Inside the Soviet Army (1982) - <AUTHOR> http://militera.lib.ru/research/suvorov12/index.html <comment><USER2> Quote From Part VIII:

 _Soviet Communists are frequently reproached for having attempted to build a socialist society but having produced something which closely resembles a prison. Such a charge is entirely unjustified. In the Soviet Union some of the inmates have larger cells than others, some eat well, others badly. There is complete confusion-a lot remains to be done to tidy up the situation. True socialism, in which everyone is truly equal, does not just resemble a prison- it is a prison. It can not exist unless it is surrounded by high walls, by watchtowers and by guard-dogs, for people always want to escape from any socialist regime, just as they do from a prison. If you try to nationalise medicine and, from the best possible motives, to guarantee work for all the doctors, you will find that they pack their bags and leave the country. Try to bring a little order into the situation and your engineers (the best ones), your designers, your ballerinas (again, the best ones) and many, many others will also flee abroad. If you continue your attempts to establish a model society you will need to build walls around it. You will be forced to do this sooner or later by the flood of refugees._

<comment><USER3> The basic point is valid regarding communism and forced equality, but e.g. plenty of countries have very efficient, well funded and cost effective nationalized medical services. It's a particularly poor example to choose to try and make the point.

The problem with communism isn't that so many of it's services are nationalized, it's that one-party politics leads to an ossified, excessively powerful, corrupt bureaucracy with no checks and balances.

Any political system that lacks dynamism and protects cronyism would suffer the same problems, regardless of it's ideological base. That's why in practice Fascism and Communism produce functionally indistinguishable resultant states.

<comment><USER4> I have yet to see an efficient nationalized medical service.

They are usually MUCH better than the U.S. model (in that everyone has basic healthcare and nobody gets bankrupt), but I wouldn't use words like "efficient" and "cost effective" to describe them.

At least within a democracy, they don't get "that" ossified, but you do get a massive, powerful and somewhat corrupt bureaucracy (at least in my country).

I find it incredible that the waste generated is less than the waste from the U.S. insurance system, yet it is so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _> The USSR is not Russia or the Russian Empire; it is not an empire at all._

 _> The Soviet Union does not need new territory. _

_> A communist regime cannot feel secure so long as an example of another kind of life exists anywhere near it, with which its subjects can draw comparisons. It is for this reason that any form of Communism, not only the Soviet variety, is always at pains to shut itself off from the rest of the world_

This is a massive insight. Most current analysis of Putin centers around a WWII Lebensraum perspective of his actions. Modelling his behavior in terms of neutralizing breakaway territories seems a much better fit.

<comment><USER6> I don't see how.

Putin isn't a communist and Western media is widely available in Russia so there is no benefit in regards to information flow in expanding the border. And there is no significant economic difference between Russia and her neighbours, the Soviets were trying to hide the evidence that average people in the West had it better than the new Soviet man.

Putin's actions look much more like those of the 19th century Russian Empire than of the USSR (which never used nationalist rhetoric).

<comment><USER7> Putin's administration justifies the current economic state and the rampant corruption in Russia by that Russia has is own 'special way' of development which is limited the history and the socio-economic heritage of the communist regime. If Ukraine(or any other ex-Soviet country) manages to get rid of the current cleptocratic system and launches succesfull socio-economic reforms that tackle corruption, it will be a strong signal to the broad russian population that the current regime is not the driver, but a hindrance to the overall development. That is why any regime change in ex-Ussr countries is viewed by suspicion or even open hostility by the elites in Russia.

<comment><USER8> Ukraine is broke. They owe Russia millions of dollars and have been living on pretty much free gas (courtesy of Russia).

I assume you live in US? Do you not find it ironic that you blame Russia for taking this seriously (in their own backyard) while US have been staging government coups within other countries (with multiple death tolls) for decades?

And in regards to corruption:

"People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones"

Perhaps you should focus on your own backyard first ;)

<comment><USER9> Ukraine is broke to a large extent because it's economy has been essentially taken over by corrupt oligarchs with close Kremlin ties. As far as comparisons with U.S., in the context of the cold war U.S. has done some nasty things. But look at all the countries which U.S. was heavily involed in. Taiwan? South Korea? Chile? Germany ? Japan? How are they doing 20, 30 years later. Now look at countries that have had heavy Russian / Soviet involvement. Cuba? North Korea? Sorry, but the comparison doesn't quite compute.

<comment><USER10> South Korea definitely had a period of dictatorship and hard knock life for it's citizens. I think Taiwan also had a period of such oppressive rule. Chile as well had dictatorship up to 90s.

At least South Korea is doing well because it has seen so much sacrifice of it's own people by enriching the nation's government and it's handful of conglomerates. They may be doing well but South Korea and Japan has the highest suicide rates, a sign that although economically prosperous do not equate to collective happiness. Chile for instance has a higher happiness index than of South Korea or Japan.

However, I will add that such economic progress is not at all miserable and unwanted situation. U.S. has provided much of the security guarantees and the environment for such successes.

<comment><USER11> You are entirely correct. All of these Asian economic successes were under a military dictatorship. The work week in South Korea is 6 days, 16 hours a day. It's not magic, it's really hard work and strictness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> (I think you posted this to hn because I posted it to Facebook again, yes?)

The really interesting things to me are:

1) Invisible divisions, and the system to split units

2) Hiding top-tier equipment from the West -- even at the cost of not allowing their own soldiers to know what equipment they're supposed to ultimately use. Vs. the US, where soldiers are expected to be intimately familiar with their assigned weapons systems.

3) A really naive view of economics, that the military is "free" because the State provides it. It doesn't correctly assign the cost as that of the foregone alternative -- a tank means 100 fewer cars, etc.

4) "Role before Rank" promotions -- officers being promoted into a role above their rank as a precondition to attaining that rank. In the US system, that only really happens for certain General Officers; everyone else is promoted and then assigned, with most early to mid career promotions being either automatic or based on seniority and checkboxes.

<comment><USER13> "Role before Rank" is how I laid out a company remuneration and incentives program.

The essence was "to be a senior dev you must already be doing these things". The proof (observed by two senior people and acknowledged by colleagues at and below your level) that you were fully performing the given role meant that you would be given the job title and salary to match.

We felt this was an improvement on other systems as it made it very clear what it meant to the individual. In that they needed to improve, learn things, operate differently, to be able to progress from one tier of recognition to the next and left it up to the individual to say whether they wanted to or not. It also handled the scenario of demotion... failure to maintain a standard of work meant that you'd set your role (and thereby rank) at the step below.

Did this work? Mostly, yes.

Definitely some rough edges when it came to dealing with long-time serving people who didn't (or couldn't) improve themselves. For those people the title and salary seldom matched their expectations.

<comment><USER14> I thought I was the only one in an organization structured like this.

While off topic a bit... I found this structure pretty discouraging.

If you don't promote your developers into the role they are actually fulfilling, it quickly begins to feel like you're taking advantage of them. That is, treating them and giving them the responsibilities of a Sr. Engineer but only compensating them like a typical engineer (or developer).

There's only so many 'atta boys you can give someone before it seems like you're dodging meaningful compensation for their efforts.

<comment><USER13> Agreed. If you don't actually give the recognition and promotion after making it clear what is needed to reach the next level... then none of this works and morale will crash.

We put in place quarterly reviews that were heavily focused on employee improvement, learning and application of that learning. Promotions were automatic and didn't need many levels of buy-in to approve. It was simply "are you doing the job of a senior dev? Congrats, then you are one".

This was also strange as to most it was very different from quarterly or annual reviews they'd encountered elsewhere that had focused on project progress and milestones. The business goal was to build and retain the best team, focusing on that meant the project goals naturally followed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Thanks to the OP for this link. I just found out why USSR didn't invade Romania (a long time subject of speculation in Romania). We were poor, communists enough, defenseless and not much of a threat. This is so funny when I remember how many naive Romanians thought our army had some "secret weapon " :D (actually we had, it was based on the beans served regularly to the soldiers :D).

<comment> guard-of-terra Why would USSR invade Romania? The only scenario I can think of is reinstating Communist government.

Seriously, USSR didn't have plans to occupy and assimilate random foreign countries. Not as far as I know.

And don't forget USSR depended heavily on Romanian furniture :)

<comment><USER16> Keeping/reinstating Communist governments through military force was a cornerstone of USSR foreign policy for many decades at that point - e.g. Prague Spring.

<comment> guard-of-terra Well, Romania was keeping Communist government so they didn't have to worry.

<comment><USER17> Concurrent to the Hungarian uprising of 1956, there was some unrest in Romania as well, and the Soviet military presence there was strengthened in response. Romania began to oppose the Soviet hegemony in the 1960s—Ceaușescu spoke out against 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and Romania built friendly relations with the anti-Soviet bloc. So it's not entirely a given that the Soviet Union would not have considered military intervention in Romania at some point like they did in Hungary or Czechoslovakia. You can't excuse the Romanians for wondering how their government could afford to get away with their open defiance of Soviet hegemony.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Yeah, Viktor Suvorov is pretty interesting writer. This guy was a KGB agent who escaped to the West and published a lot of books. Another his book worth checking out is "Aquarium" \- about his path from a spetznaz operator to KGB and then to escape.

<comment><USER19> Viktor Suvorov was not KGB (secret police). He was GRU (Military Intelligence).

<comment><USER18> You are right. I read this book when I was a kid, already forgot the difference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I read this book many years ago, back when the Soviet Union was still a going concern. A very good read, with some interesting things to say about leadership.

<comment><USER21> If you don't mind, can you give me a rundown about what it's all about?

<comment><USER20> Sure.

