: <http://www.wassermaxx.com/> \-- again compatible.

Perhaps SodaStream etc. is more popular here in Europe as we don't drive quite that much in cars. I'm sure I drink 20-30l of carbonated water per week; I wouldn't want to have to carry that home from the shop every week and return the empty bottles the next week.

Except making my water fizzy, AGA's CO2 production is apparently used to extinguish exotic fires. There's a particular type of compressed wood pellets used in heating power plants here, that wood is stored in large silos which apparently can catch fire internally. They spent 2 weeks trying to slowly extinguish this fire using 170 ton of CO2 shipped by trucks from AGA (equivalent to 400,000 SodaStream compatible containers).

<comment><USER18> You basically need carbonated water on tap! That's a pretty amazing consumption volume. I wouldn't drink much more than half that in a day if you combined all my fluid intake I don't think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Really this is a big deal? I remember soda stream from the 80's in the UK. I'm sure they even eventually had official coke and Pepsi syrups that could be used with them. Didn't kill the market there and I'm sure it won't here.

Seams like they've been in business since 1903.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodastream>

<comment><USER20> The whole "being green" thing has contributed a lot to their recent success. Also their flavors (afaik) use actual sugar instead of HFCS and diet flavors have no aspartame. I use mine just to make soda water and love it.

<comment><USER21> Are their green claims just 'greenwash'? Im thinking disposable CO2 canisters can't be that good for the environment either?

<comment><USER22> They're not disposable. They reuse them. You get a rather sizable discount (50%) for giving an empty one back when you get a new one.

<comment><USER23> I wonder why they don't market that more widely, I was looking for refills around a display and couldn't find them. There was nothing about where or how to get a canister that I could find on the outer packaging.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Seems well within CBS's rights. This isn't a "ban". SodaStream could show the ad anywhere they can convince companies with advertisement space to show it. There is not an inalienable right to air any commercial CBS is given and clearly CBS stands to lose much more from damaging their relationship with customers who consistently advertise with them than the one time payoff from SodaStream. I'll save my outrage this time.

<comment><USER25> I would've sided more with you if CBS were a cable network, but it uses the public airwaves. That isn't to say that it should be forced to show every ad, but I think it raises the bar needed to refuse an ad.

<comment><USER24> How does using public airwaves change the bar? I don't see how using tax payer funded spectrum really affects the situation at all. It isn't like it is in the American taxpayers' interest to have an Israeli company's interest put over three American companies' interest.

<comment><USER12> I don't see how the fact that it's an Israeli company has much to do with it. Sounds like they would have denied the ad it if it were an American company too.

<comment><USER24> I agree with that even if SodaStream were American CBS wouldn't have aired the ad (which honestly was created to get this exact article published), but I thought the nationality of each company underlined how irreverent using public airwaves are to this particular issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > _If the SodaStream product is a better "soda idea" than Coke and Pepsi, then > shouldn't it be given a fair shot within any medium it decides to risk its > dollars?_

On a private network? No.

<comment><USER27> They are a private network running on public airwaves. That spends millions on trying to buy legislation, including things like SOPA and PIPA. They are showing the Superbowl, and the NFL has a special antitrust exemption.

Given all that, I don't have any particular problem mandating that they run a fair advertising market.

<comment><USER18> I might be misunderstanding you, but what is fair here? If I was Coke spending many millions per year with CBS then in a prime spot an advert was played which made CBS a tiny fraction of what I had spent appeared and made fun of my company, if be calling foul. At a bare minimum I'd be calling for some heavily discounted advertising.

<comment><USER27> In this case I believe a fair market is the fair situation. That is, CBS would sell the advertising without special favor.

I agree that people with privilege get all cranky when upstarts challenge them. And so Coke might cry "unfair!" when somebody with 1/100th of their marketing budget outmaneuvers them. To which I say: boo hoo! Marketplaces exist for the benefit of consumers, not producers.

<comment><USER18> Playing the devils advocate here as I agree with you: What if Coke walks away from CBS - it wouldn't be very fair from the perspective of CBS as they applied the same rules to everyone, and a lost a massive customer. CBS probably doesn't care what consumers think, CBS are effectively dumb pipes, and can charge through the nose for their service.

<comment><USER27> Interesting point. I think that's only a problem if the different TV networks had different standards. If the fair-market setup comes about because the FCC says that anybody who takes broadcast or cable ads has to sell air time fairly, then Coke won't have any incentive to leave CBS for somebody else.

<comment><USER18> Ahh, being a non-US person I am now getting it. I imagine there is something similar for us here when stations were sold frequencies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > CBS banned SodaStream's Super Bowl spot because, apparently, it was too much > of a direct hit to two of its biggest sponsors, Coke and Pepsi.

An entire article and not a single mention of the fact that SodaStream is controversial because its factory is located in Mishor Adumim? Seriously?

<comment><USER29> Had to look that up... apparently Mishor Adumim is a factory area located near Jerusalem in Israel.

Um... my guess is that it was not mentioned because it has no bearing or implication as to the reason why the advert was blocked by CBS.

<comment><USER30> "In Israel" isn't quite true.

 _> The EU's highest court ruled in 2010 that Sodastream was not entitled to claim a "Made in Israel" exemption from EU customs payments because of the companies' primary manufacturing plant location outside of Israel in the Israeli-occupied territories West Bank settlement of Mishor Adumim.[68][69][70]_

 _> Sodastream has been criticized for operating a manufacturing plant on land in the West Bank by the Israeli non-governmental organizations Coalition of Women for Peace[71] and Peace Now,[72] as well as other human rights organizations.[73]_

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodastream#Controversy>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> And all I can do is be surprised that SodaStream is still around.

My parents had one in the 90's but it became harder and harder to get CO2 canisters to refill it with.

<comment><USER32> They are going through a resurgence, but from what I can tell it is mostly driven by people who want to make healthier carbonated drinks at home (like carbonated water + a bit of juice), not by people wanting to make a cheaper alternative to coke or pepsi at home, who were the main market in the 80s.

<comment><USER33> > (like carbonated water + a bit of juice)

Wouldn't you save a lot of bother by simply buying cheap mineral water and mixing with that? That's what I do.

You can get a 1.5L bottle of perfectly nice fizzy water in Germany for about 20 cents if you recycle the bottle and get the deposit back.

<comment><USER34> I don't think that cost is the main reason for getting this product. It's just convenient to always have soda water here without having to carry it through the city.

I recently bought one for convenience reasons (after i learned about th glass caraves) and am totally happy with it - I guess as more (young) people in the bigger cities don't own a car (and only buy small quantities of food in the supermarket around the corner), more will use products like SodaStream.

<comment><USER32> Yes, this is it exactly. I have never even bothered to price it out per liter, even if it cost a bit more it would be worth not having to lug bottles of carbonated water home.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> CBS has decided not to do business with another company because it might bother two of their bigger clients.

That is an outrage?

</comment><comment><USER36> Imagine is IBM had stopped the Apple 1984 Super Bowl ad...

