Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/why-email-will-never-die/375973/ <comment><USER2> Wholeheartedly agree with the article. I have absolute control of my inbox with filters, labels, and signing up for newsletters and/or updates on various subjects. There is no way a centralized end-to-end service is going to eclipse email for me, unless they radically change their business models.

The value proposition is just really bad in all the services I've seen so far.

"Oh, you want me to sign up for your service so that I can look at the content you think I should see alongside the ads you're making money off of? And what exactly is in it for me?"

Something I would pay for: a rolodex social network. No centralized feed. No useless info. Your profile is 2-3 sentences and your current city (with some sort of maps integration for when you travel, to see who's near you). Two buttons, one to request to view resume, and another to request to view email. That's it. With the idea being, you use the site to enable you to keep up with people. You add people you know or have worked with to your network, and you can easily get their current email and catch up when you're in the same city. Simple, no obnoxious ads, no slimy tactics to increase time on the site.

Probably will never come to pass, but I can dream...

<comment><USER3> "Something I would pay for: a rolodex social network. No centralized feed. No useless info. Your profile is 2-3 sentences and your current city (with some sort of maps integration for when you travel, to see who's near you). Two buttons, one to request to view resume, and another to request to view email. That's it. With the idea being, you use the site to enable you to keep up with people. You add people you know or have worked with to your network, and you can easily get their current email and catch up when you're in the same city. Simple, no obnoxious ads, no slimy tactics to increase time on the site."

I really want this too. I need some sort of simple contact rolodex that simply shows who I know, why I know them, and why they're important (where do they work, how do I know them, who are they connected to, etc.). Just a simple UI, something that I would use most of the time simply to search.

<comment><USER4> "why I know them" is a crucial feature missing from many services (along with "what name or alias I know them under").

I have hundreds of contacts from church, school, work, video games, etc.

<comment><USER5> Sounds like google's circles. The problem is that most folks treat their Gmail account as their "real" account and don't give it out willy-nilly. Also, that the circles thing is one-way - I can use circles to control how I see others, but can't use them to control how they see me.

<comment><USER6> > Also, that the circles thing is one-way - I can use circles to control how I > see others, but can't use them to control how they see me.

No, if you share something to a circle someone isn't in they wont see it, so they do let you control how others see you. Not a huge G+ fan, but I was a fan of circles.

<comment><USER5> I mean having a fully different profile and name, not just different posts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As this article alludes to: the heart of email's longevity, the thing that prevents it being closed by a single entity, is being a classical IETF protocol: federated, decentralized, open and interoperable.

The first two of those properties arise from being based on the DNS for SMTP endpoint discovery.

This is why every protocol needs to specify that it uses the DNS, and how.

And that is why I get so worried that the draft HTTP/2 editors so steadfastly refuses to do so.

<comment><USER8> It would be useful to draw a dependency graph of IETF and W3C protocols that characterizes each one on their degree of divergence from classical IETF values. Identify the point(s) in time where history took a wrong turn, revert to that point, fork and start over with new protocols. It can't be any less disruptive than new protocols which have a non-classical values.

Are there modern use cases for NNTP? Could UUCP be used for sneakernet or bluetooth intermittent mesh applications? What's the verdict on WebDAV, CalDAV and CardDAV as neutral protocols for sharing data, contacts & calendar?

<comment><USER7> Yes - I have used NNTP as an eventually-reliable pub/sub message bus in an unstable mesh environment. The specific use being transport of per-device usage/billing & monitoring data.

The implied Gossip algorithm of the server-to-server subprotocol was well suited to the intermittent availability of links in that particular network. Messages (articles) were PGP verified. NNTP is channelized by design, and servers like Diablo have built-in expiry management. It's also easy to monitor with a lightweight news reader.

This was only a few years ago. I was pleased with it, at the time - simple to build from readily available parts.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for that encouraging data point.

We need a neutral, replicable client-side data store with standardized interfaces for automated analysis/filtering/reading. This could be an offline archive of docs, web browser history or online/cloud bookmarks, along with _private_ annotations about content and authors (e.g. killfiles, quality ratings).

If the datastore is open (standard & source), there could be healthy competition among proprietary apps to use the datastore, but not control it. NNTP could predictively replicate (via home wifi) a subset of this cache to mobile based on personal calendar, reducing public network usage.

What's good about this approach is that it would surpass the usability of mobile apps + public cloud, thanks to the private cache reducing the impact of public network latency. With neverending hijinks on net neutrality and web standards, it may be worth exploring NNTP pub/sub between home server/laptop and mobile devices.

<comment><USER9> So basically, CouchDB + PouchdB/TouchDB/Cloudant ? I'd love to see something really emerge in this domain (CouchDB is already mature).

<comment><USER10> We are ways off, but my personal goal for [http://hood.ie](http://hood.ie) is to be able to allow people to build gmail/gdocs competitors without having to do any heavy lifting. We could use your help, though :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The main power for me in email is that I actually own it. I have my own domain. While I use Slack, Google Hangouts, Hipchat and a bunch of other services, none of them replace email. It is standardized and despite social media/chat services living and dying over time I have had my domain and email for 15 years now. I can't think of many other services I can say that about.

It is also a good medium for non urgent communication that paper mail used to serve. The problem people see with email is actually not a problem at all with email, it is with how it is sometimes abused. My boss sometimes sends me an email and then prods me via Slack if I did not read it in 5 minutes. That is what these chat/message services are replacing... The short term action required requests that were formerly served with a phone call.

</comment><comment><USER12> What I find interesting about people who say email is bad is they they almost all have some vested interest in another communication method, especially something proprietary...

Email will outlive everyone commenting here because it works. I run my own server so I know the NSA don't have direct access to content (although I always take note of any inbound messages that are flagged as not having used TLS, or where the other address is gmail etc.), I can make disposable addresses, addresses specific to websites (to identify sites that sell/leak your address), I can run my own spamfiltering that doesn't invade my privacy, I can DKIM sign my messages and have a provable way that only I sent the message, I can use PGP for any private information, I have a set of filters to classify email so I don't even need to spend that much time dealing with it, and I can access it from anywhere I can get an SSH client. No service does that.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't understand the point about college students viewing email as stale. I'm in college and email is used more than ever. I used to get tens of emails a day from various student groups (now they get sent to spam), and it is pretty much the easiest/fastest way for groups to communicate with each other.

Sure, email isn't "sexy" anymore, but that doesn't mean people of my generation don't appreciate it.

<comment><USER14> From the spammer's perspective, e-mail is stale because you're sending everything to the spam folder rather than clicking, sharing, and buying.

<comment><USER13> Other people use it though and do click through. I just make a conscious effort to remove clutter from my life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This brings up a point I think about a lot:

Is email our last success in popularizing an open and federated standard?

Maybe you can count OAuth, but IMO i have low confidence that we'll in the near future be able to collaborate on an open protocol so that many benefits of email such as control without vendor lock-in can be enjoyed.