The first three parts are a rundown of how the Soviet Army was organized at the time of writing (the early 1980s). This part was of great interest then, because reliable information on the Soviet Army was hard to come by in the days of the Iron Curtain, and the author ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Suvorov](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Suvorov)) was a recent defector. But for today's reader, this part is pretty dull, all tables of organization and maps of military districts. They're all safe to skip.

Part IV ("Mobilisation") departs from the data-dump format of the earlier chapters to talk about how the Soviet Army is organized so that in wartime it can double its number of units overnight, through a system the author calls "invisible divisions." If you wondered how the USSR was able to turn things around after the early disasters following the Nazi invasion in 1941, this chapter will be of interest.

Part V ("Strategy and Tactics") is where the book starts to get really interesting, because here it starts giving you insights into how different the way the Russians looked at war is from the way Western armies do. Part VI ("Equipment") expands on that theme by showing some examples of how that type of thinking informed the way the Soviets designed weapons that became world- famous for their effectiveness, like the AK-47, the T-34 tank, and the Hind helicopter.

Finally, Parts VII ("The soldier's lot") and VIII ("The officer's path") are narrative descriptions of the lives of enlisted conscripts and officers in the Soviet Army.

Overall, I found the book useful because the author's experience in that system taught him a lot of lessons about leadership -- especially leadership in situations where you're expected to achieve impossible things with limited resources and mediocre (at best) people. And the stuff about Soviet strategic thinking and weapons design has lots of interesting things to say about the value of simplicity, reliability and scale over things like feature richness or even user comfort.

These are not arguments you hear a lot from Western writers, so they are a refreshing alternative take. He's writing about weapons, of course, but the arguments are presented in such a fashion that you can easily extrapolate the lessons to really any kind of product.

(I actually referenced one of those lessons in a previous comment on HN, here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5062096](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5062096))

You don't have to read the book front-to-back to get the good stuff out of it; skip over the early chapters and start at Part V and you'll get all the nutrition with none of the boring, out-of-date tables and charts and maps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "The soldier's lot":

[http://militera.lib.ru/research/suvorov12/07.html](http://militera.lib.ru/research/suvorov12/07.html)

is spot on! Been there.

</comment><comment><USER23> "It is, in fact, impossible to reach the speeds of which the MIG-25 is capable using titanium: yet the Soviet designers had managed to build this, the fastest combat aircraft in the world, from ordinary steel. "

Right...

MiG-25, Mach-2.8. All steel.

SR-71, Mach-3.5. Uses titanium for 85% of its structure.

<comment><USER24> _Combat_ aircraft. SR-71 is a spy plane.

<comment><USER25> While it is true that the SR-71 & A-12 were spy planes, and that the GP makes a slightly asinine statement, the pedant (and aviation geek) in me feels obliged to point to the YF-12[1].

The YF-12 was a twin-seater derivative of the A-12 that was developed as a fighter aircraft, complete with a look-down/shoot-down radar and missile bays.

The F-12 never made it to production, but a small number high-speed of weapons tests were conducted with the 3 YF-12 airframes that were built.

With that said, the MiG-25 should certainly not be belittled as a marvel of aviation. It was a blisteringly fast interceptor and reconnaissance aircraft, with an impressive radar system for its time. It filled a special role in the Russian Air Force until last year[2].

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_YF-12](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_YF-12) [2] [https://medium.com/war-is-boring/21d12739b5db](https://medium.com/war-is- boring/21d12739b5db)

<comment><USER26> Just out of interest, was the MiG-25 'all steel' and 'all valves'? As in no electronics as we know them, just valves? I had heard that it was EMP-proof due to the lack of any transistors on board...

<comment><USER24> 80% nickel steel alloy, 11% aluminium, and 9% titanium. Using valves instead of transistors meant for easier maintenance in addition to resistance to EMP. [0]

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan- Gurevich_MiG-25](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-25)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Little background music while you read, Tovarich [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHomETco0MI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHomETco0MI)

</comment><comment><USER28> Author of this book has committed treason and famous for his pseudo-historical books, that usually paint USSR in blackest colors possible. No serious historian in Russia takes his works seriously. So I'd question anything that written in the book.

<comment><USER29> False. \- anybody went along with Soviet Union dissolution technically committed treason \- he is not a professional historian, and it shows. However majority of his theories have been confirmed by professional historians, such as Solonin ([http://www.solonin.org/en](http://www.solonin.org/en)), Hoffman ([http://www.amazon.com/Stalins-War- Extermination-1941-1945-Do...](http://www.amazon.com/Stalins-War- Extermination-1941-1945-Documentation/dp/0967985684)), Danilov, Gorkov, etc

<comment><USER30> Ha-ha, professional historians. Solonin wrotes very much false too. See comments about his book: [http://awas1952.livejournal.com/58827.html](http://awas1952.livejournal.com/58827.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Real name of author is Vladimir Rezun. Well known historic liar.

<comment><USER31> Care to elaborate? Best I could find was that his writings about WWII are, at worst, disputed. Nothing about him being a fraud.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Awesome read.

Final sentence of Conclusion: "Protest today. Tomorrow it will be too late."

</comment><comment><USER33> Anyone has any idea on what license does it have? What can be legally done with that book?

</comment><comment><USER34> What is more interesting is to look into experiences of the Soviet military in modern warfare in Angola for example.

</comment><comment><USER10> As someone very interested in Soviet Union, it's system, this is a great resource. I'd love it if this was available on kindle or a paperback.

Even Russians will say Soviet Union is shit or people will react like, 'why are you learning russian and so obsessed with Soviet Union', I think it's because I think it could've been a great system, it's a noble ideology that men and women of all races are integrated and all receive the similar dividends but human greed and corruption always ruins things. I don't like the way people have been persecuted because of Soviet Union, but I find it's technologies and philosophies very interesting.

<comment><USER35> I hope your research leads to the correct conclusion that trying to force people into equality leads to the use of force to stop dissent, and leads people to flee or campaign against it.

Socialism ends in death and misery, _every single time_. At this point death and misery is a feature, not a bug that can be fixed.

<comment><USER36> That's not true, look at Sweden, France, Germany, UK ... all practising socialism. It's helped their people with free health care, education. There are many good things about socialism.

The _Bolsheviks_ were dictatorial bastards, no doubt. And many people think Bolshevik communism is the only way to go, it certainly is not.

<comment><USER37> This is only true for the American populist definition of socialism. Here in Europe we usually talk about social democracy, where basic needs of people (healtcare, education, not starving) are addressed by the state, but one is free to form private enterprises ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model)). This is quite different from the brand of socialism the USSR was aiming for, where all private property would have been abolished.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I am really looking forward for such a read about North Korea in some years. I hope I live long enough to see it.</comment>


Founder's spouse working at a startup? - <AUTHOR> I've come across two early-stage venture-funded startups recently where a founder's wife has a "Head of X", but non-founder, role. In both cases they have the right background and seem to do good work, but it still strikes me as an odd decision - lots of possibility for things to go wrong, conflicts of interest real or perceived, etc.<p>Have any of you come across this before? Is it common? In your experience, has it ended badly? Do you consider it a red flag when looking for jobs? <comment><USER2> I think it depends on the startup and the people involved.

If it's a two person startup, then obviously it makes total sense.

If it's a two million person "startup", then it almost certainly doesn't make sense.

If it's somewhere between those extremes, then maybe it does and maybe it doesn't. But there are many factors to be considered.</comment>


Ask HN: Java Certification - <AUTHOR> Hallo HN, I am a junior Java developer (24 y., ~2,5 y. experience, from central europe). Recently, I had a conversation with my mentor from our company and he asked me if I wanted to get my skills certified, so far I've helped develop Java EE applications (with Spring / Hibernate) Are there any certificates I should have that will help me in my future career? I have already thought about this before, as I would delve into the subject by preparing for the exam.  I'm not urged by my mentor, he offers it to me because it is fully paid by the company and I have the chance to expand my knowledge for free.<p>Thanks in advance for your advice :) <comment><USER2> If someone else is paying for it and you have time, why not do it? Worst case scenario, you have proof of your ambition and get a free credential. Best case scenario, you'll learn something and get a free credential!

</comment><comment><USER3> No, skill certificates in general aren't worth the investment, both in terms of time and money.

Even worse, because of their proliferation in the past in more enterprisey industries and companies they can literally signal that a candidate looks good on paper but probably doesn't have a whole lot of real world experience. Therefore, skill certificates might achieve the exact opposite of what they're claimed to do.

So, it's likely best to avoid them.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wouldn't prefer working at a company that "requires" language certificates. That being said, I also prepared for the exam and learn a ton when I was a junior. So, I would say check the content of the prep books or try to solve sample exams. If you already know most of the stuff, don't waste your time on the details. Otherwise use it as an opportunity learn something.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. The company does not force me to certify, they just give me the opportunity to expand my knowledge. I've asked you all just what you think about Java certification, but actually I can get certified in all sorts of developer-related areas, and learn something new and get the certification paid by them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It makes me smugly satisfied that I never got a certificate in anything and I still have a successful career. You really don't need it. On the other hand I did drop thousands to get a Master's degree in CS while working. To each his own.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think it is a thing of the past, at least in non-enterprise space.

If you work for a proper tech company or startup as software engineer, no one will care about Java certifications.

If your goal is to work at some large enterprise(where tech is not the focus) or banks, then it might be useful.

<comment><USER7> I got a Java certification at a large enterprise years and years ago. The _only_ benefit I gained from it was that it forced me to _systematically_ learn the language in greater detail than I would have otherwise. I personally found the experience valuable, and I think I have a higher level of skill with Java than many of my coworkers as a result, but no one is going to accept the certificate as proof of that.

tl;dr: Certification tests provide decent motivation to keep you trudging through hundreds of pages of technical documentation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your reply. That's why I would do the certification, as it would be an incentive for me to delve into the subject. That would be one of the reasons, if not the only one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's probably a waste of time and money. Just read the free documentation for spring, it has everything you need in there. And EE applications are def on the way out. It's all spring boot, unless you're working on old stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello, thanks for the reply. I do not think that the EE applications will die out so fast, because many applications in the field of authorities are still developing as an EE application. There will certainly come alternative, so my question on this topic. Further, I have thought about certifying myself in the direction of development processes, e.g. ITIL, Scrum, etc. Would that be better than the Java certification?

