Facebook has suspended all social accounts of Cambridge Analytica whistleblower - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/18/facebook-has-suspended-the-account-of-the-whistleblower-who-exposed-cambridge-analytica/ <comment><USER2> I've said it before, but it's shocking that Facebook has escaped regulation thus far. They have 1,860,000,000 monthly active users. What other business has this many customers (or "product") AND can profoundly impact its users happiness... AND goes unregulated?

<comment><USER3> Twitter, Snap, Instagram, Uber, Palantir, and pretty much every SV unicorn which exists because the law is slow to react and they're running at full tilt? This seems like the accepted playbook in SV, and until recently it was lauded on this site and elsewhere.

That's how.

<comment><USER2> Being lauded on HN has zero impact on regulation.

What amazes me is that there's so little regard for privacy amongst legislators (and by extension their constituents, I suppose) that these behemoth companies have escaped so far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been monitoring the "trending news" section on Facebook since yesterday, just for fun.

There has been zero mentions of Facebook, Cambridge Analytica or any related news.

<comment><USER5> Tbh that's not surprising at all

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _This_ fact alone should be reason enough to leave Facebook for good. Facebook's goal is to be the middleman for all communication, and why the hell would you trust a corporation that can blacklist you from all of their platforms with a snap of a finger?

<comment><USER7> I've never accepted any of Facebook's offerings, because I don't find their terms of service acceptable. But I'm an idiosyncratic exception (certainly not alone here on HN, but statistically speaking rare).

Ask any of the millions and millions of people who built their online lives around Facebook's offerings (including Whatsapp and Instagram) though, and you'll likely get a variety of answers along these lines:

Some say all this stuff doesn't impact them (I have nothing to hide, and don't do anything illegal).

Some say they have no alternative (I need Whatsapp, because if I stop using it I'll miss all important messages about my kids' sports training schedule/birthday parties/extracurricular activities/scout troop/school committees — this is currently true for parents of young children in the Netherlands).

Some are afraid of losing contact with those who choose to do everything on Facebook.

Some are simply addicted to social media (well, not many will give you that as an answer truthfully, but it's certainly a factor).

Some feel that a behemoth like Facebook should be regulated by the government, and trust that someone else will protect their interests (i.e., they treat Facebook and its subsidiaries like a an unavoidable utility, and don't feel that they have a choice in the matter).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Mr Zuckerberg must have learned a lot during his trips to China!

</comment><comment><USER9> It's time to regulate Facebook (and the other social networks, like Twitter, Google Mail, Youtube, Whatsapp), like telcos in Germany.

For example, unless I commit crimes using my internet/phone uplink or stay behind more than 75€ on payment, my provider has no right to terminate my account given the importance for communications.

Facebook, Twitter and friends can decide to terminate my public handles and cut me off from communication with anyone without any legal way of recourse. This is not OK given their importance to modern communication.

</comment><comment><USER10> The account deletion page doesn't seem to be working either. Interesting coincidence, with yesterday's #deletefacebook campaign and all.

[https://www.facebook.com/account/delete](https://www.facebook.com/account/delete)

What I want to know is who are the people at Facebook that actually think they can get away with such shenanigans, when all of the media's attention is on them? Are they really that oblivious?

<comment><USER11> The account deletion still works. It's here: [https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account](https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Recent discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16620454](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16620454)

</comment><comment><USER13> "hey guys I helped steal your data for profit, but I've come clean now, why are you still upset with me?"

Yeah no, whistleblowing doesn't absolve you from the bad stuff you did.

<comment><USER14> It goes a long way, especially if they were part of a much larger group. Breaking rank and whistle blowing is something to be commended.

<comment><USER13> I don't think that extends as far as expecting a company that was in some sense the victim to welcome them with open arms.</comment></comment></comment>


As Angel Investing Booms, So Does the AngelList - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2011/02/15/as-angel-investing-booms-so-does-the-angellist/

<comment><USER3> A few months ago, I sat down to talk with Naval because of problems that I was seeing with a lot of garage stage startups that were showing up at Hackers and Founders. We talked for a few minutes about how I thought that early stage funding was the definition of an inefficient market.

He stopped me, mid sentence, turned his laptop around and showed me what they were building on Angel List. I was floored.

It's exactly what the article talks about: a marketplace for startups to sell equity. This is revolutionary, and because of it, there are going to be thousands of startups in the next few years that will have access to capital that never would have gotten funded otherwise.

Silicon Valley is going to be a very interesting town in the next couple of years.

</comment><comment><USER4> Is there a place for micro-angel financing that I could afford? I want to invest in startups but don't have much (low tens of thousands) to invest.

<comment><USER5> You probably don't qualify. Entrepreneurs should only accept money from an accredited investor. If all you have is low tens of thousands, very high chance you're not accredited. Meaning no one should be taking money from you.

<comment><USER6> The 'accredited investor' rules make it hard to accept traditional equity investments from small net-worth investors. My understanding is that ventures can take a small number of close-family/friends/founding-employee investments from non-accredited investors, but the added costs and risks of setting this up limit its use when there are other options.

Yet, there are attempts to hack-around the traditional overhead. Though I know very little about it, I'm intrigued by 'ProFounder', a funding mechanism that seems to use revenue-shares rather than equity to get around some of the regulatory barriers that otherwise prevent crowdfunding by small investors. See:

<http://www.profounder.com>

The founding team with kiva.org alumni (and recognizable advisors and investors) suggest this isn't just some dreamy, naive, or fly-by-night undertaking.

<comment><USER7> Another similar project is <http://www.Prosper.com> (recommended by user crasshopper)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hi all!

My name is David Lang, I'm the Community Manager at ProFounder. I wanted to clarify a few things about our platform and also provide some resources for those who are interested in learning more.

ProFounder is a crowdfunding platform for entrepreneurs that provides an easy- to-use interface to raise money from friends, family and people that you know. In the words of the SEC, the investors must have a "prior, substantial relationship" to the entrepreneur. We're not getting around any SEC rules by using revenue share. There are SEC compliance requirements for each state. We've found that - for the entrepreneurs that use our platform - <USER2> flexibility provided by the rev share model is key.

There have been a number of successful raises on the platform, between $10k - $60k. Check out the blog to read more about the case studies:

<http://blog.profounder.com>

Also, if you have any more specific questions, I'm happy to answer them!</comment>


Bring Back the News - <AUTHOR> http://measuringmeasures.com/blog/2011/1/9/bring-back-the-news.html <comment><USER2> I wasn't aware the news went anywhere. I got a notification that the incident happened on my iPhone and read about it in the New York Times app on my iPad, and I found the quality of the content to be pretty good. It sounds as though the problem isn't that the news has gone anywhere but rather that the author isn't using an optimal method to find the news.

Of course news is always going to have a bias. The key is that it's less about what you read as much as it is how you read it.

<comment><USER3> Reminds me of a discussion I had on a basketball forum with a fan complaining about their lack of awareness regarding the start of the season. Went roughly like this:

      Them: I didn't even know the season had started. They've dropped the ball on marketing.
      Me:   There have been ads on TV.
      Them: Oh, I don't watch TV.
      Me:   Quite a few articles in the main newspapers in your city and mine.
            There was a launch event too.
      Them: I don't read newspapers any more.
      Me:   Big promos on the league website.
      Them: Oh, I don't visit that. Too busy.
      Me:   Lots of league and fan talk on Twitter and Facebook.
      Them: Nah, I don't use them.
      Me:   Your team's newsletter has mentioned it a lot.
      Them: I haven't subscribed to that.
      Me:   You read this forum. We've been talking about it for weeks.
      Them: I don't really read many threads.

At some point, if you're interested in a given topic, you have to make _some_ effort to poke around or subscribe to something!</comment></comment>


Interesting startup founder discussing competitive markets - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/Why-do-companies-pay-for-live-chat-services-when-Tawk-to-is-free/answer/Robert-DAssisi?share=1 <comment><AUTHOR> some pretty inspiring comments</comment>


IE11 on Windows 8.1 - Google Search loads in legacy mode - T-A http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/websearch/9JPM-CF2KJU <comment><AUTHOR> IE11 normally sends "Trident/7.0" and not "MSIE". Apparently Microsoft has added "google.com" to the Compatibility View List [1], which means IE11 now sends Google a User Agent that does include "MSIE". Google is interpreting this to mean it's an old version of IE, and sending the legacy view. You can manually disable the CVL, but then other sites that Microsoft has determined need old versions of IE won't work. I suspect Google will update their UA regexp soon, and this will be fixed, but it does sound like a Microsoft bug.

[1] [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/gg699485(v=vs.85).as...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/gg699485\(v=vs.85\).aspx)

(I work for Google, on unrelated things.)