We have too many entrenched interests by the main players. I have been working briefly on improving the exchange of trust/reputation data online, but it seemd for us that there was no alternative to a proprietary system if you wish to see widespread adoption.

EDIT: I guess Bitcoin has good potential.

<comment><USER16> > Is email our last success in popularizing an open and federated standard?

Isn't the Web younger?

<comment><USER15> You are right, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email) quotes 1982, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web) 1989

Either way, my point still stands that besides the rapid development of the "internet", we have yet to see another standard emerge (besides OAuth and Bitcoin)

<comment><USER17> SOAP? It was almost a good idea.

<comment><USER18> It was a great idea, badly implemented. I feel confident that we'll rediscover SOAP, or something like it - it's still pretty much the best option for RPC in typed languages, which are coming back into fashion. (Maybe Thrift is better, but it's morally the same thing IMO).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> _Email was one 's passport and identity. Before Facebook became a true alternative for verifying one's identity on the web, the email address was how one accomplished serious things on the Internet. Want to verify a bank account? Email. Amazon? Email. Forums? Email. Even Facebook in the early days? Email._

Looking at Facebook's sign up page right now, and it seems that email is still required for registering a new account.

The thing is, almost every Internet service still requires an email address to sign up, and that ranges from mobile games to ecommerce shops. Some services provide the alternatives of allowing users to sign up via Facebook/Twitter/Google+; but in order for the users to get a Facebook/Twitter/Google+ account, they'll still need to sign up using an email address. Besides, almost all services that allow social network sign-in gives their users the option to sign up with email as well.

The services that do not allow email signups are few and far between -- like Medium.com, for example, but as said before, in order to get a Facebook or Twitter account, the user would still need an email address. Even mobile only apps like Whatsapp still appear to require an email address to sign up for their online support site.

<comment><USER20> Last I checked Gmail allowed me to create an account without providing an email address or phone number.

<comment><USER21> When was this?

Currently, you need to provide a code that is texted to a mobile phone for some level of proof of identity.

<comment><USER22> I have registered an account last week or so without any codes beyond captcha. It surprised me, too, because for quite a while you needed a mobile.

Maybe the requirement is based on some heuristics? IP address, country, other info provided by the user, and so on?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> and this, gentlemen, is why you should create actual protocols, not applications.

applications die, protocols stay.

if your software solution use the web protocol, you're already limited by it. that's why I hate 99% of the internet techs.

<comment><USER24> tell that to app.net

<comment><USER25> I got a free account and spent an evening or two trying to figure out what app.net was supposed to be, and I gave up. I get the feeling it was supposed to be something more than the ghost town Twitter-clone it appears to be, but I couldn't figure it out. Email's purpose, on the other hand, is pretty obvious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I still use pine :)

I use gmail so that I get good operation cross device but it's heavily filtered so I only see a fraction of total email on my phone, but I can search everything.

I then pop everything off using fetchmail and process all emails down to zero once or twice a day using pine (either in Terminal or irssi connectbot on my xperia).

This suits me not only from a day to day perspective but also because if gmail locks me out for some reason I can easily route around it and still have a full

backup of my email history.

<comment><USER27> Thanks very much for this post. I'm doing a full pop3 download of around 3 years of mostly email newsletters from my gmail account now.

In order to enable pop3 though, I had to change a default gmail security setting. Have you had any issues at all since leaving pop enabled?

Using Kmail, I'm having to fetch each month's worth of email at a time. Can't find a setting anywhere so assume that is a Google thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> _Want to verify a bank account? Email. Amazon? Email. Forums? Email. Even Facebook in the early days? Email._

This is a big part of why email continues to thrive. So many services have email baked in (e.g. a new WordPress install sends you an email). There are some services that let you choose between email and SMS, like plane reservations and banking alerts, but 95% of the time, any notification will come through email.

Given that, there is no way you could eliminate email without cutting off all those services in the process. Any new protocol to replace email would have to be a drop-in replacement for anything that currently sends out email or at least coexist peacefully alongside it.

You would think that if anyone could accomplish that it would be Facebook or Twitter, but I haven't seen any integration like that so far (e.g. get your plane reservation update or Amazon shipping confirmation by Twitter DM or Facebook message).

</comment><comment><USER29> What if someone designed a new email protocol/etc from scratch without any reference to the existing one. Could it be made better? Can you even define what better is?

<comment><USER30> Actually, that's exactly what we are trying to do with AirDispatch [1].

We started out intending to "fix" email with a better protocol, and ended up creating something much greater.

The core problems that we tried to solve (to help define "better") were:

\- Security: encrypting and authenticating your messages

\- Control: the sender hosts the message, so they can edit or delete them before the receiver sees them

\- Flexibility: all messages are, in fact, just key-value stores, so any type of data can be sent on the protocol (whether it's Mail, IMs, Vines, Instagrams, or whatever the flavor of the week social network is)

I think it's a great product, and we are going to start the developer release of the client (Melange [2]) tomorrow.

[1] [http://airdispat.ch](http://airdispat.ch)

[2] [http://github.com/melange-app/melange](http://github.com/melange- app/melange)

<comment><USER7> Much as it pains me to mention DJB; that sounds very similar to the Internet Mail 2000 model. [http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html](http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html)

<comment><USER30> Good catch! We actually completely developed AirDispatch without realizing that it had many of the same tenants as IM2000.

I haven't seen any IM2000 implementations, so I'd love to check it out if you know of any.

Do you not like IM2000, or have other feelings towards it? I'd love to hear your feedback.

<comment><USER31> Any reticence to mention it is likely due to the fact that djb is a bit of a polarizing personality.

<comment><USER30> I figured it had to do with something like that. However, do you or inopinatus have any thoughts on the system as a whole?

<comment><USER7> I think it is an interesting idea that has yet to gain traction, let alone interoperable implementations, possibly due to the cantankerous origins. May have difficulty penetrating the enterprise, where control of policy trumps most other considerations. And as with any multi-sided business model, it requires a community segment with unmet needs to provide initial critical mass. I suggest trying to make the protocol less binary and more like a classical line-oriented exchange, it'll improve uptake amongst implementers. And I wish you well; every effort to reinvent email deserves a red hot go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I can never imagine how would a university/its various student organizations get their messages through to students, without email. I went on a full-year exchange to Chile, where the email service simply is useless and everybody(including university officials) seems to rely on Facebook, which to me was simply crazy. Why would something like FB be used for any serious business? How would they suppose that everybody has a FB account and likes to use it? That was a truly horrible experience, especially for a Social Network avoider like me.

</comment><comment><USER33> People who think that email can die are the people who don't understand technology. Email is simply sending text from one user to another. There is nothing more simple than that. Therefore it probably won't die as long as we use text interfaces to our machines. What cute interfaces you put on top or machine learning features, that's all up to the marketing department. But all cool social networks and chat Apps can't do better than simply sending text.

</comment><comment><USER34> Email will always be around, but I must say that "Email killers" are really going to be successful.