</comment><comment><USER37> I knew I'd heard the name "SodaStream" before. The other day, walking around in the Castro in SF, I came across a bunch of protestors who were calling for a boycott of SodaStream: <http://www.codepink4peace.org/section.php?id=470>

As a person who hates the throwaway bottle culture of soda (and the HFCS, etc.), but who also supports middle-east peace, I'm torn here. :-/

<comment><USER38> On what grounds are you torn? If you don't like the business model of Pepsi / Coca Cola etc, avoid their products. If you don't like what SodaStream does, avoid their products. No one is forcing you to choose?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I got one a few months ago, it's really really nice not having to keep a bunch of bottles/cans/whatever all over the place. The local Target stocks tons of syrups and canisters. It's fantastic that it's cheaper and _slightly_ healthier as well.

Plus I've been experimenting with different mixins, juice, instant tea, that sort of thing.

They seem like a cool company, I've love for them to get more popular.

<comment><USER6> I've cut back a lot on my diet cola, but I really like fizzy drinks. Seeing the Crystal Light (my goto non-caffeinated drink) and others makes me highly intrigued. The 30 day money back guarantee makes it a certainty.

<comment><USER39> Heck, I just dump the regular old Crystal Light powder into the carbonated water and it makes a decent fizzy lemon aid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I wish them a joyous Streisand effect.

</comment><comment><USER41> Queue the Streisand effect...

I'd expect this to be even better for Sodastream now than if it had not been banned.

<comment><USER42> I think it comes down to whether the press hit can be as effective as a Super Bowl Ad. And there's a reason Superbowl ads are so expensive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> > I hope it gets a billion hits.

1998 called. They want their web stats back.

</comment><comment><USER44> But they _did_ air it.

</comment><comment><USER45> Is there any confirmation of this at all? Did CBS _actually_ "ban" the ad? This all smells a little like viral marketing, coupled with the "act of defiance" posting of a youtube video, as if that is really a defiance of anything.

(on a related sidenote, each year various ad trolls intentionally submit unairable commercials and then post them online claiming that they were censored by the Man. Not only do they get attention, they don't have to pay for the original expensive timeslots either)

</comment><comment><USER46> Maybe because the product in question completely sucks.

I'm reasonably sure that it belongs in the same dubious category as that other great 'money saver', the FoodSaver.</comment>


Bing sends login information unencrypted - <AUTHOR>

Login page : http://blogs.bing.com/wp-login.php<p>Screenshot of sending login data over plain text : https://i.imgur.com/dkVEFa7.png <comment><USER2> Is there even a way to create a public account on this service? Or is that an employee login? (If so it isn't using any of the standard Microsoft federated account logins, since it is WP based not too surprising).

</comment><comment><USER3> Please correct the title by including "Bing blogs"

<comment><AUTHOR> I am logged in and I don't see an option to 'edit' [https://i.imgur.com/tV96G2T.png](https://i.imgur.com/tV96G2T.png)</comment></comment>


IM Status-- How You should Use It - <AUTHOR> http://lifehacker.com/5819017/im-status-how-should-you-use-it

<comment><USER2> Why doesn't Lifehacker's page degrade gracefully if Javascript isn't present?

</comment><comment><USER3> Why is Lifehacker telling me how to use my IM statuses?</comment>


For High-Fructose Corn Syrup, Sweet Talk Gets Harder - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/business/02syrup.html?hpw=&pagewanted=all <comment><USER2> I don't understand why the focus of the anti-HFCS movement is on health. The problem with corn syrup is that it _tastes bad_ and has _lousy mouthfeel_. If I'm going to consume empty calories, I want them to be delicious.

<comment><USER3> I've had the Passover Coke (real sugar, no HFCS), and, even though I wanted to like it, I have to say that I liked regular coke better. Maybe it's just a matter of operant conditioning or something like that.

That's the only basis I have to compare HFCS to sugar. I would prefer to have a pastry from a real bakery or a homemade cookie to a Twinkie or a McDonald's apple pie, but there's a big difference between mass-manufactured crap and the expensive stuff other than that the latter uses sugar and the former uses HFCS.

The real problem with HFCS compared to sugar is that it's so cheap that it tends to be used everywhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why demonize HFCS (over sugar) before science shows any of the conspiracy theorists claims are true? It sounds like the vast majority of anti-HFCS claims have no supporting evidence. As far as obesity is concerned, HFCS and sugar are probably equivalent.

<comment><USER5> But are they equally prevalent? What if they are equivalent, when all things are equal, but HFCS is deleterious simply because of its cost induced amount and ubiquity?

<comment><USER6> Yeah, even if HFCS is shown to be no worse than sugar, I'm disturbed by the idea of this country getting fat off of corn subsidies and price protection for domestic sugar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Its a highly processed substance and that's why I would be totally against it. Also food companies put a lot of naive looking substances in food that you would never use if you made them yourself. E.g. soy and lechitin in chocolate. Maybe its not harmful, but why am I forced to eat soy and lechitin everyday? Do I really want lechitin or some gum extract in my chocolate? Same goes for corn syrup. I wouldn't suck out sugar from corn for a home made ketchup and that's why I don't want to see any corn extract in it.

<comment><USER8> Why do you object to highly processed substances?

<comment><USER7> Because your genetic heritage is unlikely to be used to it and with humanity's short history of chemical knowledge and expertise on processing food (what, 30- 50 years?) I wont be convinced that humans know better.</comment></comment></comment>


Lessons learned from implementing Paxos (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.willportnoy.com/2012/06/lessons-learned-from-paxos.html

<comment><USER2> There's a nice distributed system class at MIT [http://nil.csail.mit.edu/6.824/2015/](http://nil.csail.mit.edu/6.824/2015/) where one of the lab consists of implementing Paxos in Go. They provide evaluation scripts to see if you got it right.

<comment><USER3> code stubs and tests:

git://g.csail.mit.edu/6.824-golabs-2015

paxos assignment: [http://nil.csail.mit.edu/6.824/2015/labs/lab-3.html](http://nil.csail.mit.edu/6.824/2015/labs/lab-3.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd like to highlight a link in that post to "Paxos Made Live", a paper from Google about a real-world implementation of Paxos. I found the paper very enlightening, and it gives much credence to simpler algorithms like Raft.

[http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...](http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/paxos_made_live.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> What benefits does Paxos have over Raft?

<comment><USER6> Paxos is really a family of similar algorithms. You could have classic paxos, full byzantine paxos([http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/lamport/tla/by...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/lamport/tla/byzsimple.pdf)), multi-paxos, or fast-paxos ([http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=6462...](http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=64624)). So in a sense you could argue that it is more general than Raft. The issues that arise building production systems were not as well understood 20 years ago. Raft is similar to multi-paxos but more fully specifies things that are left out of previous academic work like transaction log snapshotting, joining new members of the quorum and transaction log truncation. I don't agree with raft's authors that raft is easier to understand, I do agree that it is a more complete spec for building a subset of real world systems.</comment></comment>


Providence Equity Partners To Acquire Blackboard For $1.64 Billion In Cash - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/05/educated-buy-providence-equity-partners-to-acquire-blackboard-for-1-64-billion-in-cash/ <comment><USER2> Blackboard is one of the crappiest products i've used at school. Thank goodness I didn't have to put up with it for more than a couple of semesters before my school changed out to a different product to manage grades/courses etc. Administrative stuff like grades, assignments, etc. with Blackboard was a mind numbing exercise. One would need the patience of a monk to deal with it. The UX still looked like it was 1991 and nobody liked to use it, students and instructors alike!