<comment><USER2> Why does the entire web community agree that feature detection is the way to go and UA sniffing is bad, but time after time shows that Google does it on nearly all of their products?

<comment><USER3> Compatibility view doesn't just change the UA string. It actually switches to a different (IE8-like?) engine.

<comment><USER4> It changes to one of: IE7 Standards Mode, IE8 Standards Mode, IE9 Standards Mode, IE9 Almost-Standards Mode, IE10 Standards Mode, or IE10 Almost-Standards Mode. I wish I was joking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting quote:

 _I 'll tell you more guys. I've updated to windows 8.1 on my tablet a month ago through MSND subscription and Google search worked just fine. Looks like this problem appeared after public availability of Windows 8.1. So I believe it's something that Google or Microsoft should figure out._

Not saying this is malicious. Maybe just Google is doing something silly. Maybe Microsoft have slipped up on their compatibility-list-thingie (which is a horrible invention IMO).

Sometimes adding too many special cases in your code instead of having one "good enough" version for everyone will cause you a million problems you never saw coming. I've had more bugs come from special casing than any general, "run everywhere" code I've written.

I can easily see how both ends could be responsible for this problem, even at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER6> "Hey, if we make Google uglier, maybe people will use Bing!"

"Probably not, but let's mess with 'em anyway."

<comment><USER7> Unless it was google..

"Hey, if we make Google uglier, maybe people will use Chrome!"

"Probably, they are used to IE not working"

Not sure who had the slip-up, but evil works both ways :P

<comment><USER8> > IE11 -> Tools -> Compatibility View Settings. > Remove check on "Use > Microsoft Compatibility lists".

That's the solution posted in that thread. It's an IE problem.

<comment><USER9> Tweaking Firefox to send the same user-agent string "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; Trident/7.0)" causes the exact same problem. It's a Google problem.

ETA: In standards mode, IE sends "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko".

<comment><USER10> Firefox sending "MSIE 10.0" maybe, but not "MSIE 11.0"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This seems to solve it:

IE11 -> Tools -> Compatibility View Settings. Remove check on "Use Microsoft Compatibility lists".

<comment><USER12> I'm trying to figure out what the problem is, and I can't see how the compatibility list would force Google into such a legacy mode:

      <domain docMode="EmulateIE10" versionVector="10" uaString="10" featureSwitch="overrideXUACompatible:false">google.com</domain>

It seems to read as: render and present as IE10, and if there is a `<meta` tag specifying x-ua-compatibility, don't ignore it.

There's another section that overrides the backwards/forwards cache setting for google.com:

        <BFCache>
            ...
            <domain exclude="true">google.com</domain>

But I've no clue how that would affect rendering so much.

I've disabled both settings (commented out) and will report back if commenting them out fixes Google.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the problem is that EmulateIE10 is slightly broken: it sends "MSIE 10" but also "Trident/7.0". Real IE10 has Trident 6.0. This looks like it's screwing up the UA regexes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It looks to have been fixed already. I'm on Win8.1, with IE11, and get the same Google homepage I get in Chrome. I haven't touched any settings.

</comment><comment><USER14> So nobody @ MSFT has access to Google.com before shipping off the product. Given that a typical engineer is so addicted to 'googling' all through the day, this would've been noticed.

<comment><USER12> (Strike this, see note below)

This problem just started in the last 24 hours - Google rendered fine and was my default search engine for over a month running the 8.1 RTM, and for a few months before that running the 8.1 Preview.

This isn't MSFT's fuck up _unless_ Google is doing feature detection and IE11 is presenting itself as not supporting some trivial HTML5 feature.

Edit: I stand corrected - it looks like something MSFT pushed out as a compatibility list update around the general availability of 8.1 is causing this.

<comment><USER12> Edit2: I'm not convinced of the above anymore. It doesn't look like the IE compat list is abnormal, but it could be a fluke interaction between Google and IE11.

On the other hand, it's very strange that it suddenly occurred in the past day, when I've been running 8.1 release for over a month.

<comment><USER15> It's also possible that Google made a change to their SERPs that didn't go nicely with the docmode IE11 is rendering it in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is what I'm seeing in IE v11.0.9600.16384 on Windows 8.1 Pro (x64): [http://i.imgur.com/9Vhx1pe.png](http://i.imgur.com/9Vhx1pe.png)

Enabling/disabling Compatibility View has no effect - it looks just fine to me either way.

</comment><comment><USER17> For what it's worth, I found I had to turn compatibility mode back on in order to upload files in Gmail.

</comment><comment><USER12> Before anyone damns Microsoft or Google here, I'd like to mention Hanlon's razor, or my preferred variant:

 _Never assume malice when ignorance will do._

Someone broke something, probably not intentionally. Microsoft has a shady history here, Google has a shady history here (esp. with hostile treatment of Microsoft user agents with YouTube and Maps!), so in the absence of further evidence let's not point fingers.

</comment><comment><USER18> Probably because of the new release of their layout engine. IE11 comes with trident 7 while all the previous versions use 6 or below. It might be causing the trouble with google. Probably that's why Google works well in compatibility view.

<comment><USER19> But the bug is that Google is broken in compatibility view and works properly when in standards view.

<comment><USER18> Oh crap. I read it the other way. My bad. It was only a guess on my part, havent used IE ever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> ??? 1\. who is using windows? (I can't believe that someone that uses windows reads these news... just go for politics ! 2\. why don't you use a browser? IE is known as a tool to download a browser!!!!!!

</comment><comment><USER21> Wow, I am soooooooooooo surprised.

<comment><USER22> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6576521](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6576521) seems to indicate this isn't caused by Google.

<comment><USER21> Gosh, nobody understands what I am saying?

<comment><USER22> Guess not :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Netflix is not the future of TV - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephenmcbride1/2019/05/21/netflix-has-175-days-left-to-pull-off-a-miracle-or-its-all-over/#42146aa275c4 <comment><USER3> I feel exactly the opposite about signing up for Disney. I will not. The reason is stated in Fast Food Nation, paraphrased as: "Disney was the first company to direct market to children." They are still the company I most fear.

As an example, I hate going to the super market with my kids. We don't watch a ton of Disney movies, but even so, they are bombarded with Frozen shit six years after that movie came out. There are all kinds of things to buy marketed with Frozen that my kids would have begged for, IF we had been watching Frozen incessantly, if we had Disney+.

I will NOT be signing up for this. I would much rather watch the shows on Netflix that I know will never have plastic junky replicas occupying on shelf space in the supermarket. Frozen was an amazing story, and Disney has fantastic writers, directors, and animators, but I don't want them hypnotizing my kids and then trying to sell them shit for years.

I'm probably in the minority in that I have never seen one of the Avengers movies, and could care less about those blockbusters the author listed. But, I really do think we are entering a new phase in media consumption where I as a parent can choose my own streaming needs (HBO, for example, with little that my kids watch) AND I can find the right combination for my kids (Netflix and YouTube) that fits my need to avoid marketing to my children. I'm sure someone in those channels will find a way to sell crap to my kids, but it'll take some time.

I think there will still be people who want to watch the Avengers sixteen times on their five different screen sizes, and will sign up for Disney+. But, it might not be as many parents as they would hope for, and I have alternatives and won't be one of them.

<comment><USER4> I have two girls. Netflix seems to have the most girl-positive shows that aren't cheesy or cheap. I generally have a pretty negative view of Disney and wouldn't sign up for it for the same reasons as you.

<comment><USER5> I agree. My daughter loves Spirit. OTOH, she also loves Disney's Elena of Avalor, which I think is exceptionally well done. The Disney stuff targeted at older kids seems pretty horrible to me.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, Disney has definitely improved with their content. I don't like being marketed about Frozen, but I do love the story of Frozen: the love of two sisters saves them NOT a handsome man.

It's just that Disney is like the scorpion and the monkey story ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog)).

"I couldn't help it. It's in my nature."

They just can't help but try to sell a bunch of shit to my kids.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seems like crazy click-bait to me. Yes, the competition in streaming is heating up, but in reality most people are likely to pick and choose a few services, not just one. Cable packages have been running $50+ per month for a while now, with millions of customers. Cord-cutting down to Netflix + Prime + Disney is still cheaper, and it's getting closer to the system I think most people wanted all along, which was the ability to pick and choose your own bundle of just the channels you want.

What has really changed is linear TV (aka traditional channels) is going away in favor of on-demand. People care about live sports, and to some extent live news. Other than that, on-demand is better.

So instead of the future being what we might have imagined 10 years ago, building a bundle of just the channels you want, instead will be building a bundle of just the distributors you want — ie. Disney originals vs Netflix vs Prime etc. I expect we will see more and more content signing exclusive deals with these aggregators as a result, and we probably also see a few more big brands throw their hat in the ring.