For example, I don't remember the last time my team sent an internal email that wasn't a forward from a client. We use Slack. Exclusively. We organize projects around it, sales efforts, everything. It has the async nature of email, the separation of topics like email, and the search power of email. It also means that none of us ever feel like we're out of the loop.

<comment><USER35> Unfortunately, the "nobody owns" feature of EMail is something Slack lacks and probably always will. Email is a federated, decentralized protocol of distributed mail servers that anybody can set up. Any email server can participate with any other email server. That's something that Slack will never have (it does interface with XMPP and IRC, but the service itself is centralized.)

It is hard to overstate how critical this fact is to Email's future. If you look at most of the canonical Internet protocols (SMTP, HTTP, DNS, XMPP, IRC, even BitCoin) - they have this fundamental feature in common. Even though they're part of the application layer of the Internet, they've become fundamental protocols that other technologies rely on. They are part of the infrastructure of the Internet.

I say this is someone who just started using Slack and loves it. I still can't see it replacing email, though.

<comment><USER36> > XMPP, IRC

I actually think these guys are interesting exceptions. Yes, they are still around, but they've largely been eclipsed by proprietary solutions. Why? Why did Twitter storm to success XMPP was ostensibly the same thing but with all of these good qualities (open, federated, decentralised, etc.). Still to this day messaging is a battleground for new entrants touting completely opaque solutions. It seems like there's something more to success than just being open, federated and decentralised.

<comment><USER35> XMPP is one of those things that billions of people use without knowing it. Facebook Chat and GChat for a long time (and maybe still now) were actually just branded XMPP solutions - Facebook (annoyingly) shut off federation, keeping in the spirit of their walled garden approach, but GChat still interoperates with other XMPP servers if I'm not mistaken.

Edit: GTalk shut off federation for XMPP extensions like multi-user chat and Jingle (Voice-Over-IP).

As for IRC - yes it has been largely eclipsed by proprietary solutions. I chalk this up to the lack of a compelling, truly simple web front-end for it. For instance, Slack seems to imitate a lot of the feature of IRC - it would be easy enough for it to just _be_ IRC underneath, and maybe it is. But as far as I know nobody ever wrote a true web client for IRC that was compelling enough for the mainstream.

<comment><USER37> Internally it's not xmpp, but instead an xmpp facing compatibility layer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'm pretty firm in my belief that one of the great marketing moves of the 21st century is convincing people that email is not a social network. It's almost on par with making people believe that diamonds are romantic and a necessary part of the marriage ritual.

I think this has been helped by the general lack of innovation in the email space. From pretty basic mail, we ended up with a few (very surprisingly few) email clients and very little advancement on the original theme outside of html formatting and huge inboxes.

Lots of people dump on Microsoft, but one of the huge upsides of exchange is the tight integration of mail and calendar. From a conversation you can immediately schedule actions. Invites are even sent out over SMTP if I'm not mistaken. Getting a calendar to integrate well with gmail was one of the major accomplishments of web-based email, yet it seems like repeating this anywhere else is an accomplishment comparable to discovering cold fusion.

There's also been pitifully little work done in improving the experience of managing email and calendar servers. Managing spam is still a tremendous problem and all this adds up to most places, if they aren't using Exchange, just buying corporate Outlook.com or gmail accounts for their employees.

The problem of course is that for any serious advancement to really work, everybody (both client and server) have to move to support the advancement.

But one lesson to be learned from Facebook and G+ is that email _can_ be replaced by an easier to use and friendlier system. There's a possibility of disruption, but it's obviously not in anybody's particular interest to keep reinventing email+otherstuff in this kind of highly centralized way. If Facebook goes down, there goes a huge chunk of the global communication system. At least with email I can be pretty sure my message is going to arrive at the destination at some point.

Another lesson to be learned is that social networks like Facebook are actually just a combination and integration of two (or three) common things that used to be all over the web: a personal website and email. You get a profile (which does a good enough approximation of the personal homepages of the web 1.0 days but actually a bit more like ) and people can message you (and more recently IM you). Basically a global presence you don't have to put much effort into to manage and a way to contact you. More importantly Facebook offers you various levels of control over who can see your presence and who can message you. Spam is _almost_ unknown in Facebook's version of email.

So when I see distributed social network efforts like Diaspora, and all this talk of authentication and protocols and whatnot I wonder why we're not really using and extending the distributed infrastructure we already have. Even if we improve it in some way that makes it no longer work with the old email network, it won't be the first time a better internet service replaced a previous one (WWW replaced gopher for example) -- there's no reason two competing distributed messaging services can't run in parallel.

<comment><USER39> I'm convinced that Facebook took over messaging because it has one killer feature the 90s didn't: real names.

Contact points on Facebook are discoverable by real name based on the social graph, which is kind of a first in the history of communication. If someone mentions a John Doe in conversation, I can get in contact with the correct John Doe with a very high probability of success and no effort.

The PSTN, email, AIM, ICQ, MSN, etc. didn't offer that. They _could_ have, but their communities developed with different norms. Facebook managed to get people to use their actual identities. That's a remarkable feat - not even Google could replicate it. But it's what made Facebook so useful and so addictive - it's about the actual lives of people I actually know.

Facebook does contain an analogue of "Web 1.0" personal webpages, but the action on Facebook is centered on the News Feed, which was sort of a new class of thing. Few people actually have profile information filled out; going to someone's Facebook page is just a way of filtering the News Feed to only content related to that person.

The real "Web 1.0" equivalent to Facebook would have been an RSS reader for all your friends' blogs. But for people to be comfortable blogging, they had to be able to (feel like they were) in control of their audience. Though Blogger, Wordpress, etc. supported user authentication, it would have been incredibly onerous compared to centralized identity. Which is more or less what Facebook became.

A truly open, distributed Facebook based on the "Web 1.0" would probably have looked something like an RSS reader that could authenticate to each friend's blog with OpenID. But it still would have lacked the ability to discover and search for people by real name that makes Facebook so useful.

<comment><USER40> And yet Snapchat took over messaging by reverting back to arbitrary usernames, AOL styles.

<comment><USER39> Snapchat bootstraps its social graph on top of the already-existing social graph of "people who have each other's cell phone numbers." Actually learning and typing in people's Snapchat usernames is possible but not common.

Exchanging phone numbers is already integrated into the social fabric of our society as a step in escalating a friendship or asking for / receiving the opportunity to date someone. It's a somewhat intimate act, and appropriate for a communication mechanism that's basically only used between people who are already friends.

Snapchat doesn't have the ability to discover acquaintances / friends-of- friends nearly as easily as Facebook does.

I also wouldn't say it "took over messaging." People don't really have actual conversations on Snapchat, they send photos of themselves making weird faces or Twitter-style status updates. New class of thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I think the main thing keeping email as the baseline for communication on the internet is it's cost. There has been no other service that can provide such a varied yet simple medium of communication - text, images, video attachments with history and an audit-able trail - for free.