<comment><USER8> In my opinion/experience, certifications for Java programming are useless. I've been working in Java for 10 years now and not once has anyone asked or cared if I was "certified" by some random company to do Java dev. It feels like a scam to me. In regards to the other certifications I have no idea, but I feel that they are probably similar.

I agree that old tech will have EE in it for a long time. But all the docs for EE are also free to read and learn on your own. The best skill you can have when being a programming is self learning/teaching.

<comment><USER9> I totally agree. I did Java certification 10 years back when I was a junior dev. At that time, many people and companies valued that on resume. Over time, people realized certification doesn't add any real value as things/technologies change over time. Nowadays people would doubt your skills if they see Java certification on resume. Also, Certifications are values in consulting market. If you are looking to work in core tech companies, it is better to invest that time learning something else. Also, I would say in those times people had no other way to showing that you have the skillset. We are living in an era where github is your portfolio. Do open source contributions or do side projects. That is a way more valuable skill than Java certification.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Amazon S3+SQS are down, bringing down Scribd, Docstoc, Twitter, SmugMug, JungleDisk - <AUTHOR> http://search.twitter.com/search?q=s3 <comment><USER2> This has been the problem with AWS all along: Aggregate downtime at good hosting providers is measured in minutes, or even seconds, per year. Downtime at AWS has historically been measurable in _days_ per year. This level of reliability puts it well into the bottom ranks of hosting providers. We're talking about the dregs of the industry here...the hosts who have a single cheap Cogent pipe running into a single cage of machines with no power backup and no backup pipe or infrastructure redundancy. This is the sole reason we don't recommend AWS to our customers, and why we don't use it ourselves for any vital services. We want to like it, and recommend it, and we have quite a bit of software that works with it, that we enjoy selling to people. But, the reliability just isn't there, and it has been a recurring problem since the service launched.

<comment><USER3> Absolutely. I'm pretty shocked by the amount of downtime they've been having.

I've been hosting with various providers for almost 10 years. I'm now with SoftLayer and VERY happy. In those 10 years, I think I've had less combined downtime than AWS has had in the last 6 months.

The big advantage to running your apps in a nebulous "cloud", aside from the scaling up-down flexibility, is that in theory the difficulty in running a stable data center (or ideally set of load balanced, geo-graphically diverse data centers) is taken care of for you. If the reality is it's a trade-off between getting easy scaling, and losing decent uptime numbers, I'll take the "hassle" of adding/dropping servers at SoftLayer which are actually UP, and which I have good visibility into, any day.

Hopefully they'll get to that point eventually, but for now, I'm staying far far away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 9:05 AM PDT We are currently experiencing elevated error rates with S3. We are investigating.

9:26 AM PDT We're investigating an issue affecting requests. We'll continue to post updates here.

9:48 AM PDT Just wanted to provide an update that we are currently pursuing several paths of corrective action.

10:12 AM PDT We are continuing to pursue corrective action.

10:32 AM PDT A quick update that we believe this is an issue with the communication between several Amazon S3 internal components. We do not have an ETA at this time but will continue to keep you updated.

11:01 AM PDT We're currently in the process of testing a potential solution.

11:22 AM PDT Testing is still in progress. We're working very hard to restore service to our customers.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've been working on a private cloud using <http://eucalyptus.cs.ucsb.edu/> that maps to Amazon incase of issues like this (though _Amazon_ was supposed to be the backup).

Has anyone else been doing the same? What have you been using?

</comment><comment><USER6> Amazon should give their sysadmins bonuses tied directly to uptime.

<comment><USER7> Yes and no. There are two sides to uptime - there's that the infrastructure is up, and there's that the application is running. It sucks to be a sysadmin bonused on _service_ uptime when the network is up, the servers are up, the database is up, but the application won't stay up and as a sysadmin there's actually nothing you can do about it; all you can do is wait for the developers to patch it.

<comment><USER8> Well clearly the bonuses should be tied to the uptime of the particular system the employees/managers are responsible for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Bezos likes the analogy about Amazon services being "electricity" for other businesses, i.e. you don't to have to own a generator if you operate a restaurant (as they used to back in the day) - just "hook up to the grid" and you're all set.

Funny analogy, since all data centers DO have their own generators: they're not restaurants.

<comment><USER10> data center = electricity for startups. why is this analogy funny?

Instead of running their own generator (server and storage), for those startups who don't need to, they can use Amazon's power, AWS.

am I missing something here?

<comment><USER11> Yes you are missing the part where the eletricity cuts off, you don't know why, you can't do anything about it, and because you relied so heavily on your electricity provider you didn't set up a plan to make your own.

If your site is your personal blog or something not important, then downtime might not be a big deal. If you don't have the money for a backup electricity provider then you have to take your chances also.

<comment><USER12> Yes, that's exactly so. Remember when there was a whole day of downtime for everyone in the colo in downtown SF?

Running things yourself is no guarantee of uptime.

The only real fix is to maintain fully redundant systems, which is extremely expensive. Otherwise, put up with downtime sometimes, because no other system will fully protect you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> At least twitter is smart and only uses S3 for profile images. The service can survive without S3. Tumblr images and audio posts are also affected by the downtime.

</comment><comment><USER8> SQS too. <http://status.aws.amazon.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, added that!

<comment><AUTHOR> SmugMug too, apparently.

<comment><USER8> Interesting, since they like to talk a lot about how they expect S3 to go down once in awhile and supposedly can handle it:

<http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/category/amazon/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I like how techcrunch is yet to make a post about this

<comment><USER15> They were too busy covering female bloggers featured in Playboy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I run my own server for a hobby project and it goes down as frequently as S3 for various reasons.

</comment><comment><USER17> It's back for us (~7:15 pm Eastern).

Any estimates on total time of the outage?

<comment><USER8> S3 and SQS seemed to first go down around 9:00 am PDT, and its now 4:45 pm PDT, so about 7-8 hours... not too good. At least it happened to be a Sunday.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's an interesting question of web services. If you depend on Amazon for your file storage, big table for your database, yahoo geo, etc then your uptime is figure is a product of the uptimes of those services.

This means that using 4 services that have a 99.9% SLA actually gives you an approx uptime of 99.6%. It doesn't sound like much as soon as you include something like Twitter you can really see the the whole uptime graph skew.

</comment><comment><USER19> Oh, _this_ is why Jungledisk is down.

</comment><comment><USER20> and this is the reason why you let other people pay to test the infrastructure "cloud". it's hard to justify not being able to do _anything_ when any AWS goes down as smugmug must be figuring out by now.

here's a piece of advice: start by leasing a couple of $75 USD per month servers. if you can, buy instead of lease. if you go bust, you can sell the hardware on ebay whereas with AWS you can't do any of that it's just money you're throwing away for 0 assets. AWS still needs to be managed, you still need sysadmins available 24/7 so you won't save any money there. the only thing AWS has going for it is provisioning. be smart and take advantage of that (eg. have your own physical infrastructure and be able to send some of the load the way of AWS if and when you need to).

<comment><USER21> Or... use multiple cloud infrastructure solutions creating a fail-over in case some of them goes down. Think of this as a "Cloud Balancer".

<comment><USER22> And here I thought the whole cloud infrastructure was supposed to provide its own redundancy.

If you need to first setup your site to work with a cloud, and then need to add a cloud balancer to guarantee uptime, maybe a regular network load balancer and old-fashioned solutions might be a better option.

At least then you have a tried and tested solution, not to mention you got it all under your control so things can actually be fixed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I did wonder why the Panoramio site they use for Google Maps photos was playing up. That explains it.

</comment><comment><USER24> Dropbox went down as well. I like Dropbox a lot because it's so simple to use. Unfortunately, they're what some people called "Amazon S3 re-seller". Dropbox's heartbeat depends on Amazon.

<comment><USER25> Fortunately, with Dropbox you still have the latest version (pre-AWS crash) on your machine. It's much more usable in a crash than web-only services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Boingboing.net went down for me, though I had no problems with Amazon!</comment>


Show HN: Quanthum – Minimalist Diary and Reputation System for Humanity - <AUTHOR> https://www.quanthum.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Just fixed a bug that prevented registration with GitHub. It should be fine now. Sorry about that. This is a diary app where you can share your memories once a day and dedicate them to anyone you care about. At the same time, usage on the app builds reputation for all human beings, which will, hopefully, serve as a basis for a larger societal purpose...

</comment><comment><USER2> I didn't understand it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I will try to rewrite the copy and make it clearer.</comment></comment>


Ask YC: Innocuous news? - <AUTHOR> Did HN get hacked? Screenshot here: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/10731/Snapshot%202009-04-23%2016-45-32.png <comment><USER2> No, I just changed the name for a bit.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=575487>

<comment><USER3> Can you do me a favor and change the word "News" to "Important Work Site".

<comment><USER4> Why stop there?

How about "User Acceptance Testing - Phase III Results". I won't have to alt- tab so much.

Hell, maybe pg can make the whole site look like an IDE.

<comment><USER5> c.f. <http://spreadtweets.elliottkember.com/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I rather liked the strange looks I got from reading Hacker News, but at least I learned a new word today

Innocuous - 1\. not harmful or injurious; harmless: an innocuous home remedy. 2\. not likely to irritate or offend; inoffensive; an innocuous remark. 3\. not interesting, stimulating, or significant; pallid; insipid: an innocuous novel.