<comment><USER7> The problem as articulated in the original article is that _Disney 's service_ is an existential threat to Netflix both because Disney will offer currently- unavailable content and because the Disney IPs are slated to be removed from Netflix.

Netflix's problem is best captured in this sentence:

> Netflix users are spending more time streaming "The Office" than any other > show on the streaming platform.

[https://www.indiewire.com/2019/04/the-office-netflix-most- st...](https://www.indiewire.com/2019/04/the-office-netflix-most-streamed- series-friends-1202127682/)

Would a Disney streaming service cause people to switch or pay for both? That remains unclear, but I'd bet on a future of subscription fatigue where people pay for one video streaming service.

<comment><USER8> Disney is just $7. It seems reasonable that cost-conscious people would choose only it, while others can still pay for it on top of their existing Netflix subscription.

<comment><USER9> Disney starts at $7. These services always increase their price once they have customers hooked. I feel the initial plan is to price it so people will layer it on top of existing services, then have enough content to make it worth having alone. Then increase the price so that users have to choose between the services, and pick Disney.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The author seems to be unaware Netflix started preparing for this _years_ ago[1]:

> _the streaming-video giant put out nearly 90,000 minutes—close to 1,500 > hours—of original series, movies, and other productions this year._

Maybe there is some concern about the quality of the content...

> _In 2018, Netflix also became the first network in 17 years to dethrone HBO > in Emmy nominations, and matched the premium-TV network in wins._

Netflix isn't going anywhere.

[1] [https://qz.com/1505030/keeping-up-with-netflix-originals- is-...](https://qz.com/1505030/keeping-up-with-netflix-originals-is-basically- a-part-time-job-now/)

<comment><USER11> Everyone knows they prepared for it. But they also getting in tons of debt to create content with only one stream of income - subscriptions.

Disney+ and Hulu are just an additional income stream for Disney. They have so many ways to make money off of content and don't need to get in debt to do it.

\- broadcast TV

\- cable TV

\- physical sells of media

-National/international theatric releases.

\- Rental/purchase video on demand

Sure Disney+ may "lose money" for the first five years, but how much of that "loss" is paying other units of Disney for content?

<comment><USER10> > _with only one stream of income - <USER2>

That's not accurate. Netflix can and do license their Netflix Originals just the same as any other production studio. They just don't do so as frequently as streaming is a superior delivery platform (from their perspective) in terms of user lock-in & profitability (no middle men). Those latter two reasons are a strong driving force for why Disney (and prior to that Fox) have been moving into the space.

> _getting in tons of debt_

Do you have a source for this being a concern?

Everything I've ever read indicates their profits are soaring e.g.

\- [https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NFLX/netflix/gross...](https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NFLX/netflix/gross- profit)

\- [https://www.marketwatch.com/story/netflix-is-growing-even- fa...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/netflix-is-growing-even-faster-and- streaming-to-record-profit-totals-2018-04-16)

Granted, I can see there are articles regarding them being in debt:

\- [https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/tv/is-netflix-in- debt-...](https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/tv/is-netflix-in-debt-what- that-20-billion-really-means/news-story/1e5878306f458237230f62eea5d4b94b)

However, even that article ends with:

> _SO IS NETFLIX'S DEBT EVEN THAT BIG OF A DEAL?_

> _Nope! Every company has debt. Apple boasts some $US100 billion in debt, > Disney around $50 billion, and Amazon about $8 billion._

<comment><USER11> You're really comparing Netflix with a total yearly net income of less than $1.5 billion with a total debt of 10.1 billion ([https://ycharts.com/companies/NFLX/total_long_term_debt](https://ycharts.com/companies/NFLX/total_long_term_debt)) to Apple with a total debt of $50 billion with a net income of $57 billion?

Apple borrowed money to pay dividends and stock repurchasing to get around repatriating income before the tax changes. Netflix is borrowing money to keep up with much larger studios.

 _That 's not accurate. Netflix can and do license their Netflix Originals just the same as any other production studio. They just don't do so as frequently as streaming is a superior delivery platform (from their perspective) in terms of user lock-in & profitability (no middle men). Those latter two reasons are a strong driving force for why Disney (and prior to that Fox) have been moving into the space_

People don't buy Netflix Originals on DVDs like they do Disney properties. People are still buying Disney DVDs of movies released 50 years ago. Disney is moving into streaming as an additional source of income.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> At the price of both of these services, am I the only one thinking "why not both"? It a LOT cheaper for both than standard cable or satellite (here in Europe anyway) and both would have stuff the other does not. Title sounds very click-baity to me...

<comment><USER13> Out of curiosity, what do you mean with "cheaper than satellite"? Initial costs of the dish and receiver aside that's free around here.

<comment><USER14> Could you define "around here"?

I'm from Germany and for premium satellite content (Sky) you pay 25-30 euros upwards for the movie and entertainment (shows and documentaries) packages.

<comment><USER13> Oh, Germany as well. Honestly didn't realize these premium satellite things are still widely used over purely IP based content delivery options so they slipped my mind there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There is no way Disney+ is going to hand out the entire Disney catalog including putting movies on streaming the same day as theater release for $7/mo. This is either a teaser rate or it doesn't buy you everything. And the theaters will freak out if they have to compete with same day streaming release.

<comment><USER16> Don't think same day streaming release is a remote possibility because Disney would be canabalizing it's theater revenue. I do think it's likely the only place you will be able to watch it after it leaves the theater.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What if consumers get bored by such "exclusive content" deals, where they need 7 subscriptions to watch the 7 things they like, and they go back to DVDs and bittorrent?

<comment><USER18> There's zero commitment to these apps. Just choose one for a couple months and watch everything new in the library and rewatch some old stuff you missed or want to watch again, then cancel it and go on to the next subscription for another two months or so.

I don't understand why people think it's a problem to need 6 different subscriptions -- there's literally no reason to have all 6 at the EXACT SAME MOMENT.

<comment><USER19> People are forgetful & passive, so they tend to subscribe and forget.

There are lots of people paying for things they don't need or could save money by switching subscriptions on & off as needed. This is one of the reasons why the subscription model is so popular with companies, not consumers.

<comment><USER20> relevant experience:

So I've started to subscribe/unsubscribe to channels through prime. It's really easy to subscribe/unsub. I unsubscribed from HBO when game of thrones finished.

But... lots of things? lots of things unsubscribing is horribly painful.

A lot of things you have to call someone, listen to the sales pitch, look up a bunch of customer data you might not have anymore, and then listen to another sales pitch and then cancel.

I have started dealing with this by just canceling the credit card. (I've got one of those cards that lets me generate throw away numbers, so I don't have to cancel everything) way easier.

So, uh, my guess? my guess is that the 'subscribe to movie through amazon' is a lot less sticky than 'subscribe to channel through cable' just 'cause it's three clicks. And then another three clicks if you want to re-subscribe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> >Disney's ownership of iconic franchises like Star Wars gives it something no money can buy.

Didn't Disney buy Star Wars?

<comment><USER22> No money can buy anymore... unless of course they license or sell it outright.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Sounds like Netflix needs to produce Blockbuster films, or buy Universal Corp(the maker of Jurassic World, the only non-disney top film of the last 5 years). Universal's market cap is only 1.28B, about 10% of the amount Netflix spent on content last year.

<comment><USER11> Where did you get that number from?

Universal is owned by Comcast.

<comment><USER23> I looked up Universal corp. Whoops, it seems Universal Corp isn't in the movie business : [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Corporation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Corporation)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Netflix has been targeting niche areas for the last few years. With most of the larger markets now having local shows in their own language or foreign shows with subs that have been appreciated a lot. I personally have watched French, Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Brazil content and probably use it more for these language shows than I do for English shows. The advances in machine translation text to audio and video morphing makes me wonder if we 5-10 years down the line we will get content modified automatically so that translated dialog audio matches morphed video lip movement.

<comment><USER25> Ugh, that sounds horrible. Instead of getting to enjoy regional differences and different languages (subtitled if desired), every show would end up the same for your locale, down to the local brands shown as product placements.

And why stop there? The actor drinks soda from a green can, and if you watch the show now it will mostly be a can of Pepsi cola. But watch the show between January and April 2020 from Canada, and you will see the new maple syrup flavoured Dr Pepper instead.

<comment><USER24> I didn't say I wanted it to happen. I personally got into movies as 10-11 year old watching Jackie Chan and other Asian kungfu movies with subs. So watching movies with subs is natural for me for many others it is not so and trying to read subs while watching might not be fun. As long as I have the choice to watch in the original language with subs I really don't care.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Personally I don't see the problem with having my content on physical media, such as Blu-Ray or UHD discs. Once I've bought it, it's mine, and no-one can take it away from me. I'll still be watching my favourite movies over and over again for years to come for a one time cost, and I don't have to worry about the streaming provider removing it from their platform.