I don't know how many startups and companies have been stopped in their path to improve service and experience by these litigious patent enforcing jackholes.

<comment><USER3> This deal has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with how difficult it is to sell into higher education.

<comment><USER4> And the fact that Blackboard has significant patents around what they do...

<comment><USER5> The '138 patent got stomped. Do they have others?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> They don't mention one of the main reasons they have such a huge market share/monopoly and a still shitty product: they're litigious bastards who have tons of inane patents for things like buttons and the like. They've sued the hell out of their main competitor D2L and the courts ruled against them and a lot of their patents across the board.

</comment><comment><USER7> At my work, we like to invest in companies that we think would be attractive LBO Candidates... Blackboard really fits the profile.

1\. Entrenched business model

At my school we used Blackboard and we had about 50,000 students. Getting everyone on board to switch from Blackboard to a new system would be pretty tough. The university would have to spend a lot in terms of re-training which would make it tough for a new system to gain traction.

2\. Recurring revenue stream

Blackboard has a recurring revenue stream which is pretty awesome for a private equity buyer. You see, the PE game is pretty simple. You buy a business for X, where about only 10-30% of X is actual cash you put up. The rest comes in the form of debt.

A recurring revenue stream is great in that your subscription fees can cover the interest payments on your debt and in many cases will allow you to have more debt as part of your capital structure than normal. Lenders will see that your business can generate a stable enough cash flow to support such large amounts of leverage. A business such as Blackboard could potentially support leverage that's on the high end of the scale because of its recurring revenue stream.

3\. Ripe for cost cutting

A company like Blackboard is bound to have a good deal of fat that can be cut. Slashing R&D funding and whatever growth spending will increase the amount of cash flow that goes to investors. My guess is they will streamline the company to be more focused on its sales force than whatever developer-base they have in place at the moment.

<comment><USER8> I used to work for a startup with a similar product aimed at K-12. This is a pretty good summary of how the whole learning management software industry works.

It's unbelievably hard to sell educational software, but once you have some customers signed up they will stay with a particular system for literally decades before contemplating a change, regardless of how stagnant and outdated the product becomes. As recently as five years ago, there were still a significant number of schools using systems based on Foxpro.

Companies spent years establishing a customer base, and then they're almost inevitably snapped up by a larger fish. My startup was purchased by a regional educational software company, which was itself almost immediately afterward snapped up by a private equity group.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Although perhaps financially this totally makes sense, I had to use Blackboard in the last year at University, and it pains me to see that somebody's paying 1.6 Billion for that piece of crap!

</comment><comment><USER10> I feel really bad for the engineers at ANGEL Learning. They were acquired by Blackboard a little over a year ago and now that they are just getting settled in there is sure to be more sweeping changes.

As cut-throat as this seems and as piss-poor a product Blackboard is, there are bound to be some talented engineers with experience in the education vertical ready to take on BigCo available soon.

</comment><comment><USER11> Investment company buyouts of entrenched education infrastructure are all about cash. The investment firm will cut any product development budget, raise prices, cut customer service, and eventually drive all the customers away. In the meantime, too many university administrations will waffle over the pain of moving to another platform for about 5 years. See how Oracle is abusing all the Sun education customers it inherited.

<comment><USER12> _The investment firm will cut any product development budget, raise prices, cut customer service, and eventually drive all the customers away._

You know, I would be shocked if they could do a better job of this than Blackboard already has. It takes a special kind of malice to do that.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review our startup, fairbooks.com - <AUTHOR>

We just launched our new startup, and were hoping for some feedback. It's a textbook buy-back company. <comment><USER2> Cool service.

You might want to be careful with the word "guarantee" however -- I entered an example book (0312185480) and your price was $3 while the going used price on Amazon is $7.75 (plus a s&h allowance). I checked the faq for the guarantee details and didn't see anything.

I personally would switch to focusing on ease instead of price since selling books one at a time via Amazon is quite painful.

<comment><USER3> I agree with the last point. The offered prices are way too low. Their price for ISBN (978-0471676003) was 11$ when the least on Amazon is 29$. So definitely focus on the ease of use

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If the ISBN is entered with dashes, it is not fetching the data i guess. It says renter ISBN in the next page.

May be you would want to escape the characters in the input field or use better regex checking. (not allowing anything but ISBNs). I just googled for ISBN regex and there were many decent resources.

Also, many notable flaws with the design. The contact page/add book page/your info page overflows the base wrapper.

</comment><comment><USER5> I like the idea. Couple of nits: 1\. The TOS link refers back to the FAQ. 2\. Why not allow search by title? 3\. Also it would be nice if the stack of books were pictures of actual books with cover sleeves in it. 4\. I know it sounds elementary, but add a picture of how an ISBN looks like.

<comment><USER6> 1\. They're still being written...this is an MVP. 4\. You'll find that if you click 'what's an ISBN'.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://www.fairbooks.com>

</comment><comment><USER7> I entered an example book for which I got $0. But still I had to go through the same work flow.

<comment><USER8> what was the isbn?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How can I know what my market rate salary is? - <AUTHOR> Short of going out and getting a bunch of offers, how can I figure out if I'm being compensated appropriately? Since it's so taboo to talk about salary, I have essentially zero data points from friends/colleagues. I've tried Glassdoor and Paysa, but the former seems low and the latter seems high. How do you all figure out what you're worth? <comment><USER2> _Since it 's so taboo to talk about salary.._

That's only really true within a company, and even then it's only bad to ask for a specific number. People are often willing to share a ball park number (eg between 32k and 38k).

That said though, I'd question the wisdom of using the market rate as a basis of an opinion of your self-worth. Figure out what you want to earn and negotiate with potential employers to get that. It's very likely to be more than the market rate, but if you're good you _can_ get it.

</comment><comment><USER3> In contrast to using sites like Glassdoor which shows what people have been paid historically, I usually look at job sites & adverts to see what people are paying right now.

I draw a line on a page and put a marker in the middle which I label with my current salary. Then I find job adverts and plot them either side based on the salary with a note of company/location. You then end up with an nice range and it's clear if you are being paid market rate. If all similar jobs are plotted higher on the scale than you, you're being under paid.

You can then use this as evidence when discussing a raise with your current company.

</comment><comment><USER4> 1\. Glassdoor.

2\. A good recruiter will be able to tell you, if you can find one. Can recommend one in Boston, but you need local knowledge.

3\. Some general advice: [http://valerieaurora.org/howto_salary/](http://valerieaurora.org/howto_salary/) and [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary- negotiation/](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Personally i just take what they offer, try to counter offer +20% and then settle for anything they feel comfortable with. Later i can still argue beeing worth more if i want.

That assuming you choose a job because you want to work there and not because of the money.

To clearify: Making out a standard is hard because the jobs are so different. You can expect to get paid more when you do project management as well for example. And less if your job gives you all the time in the world to research and learn.