The closest that anyone has come have been the big social providers with messaging applications which mimic email in many respects. Even then, they are copying the email model with a branded version - not replacing it.

It will take an entirely new and different protocol that simplifies communication with the same or better capability scope to displace email.

</comment><comment><USER42> Slack is obviously not killing emails as they are advertising through lot of PR. They have 150K active users so far. However one thing that they are correctly going after is fantastic search abilities for our own data that would include all emails, chat, attachments etc. My feeling is that eventually _communication client_ that excels in search would indeed surface to the top. This _client_ would then drive communication standards of the future, including emails. So in essence, problem is not integration of desperate sources of communication, but ability to search them efficiently.

</comment><comment><USER43> Webmail was the first and continues to be the most successful implementation of cloud. Ever.

I don't see cloud designs of now working on top of standards like email does. No wonder data tends to get stuck in silos these days.

</comment><comment><USER44> Email and WWW provide everything proprietary services are providing people now, but with less flash. The problem is that so many people are moving to these proprietary services that it becomes very difficult to organize and communicate people without making that move. I needed to coordinate with multiple people, and one of them emailed me that we should start a group chat on Facebook; why not just cc them?

</comment><comment><USER45> I tend to disagree. To me the WWW is the best thing on the internet.

But I do use the heck out of email ever since I quit all social networks a couple of years ago.

</comment><comment><USER46> I somewhat disagree with the background data this article cites as reasons for why everyone wants email dead. I do not believe people like Slack, Asana, et. al. are trying to kill email, rather, I believe they are trying to offer services that help to reduce email's dominance over communications.

One thing that email does not provide for anyone is choice. The barrier to entry is running your own IMAP, SMTP, and possibly spam blocker servers, which almost no one wants to or even knows how to do anymore. It's also somewhat inefficient for conversations, just like regular snail mail is inefficient for conversations. You mail letters, not one-line replies.

So I tend to think of IMs, chat rooms, and other methods of communication on the Internet as simply compliments to email, not replacements for it. Nothing will replace it, because nothing needs to. It's email.

(sidenote: I'm pretty sure one big reason everyone uses email is because they were given an email account, and didn't have to search out the technology. You don't see people clamoring about the reduced use of Usenet in comparison to forums nowadays. Same can be said for texting, I personally got a phone one day and someone sent me a text message, that's how I started texting. Probably never would have thought getting text messages sent to a phone that I can just talk on would have been a useful enough communications platform to seek out and possibly pay for.)

<comment><USER47> _> You mail letters, not one-line replies._

What stops you to send a one-line reply in email?

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I'll rise to the bait.

[http://incubator.apache.org/wave/](http://incubator.apache.org/wave/) (first from Google, now Apache) was/is a brave try. The main problem with email is the lack of consistent formatting rules which means that it's difficult to keep track of structure.

But hey, it's a massive success. Worse sometimes really is better.

</comment><comment><USER49> Email is still inherently a conversation with a person or people, and that is why it has value.

</comment><comment><USER50> I agree. I think there is more that can be done to enhance it, and make it a more enjoyable tool. Email clients --and I am not talking about third party services a la Mailbox, who rely yet in another server-- are still very primitive.

<comment><USER51> I feel that gmail has held back development of good desktop clients (which is what we really need). My laptop has an almost empty 1TB hard drive yet I need to wait to download an image attachment every time I want to view it. Email should be built around abundant storage, not a dependency on bandwidth.

<comment><USER52> > Email should be built around abundant storage, not a dependency on > bandwidth.

I'm sorry but this doesn't make sense to me. To cache all images you've ever received is sort of antithetical to the whole 'decentralized' nature of email, and the internet in a nutshell. The 'inconvenience' of having to re-download far surpasses the need to store every single trivial little thing on your mail client's cache. A few seconds is worth way more to me than taking up tens of gigs of images on my HD that I will never see again.

<comment><USER51> I disagree. A modern device is almost entirely composed of files downloaded from the internet. The binary for your web browser is just a local cache of an entity that exists in the cloud. You need a local cache because bandwidth and latency are too high to retrieve a new copy every single time you run the program unless you need an update. It seems a pity to not use storage to cache when it is available. Especially considering that to most people bandwidth is much more expensive than storage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> An interesting post on this subject by Aaron Seigo:

[http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2014/07/one-singular-sensation- yo...](http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2014/07/one-singular-sensation-your- email.html)

<comment><USER44> This article is good but it makes some comments that don't seem true to me.

> It's a globally addressable system that does not require any centralized > system, which means it works everywhere and for everyone no matter what > choice in service provider the individual user (or their organization) > makes.

Isn't it the case that nearly all email is routed using DNS? Certainly all of mine is. While there are certainly arguments against centralized addressing systems, the advantage that email has isn't that its addressing system is uncentralized: it's that its addressing system is more libre than proprietary systems.

>These "open social networks" don't pass messages to the end user. They pass messages to servers which the user then consults.

How is this different from email? Most people don't have email addresses at a domain assigned to their normal computer; the vast majority of email is accessed over some internet protocol from a remote server, whether its IMAP, POP3, or HTTP. I've never used Diaspora, so maybe I just don't understand what functionality its missing.

<comment><USER53> There are some designs for decentralization of the DNS. The decentralized nature of e-mail on the higher level still is valuable.

 _> the advantage that email has isn't that its addressing system is uncentralized: it's that its addressing system is more libre than proprietary systems._

I think that the biggest advantages of e-mail are its decentralization + federation based on open protocols. These make e-mail extremely useful despite all of its shortcomings. Consider for example IM services. They multiply like mushrooms these days, yet most of them completely lack federation and therefore are crippled if you look at them globally. You can't communicate with users of other services at all (unless you register there as well which defeats the purpose of decentralization). XMPP attempted to solve it, but unlike e-mail most participants on the IM scene were too selfish to fix the situation, including Google who deserted.

 _> How is this different from email? Most people don't have email addresses at a domain assigned to their normal computer; the vast majority of email is accessed over some internet protocol from a remote server, whether its IMAP, POP3, or HTTP. I've never used Diaspora, so maybe I just don't understand what functionality its missing._

I think his main point is, that in e-mail you can have real push mechanisms in theory. I.e. you send a message and the other participant receives it through the e-mail service. In social networks (even decentralized ones), the delivery of such notifications is delegated to... e-mail. Which shows their intrinsic deficiency. They aren't implementing the full scope of the communication process. I.e. if you envision a better social network, it should be decentralized but also take care of the delivery of the interactions in one coherent experience in order not to rely on other external tools for that.

E-mail isn't fully decentralized most of the time, but it still can be (you can run your own e-mail server). You can run your own Diaspora pod the same way, but like above, it would still delegate notifications to another service.

<comment><USER44> I agree that federation is critical to email's value, but isn't that true of Diaspora as well? Again, I've never used Diaspora, but why is it notifying you through email? Everyone checks their Facebook without needing email notifications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> It's like a phone number or address.