<comment><USER7> I read a lot, but I have a habit of glossing over words for which I have a vague sense, but not a precise definition.

For a while, whenever I'd read something, I'd just quickly jot down any word for which I couldn't come up with a good definition. Later, I'd look them up.

It works, and it's saved me some embarrassment. Schadenfreude didn't mean what I thought it meant.

<comment><USER8> What did you think it meant? (Just curious - I am a native German speaker.)

<comment><USER7> Bittersweet joy, rather than joy in someone else's misfortune.

<comment><USER8> Plausible. I guess the word could have taken that meaning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Innocuous News; Even creepier than Hacker news : )

<comment><USER10> agree theres some unusually shady about something claiming to be innocuous

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> In our office you get funny looks if you _don't_ read Hacker News.

<comment><USER12> I dream of such places, thanks for letting my know that, unlike unicorns, they exist.

<comment><USER13> There's no reason for them not to exist, you just may not have found one yet.

Just like magnetic monopoles...

<comment><USER14> And if you cannot find one, you should found one.

<comment><USER8> That requires a lot of energy. (For both cases.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> When I run into ignorance about the hacker/cracker distinction and don't feel like going into the whole schpiel, I find that the phrase "relax; I work for the good guys" is sufficient to calm people down.

</comment><comment><USER16> I suggest "l33t |-|@xx0r n3\/\/5"

</comment><comment><USER17> No. See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=575487>

<comment><AUTHOR> I hope it's not permanent.

Why not encode "Hacker" using HTML entities so content blockers don't catch it?

<comment><USER18> It was more of an issue for people looking over people's shoulders.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wonderful! Saves the creepy looks from those who keep an eye on the office... now just bewildered looks.

</comment><comment><USER20> Actually, i like it as Hacker News. I'm just so used to say it as "Hacker News" to explain things to my team. Can't imagine having to pronounce "Innocuous News".

</comment><comment><USER21> I like the name "hacker" why change it for all of us, the one who habe problems with it use a userscript

</comment><comment><USER22> I like Innocuous, but you could always give "hacker" a weird web 2.0 spelling to solve the problem.

<comment><USER23> That would be a step in the wrong direction, in my opinion. Pseudo-leetspeek hacker news? It's even sketchier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Allow us to customize the title, just like we can customize the title bar background.

</comment><comment><USER25> awesome</comment>


Show HN: A more intuitive linear regression interface (Statwing) - <AUTHOR> https://www.statwing.com/demos/regression#workspaces/39258

<comment><AUTHOR> We've been working hard on a more intuitive regression interface:

. Plain-English description of results

. Inline data transformations (e.g., taking a log)

. Automatic diagnostic charts and distribution visualizations

. Automatic alerts to common issues (e.g., funky residual plot)

. Plain-english guides to regression [1] and interpreting residuals [2]

. M-estimation instead of OLS

This is of course a work in progress, so we'd love to get feedback on this. Particularly if you see something in the docs you don't agree with.

[1] [http://docs.statwing.com/user-friendly-guide-to- regression/](http://docs.statwing.com/user-friendly-guide-to-regression/)

[2] [http://docs.statwing.com/interpreting-residual-plots-to- impr...](http://docs.statwing.com/interpreting-residual-plots-to-improve-your- regression)

(Logistic regression is also in the works, we'll probably do a "Show HN" for that later, so please hold comments on it)

</comment><comment><USER2> Interesting choice by linking to a deliberately flawed regression model as an example, which allows the utility of the diagnostics to show.</comment>


Show HN: Universal Pause Button - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ryanries/UniversalPauseButton <comment><USER3> This is nice! On OSX, processes can be paused and continued too (by name via killall, and by PID via kill):

      kill -STOP 1234
      kill -CONT 1234

      killall -STOP -c "Pandora"
      killall -CONT -c "Pandora"

A more nuanced control is to throttle down the CPU, via cputhrottle[1].

If I'm running a CPU-intensive calculation and don't want to bog down the rest of my system I will use it to give me enough cycles for Sublime Text to work smoothly.

It's easy to call:

      sudo cputhrottle PID cpuUsage%

ex.

      sudo cputhrottle 12345 400

1\. [http://www.willnolan.com/cputhrottle/cputhrottle.html](http://www.willnolan.com/cputhrottle/cputhrottle.html)

<comment><USER4> "This is nice! On OSX, processes can be paused and continued too"

Every once in a while I am reminded how wonderful, and perhaps unlikely, it is that I have a nice, slick, mass market consumer device (apple computer running OS X) that is honest to god UNIX underneath.

And then sad, knowing that this is a brief golden age that will probably pass.

<comment><USER5> Don't worry. Linux is slicker.

<comment><USER6> As someone who just switched to Linux from OS X, it is really hard to migrate. I miss the subtleties of the apple ecosystem. Sure Linux is awesome, but I have been battling trackpad support issues, keymapping the super_key to CMD, and just general battling the UX.

tl;dr a more powerful operating system with worse UI, which is the obvious trade. A less powerful system with a fantastic UI.

<comment><USER7> UI is subjective. I get mildly annoyed whenever I use a Mac. Little things like having to click on a window to give it focus, or having to use command instead of control in many programs, break my flow. I'd probably get used to those if I only used a Mac, but since I use Linux 95% of the time and Mac 5%, I never do.

<comment><USER8> Honestly, i don't mind the window focusing on mac. What I absolutely fucking hate though, is working on Windows and not being able to scroll on a window that's not active. By default on Mac, if a window's focused, you can scroll another (unfocused) window by scrolling when you mouse is over it. Without having to refocus windows, which is really nice when you're typing something on the focused window.

As for the cmd button replacing the ctrl button. Never going back to ctrl+<key> for shortcuts. The command button is so much nicer to use, it's your thumb vs you pinky. You don't need to stretch you pinky/move you hand slightly to have access to shortcuts and that's so nice. VERY desturbing at first (I hated it), but never going back. Or maybe I've just gotten used to using my thumb. Ultimately, I think it makes a lot more sense though. No more alt-F4 to close windows, its cmd+Q, no more ctrl+B to bold a text, it's cmd+b, cmd+h minimizes/hides your window etc etc.

Also, what i found infinitely annoying at first and that I really like now on Mac, is the window switching with the keyboard. On Windows, alt+tab switches between all windows (including different instances of same program). on Mac, alt+tab switches between applications and alt+` switches between different instances of a said program. I find that more elegant when you have a lot of windows opened, which i always have.

But all these are tiny little things that add up to something really nice to use, but each individually don't and will never justify OS X being _the best OS in the world blah blah_. You can probably achieve a similar behavior on windows/Linux/whatever. What's nice about it though is that it's the default setup, no third party app needed/config files. You install it and it makes sense. That's why I'm not switching from OS X anytime soon, it's ergonomic, the UI is sick, power user features everywhere, and a real unix. I see it as a linux that works perfectly out of the box. I remember the first month I spent on OS X (coming from 4 years of linux, 2 yr Ubuntu and 2 yr Arch, using both full desktop env (KDE mostly) and lightweigth window managers), everything works and works well and everything is ergonomic and makes sense. Put simply, a Mac never (or very rarely) gets in the way of your work. And that makes a big difference.

But then, I just like Macs because of how I use my computer. I get it that some might prefer a Linux or Windows, and I respect that. I'm just extremely thankful OS X answers exactly what I expect from a computer.

<comment><USER9> For Windows, Katmouse alleviates some of the pain of scroll focus: [http://ehiti.de/katmouse/](http://ehiti.de/katmouse/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great app but I have one request. Can you please modify it so instead of pausing the game until my SO is done talking, it pauses my SO until my game is done its cutscene? Thanks in advance.

<comment><USER11> Ah, I didn't know Adam Sandler posted on Hacker News.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This should be a basic requirement for all games. Even before I was married my mom would call or someone would ring the doorbell. And when I was a kid I had to go down to dinner or take out the trash.

<comment><USER13> "Tricks of the Mac Game Programming Gurus [[http://www.amazon.com/Tricks-Mac- Game-Programming-Gurus/dp/1...](http://www.amazon.com/Tricks-Mac-Game- Programming-Gurus/dp/1568301839\]") actually dedicated about a paragraph or two to the topic, driving home the point that a game that cannot be paused is leaving N% of potential players on the table right out of the starting gate (and I believe they even had a hypothetical about "little Jimmy" not being able to pause to take out the trash and therefore his parents uninstall the game).

These days of MMOs and other coordinated time-sinks make me miss the simplicity of pausable single-player and turn-based multiplayer sometimes.

<comment><USER14> That is probably 90% of the reason I stopped playing multiplayer games. Which sucks because the number of single player games I want to play is, I feel, getting smaller over the years. There was a day when first person shooters, no matter how good the multiplayer was, had a single player campaign as well. There was a day (even when processors were absolute shit) when you could add bots into the game and they would play like humans with personalities.

Hell, even the single player games are getting to be unpausable. How many cut scenes are there in GTAV? And if other duties are at hand, the only option is to skip the story line so you can pause.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Great idea, will be helpful.

Now, I only need a similar tool that kills the process with the highest CPU and MEMORY load with a short cut. Reasons: Sometimes a process leaks memory and fills up 16GB RAM and opening a new process like taskmgr is impossible to severe paging-IO. Sometimes a full screen application crash and spawns a modal crash dialog behind the full screen window so only taskmgr and keyboard usage works (as the mouse is hidden by the crashed full screen app).

<comment><USER16> Magic SysRq-F

<comment><USER17> Wooow, thanks a lot! I'm going to test it now.