<comment><USER4> I once got an offer, accepted it, then had some issues with IP contract. They offered me 20% more.

That means I probably could have gotten 30% more than initial salary. So just adding 20% on top is not always enough.

<comment><USER5> I seriously suspect this is different in other countries. But if you come fresh from school or a newbie generally i dont see why they should pay you more money than average before they even know you are good.

But anyway, i also never worked for the money. The more i earned the more i spent. Therefore its not something i really care about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I devoted a chapter of my book to this topic, so I'll summarize my method here and then share a link to read that chapter for free.

I recommend a three-step process:

1\. Estimate your market value in your industry 2\. Adjust that estimate for your local region 3\. Adjust it again for the specific company you're focused on

Each subsequent step will have less data available, but the data you do find will be more specific to your situation.

 _1\. Your industry-wide market value_

Starting at the industry level, there are four places I tend to point people: paysa.com, salary.com, payscale.com, glassdoor.com. Those tend to cover most industries pretty well. You can take an average of averages to get a decent baseline for your industry.

 _2\. Your market value in your region_

Once you have that industry-wide number, you should adjust it for your local region if you can. This helps to account for cost of living and local demand differences. You can reach out to peers at other companies or talk to people at local conferences to get this sort of info. (NOTE: Asking people what they make is taboo in the US, but you can ask in a roundabout way that works pretty well: "If someone with this skillset and experience were hired for this job at your company tomorrow, what do you think they would make?" People are more comfortable answering vague versions of the question.)

 _3\. Your market value for a specific company_

Finally, if you know someone doing the job you're interested in at the company you're interested in, you might be able to get more detailed information about that specific company's pay ranges. You might also know a hiring manager or recruiter at the company, and you could buy them coffee to learn whatever you can.

Once you've gone through those three phases, you should have a pretty good idea what your market value is.

 _Read more_

You can read the chapter from my book Fearless Salary Negotiation here: [https://fearlesssalarynegotiation.com/book/value](https://fearlesssalarynegotiation.com/book/value)

You can get a free guide, worksheet and short video course to walk you through the process here: [https://fearlesssalarynegotiation.com/how-to-estimate- your-m...](https://fearlesssalarynegotiation.com/how-to-estimate-your-market- value/)

<comment><USER7> FWIW, this comment was [dead] when I happened upon it; I apparently resurrected it when I vouched for it.

I do like your work, but you may want to dial down the self-promotion a little?

<comment><USER6> Thanks for letting me know - I appreciate it. And thanks for vouching for my comment - it would be a shame if OP didn't see it. Cheers!</comment></comment></comment>


Darpa Prepares to Launch "Satlets" - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/satellites/darpas-satellite-revival-program-gears-up-for-first-launch

<comment><USER2> Here are some primary sources - I wrote this up yesterday, it's pretty cool but still very early. The whole cannibalizing old satellites thing is a long ways off, this is more a field test of the modular unit:

>[http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/12/prweb12381214.htm](http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/12/prweb12381214.htm)

>[http://www.parabolicarc.com/2014/12/09/54124/novawurks_confo...](http://www.parabolicarc.com/2014/12/09/54124/novawurks_conformal_blocks/)

>[http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/TTO/Programs/Phoenix.aspx](http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/TTO/Programs/Phoenix.aspx)

>[http://www.novawurks.com/applications/darpa- phoenix/](http://www.novawurks.com/applications/darpa-phoenix/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I liked the IEEE email header "DARPA prepared to bring Zombie Frankensatellites to life" better, but I went with the article headline.</comment>


Protect IP Author Senator Patrick Leahy Says 'Further Study' is Needed - <AUTHOR> http://leahy.senate.gov/press/press_releases/release/?id=721ddff6-3399-4d56-a966-bca3f848759b

<comment><USER2> If there was Internet Freedom bills proposed, there would be discussion on Internet Freedom instead of these discussions of compromise and feasibility for the anti-Internet activists. This appears to be a stalling tactic to more anti-Internet measures, or promoting anti-Internet measures. They have introduced similar bills after it failed before.

"Hey, a lot of people don't want more Internet controls. So lets get them involved in the Internet control discussion by playing on their hopes of less Internet control. Their supporters will lose momentum as people say 'discussions are ongoing'. We can then easily pass more anti-Internet stuff when we can as we have done in the past. It's brilliant."

</comment><comment><USER3> So lets go ahead and pass the bill as is, with an amendment that requires us to study the potential affects of the bill at a later time before enacting the bill.

I'm sorry but no thank you. I don't trust you money grubbing ass hats to enact the bill properly; I'm not going to trust you to study the already passed bill properly.

<comment><USER4> Yup, this is BS. On the other hand, it looks like all this pressure is having (at least a little) effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This rings true:

 _I worked closely with the ISPs in drafting this provision to ensure they were comfortable with how it would work_

This sounds like BS:

 _I remain confident that the ISPs – including the cable industry, which is the largest association of ISPs – would not support the legislation if its enactment created the problems that opponents of this provision suggest._

At best, that second quote reflects a real misunderstanding of the big ISPs and their interests.

<comment><USER6> Limiting the growth of a disruptive competitor isn't any motivation to support this bill. i.e. the entire internet

on the internet means not bumping ratings

<comment><USER5> It is. The biggest ISPs in the US (like Time Warner Cable and Comcast) also own media properties.

Raising transactional costs for new sites is good for them. It keeps the media properties more valuable, and it raises the percentage of their traffic they can monetize. Roughly the same payoff as in a non-net neutrality world.

<comment><USER6> Comment was sarcastic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Am I the only one more concerned about furthering the "guilty until proven innocent" than I am about the DNS? Of course the DNS issue is huge, but not nearly as large (IMO, bviously) as "prove you are innocent from behind bars".

</comment><comment><USER8> You'd think there'd be some "study" involved when authoring the bill, except I have my doubts that he wrote even a single line of it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Just reading the first few sentences it's apparent that the author is 70+ years old.

<comment><USER10> The word "senator" is usually a strong hint. Incumbent politicians tend not to be young.

<comment><USER5> I read your comment and thought "surely that's changing over time and we're trending towards younger legislators."

So I went looking and it turns out I'm completely wrong. Check it out -- the WSJ did this interactive chart that shows Congress hit a low in the early '80s and has been aging ever since:

[http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info- CONGRE...](http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info- CONGRESS_AGES_1009.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I know I'm being bitter and jaded, but I assume they're just gonna put it on the shelf for a few months, hope everyone forgets about it and then try to get it through quietly attached to some other giant spending bill or something.</comment>


How removing caching improved mobile performance by 25% - mite-mitreski https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5n5npf/how_removing_caching_improved_mobile_performance/ <comment><AUTHOR> The reddit link just points to [https://engineering.klarna.com/how-removing- caching-improved...](https://engineering.klarna.com/how-removing-caching- improved-mobile-performance-by-25-52a17cc339a2#.krsoquvkv)

<comment> mite-mitreski Epic fail on my end, reposting</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best Online Course for Distributed Computing or Systems? - <AUTHOR> I have worked through 6.824: Distributed Systems at MIT and it has been truly eye-opening! Learned much about existing systems, building new ones and limitations that exists.<p>Which others exist that are worth finishing in combination with 6.824? <comment><USER2> Is there even any that even exist? --Mind linking me to this one if possible.