</comment><comment><USER55> Nice article! We totally agree and don't believe in those "we need to replace email with an app" approaches. For example, that's why we build our service StandupMail ([http://standupmail.com](http://standupmail.com)) completly upon emails.

</comment><comment><USER56> It would probably only take one innovation in email, something that Gmail could probably pull off, to make email lovable again.

I really think that if Google could help alleviate people's concerns with email (volume, spam etc), people would be quite happy with email again :)

<comment><USER57> Maybe add a little bit of useful cryptography even. Spam is already fixed by Google, and volume? How could Google fix that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> what if we limit email to 140 characters and make it the ultimate decentralized push notification system?

<comment><USER59> Elevator pitch: "It's like email but for messages"

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Email is important, WWW is all

</comment><comment><USER61> Bitcoin is better IMO.

But I agree that email is a great thing. I hope someone creates a sick email client that turns back the flow from Facebook to the email. I'm fine with Thunderbird + Enigmail, but I don't see the average person using it any time soon (or ever if unchanged).

</comment><comment><USER62> That is, except for kittens.

</comment><comment><USER63> Has anyone got an invite code for the new Email product Sortd.com?

<comment><USER64> I got an invite code from a coworker as I couldn't wait any longer to get in!

I've been using it for two weeks now and I have to say it's a must have app for all Gmail users ... It's has completely changed the way I work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Facebook Messenger will eclipse email. Social network is the perfect spam filter.

<comment><USER66> Doesn't solve the "This order is wrong I need to send email to firstname.lastname@example.com" problem though.

<comment><USER67> I'm actually afraid that the internet is moving to this model, specifically with Facebook. How many times have you seen an ad that, instead of a URL, asks you to go to their Facebook page?

<comment><USER68> > I'm actually afraid that the internet is moving to this model, specifically > with Facebook. How many times have you seen an ad that, instead of a URL, > asks you to go to their Facebook page?

No more often than I used to see the same thing with an AOL Keyword instead of a URL. I don't think the internet is "moving to this model" so much as it is a model which periodically emerges when a particular portal is dominant enough with the commercially-relevant audience, and fades as the dominance of that single portal.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The biggest merger you didn't hear about today - <AUTHOR> http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2013/05/20/the-biggest-merger-you-didnt-hear-about-today/?iid=HP_River <comment><USER2> That was a great post. It's a very valid point that there are things going on in the world which are just as important as - if not for more important than - M&A around Internet media hubs. Seeing even one media site take a refreshingly honest stance like this warms the heart.

This many years after the 'net bubble burst, you'd think we would have gotten beyond this obsession with net media sites. But sadly, no... this reminds me of a year or two ago, when there was a similar situation involving, aaaah, I don't remember, maybe Facebook or something, and around the same time there was a huge enterprise software deal (IBM bought somebody, or something). Net result: The Facebook (or whoever it was) deal was reported everywhere, all over HN, Reddit, etc. The other deal? Crickets...

Whether all of us want to admit it or not, we do participate in something of an echo chamber here, and anything that comes along now and then and helps tear down those walls, even to a small degree, is a Good Thing.

IOW, there's a _much_ bigger world out there than the world of YC, Twilio, Tumblr, Google, Yahoo, Dropbox, AirBnB, Medium, Apple, 37 Signals, Heroku, Square, Twitter, Facebook, Color, etc.

<comment><USER3> The simple fact of the matter is that the (consumer-facing) tech industry is much more sexy than pharma, by virtue of people consciously interacting with tech products on a daily basis. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry these days wants to make a mobile or web app, and it's getting easier for them to do so with each passing year.

In comparison, biotech doesn't have this phenomenon, which makes it a good industry to get into if you know what you're doing.

<comment><USER4> Actually, the ability to make drugs or biologicals is quickly dropping in complexity. Right now, one can design drugs and biologicals on one's workstation. There are production agencies that can make one's design real. The only reason this is not as accessible and known as 3D printing is that the design phase requires much more specialized knowledge. It's not unlike designing one's own circuit board and getting one of the shops to print it for you.

<comment><USER3> > Actually, the ability to make drugs or biologicals is quickly dropping in > complexity. Right now, one can design drugs and biologicals on one's > workstation.

Uh, no you cannot. I have worked on these exact sorts of problems, and we are _nowhere near_ being able to "design drugs and biologicals on one's workstation."

<comment><USER5> Dr. Alexander Shulgin managed to some pretty groundbreaking drug design in his small home laboratory.

Of course it was hardly rigorous, and his analysis of what he made was mostly subjective rather than scientific, but it seems kind of analogous to what a hacker does vs what an engineer does.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure how this is related to the technical issue of not being to just "design" drugs on a computer and have them "printed out."

> in his small home laboratory.

You can certainly work out of a home laboratory, if you so desire. The location is not particularly relevant. But it will definitely cost you a lot more than a laptop and internet would. And even then, what Shulgin did was quite limited by his capital resources.

> it seems kind of analogous to what a hacker does vs what an engineer does.

Don't forget that he already had a PhD in biochemistry from UC Berkeley. If he had just tried to learn like a "hacker," he would have either bankrupted or killed himself (or killed someone else and ended up in jail).

And even then, he got raided by the DEA and fined $25000 (the regulation issue).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm actually on the fence about which merger is more important.

On the one hand, tumblr is a toy[0]. Warner Chilcott, founded in 1968, and having gone through mergers before, is Serious Business.

On the other hand, should we really be upset that toy makers are getting a lot of press? I honestly go back and forth on the issue. True, if I had to pick between the medical products of WC/Actavis vs the blogging platform of tumblr I would probably pick WC, because I think the net happiness for the world is probably better served via their drugs than easy blogging access.

But there is something delightful about an age in which cool toys get recognized, and I think that's important to remember.

Incidentally, does anyone know if mergers like these affect which drugs get offered by a company? I can see the tumblr acquisition having a larger effect on society than the WC/Actavis one if drug companies are less likely to stop producing a drug than tech companies are to shut down a product.

0\. I know a lot of toys turn out to be remarkably useful and transformative. That's part of my point.

<comment><USER7> > Incidentally, does anyone know if mergers like these affect which drugs get > offered by a company?

I think the FTC can (and does) block pharma mergers which severely reduce competition -- they will either block a merger or force spin-offs of certain divisions in an effort to prevent the acquiring company to corner a market on certain drug therapies (e.g., <http://ftc.gov/opa/2009/10/pfizer.shtm>)

Finally, I don't know which acquisition is more "important", but I think the primary reason that the Tumblr acquisition makes news is because it has the feeling of a "lottery win".

Everybody likes this story: 26-year old CEO, a handful of employees. Maybe they worked hard, but they also caught the wave at the right time. Bunch of young people get rich over the course of a few years. *edit: Many people like to believe that they could get lucky and have a similar payday.