Edit: Not working as expected :(

Run python script that allocated a couple of gigabytes of RAM effectively causing my machine to freeze. And OOM killer figured out the best thing it can do is this:

      [2889118.406439] Out of memory: Kill process 11878 (SpotifyHelper) score 302 or sacrifice child
      [2889118.406442] Killed process 11878 (SpotifyHelper)

<comment><USER18> Such are the ways of the OOM killer: [http://lwn.net/Articles/104185/](http://lwn.net/Articles/104185/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> You can also download the executable (if you don't want to compile it) from [https://www.myotherpcisacloud.com/post/universal-pause- butto...](https://www.myotherpcisacloud.com/post/universal-pause-button)

<comment><USER19> You should consider uploading that file to the Github repo in the "Releases" section so people can find it easier.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "I've already gotten great value out of the program, as there are lots of cut scenes in The Witcher 3, that I don't want to skip."

The Witcher 3 pauses cutscenes when the window is not in focus. So the example is probably not the greatest.

<comment><USER21> My son has been playing Witcher 3 for the last few weeks, and literally every time I walk by, there's a cutscene. I'm pretty sure I have yet to see anything _but_ cutscenes. It's all cutscenes. Listening to it in the background, it sounds more like an episode of Sons of Anarchy than a traditional videogame.

<comment><USER22> The script is apparently ~450,000 words! I have 28 hours of playtime but the game only shows me at 17% completion - its massive and detailed open world is stunning.

<comment><USER23> 450 kwords? That's like 2-3 large novels...

<comment><USER24> 1984 was around 85,000 words (from memory). So 5 times that

<comment><USER23> Wolfram Alpha says average word length in English is 5.1 chars.

450000 words * 5.1 bytes ≈ 2.2 MiB

I like to read novels on my phone in plaintext format. 2001 by Clarke is 368 kiB. Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson is 1.1 MiB.

1984 would be 423 kiB, which I consider pretty normal, not "large". But that's subjective, I guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Nice idea and app. Having a quick look at the code I had forgotten how much work needed to be done for old-skool Windows applications. They do give you great lean applications though which is something I miss.

I will always have a soft spot for small, lean single function applications. I guess it takes me back to my UNIX days. Some of my favourite more modern programs are SumatraPDF, uTorrent (the older 2.x versions) and Notepad2, lovely single exe programs that are self-contained. No installers and messy configs all over the place or in the registry.

<comment><USER26> Sumatra PDF is the best. I actually prefer it, running under wine, to any of the Linux PDF readers I've tried. I used I to write/preview my thesis.

<comment><USER27> Did you try Foxit reader? They actually have a Linux build that is not as feature-full as other releases, but still better than any native Linux PDF reader.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> You can do this to any process in Windows' Resource Monitor too - the one you can open from task manager. On the CPU tab you can right click any process and suspend it.

<comment><USER29> not seeing this in Windows 7. Is this specific to Windows 8 and above?

<comment><USER30> From Task Manager, open Resource Monitor. That's the one with green charts on the right hand side. It has different context menu than the Task Manager. Picture (on windows 8): [http://thewindowsclub.thewindowsclubco.netdna- cdn.com/wp-con...](http://thewindowsclub.thewindowsclubco.netdna-cdn.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/01/Wait-Chain-Traversal-resmon.jpg) I'm not sure if Windows 7 has it, though.

<comment><USER31> Win7 has it. In task manager, go to the Performance tab, and then press the "Resource Monitor" button.

Or run `perfmon /res`.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> That's interesting. However, I wonder ... don't you think it can be abused in some games that try to compensate lag? For example, what if they use a code similar to:

      delay = currentFrameTime - <USER2>
      playerPosition += direction * delay

I know that some games (such as Diablo III) may automaticallt ban you if you happen to run a program that may be used to cheat (they detect that via a background process check).

<comment><USER15> He wrote it's useful for singleplay games that have an intro. If you use it in multiplayer games you certainly will simply drop out of the game as you will loose the connection or what you described depending on the server implementation.

<comment><USER33> That doesn't just apply to multiplayer, though. OP said Diablo 3, which is multi OR single player. Many games now use those phone-home anti-cheating measures (or drm measures) even when you aren't actually playing with anyone else.

<comment><USER32> Is Diablo III single player? When I played it at the release, connecting to a remote server was required (which is a shame, btw. I will miss the modding community that Diablo II had).

<comment><USER34> It _can_ be single-player, but you still need a connection to do so.

<comment><USER35> Is this also true for the console port(s)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Now if only there was a Universal Skip Button for those games with unskippable credits, intros or cutscenes!

<comment><USER37> This actually is sort of possible, you have to mess with the system clock as seen by the program, to make it think much more time has passed than really passed. It will run those scenes at hyperspeed.

Then give back the time later (if you need the clock to match the real clock) when it's waiting for input.

<comment><USER38> There was a program called cheat engine that let you drag a slider for program speed, as well as generally dig around RAM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Indeed some deep nesting here. You made me remember a quickbasic program I wrote for a class back in early 90s, where I packed the whole program in a single do-loop with about 20 indent levels at it's deepest, and I loved it. But... the prof told me to never do that again :( Anyway, thanks a lot for the flashback :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed, it's not the most elegant code, but it's so short and simple I haven't bothered reorganizing the code yet. I probably will start adding features like re-bindable pause key, etc., and I will untangle the mess a bit at that time.

<comment><USER40> quickest way to do it is to negate your if conditions in the loop something like this:

        if (ForegroundWindow)
        {
            ...
        }
        else
        {
            MessageBox(NULL, L"Unable to detect foreground window!", L"UniversalPauseButton Error", MB_OK | MB_ICONERROR);
        }

becomes

        if (!ForegroundWindow)
        {
            MessageBox(NULL, L"Unable to detect foreground window!", L"UniversalPauseButton Error", MB_OK | MB_ICONERROR);
            break;
        }
        ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Without reading the explanation, immediately my roommate and I figure out how to do it via the linux terminal by pausing the main thread. It seems so obvious, don't know why I wasn't doing this myself.... since I have the same problem as the OP.

</comment><comment><USER42> @OP

I've added this to the scoop-extras bucket for Scoop[0]. So users with the extras bucket can install it using:

      scoop install universalpausebutton

EDIT: Do you have a licence?

[0]: [http://scoop.sh](http://scoop.sh)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Added MIT license.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Really clever. What a thoughtful project, too. Hope your SO appreciates the work you put in on it!

</comment><comment><USER44> Wow, coded like a simple old school Win32 API win app, I didn't realize that was still possible in modern Visual Bloatio. Nicely done.

<comment><AUTHOR> My favorite kind of application. Small, lean, close to the metal, and built like a brick house. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I love this!!! The pause button was incredibly useful when trying to figure out what went wrong with DOS boot sequence. I wonder if it would be possible to include support for it in Linux kernel? Sometimes I would like to read those messages that fly over the screen (no, dmesg is not enough)...

<comment><USER18> This program doesn't pause the kernel, just the game's process. Other people in this thread have given equivalent solutions for un*x.

If you want to actually pause the linux kernel you'll have to use something like the magic SysRq: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key)

Alternatively you can run the operating system in an emulator like qemu.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> This specific example is nice although not truly universal.

An interesting startup idea would be a bluetooth thingy (kinda vague, maybe a necklace?) that when pushed becomes a TRUE universal pause button. Pauses my DVR, my car audio, my linux mythtv box, everything, silences my phone ringer, mutes the TV, shuts off the alarm clock, temp-mutes the smoke alarm if its currently going off, silence the oven timer, car alarm off if its currently sounding, you name it.

Sounds technologically possible although a huge PITA, which sounds like a great startup idea.

You might need to ram thru a whole new bluetooth LE broadcast protocol, maybe. Or just a blind beacon of "anything" thats sniffable (edited: whoops that wouldn't work so well with silenced burglar alarm systems).

I suspect this would sell pretty well once it gets universal...

<comment><USER47> years and years ago I had some thoughts tumbling around about how I'd design an automated system for muting/vibrate-mode only for phones in cinemas/libraries/quiet-zones, etc.

The security implications and UX involved in managing settings in a non- infuriating fashion rapidly sunk it though, and I daresay it would never have been practically deployable unless business/landowners/whatever could enforce its use as a condition of entry.

Also, you forgot the hollow tooth + airbag components + RF magic => remote operated ball-gag :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Win10Phone/Android/iOS apps are suspended and restored the same ways too. Only the visible app (and some system processes) is running in iOS1-8 (in iOS9 iPadAir2 two apps). It's usually unused in desktop OS (except for universal apps in Win10).

</comment><comment><USER48> I would love this for Mac, not for games but for all browser tabs. Find whichever tab I'm playing music in, and pause it, whether it be SoundCloud, YouTube, or some other streaming something. Fantastic idea though!

<comment><USER49> At WWDC, they announced that the new Safari version would be able to do something like that.

<comment><USER50> That's only muting tabs, which Chrome has been doing for years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Always used to watch those cutscenes on youtube! Awesome app btw.

</comment><comment><USER52> Having a modernized pause/break key on your keyboard can also be handy if you ever have to use software that acts stupid on purpose, like these "Safe Exam LockDown Browsers" that some schools and universities around here have started forcing upon their students. Software like this typically just run a timer or similar to make sure that only their windows are running in the foreground, but sending them a SIGSTOP stops this annoyance.

</comment><comment><USER53> But what if the process uses a timer to update an animation? (I.e., the state of the timer determines the frame in the animation).

In that case, after unpausing, the animation would just skip ahead.

As a remedy, the pause button could also stop the system clock as seen by the process.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, different applications are guaranteed to react differently to this, depending on how they were written. And a lot of games use the _rdtsc intrinsic straight from the CPU... I can't pause that. :)

<comment><USER53> You could write a virtual machine that compiles all code into essentially the same code except for the rdtsc instruction (basic-block analysis).