<comment><USER3> [https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/schedule.html](https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/schedule.html)

Read the paper/notes from the schedule and you'll learn a ton (took this course as an undergrad)</comment></comment>


Show HN: 8chen – a beautiful, fast Hacker News client for iOS - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/8chen-for-hacker-news/id1308885491?mt=8 <comment><USER2> Thanks for crafting and sharing 8chen, Daniel - very easy to read, parse, and share.

Would it be possible to add an option to disable the animations?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I can definitely do that when I get some time. Which animations in particular, and why?

<comment><USER2> > _Which animations in particular_

All of them ;-)

> _and why?_

Please pardon my frankness, but they strike me as garish, jarring, and unnecessary. Every time they appear is rather unsettling and distracting, to the point that I've had to switch back to another app.

Again, perhaps it could be an option? I am sure that many would disagree with my assessment.

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate frankness. A lot of the animations are just standard, out of the box iOS animations, like the push/pop navigation between UIViewControllers. I would imagine that most users like and expect these.

<comment><USER2> Great point. I am certainly behind the times. However, I can only recall seeing textual animations like those in other HN readers, despite having 166 apps installed on my primary iOS device. Happily (for me anyway ;-), MiniHack is free of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> What's with this app's name when there's already an imageboard site very similarly named 8chan?

<comment><USER4> Maybe "8chen" because it sounds like "HN"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Correct! I had no idea "8chan" was a thing either</comment></comment></comment>


A Society Dies - <AUTHOR> https://eand.co/this-is-how-a-society-dies-35bdc3c0b854 <comment><USER2> "The hate-filled vitriol of Trumpism, the barely-hidden hate of Brexit"

Before I got to the end of the article, I knew this was where it was going.

No mention of the left-wing violence on our college campuses, and the conservative speakers that have their freedom of speech violated regularly and their lives threatened with impunity.

No mention of the top tech companies attempting to sway our next election by misleading the general public through blatant censorship of the right.

The doom and gloom about poverty is ridiculous. The current US economy is the best it has been in a decade. Our gas prices are very low because the Trump administration has reduced regulations and opened up local drilling (which means less reliance on oil from the Middle East).

Unemployment rates for everyone are at record lows.

Our society might be dying, but it has nothing to do with what is mentioned in this article.</comment>


Windows 10 Without the Cruft: Windows 10 LTSB (Long Term Servicing Branch) - <AUTHOR> http://www.howtogeek.com/273824/windows-10-without-the-cruft-windows-10-ltsb-explained/ <comment><AUTHOR> It's a pretty good reason to stay away from anything proprietary. Otherwise, bloat will be enforced on us with my own money and no given control to remove it. It's a 21st century!!</comment>


Cleaner specs with custom RSpec example groups - <AUTHOR> http://benediktdeicke.com/2013/01/custom-rspec-example-groups/

<comment><USER2> I like the numerous examples in your article. They really help to drive the point home</comment>


Startups launching in 2013 (A selection curated by Beta List) - <AUTHOR> http://checkthis.com/startups2013

<comment><USER2> Great stuff! A great list of companies.</comment>


Ask HN: Who should own the software copyright in early stage startups? - <AUTHOR>

I'm in the process of co-founding a web service startup (my first one) with a non-technical business co-founder and we're in the process of negotiating seed funding.
My family and family friends are encouraging me to attempt to retain copyright of the code that I've written for the company so far, but this seems dubious at best -- I would never invest seed money into a web startup if the code wasn't owned by the startup in which I was investing, but maybe others would?.
I know it's standard practice for employment agreements to have clauses that say the company owns all of the work product and IP, but what about founders?
So, is there a standard practice for this sort of thing?
Opinions are great, but I would really love to hear from people with anecdotal experience.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> A company that doesn't own its own product is basically a bomb waiting to go off. The company should "buy" any work that you did pre-incorporation in exchange for your founding stock.

</comment><comment><USER3> When Skype was first sold to eBay, eBay did a whoozy and made bad assumptions resulting in them buying Skype without the core IP.

This later cost them a gazillion dollars after a court process, and the whole world realized they needed to watch their backs just that little more.

I'd recommend exchanging pre-existing IP with the company for your founding stock, otherwise nobody will want to go near you.

</comment><comment><USER4> Absolutely the company owns the IP. Investors would be concerned if that wasn't the case. Your best case scenario would be for you to license the code from the company, but as an investor I would think twice if the founder(s) presented this as an option.

</comment><comment><USER5> The company should own the IP, you (and your cofounders and investors) own the company.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yeah. Don't even think about it. The company should own all relevant IP.</comment>


Never Send Your CV via Gmail - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/swlh/why-you-should-never-send-your-cv-via-gmail-b4fddd35fb3e <comment><USER2> This entire article is premised on an excuse from a single HR person that an email ended up in their spam folder. It is probably worth keeping in mind that "your email ended up in spam" does occasionally happen, but it is also a widely used polite white lie that people use instead of saying "I ignored your email."

<comment><USER3> This is the real answer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The article says that the issue was on the recipient side, not the sender's side, so the title is wrong -- sending via Gmail is fine, receiving via Gmail is... well, supposedly an issue, but I've never had a resume land in my spam folder so I'm skeptical.

(Amusingly, my Google job offer landed in my Gmail spam folder years ago. But that was because of a weird thing where forwarding from my @university.edu account would screw with headers that Gmail uses to verify the authenticity of an email.)

Also...

> They must be using Gmail client to access their office emails, I guessed.

Is that even a thing? Does Gmail reroute stuff to spam that came into your inbox via POP/IMAP?

<comment><USER4> I agree that it doesn't sound like it has anything to do with how he sent it.

I wasn't aware of a feature like this, but a quick search turned up documentation for an "email quarantines" feature in G Suite ([https://support.google.com/a/answer/6104172](https://support.google.com/a/answer/6104172)).

I do get mail received over POP from another account in my spam folder, but I suspect it doesn't explain this quarantine behavior.

I'm not sure if a G Suite email user can add a private email over POP/IMAP, but I would be a little slack-jawed if they could AND their personal mail could get pulled into the organization's quarantine?

<comment><USER3> The quarantine docs you linked make it look like this is configured per- customer, so if the author's email did in fact get quarantined, its because IT configured it that way not because of a Gmail bug.

Also:

> For a quarantined inbound message, the intended recipient receives no > indication of the message unless you release it for delivery.

So the recruiter wouldn't even see the email in their spam box. It just wouldn't exist as far as they can tell if it was quarantined.

<comment><USER4> I wonder the same, yes--it's just what I found for trying to figure out what they might even mean by quarantined in the first

It wasn't super clear to me (at least, on a quick read) what the recipient would/wouldn't see if they were given permission to admin quarantined mail, if the mail eventually got released from quarantine after someone realized it wasn't crap, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Summary:

> Author applied to multiple positions via email and was not hired. He > suspects this has something to do with his resume ending up in the spam > folder on the other side, who use Gmail.