That's much more appealing than: company works hard, grows slowly, makes drugs, has setbacks, expands, has more setbacks, gets bought. Middle-aged people then get laid-off so that the acquiring company can squeeze more $$ out of WC's drugs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I feel like we're celebrating whoever can make the most money in the most ridiculous way rather than those who make the most useful thing for society. A lot of kids are growing up with this pathetic and twisted idea of success being... come up with "some stupid internet thing that everyone uses", get money from some rich guys, get advice from other successful guys, grow your stupid internet thing into a business using their money and the hard work of hundreds of employees, be worshiped and become famous. On top of that media and society concentrate worship, idolization, and ass-kissing towards 1 person. It doesn't matter if you came up with the iPad while working at Apple, Steve Jobs will be the one who will be known for it by nearly everyone. Did you redesign Facebook and make hundreds of millions of people rejoice at the new easier layout? No one will know your name, Mark Zuckerberg will be praised. Did you create FarmVille, FishVille, Mafia Wars, Cafe World? Their names will be connected to Mark Pincus, not yours. Not to say that these leaders were lazy, many people have been given hundreds of millions and have wasted it away without having anything to show for it, these founders took the money and trippled it. That takes work & intelligence but it's never done by one person. Yet the success all goes to one person.

It's so shallow and superficial & yet there's no one to blame. It's no one's fault. We can't help we celebrate such primitive things. Especially looking at The Kardashians and Paris Hilton. Usefulness need not apply to this contest. Worth seems to be measured in how many people you can get to follow you. 50 years from now all of will be old and we'll read about how some 9 year old made $75 billion dollars by creating a website were kids under 18 can gossip and rate how lame their parents are. You will sigh. You will laugh. And you'll remember it all started in our generation.

<comment><USER9> I believe it's the novelty of the fact that "some stupid internet thing that everyone uses" was purchased for 1.1 billion that makes it newsworthy. An extremely profitable medical company that very few people come into contact and that makes life saving medicines is purchased for a large amount of money and goes unnoticed and this is somehow surprising? It's the height of pretentiousness to expect that everyone be as interested in the things that you are interested in and to look down on them if they aren't.

<comment><USER8> Valid point. So does it make me an asshole to look down on people who worship Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > So we give readers what they want, even if we don't necessarily think it's > what they should want. It may mean we're no longer elitist. Or, more likely, > it means we're no longer living up to our responsibilities... Sorry.

There's a lot to unpack there, but maybe the most revealing thing is that the paragraph made it through CNN's editorial process.

<comment><USER11> these days, even anti-CNN rhetoric generates pageviews for CNN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's really unfortunate and sometimes unnerving that we live in a time where most people are so caught up in the hype and bullshit of meaningless companies, actions, ideas and people that have no real importance and benefit to our daily lives.

It's even more unfortunate to see the actions of CEOs based on hype, big cash reserves and Silicon Valley VCs begging for an exit. I've been seeing it all day on Twitter: VCs ecstatic about Tumblr's "successful exit", they're done and can now go home and drink champagne.

But the problem is not with Tumblr being a blog full of porn and cat GIFs, running out of money, having 175 employees most of which do little, and making $15M vs. $100M projected revenue. The problem is with the state of the industry as a whole.

The problem is with a company like Yahoo! rushing to get a deal done for a company that would be worth $100M in 6-months when it runs out of money. It just doesn't make sense. But maybe it's not supposed to.

Warner Chilcott is obviously a company that tries to do good and create products to better humanity (for the most part), and I'm not saying that Tumblr is worthless - it isn't - but the madness behind the media, the Yahoo! board meeting on a Sunday to get a deal done before Captain Zuckerberg swoops in (I'm sure he's laughing and could care less) is maddening.

This isn't a rant, it's more of a "what the hell is going on with companies and innovation of substance?" I really enjoy Thiels quote of "we wanted flying cars instead we got 140 characters." It really embodies the state of the industry in one sentence. Every month a new chat application gets a $3M round, another photo sharing app gets all the hype, bang with friends is the "it" app - what happened to people actually trying to solve REAL problems? Problems that will enable us to continue as a society and not implode.

<comment><USER13> _what happened to people actually trying to solve REAL problems?_

What did _you_ work on today?

(EDIT) Less snarky way of putting it: It's not fair to judge others' motivations -- or to say that Tumblr's employees do "nothing" -- especially if (at the very least) you're not tackling big, "real" problems yourself.

<comment><USER12> What did I work on? Well, to answer your question I've been working on solving major problems affecting our society, which include obesity, diabetes, unhealthy lifestyles, poor nutrition and high blood pressure. With that said, it wasn't a snarky comment - it was an analysis of the state of innovation and business in SV in general. I'm tackling big problems. And I wish more people would do the same. We have a lot of challenges to solve.

<comment><USER14> Could you elaborate in detail how you are tackling significant problems like obesity, diabetes etc.? I'm genuinely interested in your work.

<comment><USER12> Probably not the right place (or thread) to elaborate in detail on a handful of complex health problems that my team and I are working on. But with regards to obesity, for example, we're looking at hardware and software applications to gather, analyze and make sense of quite a bit of physiological, social, and genomic data. It starts with the basics really, and most people simply have a hard time executing them: exercise, proper nutrition, healthy sleep, etc. So the goals are to make sense of a ton of data, using existing and new sensors, and use software to enable preventive medicine.

Obviously, there's a lot more to it than this, but medicine and technology are two really exciting areas people should be starting companies in. Pushing the envelope, asking questions and trying to solve problems. Nothing wrong with the occasional social app or service having a big exit or becoming a major player, but that gives people a lot of incentive (and false sense of hope) to try and make another IG or the 15th chat app. It's amazing what a dozen great coders, thinkers and innovators from "Photo App A" could do, if they were focusing on bigger problems. And it doesn't begin or end with healthcare, you have energy, hunger, disease, and a dozen other real issues. But I digress.

<comment> guard-of-terra What's in for people who don't have diabetes or obesity? I don't but I read some tumblr.

Futuremore, if you could just develop a pill that makes you fix your weight instantaneously and forever, that would be great; but data gathering will only help people willing to help themself. And most of the world doesn't have such big problems with obesity anyway, while they still like cat pictures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Dan Primack, the author of this article, has a daily (M-F) business newsletter called the _Term Sheet_ which is highly worth subscribing to. It does a great job -- as this article does -- of getting outside of the traditional SV VC bubble, focusing on all sorts of coverage from B2B to industrial to even fashion.

<http://money.cnn.com/investing/> (Right sidebar, under 'Newsletters.')

<comment><USER16> Yes it is great. It has a voice, isn't too dry, and gets me slightly out of the usual tech bubble-like posts I read elsewhere. Plus he often posts reader comments, which are critical and dissenting views of his own posts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I was expecting this post to be about Glencore merging with Xtrata [1]. Although in news for over a year, the merger was completed earlier this month.

It is important for the fact that this merger creates the largest commodities trading entity and the fourth largest mining company on the planet.