That is a lot of work, but I wonder if there are no debugging or reverse- engineering tools that work in that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Wouldn't it be easier if your girlfriend would not expect that she can walk in and interrupt you any time she wants?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, maybe. But then maybe I wouldn't have a girlfriend. And more importantly, maybe I wouldn't be reminded that sometimes it's OK to peel myself away from a video game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Reminds me of old utility which could resize any DirectX based game and force them run in windowed mode.

</comment><comment><USER56> For a fraction of a second, part of me really hoped it could somehow be a pause button for life itself.

</comment><comment><USER57> Would love to have this for email.

</comment><comment><USER58> aka "Windows users discover our CTRL+Z" :) Been doing that very often during Ludum Dare where the best games have usually very fine gameplay and very poor everything else, like lack of pause or progress save - surely came handy.

</comment><comment><USER59> On OSX you can use Activity Monitor to use View > Send Signal To Process....

</comment><comment><USER60> It even pauses video studio! It really is universal.

</comment><comment><USER61> Damn, I thought this was for real life.. could've used one of those. Better than hitting snooze 10 times.

</comment><comment><USER62> It wasn't until MGS4 before the Metal Gear Solid franchise got cutscenes which you could pause. Which was sorely needed because of how story driven the series is, and how long some of the cutscenes are -- I think the end of MGS4 was something like 1 hour, 30 min.

</comment><comment><USER63> Can we pause the significant other too?

</comment><comment> cool-RR _" I like to play video games. I also have a significant other, and she often walks into the room to talk to me while I'm playing a video game."_

Looks like the real solution would be to pause your SO ;)

<comment><USER64> I encountered this problem with babies. They _definitely_ don't pause.

My solution was the DS/3DS line of consoles... snap 'em shut, bam, paused. I've called them the consoles of choice for the discriminating father.

(If you've never had kids and find yourself wondering what horrible father would be playing video games while taking care of his children, well, you see, it turns out that sometimes your child wants to sleep on somebody, and will not sleep any other way... and there's only so many things you can do with a baby that cries if you move sleeping on you. Both of my kids went through that phase for different reasons.)

<comment><USER34> Does the Xbox One not do this? I mean suspend gameplay and resume with just a touch of a button?

<comment><USER65> I believe the PS4 does this too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> test comment!!</comment>


The Foursquare Of Flying? - <AUTHOR> http://transitnote.com

<comment><USER2> Hah! Thanks for the post! This is just a little hack Ive put together. I saw how people tweet their departure and arrival airports when flying, so I thought Id make a web app around it. It will also notify you of other users who are flying the same path. I hope you enjoy it!</comment>


Android chief says Google I/O will focus on devs, not new products - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/13/sundar-pichai-interview-google-io/ <comment><USER2> Nothing like waiting with baited breath until a keynote to find out what is going to be announced, all that anticipation and then "disappointment" in the popular tech press at how underwhelming the products discussed where.

But then this is Google we're talking about, that takes so much of their marketing advice from Microsoft, and not Apple that actually not only knows how to put on a show, but the put "butts in seats" for it.

On a side note, seems like Glass will be a niche product in the first revision, then expand into the mass market as fashion-focused partners come on board and problems like this one ([http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/latency-the-sine- qua-n...](http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/latency-the-sine-qua-non-of- ar-and-vr/)) are solved.</comment>


The story behind XCOM: Enemy Unknown - <AUTHOR> http://www.baltimoresun.com/business/bs-bz-firaxis-launches-xcom-20121008,0,6100681.story For more than four years, a team of 40 or so people in Sparks secretly worked for this Tuesday.
In perhaps the biggest day in Firaxis Games' history, the design studio releases "XCOM: Enemy Unknown," a richly detailed and immersive video game that already has gotten rave reviews.
Firaxis and its parent company, 2K Games of Novato, Calif., need all the buzz they can get. Firaxis wouldn't say how much it spent developing the game, but large releases typically cost tens of millions of dollars. It's a calculated gamble that's commonplace in the video game industry, where companies pursue big-budget blockbuster hits in much the same way Hollywood bets on movies.
"You're talking about a big investment to reach a lot of people with a high end production product," said Steve Martin, Firaxis' president. "It's the biggest game Firaxis has ever produced. … It is a Herculean effort to make something this big." <comment><USER2> The original Microprose game was awesome. The turn-based strategy version of this remake is more interesting to me than the FPS for sure. There are some video trailers here: <http://www.xcom.com/enemyunknown/videos></comment>


Personal Drones Fly Above Burning Man - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/aerial-robots/personal-drones-fly-above-burning-man

<comment><USER2> The glaring omission I see in the article is any mention of BMORG's photography policy, which is much stricter than US law. Some of the FPV ROVs may be up there just to fly around…but it seems as if most of them exist for photography's sake.

[http://www.burningman.com/press/photo_guide.html](http://www.burningman.com/press/photo_guide.html)

[http://www.burningman.com/press/pressRandR.html#pressRR](http://www.burningman.com/press/pressRandR.html#pressRR)

<comment><USER3> Burning Man/Black Rock Rangers had an orientation you had to attend to get permission to fly your own drone/quadrotor. I'm assuming you also had to agree to their photography policy, which I'm okay with as I don't want pictures of me riding my bicycle naked across the playa showing up on Flickr.

<comment><USER4> They probably had to also touch on the fact that many of them will be flying FPV (first-person-view) with a headset, so dealing with those if they're recorded as well (most aren't, so probably a non-issue).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> All it will take is one UAV crashing into some people, resulting in horrific injuries, and the UAV will be banned, or more heavily regulated.

These UAV are not toys, and have a high potential to cause grave injuries.

<comment><USER6> I agree. Burning Man has evolved from a very unsafe event towards more safety. I doubt if we'll see any more blowing up oil derrick type events. Someone is still going to try to take down a drone though, especially if it appears to photographing naked people.

<comment><USER7> As long as the operator of the photographing UAV follows the same photography rules and guidelines as the people running around with cameras on the ground, I don't see a problem. Also, shooting down a UAV is a) illegal (property damage) and b) even more dangerous that the actual UAV operation, since a shot-down UAV will surely come down uncontrollably - the responsibility for that damage will then rest on the shooter.

<comment><USER6> Just as Burning Man is a test bed for civilian use of drones, it will also be a test bed for civilian anti-drone measures. These don't actually have to involve shooting it down, but people are already thinking about it

[http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/07/local- an...](http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/07/local-anti-drone- activism-begins-if-they-fly-in-town-we-will-shoot-them-down/278198/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's going to turn into an all out semi-fun war of drone counter measures (lasers, guns shooting plastic projectiles) and even drones battling other drones in the sky. This should be interesting.

<comment><USER8> I would imagine that a net-shooter would be the most effective weapon against drones. Plus, it's a weapon that could feasibly be operated from a drone itself without weighing too much, being too hard to aim, and minimizing human casualties if it missed.

<comment><USER9> I think radio jamming would be much cheaper and more effective. Most short- range RC aircraft run on very widely-available consumer spectrum bands like 2.4GHz.

<comment><USER3> Drones can operate completely autonomously, with no RF link.

<comment><USER9> Indeed, they can be programmed to follow GPS waypoints for example, but I don't think that's a common use case, especially for high production value photography/videography like the examples highlighted in the article. Perhaps it would become more common if radio jamming became more common.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wibson, a decentralized data marketplace empowering users to monetize their data - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/introducing-wibson-a-decentralized-data-marketplace-empowering-individuals-to-monetize-their-own-7747b59bfef1?gi=b0d159bd3ca7 <comment><USER2> But what's the data one can sell. The post is really vague on details.</comment>


Ask HN: What is needed in startup world? - <AUTHOR> I bought more than 15 domains related to startups for building something meaningful for startups next year so good ideas and suggestions are most welcome. I am willing to put much efforts to provide value to startups. <comment><USER2> From my perspective, a strong and honest leader that learns from their mistakes, listens and considers advice, but importantly can stay on top of the finances. Basically the opposite of my last boss.</comment>


Can Disqus And Profy Set Bloggers Free? - <AUTHOR> http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/can_disqus_and_profy_set_bloggers_free_ <comment><USER2> What about Intense Debate? It's a disqus alternative, although I didn't use either to such great extents that I'd know what's better.

<http://www.intensedebate.com/></comment>


Google's mobile search results now include videos of celebs answering questions - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/07/googles-mobile-search-results-now-include-videos-of-celebs-answering-your-questions/?ncid=rss&utm_source=tcfbpage&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=FaceBook&sr_share=facebook <comment><AUTHOR> I submitted this because I saw it today and am not entirely sure what Google's play here is. Would love to hear your opinions/guesses.</comment>


Please be more careful when interpreting the Stack Overflow Developer Survey - <AUTHOR> https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/382731 <comment><USER2> > We asked respondents to evaluate their own competence, for the specific work > they do and years of experience they have, and almost 70% of respondents say > they are above average while less than 10% think they are below average. > This is statistically unlikely with a sample of over 70,000 developers who > answered this question, to put it mildly.

I'm seeing a lot of argument about statistics, and very little about the wording of this question.

It seems to me that by asking specifically for competence "for the specific work you do" means that everyone gets to define who they're comparing against.

What this means is that it's entirely statistically possible for 70% of people to be above average relative to whoever they choose their peers to be. I might compare myself to you, and you don't compare yourself to me, so we can both be above average.

In order to argue about the math and statistics, the question needs to be well defined, and the group to which we're talking about averages needs to be the same for everyone. This question, the way its worded, practically guarantees that the group someone compares themselves to is different for every single respondent.

<comment><USER2> It's too late to edit, and maybe nobody will see this now, but I wanted to add that the particular question of competence and the majority result strongly reminds me about the story of the Air Force discovering that cockpits designed for the average human size were causing crashes because literally nobody is averaged sized.