If this was a problem in an application I was debugging, I would highly mistrust this theory and dig deeper to find a more probable cause.

</comment><comment><USER6> Having been on both side of the hiring fence, many HR departments primarily pass around PDFs when evaluating candidates. If you instead, as suggested, include a link, I think you're even more likely to shoot yourself in the foot because when you're evaluating dozens or hundreds of candidates, anyone who makes you take an extra step is very easily lost in the shuffle, even inadvertently.

The spam filtering tools can indeed be frustrating and even dangerous; the answer is to find a way to cordially confirm receipt and make that a practice. I switched away from Gmail to another dedicated email provider and found even more of emails were getting sent to spam, with no real recourse for diagnosing.

<comment><USER7> Yeah email is a train wreck now. The right answer is to use all the mediums. Gmail, link, and follow it up with a phone call/chat/etc. The resume email is just one arrow in a small flight of arrows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The fact that this so called developer doesn't understand the difference between a sender and a receiver of email makes me think there are other things in the CV that caused them to not be hired.

<comment><USER9> Understanding Gmail's spam/quarantine policies (which was both the sender/receiver here) is not really relevant to engineering roles, unless maybe you're on the marketing team.

<comment><USER8> Seeing a system and getting somewhat of an accurate understanding of how the parts work is, though.

And it's not like "email" is some esoteric thing he's only now come into contact with.

For example, don't say "GMail". This is about email. To misquote Babbage: "I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a conclusion".

This conclusion screams of not being able to understand the logical effect of a known fact. I wouldn't want this person troubleshooting anything, for example.

And I didn't see many comments about the rest of his statements. It's a mess. He seems somewhat angry at GMail's suggestions (this would be on the sender side) because sometimes he doesn't want to say what GMail suggests. Again… confusion of ideas.

Actually, now that I think about it I'm seriously suspecting this was written by a bot. More articles than you'd expect are written by bots, and this is close enough to making sense (on multiple points), but without an _actual_ logical point, that it's a possibility.

<comment><USER9> Gmail is decreasingly an email client an increasingly a protocol. Gmail-to- gmail messages get treated quite differently, and ultimately OPs conclusion that gmail intercepted their email because it determined that CVs are suspicious is correct.

I would add that I think it's a bit fickle and unkind for internet strangers to pass judgement on a person's ability to do their job based on a post like this. This individual did not ask for our opinion on their ability to do a job, but instead gave (a useful) warning about how the gmail client handles CVs.

<comment><USER8> > This individual [...] gave (a useful) warning about how the gmail client > handles CVs.

That's one way to see it. To me it was about as coherent and thought through as someone yelling and on the corner about 5G towers causing coronavirus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had a different gmail hiring snafu happen to me. I was applying to jobs, and my offer for an onsite interview at Microsoft was filtered to spam by gmail. I was also applying to google at the time, so I joked that google was being jealous and wanted me for themselves. Thank goodness I checked my spam that week, I now work at Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER11> What a weird article.. first of all, what does _sending_ it with gmail have to do with anything?

He says the company is USING gmail to receive.. that's where the spam-filter comes in. He could have sent this with any service and it still would have been filtered out.

Then he complains about gmail auto-complete? First, I have found it to be quite helpful.. but next, if you don't want it to autocomplete then you just keep on typing. Yeah sometimes it might try to correct a specific word.. just like everything else these days. It's not always going to be perfect.

For someone who is apparently trying to get such a tech job- not understanding the email filter was on the receiving end and he would have hit the same situation no matter what is... quite disturbing. Especially after going through the trouble to write an entire article about it.

</comment><comment><USER12> Spam filtering is (mostly) on the receiving side. You have little control over whether or not the recipient is on Google mail. It doesn't really matter if you send using gmail, and it might be even better for deliverability given the reputation systems in spam filtering

</comment><comment><USER13> I do not understand, why we put emails in spam folders instead of rejecting them (as some providers do, e.g. mailbox.org, posteo.de). It may seem weird at first, but at least if something important would end up in Spam, the sender is going to get a notice.

<comment><USER2> The same reason we shadowban people or give vague responses to incorrect passwords guesses. You don't want to give bad faith users information that makes their job easier. Telling spammers whether their emails were received or not would be incredibly valuable in interrating ways around the filters.

<comment><USER14> Does that really help, when the spammer can make their own email account on the target's email service (eg. Gmail), send the spam email to this email account and see if it gets through the filter?

<comment><USER2> I don't know. Although I would be mildly surprised if there was a single universal spam filter applied to all Gmail accounts. I would also think there are more inputs to the system than just the sender and the body of the email. Gmail being so big allows other variables like the rate that address is sending to all of Gmail as well as how users engage with those emails. Therefore getting a single test email through the filter probably isn't proof that you have defeated the overall filter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is patently incorrect. The author doesn't have any idea on how GMail's email filtering works.

<comment><USER3> Particularly given that the author thinks the _sender_ is responsible for _recipient_ -side spam filtering...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wait I'm confused, are they _not_ sending around a pdf file for their resume??

</comment><comment><USER17> I am wondering what happened to paragraphs?

This one line one sentence style seems to be popular on Medium.

But there is no rhythm. There is no flow.

Each sentence must have started on separate index cards.

Why wouldn't you weave them together?

So much white space, so many long pauses.

Do people enjoy reading this kind of writing?

<comment><USER18> I would much rather a paragraph. But these days, I see spelling errors on some of the most popular news publication websites and have just come to accept that the quality of writing online is diminishing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It doesn't matter what mail client you use, the issue was at their end

</comment><comment><USER20> Another less known fact is that gmail blocks zip files/archives that contain executable extensions, scrips, or encrypted filenames. I few months ago I tried sending a document that contained my PII and I was unable to send it because gmail couldn't determine the content inside the archive. This feature that should have a on/off option IMO.

[0] [https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6590?hl=en](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6590?hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER21> Interesting point. Later in the article, Google Hire is mentioned. The article was written in February (Medium redacts the year) and in Sept Google Hire was sunsetted.

</comment><comment><USER22> Write it in docs, use a template. Attach a pdf to the email.

That being said, if phone numbers are spam, I've been typing my phone into email signatures for like ever when I need to.

</comment><comment><USER18> I have sent my CV containing both my phone number and email address to various companies and have never encountered this problem. I don't think the PDF containing your personal information was the problem, but potentially the individual dealing with your information.

</comment><comment><USER23> Good news if you're concerned about Google's Hire product: it'll be dead by September ([https://killedbygoogle.com/](https://killedbygoogle.com/))

</comment><comment><USER24> I recently had gmail putting my outgoing email in my own spam folder rather than sent items. When I've checked I've found that the recipient has received it but it's really odd behaviour.

</comment><comment><USER25> TL;DR version: Sent CV by email and Gmail put it in the recipient's spam folder, which cost this person an interview (the position was filled by the time this was checked). Then the post goes on tangents about Gmail and Google.

Forget about a CV, I think it's impossible to say which of your emails to any Gmail recipient would even go to their inboxes. Gmail has a very aggressive, as well as stupid, spam filter. I've seen emails go into spam even after adding an address to my contacts list and marking mails in the spam folder from some contacts as Not Spam.