[1] wsj: <http://goo.gl/UOaN2>

[2] wiki: <http://goo.gl/faWrJ>

<comment><USER18> Glencore and Xstrata are so incredibly far from the consumer mind that it's hard to explain.

Yet the impact of that merger? Ultimately, very large.

But it's difficult to make a story out of it. No photogenic women are making instant billionaires out of photogenic high school dropouts. The narrative is dull. Two companies, one which digs and one which deals, have decided zzzzZZzz

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Tumblr's 2012 Revenue was only $13 million? How can they afford 175 employees, a building, infrastructure, etc on $13 million and ~$125 million in seed? I may just have an issue with frugality I suppose.

<comment><USER20> In case you haven't heard, having revenue is no longer cool. Having a huge user base on a service that isn't self sustaining is - and people will pay big bucks for those companies!

<comment><USER19> I suppose this is because there are two outcomes for these huge user bases like instagram and twitter.

1) Get bought by a larger company that can use add your user base to their total user base

2) Start advertising intrusively and hope that you can make enough before your service is no longer favorable

Instagram comes to mind for #1. I'm thinking Twitter will go with #2 when investors get sick of no returns year after year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The reasons listed are pretty silly and jaded. The reason the Tumblr acquisition is bigger news is simple: it's a big player in a fast growing economic sector. As big as both Warner Chilcott and Actavis are, their industry is mature. The Warner Chilcott acquisition is unlikely to shake things up. Tumblr is one of the "not facebook" players in social that's gotten a lot of mind share. If and how they can turn that mind share into revenue is important to the sector (and the market).

<comment><USER15> You didn't refute anything in the article. You're saying you think the Tumblr acquisition gets more attention because it has a lot of mindshare (which is circular logic) and because internet content is a faster growing market than pharmaceuticals (which I have no way of knowing whether or not that's true, but its not as if Primack is arguing the opposite.)

<comment><USER22> Bah. How much coverage do we get for, say, some random has-been celebrity's drunken arrest versus wars that cost a lot more than $11B?

What the media chooses to cover (and what consumers choose to read, since we no longer have the limited-sources excuse) has pretty much nothing to do with the actual big-picture importance of the events.

<comment><USER3> That's _exactly_ the point the article is making and trying to correct.

<comment><USER12> People have lost touch with reality a LONG time ago.

They do not care about health (America is the fattest, unhealthiest country on the planet), they don't care about science & technology (Tumblr, IG, FB, reality TV, TMZ, etc. dominate the news/app/entertainment spectrum and bring little to no value), they care about GIFs, cats, Kim Kardashian and other brain dead agenda.

It's very unfortunate but that's the way it is. People could care less about Warner Chilcott. They care about stupidity.

Companies like IG, Tumblr, and others are smart because they seem to employ the "if you can't beat em, join 'em" logic.

<comment><USER23> > People could care less about Warner Chilcott

Couldn't. "People couldn't care less ..."

<comment><USER24> Actually, "I could care less" is a transplanted idiom (from Yiddish), and is correct. It implies "... but that would be too much work." It is an Americanism, though, and is not generally understood outside of the lingering cultural influences of the "borscht belt".

English -- any natural language that's progressed beyond early creole, for that matter -- is not, and should not be treated like, a completely self- consistent system of formal logic. "Me" (or other "object" pronouns) in a compound subject is correct, as are double negatives, split infinitives (English doesn't actually _have_ an infinitive, it has a form of phrase that occupies the function of one), and so forth. The prescriptivist dictates of Lowth, Murray and Cobbett are an artificial imposition on language that rejects them at every turn. It's time to use the _real_ grammar of the language, rather than trying to structure English on some formal (and, it would seem, rarely spoken) version of Latin or Greek.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for that, I always felt the same way even though "couldn't care less" seems to be the more grammatically correct version.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I don't think they're totally in the wrong reporting on on tumblr. The purchase of Tumblr by Yahoo is far more relevant to the majority of readers than Warner Chilcott. We use and interact with Tumblr, know about it's features, and understand the history of the new owner. This isn't just a story about a big number.

<comment><USER2> _The purchase of Tumblr by Yahoo is far more relevant to the majority of readers than Warner Chilcott._

I agree that the Tumblr news at least _seems_ more important to a lot of people, and I'll add that perception is not always reality. Just because we've all _heard of_ Tumblr and maybe even _use_ Tumblr, doesn't actually mean that Tumblr is particularly _important_.

<comment> guard-of-terra But isn't medical topics even less relevant for me today?

I'm 28, so if everything goes right I have 20 to 30 years before I'll need any kind of life saving from medicine. And in 20-30 years the landscape might be very different, so for me medical topics are not of any importance at all.

Unless they let me to grow hair or teeth; or customise my body and mind.

<comment><USER12> WRONG. Medical topics are more relevant for you today than have ever been before. The best medicine is preventative medicine and if you start a proactive approach now, you'll live longer. Not by waiting until you get a disease and then trying to figure out how to cure it using the latest technology. You could have a genetic mutation in the next five minutes, the more you know, the better prepared and proactive you'll be.

Healthcare has never been more important than it is today for all walks of life.

I'm sorry, but that was one of the most mind-blowing comments I've read on HN.

<comment> guard-of-terra But I really don't want to spend any time today on using medical devices (that's the acquired company does, right?)

The probability of me having a genetic mutation is low given no family history.

I don't see the point of being old for so long it takes half of your life. I want to live my life and then be done with it at the age of 70, perhaps? Unless they find a way to make youth longer. Not even middle age - youth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Yahoo and Tumblr get more press because they are mass market companies and journalists are in the mass market.

Basically, it's availability bias.

I whined and moaned about it here: <http://chester.id.au/2013/01/05/on- selling-to-consumers/>

</comment><comment><USER26> >It's easier for most of _us_ to understand what Tumblr makes than what Warner Chilcott makes.

I would argue that statement since he says Tumblr is a "blogging platform" and "the latest/greatest means for teens to express themselves". Tumblr is more nuanced than that. It's also a social network and to relegate it to teens seems very out of touch.

To me, it's much easier understand what a pharmaceutical company makes (drugs, a physical product) than what Tumblr makes (blog/social network/place for online advertising/???).

</comment><comment><USER27> One important detail to remember is that Facebook, Tumblr, Yahoo, Google, etc are not in the search/blogging/social media industry. That's all a smokescreen. People who follow the money and value chain see past the porn and cat GIFs and consider these companies to be in the advertising industry. The average EV/EBITDA ratio for the conventional advertising industry is 7.77 (src: [http://people.stern.nyu.edu/adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/...](http://people.stern.nyu.edu/adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/vebitda.html) ), while Warner Chilcott's is 2.94 (src: [http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Warner_Chilcott_(WCRX)/Data/E...](http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Warner_Chilcott_\(WCRX\)/Data/EV:EBITDA) ). This implies that the market (in general) gives a higher valuation multiplier for advertising companies than this healthcare company. Then again, Facebook's EV/EBITDA ratio is 49.8 (src: <http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Facebook/Data> ), which makes one wonder: what makes these high-tech mobile advertising companies more valuable than TV/print ads?