I know I'm in a minority though, and at some point in the next decade, streaming services will be the ONLY place content is released, and the concept of owning physical media will be considered archaic.

</comment><comment><USER27> I don't necessarily disagree with the statement that Netflix is not the new TV. However I clearly see them in a position alike to a big TV channel. Disney would just be another player as it's content would simply be different.

Still, I hope Netflix keeps Disney off their ground as I would prefer them competing against one another rather than seeing it replaced or bought up.

Netflix has been doing grandiose work be it in their shows or even their open- source work.

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't believe Disney has the technical skill to make a decent cross platform streaming app work right away.

There will be months of buffering and bugs, and that will mean they won't get many customers. After 6 months of that, the IP will be forgotten by regular punters. If content isn't watched and talked about in schools/offices/at home/in memes, people forget fast. Disney's whole catalogue will get devalued.

<comment><USER11> Disney owns BAMTech the same company that rescued HBO's streaming service and that's used by MLB@Bat.

They also have a controlling interest in Hulu.

<comment><USER29> Right? They literally went out and bought one of the best streaming tech companies, years ago, to prepare for this. People are acting like Disney is just starting this project today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > In a world where you can watch practically anything whenever you want, > dominance in distribution is very fragile.

That sounds exactly like the arguments against Uber to me: that these companies indeed have changed our day-to-day lives, but their innovations are in no way exclusive and users will easily switch between providers, quickly reacting to changes in quality of service (ride cost for Uber and Office and Friends being on Netflix).

</comment><comment><USER31> I, too, look forward to the day that 100% of our entertainment is controlled by this American mega-corporation.

<comment><USER32> You mean today and every day for the last X years?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Not many people are going to subscribe to a service to watch the same movies over and over again. DIS+ is dead int he water unless it somehow creates exclusive novel new content, which it wont just for its service, ergo DOA

<comment><USER34> you clearly do not have kids..

My 5 year old boy will watch the same film again and again for days until he get bored and move to watching the next same movie for days, rinse and repeat.

my brother is 29 now but did the same thing when he was at that age, i still know most lines from lion king by hearth because of that.

i have a friend that watch braveheart at least once a year.

i myself, there are many movies that i would rewatch every once in a while, many from disney.

so it is not even a new or uncommon behavior that people watch the same movies again and again.

also, disney already announced several series just for this service from marvel (wanda and vision, winter soldier and falcon, loki) and star wars (mandalorian, a new clone war season), so yes they will have exclusive novel new content made just for it in there.

also, once it goes live all new movies from disney, marvel and star wars will only be available there.

so it is definitely not dead in the water.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's a saying in investing, "Don't bet against the mouse". And to anyone doubting Disney being able to take over streaming, I challenge you to bet against him.

</comment><comment><USER16> What's interesting to me about this debate is that everyone seems to view it as a Disney is coming for Netflix story and not the other way around. But what prevents Netflix from creating its own animation studio and producing its own blockbuster films and distributing them in theaters? What about licensing merchandise from its movies or television shows? It's not all that clear to me that consumers will pay a monthly fee to stream movies they've already seen. In any case Netflix is so different than what Disney announced with Disney + that the case put forth in the article seems very simplistic and lazy.

<comment><USER11> Netflix is already getting in enough debt trying to keep up with competitors with the only income being subscription revenue. How much debt do you think they can take on?

Besides "creating blockbusters" isn't easy. See all of the other studios who are trying to create "shared universes".

<comment><USER16> Because capital is cheap right now so you have lots of investors around the world with cash they are looking to get return on willing to lend it at relatively low rates. Netflix is able to borrow at low rates while ratcheting up the subscription price and adding millions of new paying customers every quarter which is how they are fueling hypergrowth. The idea that they should be cutting spending is completely antithetical to their long-term strategy.

There is going to be a critical mass, I don't know where it is but I suspect its not far off, where enough subs around the world are paying a high enough rate while the need to produce new shows will be capped to keep people on the platform. Then you have a wheel where enormous amounts of cash is coming in every month and a fixed amount of content is being output. That's the path to profitability.

Then if the sub base and price point continues to rise, they have enough cash to do other things like build theaters or produce blockbuster films. And that's not even counting if they come up with additional ways to generate revenue such as licensing.

<comment><USER11> So if all it takes is money to make "Blockbuster films" then why isn't anyone else doing it besides mostly Disney?

Netflix has around 150 million subscribers and they charge less in developing countries than the US. Their entire quarterly profit was $291 million last quarter. To put that in perspective, that's half the profit that Disney made on Avengers Endgame alone and that's not including merchandizing and home video sells and rentals.

Disney doesn't need to get into debt for content and by the time Endgame reaches Disney+ it will have already made a larger profit probably than Netflix makes in an entire year.

<comment><USER16> Netflix made over $4.5 billion in revenue last quarter and has been consistently growing it every year at insane rates. Disney? Not so much.

A blockbuster film costs hundreds of millions of dollars to make. How many companies have the money and desire to play in that space? It's Disney's and a couple of other studio's wheelhouse. Netflix is quickly reaching the scale to compete there though and they have demonstrated the ability to hire away talent from all the major studios and quickly put out content that viewers demonstrably spend time watching.

It seems like half the bull case for Disney + is Endgame. How many people are going to pull out their wallets to sign up for a subscription to stream a six- month old movie that they've probably already seen if they're that excited about it? Seems like a stretch to me.

<comment><USER11> _Netflix made over $4.5 billion in revenue last quarter and has been consistently growing it every year at insane rates. Disney? Not so much._

Disney's revenue was three times that and they just added Fox.

Revenue means nothing without profit. Netflix's total profit last quarter was less than that of either one of Disney's last three Marvel movies.

 _Netflix is quickly reaching the scale to compete there though and they have demonstrated the ability to hire away talent from all the major studios and quickly put out content that viewers demonstrably spend time watching._

It's not about the _talent_. Both Black Panther and Captain Marvel were made by unknown producers. Disney has multiple franchises that have been popular for decades.

 _It seems like half the bull case for Disney + is Endgame. How many people are going to pull out their wallets to sign up for a subscription to stream a six-month old movie that they 've probably already seen if they're that excited about it? Seems like a stretch to me._

People are still buying Disney movies from decades ago. Kids will watch the same movie repeatedly. A lot of Disney movies are considered classics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> in India sports too is moving to streaming, hotstar gave a full page add today bragging 18.6 million viewers simultaneously watched IPL cricket finals.

if Disney was this serious they should have launched their services when Netflix announced original productions.

</comment><comment><USER36> Torrents. Either the dumb rentier platform wars end in an open streaming protocol standard, or we just stick with piracy. Capitalism is absurdly inefficient.

<comment><USER37> Assuming we had an open streaming protocol standard and standard clients, how would that solve the issue of competing streaming services all wanting their own monthly fee and offering different content?

No one cares about the protocol and the client - people want their content.

<comment><USER36> The idea is to decouple the content from the platform. So one way you could do it is have the content deployed to an open distributed file storage and streaming protocol (IPFS or Holochain perhaps, blockchain will never scale).

Content creators upload it to this network and the content becomes a standalone entity.

Platforms then have full open access to the content. The platforms compete on the UX/UI and recommendation algorithm layers. Every platform will have access to all content. But if Netflix provides the best viewing experience then people will pay a monthly fee to use it.

Each time the content is streamed, the user (or platform) pays a microfee per minute watched which goes directly back to the content creator.

Omitting quite a few technical details but you get the gist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Netflix is not the future of TV. It's the present.

</comment><comment><USER39> $6.99 ?

I'll sign up for both</comment>


PMOG - <AUTHOR> http://pmog.com/ <comment><USER2> Maybe I'm just stupid but the description doesn't make any sense to me. Anyone who's played this care to do a quick overview?

<comment><USER3> last I looked, it was something like RescueTime or 8aweek, with funny graphics. Interesting, though.

<comment><USER4> Would this be an inappropriate time to suggest a merger between RescueTime and Idle RPG? Imagine how much more productive you'd be if you leveled up inverse proportionally to time spent surfing the web.

<comment><USER5> That would be cool! e.g. at rescuetime my efficiency is at 83%. Yawn.

How much cooler would it be if I was a Zen Monk in the Order of Time wielding a Staff of the Moon. With pretty graphics of course (and a widget for on my blog).

I mean, people have already succeeded in turning MMORPGs into work (farming, selling virtual stuff on ebay), why not turn work into an RPG?