When it originally arrived, Gmail really revolutionized how web based email ought to be done. Now it's just a bloated and buggy mess that has managed to get a very large user base. I shudder to think how (paid) GSuite accounts also lose genuine emails to spam.

</comment><comment><USER26> Perhaps there should be an interstitial when loading Gmail if there are items in your spam that you haven't seen 1-2 days after receiving them.

</comment><comment><USER27> You can send your resume as a flat PDF to avoid this problem.

<comment><USER28> Is it really that easy? I see no mention of _how_ the author sent their materials, but a directly-generated PDF is just as easy to search as a word doc, isn't it? Does gmail explicitly only inspect the latter?

<comment><USER29> Unless the PDF is generated as one big image, making it a _tad_ bit harder for google to scan, yes, PDFs are easily parsable. There's a ton of open source libraries out there for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Mail it to them in a legal-sized envelope on dead tree carcasses. Harder to ignore, they'd print it anyhow for candidate finalists, and virus FUD is a non-issue. Send them an email copy as a backup or in-case they need an electronic version too.</comment>


What We Can Learn About Pricing From Menu Engineers - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2009/09/13/what-we-can-learn-about-pricing-from-menu-engineers/ <comment><USER2> Organizations will always come up with ways to encourage buying more (or paying a higher price), but the strategies are a moving target because a given market will learn and adjust (albeit slowly). I would argue that the MRSP "trick" no longer works because almost no one expects to pay it anymore.

Using some of these tactics could backfire depending on how educated or savvy your target market is. Think of spam messages, those over the top tactics used to work on more people, now for most educated people that type of hard sell doesn't work.

Of course it all depends on the target market, if you're selling blankets with arms the bar is a little lower.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Menu engineer" is a job title now?!

<comment><USER4> Which makes me happy that "Engineer" is a protected title in Canada.

<comment><USER5> I've always been curious why people get so upset when people adopt this word outside of its, uhhh, less than traditional context. When did titles suddenly become important around here?

<comment><USER6> Would you get mad if your "Medical Doctor" wasn't? Or your "Lawyer" wasn't qualified? Or perhaps the "Engineer" who designed the trusses holding up the stadium where you see a ball game was just an unqualified amateur?

<comment><USER5> I was primarily talking about labels, not qualifications, but I do feel they are connected.

There are plenty of people who call themselves "tree doctors" yet medical doctors have no problem with that (and certainly don't go all tribal and True Scotsman about it). Perhaps the difference is that in the public eye, the term doctor is synonymous with the qualification, whilst "engineer" has yet to reach that status?

<comment><USER4> It's because in Canada the term Software Engineer has a very specific meaning. It means you did a 4 year Software Engineering programming program at an accredited university and then worked under a professional engineer for a certain number of years (I think it's 4?) and then passed your accreditation examination.

I'm Canadian and I have a bachelor's degree in Computer Science. I don't call myself an Engineer because other than being against the law, I have a certain respect for the amount of work the people who earned the title went through.

Also, if they majorly screw up, (though this isn't nearly as likely in software, it's usually happens when bridges or buildings fall down) an Engineer can have his accreditation revoked.

Which is why legally calling yourself an Engineer in Canada, software or otherwise, has a certain status associated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My very first customer was the boss of a friend of mine. I asked my friend what his boss was willing to pay. "It doesn't matter," my friend replied, "Just charge him 50% more than what you really want and let him negotiate you down. As long as he thinks he's getting something from you, he'll be happy, and you'll get whatever you want." Great advice.

<comment><USER8> Way back, my grandfather used to haggle in the local shops (back when they where still worked by their owners, haggling was possible). What he didn't get, was that the shopkeepers knew he was going to haggle and so adjusted the price upward.

So yeah, that trick definitely works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> the impression of utility is more important than actual utility. what does the extremely high priced option (50k in the example) signal to the customer? that someone out there is deriving 50,000 + x value from that service.

<comment><USER10> depends on what you are selling, as a previous poster said, and who you are selling it to. My experience selling to computer nerds has been that we are a very rational and price-sensitive bunch. we shop around, and we want objective measures.

Actual utility, much like truth during a court battle, is a big advantage. Sure, it's not overwhelming, but it helps a lot. If you are providing actual utility, your customers will do your marketing for you.

Personally, I think the choice depends a lot on what you are good at. If you are good at marketing and have little technical and/or engineering skill, sure, you will get more out of marketing. But the opposite can work too.

Personally, I'm always very amused by people telling me I should raise my prices. I started out selling FreeBSD jails (with an actual utility close to my current $8 product) for $40 each. I rented two. Switching to xen, then dramatically dropping my prices (well, and a few years of actually, you know, learning what I was doing) helped me a lot.

Marketing is easy when you have obvious and objective advantages over competing products. You can yammer all day about this or that or the other, but if you can point at your price sheet and say 'hey, look- I'm kinda like that other guy, only 1/4th the price' well, for price sensitive customers, that's a difficult to refute reason to give you a shot, especially if the advantages your competitors cite for the price premium are not immediately testable.

Differentiation is only in your interest if you are better at marketing (and/or have higher costs) than the competition. In my case, the competition is much better at marketing, and my costs are such that I can dramatically undercut them while making a profit, so it makes sense for me to just focus on providing a decent product while occasionally saying "Hey, look at me. I'm kindof like the competition, only 1/4th the price!"

<comment><USER9> the point of the higher priced option is that it doesn't cost you any current customers while potentially bringing in customers who wouldn't have otherwise used you though. like the article said, even if the premium option just adds a bunch of management-appeal language with no objective value, you still might be able to get it into the hands of the engineers who work under them (at companies where idiots make the purchasing decisions) that might otherwise not had the option.

secondly, the view that undercutting (for the same objective value) will always be interpreted correctly by the customer is a little naive. In reality you often don't want to undercut your competition by too much for exactly the same reason my initial post was about: perceived value.

<comment><USER10> /secondly, the view that undercutting (for the same objective value) will always be interpreted correctly by the customer is a little naive. In reality you often don't want to undercut your competition by too much for exactly the same reason my initial post was about: perceived value./

The thing is, I've tried setting prices at par with the competition. Sure, it was high margin in terms of computer hardware, but computer hardware is the cheapest part of the equation. Cutting prices dramatically is why this project went from being a net loss to paying for my rent and a new server or two every month. It became much 'higher margin' because it's cheaper to just give everyone 4x as much ram than it is for me to compete on marketing with the other players in this field.

Sure, there are people I'll never appeal to, and that's fine. There are some real reasons why you might want to pay extra to have a 'real company' handle your VPS rather than three guys.

I think that if you want to retain credibility, you can't pretend that you can serve everyone.