Discussed on HN before [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11230287](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11230287)

"Before he crunched his numbers, the consensus among his fellow air force researchers was that the vast majority of pilots would be within the average range on most dimensions. After all, these pilots had already been pre- selected because they appeared to be average sized. (If you were, say, six foot seven, you would never have been recruited in the first place.) The scientists also expected that a sizable number of pilots would be within the average range on all 10 dimensions. But even Daniels was stunned when he tabulated the actual number.

"Zero.

"Out of 4,063 pilots, not a single airman fit within the average range on all 10 dimensions. One pilot might have a longer-than-average arm length, but a shorter-than-average leg length. Another pilot might have a big chest but small hips. Even more astonishing, Daniels discovered that if you picked out just three of the ten dimensions of size — say, neck circumference, thigh circumference and wrist circumference — less than 3.5 per cent of pilots would be average sized on all three dimensions. Daniels's findings were clear and incontrovertible. There was no such thing as an average pilot. If you've designed a cockpit to fit the average pilot, you've actually designed it to fit no one."

[https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us- air-...](https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-force- discovered-the-flaw-of-averages.html)

So to go one step further and make a stronger statement, it's not just possible for 70% of devs to be above average, it's statistically likely for 100% of devs to be above average with respect to _something_ they do, relative to _some_ group. It's so subjective that it's meaningless, and we can't really talk about the statistics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > It is an error to use the sample size of a non-random sample to support the > underlying comparison with the population of interest. Sample size can > decrease random error, but not bias

</comment><comment><USER4> Next year, ask: "Compared to developers of similar position, experience, and willingness to respond to Stack Overflow Developer Surveys, would you consider yourself less competent than average, of the same competency as average, or more competent than average?"

<comment><USER5> How can you compare another developers willingness to respond to SO surveys to your own?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > any conclusions drawn by such studies must be taken with a not-insignificant > sized grain of salt.

Please be more careful about drawing conclusions about the statistical significance of salt grain size. ;)

</comment><comment><USER7> Abuse of the Dunning Kruger effect, lead to a faulty conclusion that data can't support.

</comment><comment><USER8> > you cannot generalize from a non-random sample

So, honest question:

If any survey of any size can be ignored on the basis that the sample is not random, then how is any survey meaningful?

Isn't this a self defeating argue?

You can't prove the sample is random, all you can do is show differences between samples and suggest its not _consistent_... but how do we go away and prove that some other survey we're comparing it to is from a random sample?

ie. Isnt this just a convenient excuse to deny that a survey is meaningful?

Statistically, how do you _mathemtaically quantify_ the effect of selection bias?

...because, it seems to me, unless you can actually do that, you're just doing some arm chairmhand waving because you don't like the results youre seeing.

This has come up several times (eg. js survey about react vs angular), and no one has ever given me a meaningful and mathematical response.

Its always just.. "it must be sample bias", regardless of the 90000 people they surveyed.

I don't accept you can survey 90000 developers and cannot offer any generalisation from those results _without quanatitively proving_ there is an overwhelming sample bias, and _specifically_ quantifying the degree of that bias.

Am I missing something here? Everyone seems thoughorly convinced that this is perfectly normal.

(I'm not proud, I'll take your down votes, but please answer and explain what I'm missing)

<comment><USER9> The key is in how you randomly select the sample from the population.

This was the author's point. Just because you have 90k SO respondents doesn't mean you can say anything about developers as a population. You can say lots of stuff about SO users. Or maybe developers who use SO. But just because you have lots of responses doesn't mean you know what developers or jugglers or farmers or whatever population interests you.

The confusion rests with SO's statement that their survey should be representative of developers in general (or CS graduates or whatever other than only SO visitors).

<comment><USER10> It's not even a random sample of SO visitors, as the there is, at the very least, self-selection bias.

<comment><USER9> I agree, although I think it's more easy to correct for this bias to generalize to all of SO than to all programmers.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Fence.Chat V2 – Discover and Share whats happening around you - <AUTHOR> https://fence.chat <comment><USER2> In Firefox, I see a pig.

In Chromium, I receive a message "Unable to fetch location."</comment>


EBay to Spin Off PayPal - <AUTHOR> http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/09/30/ebay-to-spin-off-paypal-adopting-strategy-backed-by-icahn/ <comment><USER2> When the going gets tough, firms call in consultants. When Bain or McKinsey arrive, they tell you to make a change. Is your firm centralized? Decentralize it! Is your firm decentralized? Centralize it. Donahoe's "master fix" and subsequent exit should give pause to industry thinking of hiring consultants to run their companies in the long-run; for as the saying goes: the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

<comment><USER3> Hilarious and on point, but to their credit consultants look at what you are currently doing which isn't working, and suggest you do the other thing on the theory that worst case that won't work either but at least you will have tried something new.

I generally think that it is a symptom that the management isn't able to manage the business. Not everyone has the skill set to mix a tech and commerce company into a living / breathing entity.

<comment><USER4> The "higher brand" consultancies also live by their stamp of approval.

A CEO who wants to do a risky strategy will hire the biggest brand name possible to provide cover. "Nobody got fired for hiring McKinsey for advice" is similar to "Nobody got fired for buying IBM hardware". And in this case, the CEO can say, "Well, I hired the best to help me think it up" when it goes wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is anyone else worried about the long term stability of Braintree under such an aggressive board environment? I was always concerned about conflicts of interest with PayPal acquiring Braintree - two competing and incompatible ways to pay with a credit card. As much as I admire Braintree engineering, and I would normally trust a board to believe in the Braintree brand of reliability, it does no good if a single unpredictable actor, namely Icahn, could strongarm the parent company into underfunding or cannibalizing Braintree. Am I just being paranoid?

<comment><USER6> I'm an engineer at Braintree.

Speaking only for myself, I don't see a conflict of interest between us and PayPal. PayPal has embraced our APIs and approach to support as the future of how merchants will integrate with PayPal, and we've been able to leverage PayPal's consumer brand to build better products for our merchants.

I was initially very, very skeptical of our acquisition, but I have to admit it's turned out well. I don't think there is any risk of them underfunding or cannibalizing us.

<comment><USER7> For what it's worth, PayPal is embracing the shit out of BT acquisition - really see that as the north star for our merchant integration story. Everyone knows they know what they are doing and only want to help, they don't want to hinder/hobble/mess with it.

<comment><USER8> So what you're saying is that they learned their lessons from the VeriSign Payment Services acquisition, and learned not to actively try to break things that work?

(Yes, still very, _very_ bitter about that. If you have a different perspective on that time/process, I would genuinely like to hear it.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great decision, allowing PayPal to grow beyond the virtual ceiling placed by being governed by a marketplace company which rightly has its own agenda before PayPal's.

<comment><USER10> As long as the split does not disrupt the current relationship for buyers and sellers using Ebay. Right now the process is quite simple and there had been recent efforts to link the two sites even more, as in not needing to ever log into Paypal to complete ebay purchases.

hopefully that integration won't suffer.

<comment><USER9> I don't see why it would... ebay would still hold a significant percentage of paypal and influence such decision making. The main benefit will come from large competitors choosing Paypal as it becomes a less biased payment service and not one that directly profits a competitor. Essentially, Ebay will now have to pay closer to market-rate for processing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Spinning off PayPal really hurts the long-term growth potential of EBay. They haven't grown much at all over the past few years, once you take out the PayPal revenue. That will really hurt the stock price. Meanwhile, I would expect PayPal's stock price to grow as it's potential for growth is pretty large. Will be very interesting to see how they split the existing EBay shares for shareholder and at what price.

<comment><USER12> > Spinning off PayPal really hurts the long-term growth potential of EBay. > They haven't grown much at all over the past few years, once you take out > the PayPal revenue.

But, as a current shareholder, you will still own PayPal and Ebay shares. The question is whether they are better together or better apart. There isn't any obvious synergy between the two anymore.

> Will be very interesting to see how they split the existing EBay shares for > shareholder and at what price.

No, there is nothing interesting about that. Each shareholder get X shares of Ebay, Y shares of Paypal and Z dollars of cash. The price of the shares is set by the market. The values of X and Y are pretty much arbitrary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The recent Alibaba ipo demonstrates this is a stupid idea and that eBay has been chronically mismanaged for years. That it has effectively squandered such a massive lead and headstart is incredible.

<comment><USER14> Alibaba spun off Alipay. How does the Alibaba IPO demonstrate spinning off PayPal is a stupid idea exactly?

<comment><USER15> Alibaba spun off Alipay because Jack Ma wanted to control Alipay instead of the Alibaba majority stakeholder such as Yahoo and Softbank. It was an uncontested power move by Ma.

<comment><USER15> Sorry, I don't know why my comment was posted 3 times...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Icahn is only interested in Icahn. I can't really see this as positive for anyone just because Icahn has a track record of pressuring businesses into destroying their value creating engines in order to enrich his own coffers. He's a pillager, not a builder. Why does anyone tolerate doing business with him anymore?

<comment><USER17> Firstly, this is not an instance of a company being pillaged by an activist investor. Icahn is not assuming control of the company, he's trying to make them change direction.

Secondly, Icahn has been completely right about eBay. Andreessen functionally stole billions from eBay via a deal with one of the most egregious conflicts of interest we've seen in all of corporate America. Which, fine, it was a fuckup. Sometimes companies fuck up. But then, eBay keeps the same board of directors with the same crooks running the show. eBay needs an activist investor or else these are the guys who are going to pillage the company (even further). Not Icahn.

<comment><USER18> To be fair, I think Andreessen only got a couple hundred million (3% on an $8.5B acquisition [1]). But while pmarca says he recused himself, the whole thing reeks.