<comment><USER3> I think that is an accurate description of PMOG.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=132451>

or

[http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2008/03/human-data- as-...](http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2008/03/human-data-as-a.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> Is this better than ProgressQuest?</comment>


LifeLabs goes to court to block privacy watchdogs from probing 2019 data breach - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/lifelabs-data-breach-1.5667618 <comment><USER2> Is there a reason why we can't have strict liability laws for data breaches? Seems like every time companies get off because proving negligence or damages is too hard. If you get hacked, you should pay $x per affected individual. No more "we did our best, but it was a Sophisticated Attack™ carried out by a nation state/APT, so plz don't fine us". Imagine if companies could use this logic if they lost physical goods. eg. if a bank got robbed, they shouldn't be able to say "well they were a really sophisticated crew of bank robbers, so there goes your deposit!".

<comment><USER3> We all know public entities would be exempt. What's the point then?

Government will just leak more important info.

I think a shift toward identity as a service is underway for the market to solve this. Auth0 and the like are offering a solution.

<comment><USER2> >I think a shift toward identity as a service is underway for the market to solve this. Auth0 and the like are offering a solution.

How does auth0 solve this? This isn't about your email or passwords getting leaked. This is about your lab test results (eg. HIV, herpes, etc.) getting leaked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Canadian here.

Not sure how there is no government oversight for handling of sensitive data in the first place. I get that we have a "Privacy Commissioner of Canada". But this sort of thing should almost never happen.

Also, how the heck can a privately owned company that deliberately mishandled data (let's be honest here - instead of paying legal fees to fight in court, you could be, I don't know, tightning up your NetSec?) overrule a federally mandated officer?

Holy crap this stinks.

<comment><USER5> Write to your MP. Not that they will do anything - Maybe you'll be luckier than me and wont get a canned response about how they are "working hard to stop this" without taking action.

<comment><USER4> I occasionally do - and there are times where I do get a response back.

I'm considering registering myself as a lobbyist so that I can have more of a face to face contact with councillors in my city, and actually push for more change.

Because right now, if people in tech aren't advocating for better security practices...we're going to doom ourselves by standing by and not doing anything at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Canadian here. This lifelabs breach is a national travesty. Compared to the ruckus the opposition made for the We charity situation, why are they not after these guys? This really disgusts me about our political system today .. if you can score points against your opposition, go full-on guns blazing. If it actually is of consequence to citizens, meh.

<comment><USER7> Wait that whole billion dollar ethical possible crimminal situation that the government created on their own makes you made you angry at the opposition (left / right / french / green)?

You don't think it's of any consequence to citzens? You think they are causing an unnecessary ruckus?

What part of Canada are you from? Is that you Justin?

<comment><USER6> All levels of the Canadian govt have done a reasonable job during the pandemic when a bulk of the world has faltered. I'm not a fan of all the fiscal stimulus (top tax bracket) but I understand why it is being done. There is a concept called Helicopter money that some economists have proposed. You may want to look into that.

I'm in Ontario btw and don't see the need for a personal attack in your comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The cost of litigating to suppress details could be less than the cost of LifeLabs potential exposure to a class action suit because of what could potentially be construed as negligence in their IT security practices. They're not just psycho jerks for fighting it, it could just be part of their fiduciary duty.

The risk to them is, IMO, the standard of security and privacy governance within the public sector is much higher than pretty much any other institution I've seen, so in comparison, showing that a private company did not meet that standard would be trivial. However, the question of what kind of diligence was done on the original contract (or not) could blow up, since every mandatory risk assessment (if completed) done on it would have raised this breach possibility and recommended controls to mitigate it.

I was livid when I read about the breach as it's precisely the kind of incident every single security and privacy analyst who has ever advised the public service has used as a baseline scenario. It fell out of the news cycle I think because it was so bad it crossed the line into discrediting institutions, which isn't done in mainstream Canada.

The party in power whose minister approved this contract has been out of power for 3+ years, so politically for them it's just wastewater under the bridge, but as a legacy, this breach was in the realm of worst case scenario. For the sake of popular trust in the health system in general, the root cause analysis should be seen through.

</comment><comment><USER9> As a Canadian, I find this disgraceful. This data breach poses a significant and life-long financial risk to all those impacted. For example, insurance companies could obtain this data and use it to increase premiums for individuals they deem to have higher risk due to the data from their blood tests.

LifeLabs needs to be held accountable and the courts should make an example out of them, and send a clear message to other companies that hoard personal data.

Corporations need to consider personal data as a liability, not an asset.

</comment><comment><USER10> Reminds me of a small privacy issue with many Canadian institutes: a lot of medical institutions and facilities use google maps or google fonts. This sort of reveals to google that a user with a certain ip address is visiting a certain site related to <private medical issue>

</comment><comment><USER11> Stalling tactic? I don't recall anyone ever being fined over a breach. Sounds like a tactic to escape whatever is left of the news cycle on this.

</comment><comment><USER12> I now wonder where does the Prime Minister get his lab work done?

<comment><USER12> I lost a few points but it was a genuine question. Does the PM just walk into a lab with a requisition and get blood work or does he have a private doctor and private lab do it. As the PM I would assume his medical results would be of interest to some people and as a Canadian genuinely have no idea how he manages his affairs. It would be interesting to learn more about how he keeps his affairs private.

<comment><USER13> He comes from an important political family, but he hasn't been Prime Minister for his whole life. There's a fair chance that LifeLabs has handled his data at some point.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: When do you get downvote privileges? - <AUTHOR> I get downvotes sometimes.
Sometimes it's because I said something someone didn't like, sometimes it's because it's an unpopular opinion. Most times, I get upvotes more than downvotes, but I can clearly tell a lot of people have downvote privileges.
When do you get those on HN? <comment><USER2> 500 Karma I believe, so you are close.

<comment><USER3> Also, the option isn't always there; you can't downvote any direct reply to your comment, can't downvote older comments in the thread, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks guys!</comment></comment></comment>


Scientific Report of the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee - <AUTHOR> http://www.health.gov/dietaryguidelines/2015-scientific-report/

<comment><USER2> I spot-checked a few sections of this document to see how accurately they matched my own conceptions of the state of the evidence. Specifically, I went to areas where I knew there was active controversy, to see which side they took, but more importantly whether they had acknowledged the presence of a controversy at all. Keep in mind that I specifically went to spots where I expected to find trouble; I did not look at all the parts I expected to be fine, and given the length (571 pages), that's most of it. So please don't take this as reflecting too negatively on the paper or its authors; these issues can almost certainly be addressed in a revision. So, with that out of the way...

Part D, section 6 concerns sodium intake and its relationship to blood pressure and cardiovascular disease. This is an area of controversy; see for example Scientific American's "It's Time to End the War on Salt" ([http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-end- th...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-end-the-war-on- salt/)). This report could reasonably take either role, but it would be worrying if it did not acknowledge the existence of a controversy at all.

Scientific American cites a number of negative results on reduced sodium intake. I didn't have time to track down all of the, but I did track down a few, including a Cochrane review "Reduced Dietary Salt for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease: A Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials" (null result, [http://ajh.oxfordjournals.org/content/24/8/843.short);](http://ajh.oxfordjournals.org/content/24/8/843.short\);) "Fatal and Nonfatal Outcomes, Incidence of Hypertension, and Blood Pressure Changes in Relation to Urinary Sodium Excretion" (opposite result, more sodium increases survival; [http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=899663](http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=899663)). It mentions the INTERSALT study, which, apparently, has a different result depending on who's interpreting the data.

This report doesn't cite any of those. It makes no mention of there being a controversy or mixed results regarding sodium intake. It says they conducted "a focused review of dietary sodium and its relationship with blood pressure as well as its relationship with CVD", but I don't think they did.

I didn't have time for as thorough an inspection as with salt, but a cursory look suggests to me that there are also problems with its presentation of omega-6 fatty acid, which some believe to be very very bad but which is barely mentioned.

I don't think this document is ready to be presented to policymakers in its present state. Presenting the appearance of consensus when there is none, is how nutrition got into this mess in the first place.</comment>


Why did HN lose popularity in early-mid 2013? - <AUTHOR> http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/news.ycombinator.com

<comment><USER2> There is no corresponding dip in our own traffic graphs. It is probably an Alexa measurement artifact. We started using a CDN and switched to https by default for logged-in users sometime in 2013, which could affect measurements.

<comment><AUTHOR> Got it - thanks for the confirmation. I was not sure how to interpret this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> For the record, there's no corresponding dip in the number of Comments and Stories submitted to HN.