Besides, I'd go nuts if I had to teach unix to every middle manager who decided to sign up. Slicehost is great. if you need a bunch of hand holding, use them. Sure, you've gotta pay for it, but you know what? tech support is a soul-sucking job. It's incredibly difficult to maintain a good support organization, and I think it is quite reasonable to charge extra if you are able to do so. (I mean, assuming slicehost's support is as good as people seem to say; I haven't personally used them. But I hear nothing but good things.)

if you know what you are doing, and if you have a system, like mine,[1] that allows you out of band console, rebooter, and rescue media, you don't need very much support. This is good for you and good for me, and my prices just don't work, otherwise. Hardware is cheap, good people willing to do tech support are not.

Objective, testable arguments appeal to my market, and 'Hey, I'm kindof like slicehost, only 25% the cost' is a very strong, testable argument.

But my central point is that you should focus your marketing effort. saying "I am all things to all people" is an obvious lie, which will cause most technical people to write you off as worthless marketing garbage before you get a chance to explain what you are actually good at. Figure out what you are good at, and focus on and talk about that. Be consistent.

Sure, Perceived value is what you get paid for, but unless you are a whole lot better at marketing than I am, increasing objective value is by far the easiest way to manipulate perceived value. Besides, increasing objective value makes me feel good about myself, and increasing perceived value without increasing objective value makes me feel kinda slimy.

[1] in the interests of full disclosure, and, uh, in not getting people signing up then exercising my 30 day money back thing, I will point out that my system sucks badly if you want to provision a new server, or if you want to resize your server. I'm working on it. But I do think my system does a very good job of emulating a remote server in a co-lo with a serial console, a rebooter, and a rescue CD in the drive.

<comment><USER9> _increasing perceived value without increasing objective value makes me feel kinda slimy._

I feel like this is representative of why technical people leave money on the table in general. every product has a laffer maximum, objective value doesn't really exist.

also you are getting that you can maintain your current pricing structure completely unchanged except for adding some premium option that you don't intend to actually sell (you can price any added features that you don't really want to support so high that on the off chance someone does buy it you won't mind working for that money), right?

<comment><USER10> "I feel like this is representative of why technical people leave money on the table in general. every product has a laffer maximum, objective value doesn't really exist."

Maybe. what about comparative advantage? I can probably compete with the best SysAdmins my competitors hire. Yeah, some of them are better than I am, but it's at least a contest, you know? I'm not completely outclassed. I have a fighting chance.

Put me up against the best marketing guys my competition can hire, though, and I'll be humiliated. I'm just not very good at manipulating emotions, so I'm better off if it appears that I'm not trying.

That, and I still don't believe I'm leaving money on the table. my growth rate right now, (a bit over a server a month) is probably about optimal. It's fast enough to be exciting, but it's slow enough to be not overwhelming. The hardware margins are fine; a full server more than pays for itself in two months. Really, any more than that is just silly.

I think what I need to be focusing on now is automating the bits of support we are currently (badly) doing by hand, that is, provisioning and re-sizing domains. Next, I think, backups, as that's the biggest threat right now. Data- loss events are horrible.

<comment><USER9> _I'm better off if it appears that I'm not trying._

well that's a different signal, depending on your market (technical people in this case) it could be a superior signal.

<comment><USER10> yes. I understand it is marketing, just as much as having a $25 burger on the menu. The difference is that I don't understand what a $25 burger can honestly signal. Maybe, for the target market, a $25 burger can honestly signal something important, that I just don't understand? Perhaps "we take care to make you feel like you are eating at an expensive restaurant." I can imagine that being important to some people. I'm pretty certain, though, that a $25 burger on my menu would signal something that was very negative to my target market. If nothing else, it would look like a dishonest signal. Because I don't understand what a $25 burger is signaling, I would not follow through on that signal.

I mean, I am trying to signal that I'm one of you. I'm not going to fuck around in an attempt to extract pennies from you. I'd be doing this for free if that didn't carry some serious negative consequences. If you are not a nerd, you have no idea how much many of us hate talking to sales every time we need to buy new equipment or space. Like most marketing signals, if I don't follow through, if this isn't an honest signal, the market would believe me for about five minutes.

<comment><USER9> the $25 burger signals that your restaurant is capable of making a burger worth $25 to someone. this then reflects well on the care you take with your cheaper offerings. of course in reality the relative qualities of product offerings can be completely unrelated, but our monkey brains are not objective. thinking that nerds are free of bias is a bias :)

<comment><USER10> I don't see how a $25 burger on the menu signifies that $25 burgers are selling. Especially in the IT industry. It's normal for vendors to have 'list prices' that are 50%-70% higher than what you can negotiate them down to. (seriously. talk to a small business who has bought a new NetAPP or EMC storage device.)

Also, yeah, we are all biased, even nerds. I'm sure you could, for a short while, trick nerds into paying more because of those biases. But I'd bet money that they'd figure it out, probably sooner rather than later, and they'd be mad at you.

If you are selling to the middle managers who tell nerds what to do, it's different. But I'm a long ways from being able to hire someone who can pull off that sort of thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "My hunch is that most companies could increase revenue by simply adding a very high-end offering, even if they never sell a single one of those expensive units."

This strikes a parallel to something 37Signals once said, many moons ago, though I believe I had misinterpreted their point. When they said it (or when I read it,) I assumed it meant that you should definitely throw a premium option out there because there are some people who always buy the premium option... even those who wouldn't consider buying a less-than-premium option.

It honestly never occurred to me that its primary purpose is to make the other prices look smaller by comparison.

<comment><USER12> I think there is an aspect beyond simply a perceived savings–especially if your web app is B2B.

In our two main products we sell more of the mid and higher priced options. My theory is that business owners (especially sole proprietors) like to think of their company and needs as bigger than they actually are ... "I can't get just the start/basic/hobbyist/limited plan. I need the veteran/professional/unlimited/premium plan."

So, in our experience, customers may not always buy the highest offering, but they will rarely buy the lowest offering.

<comment><USER5> > business owners (especially sole proprietors) like to think of their company > and needs as bigger than they actually are

Do you think that's an aspirational viewpoint, or that they are actually poor at judging their needs?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Isn't this kind of like being evil to make more money? Exploiting flaws in the way people reason about price is not the same as delivering value.

<comment><USER10> is it evil to try to charge as much as you can? I would argue no. Certainly, in the case where my product is limited, such as when I'm selling my time, I put effort into that. Is it evil to spend time trying to charge more for the same product rather than spending that time making a product that is worth more? maybe. It's certainly not admirable.

I explained in a previous comment that I think not differentiating, and instead competing on price and value can be a good strategy, especially when industry margins are high.

<comment><USER14> I work in computer repair as a sole proprietorship, and if I charge too much I won't get repeat business. But you can't always judge if someone will refer more customers to you or give you repeat business.

<comment><USER10> when I say 'charge as much as I can' I mean 'set my hourly rate as high as possible' where the hourly rate is set before the work is done (and usually before we meet)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Unit testing is for lazy people - <AUTHOR> http://swizec.com/blog/unit-testing-is-for-lazy-people/swizec/3752

<comment><USER2> And we're proud of it! It's lazy to do things right first and lazy not to want to fight with our code, seeking out bugs. BTW, Unit Testing is getting even lazier with Typemock Isolator V7 (<http://www.typemock.com/isolator-v7>). It's finding the bugs for you, so you don't have to waste 2 hours hunting around.</comment>