Though don't forget what is actually the far far bigger failure. When that idiot Meg Whitman acquired skype in 2005, she acquired skype but not the underlying tech (Joltid), then fucked the founders on an earnout. So there was tons of bad blood, and they were declining to relicense their p2p tech to skype. You can read all about it [2] and elsewhere. That, plus some other stupid stuff, made ebay give the founders 30% of the company back for $160m. I don't think Andreessen was on the board for the initial acquisition, but what idiocy.

It's hard to believe a reasonable technical person was involved in the initial acquisition. Where the hell was the board? The point is, it's hard to say ebay has had competent executive leadership or a board for a while.

[1] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-03/ebay-andreessen- ref...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-03/ebay-andreessen-refute-icahn- s-claims-on-skype-acquisition.html)

[2] [http://mashable.com/2009/11/06/skype-lawsuit- settled/](http://mashable.com/2009/11/06/skype-lawsuit-settled/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This article come to mind. Would Google be interested in buying a stake in Paypal now?

[http://www.cnet.com/news/google-to-buy-slice-of-ebay- unlikel...](http://www.cnet.com/news/google-to-buy-slice-of-ebay-unlikely- says-analyst/)

</comment><comment><USER20> I think one of the major sources of eBay's troubles is their decision to slowly abandon their P2P focus, in favor of the "shopping mall of the internet" model that Amazon uses. Rather than pursuing this model and doing it better than the competition, they chose to ape them, and badly.

Like CrazyCatDog said, eBay is the textbook example of what happens when a tech company is run by consultants who don't understand the users.

<comment><USER21> A contrarian view: there is some room to attack Amazon, primarily in the UX department. I wouldn't rule that out as a strategy for growth, but is eBay the right company to execute it? That's where it gets murky. They have a lot of the same usability flaws.

<comment><USER22> > A contrarian view: there is some room to attack Amazon, primarily in the UX > department.

Good luck with that. I've spent over $50K at Amazon over the last decade according to the data I dumped out of my orders. I'm a prime member. Amazon's site isn't perfect, but between the reviews, 2-day free shipping, 1 day at ~$5 extra, and product selection rivaled only by Walmart, I wouldn't look at Ebay unless it was something exotic (5 ton military truck for example).

"Bid" on something? No. Use Ebay's UX compared to Amazon's? Again, no thank you. Wait 5-7 days (at least) for something? Good luck Ebay!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This articles suggests only 20% of PayPal will be sold, although I doubt that number is anywhere near final. It's just like EMC spinning off VMware. EMC held on to 80% of VMware [and still does?]. It lets them capitalize much more effectively on the faster growing subsidiary. Even today VMware trades at double the PE ratio that EMC does.

<comment><USER6> The 20% figure quoted is describing an earlier deal that eBay considered and rejected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The one question no one seems to be asking is how much of PayPal's revenue is due to transactions on eBay. I suspect that it is the majority. If that's the case, then with the spinoff, it would be in eBay's interest to make all other types of payments equally attractive on its site -- not so good for PayPal, I'd think.

<comment><USER25> Last year Ebay's marketplace accounted for 30% of Paypal's revenue. Ebay mentioned that this number is declining and is forecast to hit 15% in the future. So significant but declining.

"That's no surprise since about 30 percent of PayPal's business is still on eBay, although that is down from 50 percent only a few years ago. Donahoe said eBay projected it would get to 15 percent quickly." [http://recode.net/2014/09/30/ebay-to-spin-off-paypal-with- ne...](http://recode.net/2014/09/30/ebay-to-spin-off-paypal-with-new-ceos-for- two-publicly-traded-companies/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Wait, payment processing is seeing a lot more competition and now they decide to split? I don't know if this is such a "value creation" move.

<comment><USER21> I think the argument is that as the landscape gets more competitive, eBay can't afford to tie themselves so intimately to a single payment provider.

That is why eBay's stock lurched upwards as soon as the news was announced. To someone looking to invest in an online marketplace, eBay is more important than PayPal by itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Once this goes live, PayPal will sooner or later face stiff competition beyond its current stage under the umbrella of eBay, competing against Chinese players like those of alipay and tenpay which already have users in the hundreds of millions. These players are agressively looking into the markets outside of mainland China.

The landscape won't change in a few years, but in a decade, may look completely different.

<comment><USER28> I agree that they are companies with promise, and certainly will be strong in their domestic markets... but I remain skeptical of their success in the West. I personally would not directly support Chinese businesses if I have an equivalent Western business that I can support, not simply because of xenophobia or some nationalistic nonsense, but because what China does as a Government is reprehensible. For all its faults, America is still a shining emblem of Democracy when compared to other powers such as Russia and China.

<comment><USER14> Not only that, but China doesn't allow an even playing field in any regard what-so-ever in their domestic economy.

Foreign investors still can't own more than the majority share in a Chinese company.

China is anti-West when it comes to supporting their domestic companies. They block out major competitors, such as Google or Facebook, and they make life very difficult for anyone that attempts to compete with their domestic companies.

The crap Alibaba pulled in stealing tens of billions in wealth from Yahoo by spinning off Alipay without proper compensation and forcing Yahoo to sell half its stake in Alibaba is par for the course in China.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I wonder if this will affect PayPal's recent enthusiasm for Bitcoin one way or the other.

</comment><comment><USER30> The first thing that comes to mind is that the clock has just started ticking for PayPal to become accepted all over the web in places that it may not have been as welcome. For example, I'm sure Amazon will add PayPal within 90 days of Paypal going public (if not sooner).

<comment><USER31> Isn't Paypal just another middleman between the retailer and the banks?

I mean, Paypal is all very well for a small site where customers don't trust you with their card details or you're not doing enough volume to get a decent merchant account - but neither of those applies to Amazon.

Paypal will want a bigger cut than Amazon's existing credit card processors. So why would Amazon want to use Paypal?

<comment><USER32> PayPal allows people who don't have a credit card to make purchases online. Many people in European countries don't have a credit card for example. Accepting PayPal is an easy alternative to supporting all of the different payment methods that you might need to meet certain regions expectations.

<comment><USER33> Not sure how widespread it is, but here in Portugal banks offer a service that allows you to create virtual CCs tied to your bank account. You just set a limit (in €) and it returns all the CC info needed to make a payment.

<comment><USER34> Bank of America has the exact same thing.

[https://www.bankofamerica.com/privacy/accounts- cards/shopsaf...](https://www.bankofamerica.com/privacy/accounts- cards/shopsafe.go)

<comment><USER35> do any other banks have this?

<comment><USER36> Chase.

<comment><USER34> Really? Where? I've been a chase customer since they bought BankOne in ~2006 and haven't seen this.

<comment><USER36> Sign in to the online portal. If you have a credit card with them you can generate virtual ones tied to that same card.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> eBay's acquisitions have rarely made sense, PayPal being the only one I can think of that had synergy. Does anyone understand why they bought Magento, for instance?

</comment><comment><USER38> Next target: Yahoo.

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm amazed that this jackass who ran TWA into the ground still has so much staying power. [http://www.businessinsider.com/marc-andreessen-carl-icahn- ki...](http://www.businessinsider.com/marc-andreessen-carl-icahn-killed-an- entire-airline-2014-3)

<comment><USER40> What, you're only allowed to learn from failure in Silicon Valley?

<comment><USER41> TWA wasn't a failure for Icahn. He made hundreds of millions of dollars by selling its assets to pay himself.

<comment><USER42> A win for them (Icahn and Andreessen) is measured by their wallet not about the societal impact.

<comment><USER22> We shouldn't confuse what normal people consider success to be with with what a sociopath considers success.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> NoOoOoOo!

</comment><comment><USER44> market share is the most important thing. Paypal will hurtle without Ebay. I think this is a wise and significant decision. And hope Paypal could reduce rates or even chance the fees.

</comment><comment><USER45> market share is the most important thing. Paypal will hurtle without Ebay. I think this is a wise and significant decision. And hope Paypal could reduce rates or even chance the fees.

<comment><USER46> "hurtle" might be kind of an ambiguous verb here. I think you mean that PP will take off, but hurtling usually seems to imply traveling under the influence of inertia and gravity alone.

EDIT: why have two green accounts posted the same non-idiomatic comment in a matter of minutes?

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Smart move, eBay divests before bitcoin really starts eating PayPal's lunch

<comment><USER48> Bitcoin provides zero protection to buyers.

It's delusional to think people would want to buy stuff from ebay without the protections from Paypal or their credit card provider.

Current consumer protection advice is to walk away from any sale that uses things like Western Union or cash transfer - and this is likely to be extended to include Bitcoin as soon as anyone in the general public hears about Bitcoin.

<comment><USER33> Still, a simple escrow system on top of Bitcoin could provide the same guarantees while potentially being cheaper. It's not like Bitcoin prevents such systems from being created - on the contrary, it has mechanisms to support them.

<comment><USER49> What makes you think it would be much cheaper? I think it might have to be more expensive. The anonymity aspects of bitcoin could result in more fraudsters getting away with fraud.

<comment><USER50> _The anonymity aspects of bitcoin could result in more fraudsters getting away with fraud._

Ignorance creates comments like this. Bitcoin transactions are not reversible, you have zero opportunity for fraud as a buyer.

<comment><USER49> Read above. We are discussing a hypothetical system that provides a PayPal- like guarantees layer on top of bitcoin. As you point out, bitcoin transactions are always irreversible. That's what could make it more expensive in my view. The service would always be reimbursing buyers involved in failed transactions at its own expense.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Riding the Unicorn - <AUTHOR> https://www.thecut.com/2019/10/peloton-is-spinning-faster-than-ever.html <comment><USER2> IMHO a better title would be "Peloton accidentally built a fitness cult. A business is a little more complicated"</comment>