[http://i.imgur.com/r9Ayvb1.png](http://i.imgur.com/r9Ayvb1.png) [http://i.imgur.com/4FwglA8.png](http://i.imgur.com/4FwglA8.png)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> As shown in the link, the traffic to HN dropped considerably in early-mid 2013 until it regained traction later in that year. Does anyone here have any explanation for that sudden drop in 2013?</comment>


Letter of Recommendation: Color Blind Pal - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-color-blind-pal.html <comment><USER2> I tried the app. Maybe I'm just tired, but I could not find a setting where it actually helped me distinguish anything.

It made things worse every time I tried shifting. I'm red green colorblind, but don't know or recall if it's red deficient or green or both.

Neither setting on the app helped me.

As for simulation, I've never found one where I couldn't see the difference between simulated and normal. That just means that their adjustment is not perfectly aligned with my deficiency. I just mention it so you with more normal color vision don't take these simulations as a golden reference. They should be seen more as a hint of what it is like.

<comment><USER3> Such an app would probably need a training phase where you have to specify which colors look identical to you, so that the adjustment can be optimized for your personal color curves.

<comment><USER4> I love your idea. Could someone please make an app that incorporates training, both to benefit the user and to compensate for the specific device that is running the app?

Like many others here, I work in a technical professional capacity. We are tasked with preparing engineering analyses, presentations, and splash sheets that discuss our ideas. As a reviewer for some of these documents, I often challenge people to consider the use of color and how it expresses on black and white prints.

If we had a reliable app for this, I could extend my recommendations to ensure that color printed materials appear correctly to people who have trouble seeing or differentiating colors. It would add a new dimension of accessibility into the products we create.

<comment><USER2> colors will never appear correctly to someone with color deficiency. The information is lost, not translated.

The best you can hope to do (short of altering eyeballs) is to make sure colors are differentiated in the perception of a color deficient person.

Beyond just seeing a difference side by side, in many cases such as charts, one needs to be able to look at a color splotch at one part of a chart and be able to recognize it in another. This is harder than side by side diffentiation.

For many colors that are as different as black and white to normally sighted persons, those same colors might as well be very slightly different shades of the same color.

So in a grayscale chart with overlapping lines, it's hard for anyone to distinguish small differences in shades, so people used unique symbols to differentiate them.

That's still the most reliable way to help colorblind people. Don't solely rely on color. Augment with patterns and symbols when you can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The glasses mentioned in passing here really do seem to be effective for some people so they're well worth investigating if the price is manageable.

To quote an acquaintance who started using them a year or two back: "... it's like seeing an electric sign turned off (colorblind) VS turned on (with my glasses)" and from recent posts on Facebook he's clearly getting a huge amount of value from them.

My understanding of the mechanism is that they suppress the wavelengths that the other receptors are strong in so that the weaker receptors have more of an influence. Presumably they therefore can't help true dichromats.

Doubtless others here know and can explain more.</comment>


The SSD Endurance Experiment: Only Two Remain After 1.5PB - <AUTHOR> http://techreport.com/review/27062/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-only-two-remain-after-1-5pb <comment><USER5> The definition of wear out is more than just the SSD declaring the cell bad, or the SSD failing suddenly. A cell is technically declared worn out when the chance that the cell suffer charge leakage after N months at temperature T exceeds probability P. (Where exactly what these parameters are are a secret that the SSD vendors don't disclose. There are some standards, but the SSD vendors don't necessarily use those standards when the make promises about their product's wear endurance.

So even though an SSD might last for 1.5 PB's worth of writes, there is no guarantee that if you were to then put the SSD on a shelf and wait nine months, that they data will still be good. This is probably one some vendors will declare themselves to be dead after so many gigabytes worth of writes, even if the flash cells haven't "failed" yet. Otherwise users might depend on the SSD's contents being retained, when in fact they might suffer data loss.

But of course, this doesn't really matter much, because you treat all data stored on SSD's as a cache, and do regular backups, RIGHT? :-)

<comment><USER6> This does not invalidate your point of course, but note that the article describes one of the tests some of these drives have passed: write a large file and power the drive off for a week and then check the file.

<comment><USER7> Try powering off for 5 years and keeping at 75oC and see if the data is still there.

<comment><USER8> Wouldn't most storage types, including regular hdds and optical media fail this test though? I am not talking about complete data loss, but some data would be corrupted after such time.

<comment><USER9> Magnetic media (hard drives, tape) will essentially retain data indefinitely unless exposed to magnetic fields that are strong enough or until the Curie point is reached, both of which are unlikely scenarios for long-term storage. Even in cases of fire that destroys the external components of an HDD, if the platters didn't get hot enough the data is still there:

[http://istcolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov/fall2008/presentations/peders...](http://istcolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov/fall2008/presentations/pederson.pdf)

Flash-based memory is different - unlike magnetic media which can be thought to be _bistable_ , flash is inherently unstable ( _monostable_ ); the erased state of a cell is lower energy so the electrons stored in a programmed one are "under pressure", and due to tunneling effects, slowly leak out over time.

The consequence of this is that magnetic media will continue to store information long after it's obsolete; I'm almost willing to bet that the data on a modern HDD will still be there on the platters in 100+ years, even if the rest of the drive becomes inoperable. Ditto for optical media such as pressed CDs - in that case the bits are manifested _physically_ , and unless the medium is degraded to the point where the bits are no longer distinguishable, the data stays (theoretically, even a CD whose reflective layer has degraded is still readable via SEM or other physical means, since the data is physically pressed into it.) On the other hand, flash will slowly and irreversibly erase itself over long periods of time, as each cell returns to its non-programmed stable state.

<comment><USER10> This is not exactly true, the magnetic fields on HDD migrate around on the disk over time and eventually become unreadable by the disk. In theory the data remains recoverable for significantly longer than that but it's not 'stable'. While historically not much of a problem it's a larger issue as HDD keep increasing in capacity.

HDD actually internally refresh data to avoid this issue so their much better as 'hot' storage. Tape is designed to avoid most of these issues and is much better for long term storage.

"Magnetic media – such as floppy disks and magnetic tapes – may experience data decay as bits lose their magnetic orientation. Periodic refreshing by rewriting the data can alleviate this problem. " [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The main issue I have with this form of testing is that it's basically measuring the _ultimate_ endurance characteristics of the flash - <USER2> program/erase cycles until some piece of the flash becomes completely unusable. The majority of the time the first failure will occur in a user data block, but there's a nonzero chance that it's in a block mapping table or the firmware itself, and that will definitely cause catastrophic failure. The article seems to be implying that it's OK to write more data than the manufacturer specifies, but this is not something anyone should ever be doing in a real-world scenario, because retention is inversely proportional to endurance and also (exponentially!) to temperature. A drive that retains data for a week at 20C may not be able to at 30C or even 25C.

The 840 Pro's reallocated sector count appears to have started rising at 600TB, which is roughly 2400 P/E cycles, on average, of the whole flash - <USER3> is not surprising and agrees with the typical endurance figure of 2K-3K for 2x nm MLC.

I've never agreed fully with the reasoning behind MLC - yes, it's technically twice the capacity for the same die area/price as SLC (or alternatively, half the area/price for the same capacity), but it's also nearly _two orders of magnitude_ less endurance/retention and requires far more controller complexity for error correction and bad-block management. In a storage device, I think reliability is more important than capacity - even with backups, no one wants to lose _any_ data. The tradeoff doesn't make so much sense to me - theoretically, you could buy an MLC SSD that wears out after a few years (thus needing replace it and copy the existing data over to the new one, along with all the risks that causes, etc.), or for only twice as much, an SLC one that probably won't ever need replacing.

A 256GB SLC SSD with 100K P/E cycle flash is conceivably good for 25PB and 5-10 years, or <1PB and over a century... i.e. you could probably use one for archival if stored in a good environment. Part of me thinks the manufacturers just don't want to make such long-lasting products, hence the strong association of SLC to "enterprise" products. (And the much higher pricing of SLC SSDs, more than the raw price of NAND would suggest.)

<comment><USER11> The rationale is that most people will _never_ approach those kind of number of P/E cycles, and so people would rathe pay for more space, or pay less. Even in many cases in enterprise settings.

We have some cheapish SSD's in use for some of our high traffic database servers. We lost some drives that failed catastrophically, and the company we bought it from "suggested" we might have worn them out and maybe we didn't have a reason to RMA them, and perhaps we just ought to buy more expensive enterprise models next time.

So we checked the SMART data, and after a year of what to us is heavy 24/7 use with a large percentage of writes, we'd gone through less than 10% of the P/E cycles.

(We did our RMA, and it was very clear that this was a problem with the model/batch - all the failed drives were OCZ Vertex drives from when their failure rate shot through the roof before the bankruptcy)

All our other SSD's are chugging along nicely; the oldest have suffered through 3-4 years of heavy database traffic. I am just waiting for the oldest ones to start failing.

At that rate it doesn't matter if they won't survive as long as SLC anyway: We'll end up replacing them with faster, higher capacity newer models soon anyway - we usually do on a 3-5 year cycle depending on hardware and needs -, because it's more cost-effective for us to upgrade regularly to increase our hosting density as it helps us avoid taking more rack space, and colocation space/power/cooling costs us more than the amortised cost of the hardware.

The consumer market is similar: Most people don't ever buy replacements for failed drives - they buy a newer computer.

<comment><USER9> _The rationale is that most people will never approach those kind of number of P /E cycles_

The flip side of that is most people could now have drives that don't cost all that much more, but last _much_ longer. Most SLC tends to be rated for 100K cycles and 10 years of retention; assuming a roughly inverse correlation, at 10K or 1K cycles the retention goes up considerably to a century or more.

 _The consumer market is similar: Most people don 't ever buy replacements for failed drives - they buy a newer computer._

That is true, but the long-term implications are more subtle; the fact is that most people don't backup, and quite a few of them keep the old drives (that were still working when they were replaced) around as "backup", with the implicit assumption that the data on them will likely still be there if they ever decide e.g. that they wanted to find an older version of some file they had. With flash memory, this assumption no longer holds.

On a longer timescale, we've been able to "recover data" from stone tablets, ancient scrolls and books, this being a very valuable source of historical information; and most if not all of that data was probably never considered to be worth archiving or preserving at the time. More recently, rare software has been recovered from old disks ( [http://www.chrisfenton.com/cray-1-digital- archeology/](http://www.chrisfenton.com/cray-1-digital-archeology/) ). Only the default, robust nature of the media made this possible.

Despite modern technology increasing amount of storage available, and the potential to have it persist for a very long time, it seems we've shifted from "data will persist unless explicitly destroyed" to "data will NOT persist unless explicitly preserved", which agrees well with the notion that we may be living in one of the most forgettable periods in history. It's a little sad, I think.

<comment><USER12> The fact is, even it wouldn't matter as-is if the data took 10000 years to degrade from the platter itself. Most consumer hard drives those days are made for laptops, which are probably used for less than 5 years on average. Even if you consider external HDs and desktop HDs, a long of a lifetime isn't much use: the control electronics themselves fail fast, and the mechanical reliability even faster.

It's an optimization rule of thumb: in an optimal trade-off for (e.g.) maximum reliability for cost, the reliability of each element will tend to be close (actually the derivative of the reliability vs cost will be equal, but this tends to imply the former) -- i.e. you improve the least reliable and sacrifice the most reliable, even if the most has very reliability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I normally find it annoying when they run endurance tests like this using only one drive of each brand and treat the results as particularly meaningful. However, in this case I think the failures may suggest things about the drives underlying architecture not just who picked the best sample from the bin.

<comment><USER13> > I normally find it annoying when they run endurance tests like this using > only one drive of each brand and treat the results as particularly > meaningful.

The main takeaway for me from this is less around the reliability of individual drives, but that SSDs _as a whole_ have moved into a space where I don't really need to worry about them being signifiantly less reliable than hard drives.

<comment><USER14> Well, they could still improve.

My Macbook's SSD died in a blaze of reallocated sectors and write failures just last week, and that thing was just around 2 years old.

For comparison, I've only had 2 spinning hard drives fail on me (I've owned around 25), and those were >10 years old and mostly decommissioned.

It could be a statistical fluke, and the sheer speed of SSDs means that even now, a higher failure rate is acceptable, but SSDs in general don't have the longevity of older magnetic hard drives.

<comment><USER15> My Macbook's SSD lasted just six months before it failed, right before printing a boarding pass for a transatlantic flight. Afterwards it turned out Time Machine had been making corrupted backups, which wasn't fun, fortunately no user data loss, only Applications. I've learnt my lesions about SSDs: they don't give you any hints that they're about to fail, and one they do, it's game over.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> These SSDs are failing at roughly 3000 write-out cycles. Traditional hard drives can take 6 hours to write out, so doing a similar test would take ~2 years.

Spinning disks are so freaking slow that you could never test the reliability apples-to-apples. Any workload that wears out an SSD could never be run on a traditional HD.

<comment><USER17> A very good point, but it would still be good to see a comparison, even if it does take 2 years to run on a traditional HD.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is encouraging although even tests on early drives showed that an 'average' drive should last far longer than people need them for - <USER4> based on the number of allowed writes. 750TB? That's more data than my department, an imaging research group, have on our cluster...

There are some more tests which are very hard to do because you need time and a large sample size, for instance what's the data retention time for a typical SSD?

As far as I can tell, nobody really knows because you'd need to leave the drive off for probably more than a year - and as soon as you turn the drive on, presumably you refresh the charge that's leaked out? Most of the time this isn't a problem because almost everyone turns on their PC or laptop weekly/monthly if not daily.

<comment><USER19> If you don't have much RAM I suppose you'd hit these limits much faster as OS would swap a lot of data onto drive.

<comment><USER20> Two of the drives survived a year of continuous use, so even regular swapping is trivial.

Say you're using your computer 12 hours a day, half of that doing tasks where memory usage greatly exceeds your physical memory, and you're using 1/4 of the bandwidth of the drive to swap in/out (of which 1/2 are writes).

Under this quite heavy scenario, the writes will catch up to this endurance test after _32 years_.

The speed, price & capacity of these drives are (at least for now) improving so quickly that by the time you wear one out, even with torturous use, replacing it will be trivial.

Cost per gigabyte has halved over the period of this test. So even when taking the drive that just died and using it for the most pathological use case imaginable, you'd be buying a $200 drive today, replacing it with a $100 drive in one year, $50 in two years, etc. Not a big deal.

<comment><USER21> I just wish someone could tell me one I could buy that would last longer than 1.5 years in my laptop. I'm on #3 now :(

<comment><USER22> The 100 "GB" OCZ Vertex LE in my laptop has 27,834 hours of power-on time. This is the only drive in the system, and it houses several always-on encrypted swap partitions. I'd be surprised if you could purchase a new one at this time, though. :P

I can get back to you in a little more than a year about the 750 "GB" Samsung 840 EVO in the lady's laptop, and 6->8 months on the Crucial M4 SSD in my gaming PC. :)

<comment><USER21> My last to fail was an OCZ Vector :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> So not entering read only mode after life end seams like a very dangerus bug that is not realy accepteble.

Sidenote: Articles like this always scares the shit out of me I have a kingston ssd that has been in my main server for almost 3 years now.

The smart data seams to say that it is 100% fine but as it has been on for 24* 365*3 hours that seams unlikely.

<comment><USER24> Yes, but your data is on more than one drive, yes? Presumably you have some sort of RAID setup whereas if the one drive were to truly fail, another would pick up in its place.

<comment><USER25> What worries me about raid mirrors on SSDs is that a lot of SSD failures are not due to a part failure, but rather, a pattern failure ... meaning, if you subject this SSD to thus and such series of writes, then it fails.

So the worry is, if you mirror an SSD then you could (theoretically) inflict the exact same pattern on them over their lifetime and they would fail simultaneously.

That is why all of our SSD boot drives, which are indeed mirrors, are built from two different SSDs ... either two different generations of Intel SSDs (3xx and 5xx for instance) or one Intel and one equivalent Samsung. This way, their behavior cannot become correlated...

<comment><USER11> That should concern you for regular drives too.

The infamous IBM DeathStar problem was partly resolved with a firmware upgrade that added wear levelling, because the crashes were found to be due to material flaking off the platters when the head remained in the same location, leading to dust in the drive that had a high risk of trigger head crashes so bad it'd strip almost all the material off the glass platters.

There's a fun picture on Wikipedia:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST_Deskstar#mediaviewer/File:...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST_Deskstar#mediaviewer/File:IBM75GXP_Failed_Disks.png)

We had an array of 10 of them in 2001, and when the first one failed we weren't aware of the problem and didn't think much of it. Then the second failed a week later. The third a week after that. And so on, almost like clock-work until all of them were dead. At the time that array made up enough of our capacity that we couldn't afford to just take it out of rotation until we'd replaced the drives.

It's the event that taught me the hard way to always at a minimum mix batches, and preferably models and/or brands (just mixing drives from different batches would've been insufficient with the DeathStar, as far as I remember). As well as to favour multiple smaller arrays... We never lost any data, and the array remained available for the entire time period it took to cycle through all the drives, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I kind of anthropomorphize the devices in tests like this, so it's a bit sad to see the poor things made to run until their legs fall off. But it's nice to know they run farther than expected.

<comment><USER27> running a defragment operation on a few of these makes them emit some electronic noise if you listen closely. :D

<comment><USER28> For real though, don't defrag an SSD. It's pointless and wears it out for no reason.

<comment><USER29> The old Windows defrag with the small blocks was like visual bubblewrap.

We need more system utilities that are fun to watch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The fact that they work better than spec indicates to me that we are still at the forefront of this technology with good engineering effort behind it. Once it matures and companies try to squeeze out every dollar, expect them to fail a lot more and the MTBF to be less than advertised, similar to printers etc

</comment><comment><USER31> It'd be nice to get some endurance testing on the sandisk internal solid state drives (eg. [http://www.amazon.com/Sandisk-SDSA5JK-064G-Module-Laptop- Net...](http://www.amazon.com/Sandisk-SDSA5JK-064G-Module-Laptop- Netobook/dp/B00IWNYRQ0))

I've had one fail three days ago on a laptop that was barely a year old. I'm not even sure what actually failed - debugging a broken ssd is a pain, and when I mount it it just freezes for ages, making the matter worse.

Sandisk being the only real seller of those things there isn't exactly a lot of competition but I'd like to actually see how they hold up vs. regular SSDs. There is a bit of a false expectation when you buy a laptop with a ssd, expecting the endurance of a regular ssd and getting something potentially awfully bad.

<comment><USER32> Have seen quite a few Sandisk SSDs die over the past 3-4 years. Ditto, OCZ.

Yet to see an Intel or Samsung bite the dust. I'm sure it's only a matter of time, but I won't buy any other brands.

<comment><USER22> I have an OCZ Vertex LE that's still going strong after a little over 27,800 power on hours and ~18.6 TB of data written.

I would be shocked if "Judge reliability on drive models, rather than manufacturers." was any less true in the SSD era than it was in the HDD era.

<comment><USER11> You're right, sort of. Most of the time that's certainly the case. But OCZ QA appears to have fallen off a cliff at some point, to the extent where it was presumably a large factor in their bankruptcy, and it was a systemic problem with most OCZ models.

A huge list of models have failure rates way above average, with a number of them exceeding 5%, and some claiming that the failure rate for some of the Octane and Petrol models exceeded 30%.

The best ones have been in line with other manufacturers, though. Unfortunately the problems were so widespread that your odds of picking a "safe" OCZ drive for a while were ridiculously bad, unless you were prepared to wait for a year or two to get hard numbers on a model before buying.

The Vertex line has been a crapshot, for example. Several of the Vertex 2 models had unreasonably high failure rates (5%-10% range). Your Vertex LE is as far as I know based on a different design/controller than the regular Vertex 2 and might have "escaped" the Vertex 2 problems. The Vertex 3 appears to have been much better (and none of the Vertex 3's we have have failed). Vertex 4 has been disastrously bad for us - every single one failed hard after less than a year, to the point where even the SMART data is partially corrupted on most of the drives (claiming it's been powered on for 75 million years for example..), and marked the end of buying OCZ drives for our part.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm happy to see the high write longevity these drives are achieving, but it frightens me a lot that it seems like the fail-safes where they're designed to go into read-only mode instead of just dropping off the controller and losing your data are failing on all of them, even the Intel!

<comment><USER34> In my experience with traditional HDDs, they often drop off the controller and lose your data when they fail. Which means that, at least, SSDs are not worse than HDDs in that regard. And they have the potential for a softer failure mode (going read-only).

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> There was test at czech site diit.cz. SSD survived several overwrites. But after it was left disconnected for several months without power, it lost all data. Apparently SSD needs to repower its cells periodically.

<comment><USER36> Note that the techreport includes a component of leaving SSDs unpowered to verify exactly that kind of issues. Although it's not a very long one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I wish they tested a Crucial drive, too. Crucial drives tend to have great dollar/GB ratio.

</comment><comment><USER38> I wish the number of samples was much, much higher...

<comment><USER17> Yes and that SSDs had also been compared to normal spinning hard drives, too.

<comment><USER39> Here's somebody else's data: [http://www.overclock.net/t/1284055/ssd-return- rates](http://www.overclock.net/t/1284055/ssd-return-rates)

<comment><USER40> 2012

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> The intel failed to reach the petabyte mark.

This is interesting because many datacenters use the intel.

<comment><USER42> Though it is noted they intentionally fail:

> The Intel 335 Series is designed to check out voluntarily after a > predetermined number of writes. That drive dutifully bricked itself after > 750TB

<comment><USER43> This is also the consumer drive instead of the enterprise drive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I am concerned about the lack of read-only at EOL.

I, for one, would _much_ prefer slightly less longevity and better reliability than vice versa.

I mean, I do backups, but backups only do so much.

<comment><USER45> Backups only do so much? Could you elaborate on what your backups don't do?

My backups allow me to recover from theft, hardware failure, accidental deletion, and more. If my computer were to burst into flames right now, I would only lose 30 minutes of work.

Even if SSDs reliably went read-only at the end of their service life, I would still keep my existing backup strategy. There are so many ways to lose data without disk failure.

<comment><USER44> I have a laptop, and as such tend to use it on-the-go.

As such, backups won't capture anything after the last time I had access to my backup volume.

Also, again, I don't always have access to my backup volume.

I'm not saying "I wish that they would go read-only so I didn't have to back up" \- I am perfectly well aware of the need to back things up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> If an SSD is written to once, and kept powered on (and at a temperature in the low 70s), while getting regular reads, how long can I expect this drive to last?

If that drive is powered on, but kept at low temperatures (say near or below freezing), does this help it survive longer?

What failure modes would occur in such an environment? Would it just be power surges frying the thing, static electricity?

</comment><comment><USER47> They should have included Samsung 850 Pro, which sells since August. [http://smile.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_0_7?url=search- alia...](http://smile.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_0_7?url=search- alias%3Dcomputers&field-keywords=850%20pro&sprefix=850+pro%2Caps%2C411)

<comment><USER48> That would've been a bit hard to do seeing as how the endurance test has been running for over a year. Even with SSDs, 1.5 petabytes of reads/writes takes a while to write.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've always been curious - I understand that memory cells have their own durability, but how about the controllers that are used to transfer that data? Do they wear out too? In fact, can a CPU fail after having exobytes of data sent through it?

</comment><comment><USER49> Does anyone know if there's a utility that monitors SSD health? I've a 512GB SSD, which I'll probably keep for a while, but I don't like being in the dark about how far along its lifetime I am

<comment><USER50> Samsung drives come with Samsung Magician, which is a pretty nice utility.

<comment><USER51> And the only time I've lost a drive was due to a Magician firmware upgrade that was wrong. I now avoid it out of general fear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I can't find in the article if those were sequential 1.5PB writes or random small writes (i.e. < 4KB). If the later case, this article should be flagged.

<comment><USER53> They link to a post with details of the test in this post, which mentions it is sequential - [http://techreport.com/review/24841/introducing-the-ssd- endur...](http://techreport.com/review/24841/introducing-the-ssd-endurance- experiment)

<comment><USER52> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Really excellent writing on these pieces. I lol'd at "dutifully bricked itself". If only all tech writing were as colorfully engaging.</comment>


Cocaine Contaminates Majority of U.S.Currency - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=cocaine-contaminates-majority-of-american-currency

<comment><USER2> Depends on your definition of contaminate.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, really. A few more micrograms of coke and those fiat dollars might actually be worth something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well if it wasn't so baller to snort with a rolled up Benjamin, we wouldn't have this issue.</comment>


Programming language power versus genome: can they be compared? - <AUTHOR> http://www.hxa.name/notes/note-hxa7241-20091019T2052.html

<comment><USER2> When you ponder over introns (junk DNA), one can see a comparison with programs that have been written by various programmers and have large sections commented out, or classes and routines that linger along and no-one uses anymore, although it did pass my mind a couple of times that these sections are just 'comments'.

Looking at DNA from a different angle it is data+code.

The nearest comparison in my mind is a zillion individual erhlang programs working concurrently with the output, not always very predictable.

Another similarity to programming is bugs!</comment>


What is DevOps? (from a practitioner point of view) - <AUTHOR> http://davyhua.com/blog/what-is-devops/ <comment><USER2> Excellent post!</comment>


The laptop designed by its users - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/18/eve-tech-laptop-tablet-computer-crowdsourced-eve-v <comment><USER2> Looks like it is challenging Surface. I am in a market for those</comment>


Playing games at work? Make it legit - <AUTHOR> http://alternativeto.net/software/getbadges/ <comment><USER2> perhaps the right link is [https://getbadges.io/](https://getbadges.io/) ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

<comment><USER2> no problem, did you have a look to it ? What do you think ?</comment></comment></comment>