<comment><USER28> Obvious answer, but targeting is much more effective for online companies, and success is much easier to measure. An online advertising company can give much better, more quantifiable ROI by targeting specific users more likely to convert: in Google's case, it's largely due to the desire to click inherent in search, whereas in Facebook's case it's through deep demographic information. They can also directly measure the effect an advertisement has, by measuring click throughs, etc. Compared to the much more nebulous effects of TV/print ads, this can be highly appealing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Only in the spirit of media taking a shot at itself, which I think we can all respect, I think the paradigm of the article can be applied to any type of news story. For example, 14,612 people were murdered in the US in 2011, but how many of those stories were ever heard on national 24 hour news channels, such as CNN? Perhaps a handful through the course of the year which the media focuses in on and exploits to their own financial gain, and the majority of those stories involve attractive white women.

It is hard to beat up one anyone openly critiquing themselves, but this could have had much greater impact by examining media behavior vis-a-vis a controversial issue not unequal treatment of two otherwise non-controversial mergers.

</comment><comment><USER30> Well, but then there is also IMS Health buying 360Vantage. Still software, but in life sciences.

There is a lot going on outside the HN bubble, but this is ok, some markets are simply more closed off to outsiders. Life sciences software is not particularly open, a lot of vertical players in there now and "verticalness" is increasing.

HNers will likely completely miss that boat, but again, this doesn't mean anything there are enough other things happening and bigger fish to fry.

</comment><comment><USER31> This was refreshingly honest.

</comment><comment><USER32> It might be better for companies not to have such press about their mergers or at least I don't see how it is any advantage for the short term blip media coverage of these kind of events provide. And if you are a value investor, having less noise around the price of a share due to short term media coverage of big events might be an advantage as well.

</comment><comment><USER33> From an investment standpoint the Tumblr acquisition was far more interesting, because it represents a much bigger gamble. Sure, the numbers are relatively small now. But Tumblr is one of those companies that could end up dominating its market segment withing just a couple years. Or (more likely) it could become irrelevant and quietly closed.

<comment><USER34> A blogging platform seems like a perfect example of a commoditized software product. Buying these "audiences" never seem to work very well...

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> As a reader I'd usually would like to see what I _should_ want. Then I get some value.

Unfortunately, what I _should_ want according to others is generally "news that'll make them richers", while I think I just want neutral information ;-)

And that's why today what I see is tumblr/yahoo merger stuff everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER36> _> So why are we media folk so obsessed with the acquisition of a low-revenue blogging platform and so dismissive of an $11 billion combined revenue drug- maker? Four basic reasons:_

Where's the "It'll get us pageviews!!!!" motive?

<comment><USER37> The fourth point is specifically about them chasing pageviews: "4. We largely cater to people who spend part of their day on the web, consuming content. Not surprisingly, those people tend to have a particular interest in things that involve the web and web content. It's a huge built-in audience, and we reporters know that our bread is ultimately buttered by pageviews."

<comment><USER36> imo that's a really masked way of presenting things, since it turns "we're doing this for our bottom line!" into "we're doing it for you guys!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Tumblr's a consumer-facing media property. That's why it gets more press. More people know about it and directly use their product. (Same with Yahoo!.)

</comment><comment><USER39> So, where's the article actually about Actavis?

<comment><USER40> It's a self-referential link, as stated in the article.

"And, to be clear, we here at Fortune are certainly part of the editorial imbalance. So far this site has already published three posts about Yahoo's (YHOO) purchase of Tumblr, and none about Actavis buying Warner Chilcott (save for this one)."

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> My problem is that I do not know who the hell is Warner Chilcott neither Actavis. Probably that's the case for a lot of us.

</comment><comment><USER42> If you want to read about M&A. Pick up a copy of The Financial Times or The Wall Street Journal.

</comment><comment><USER43> Now that I've heard about it, I feel like I've been lied to.

</comment><comment><USER44> The drug merger is uninteresting since as two slowish-growing public companies, the value of each are known and after some straightforward cost- cutting it will be business as usual. Yawn.

<comment><USER2> The Tumblr merger is uninteresting, as two sluggish and unexciting tech companies merging usually results in one even bigger and more sluggish tech company. After some straightforward cost cutting it will be business as usual. Yawn.

<comment><USER44> Unable to downvote. This post is dumb. Tumblr is far from sluggish. Tumblr likely will really operate fairly independently. There won't be any cost- cutting..probably the opposite.

<comment> qu4z-2 There's a reason you don't have downvote :)

<comment><USER44> Are authors unable to downvote replies? That reply definitely deserved downvoting more than my comment.

<comment> qu4z-2 Well, be that as it may, you're probably not very impartial in this matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> That's the old rule in investing that things which bring really handsome profits down the line are not this much in the public interest.

When I was telling people back in 2007 I'm buying gold and silver they thought I'm crazy. It was waaay to expensive at $600usd and $10 usd respectively.

Since then I just heard that gold and silver are "a bubble". Literally, like for past 6 years my family, my coworkers, the media, you name it - treat this investment type with the highest dose of suspicion. While their "investments" (a.k.a. house - a place to live not an investment really) - went bad.

It's funny how the markets work.

The genuine growth stocks/assets will be the ones that don't bring too much of the media attention and the ones that "climb wall of worry".

Gold mining cost is currenly above the price of gold. A bubble?

Tumblr P/E (price to earning ratio) is 1:100. And any investor worth his buck knows that anything above 1:15 (some say 1:10 in bad market conditions like we have nowadays) is too expensive.

And still everybody wants to buy it, media reports on it all the time, and overnight everybody and their uncle knows who Mr. David Karp is. That's how you spot a bubble. Or at least seriously overvalued asset. And assets are to be bought on cheap and sold expensive not the other way around.

<comment><USER46> _Gold mining cost is currenly above the price of gold. A bubble?_

Where did you get this info?

<comment><USER45> From:

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-17/gold-miners- lose-16...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-17/gold-miners- lose-169-billion-as-price-slump-compounds-etf-pain.html)

Quote: "Gold producers, ignored as global stocks rebounded in the past two years and investors turned to exchange-traded funds that track bullion, face closing mines or shutting themselves down after the metal's worst slump in three decades this week made 15 percent of miners unprofitable."

I also read that the biggest gold mine in the world in South Africa (70% world production) is not profitable at these prices.

But you'd need to google for that information yourself.

Also, I'll add another point. The definition of bubble is that nobody knows that's a bubble. Everybody will think and tell you it's a genuine investment, actually the best investment going on at the moment. That's why one way of making sure you're not investing in overvalued assets is to ask your cab driver if he invests (or would like to invest) in that asset. Now, evey cab driver who drives me stays away from gold because it's a "bubble". But in the day they would all just love to buy Facebook.

So media says gold is in bubble. All my friends do. My family does. You check the stats - the price merely covers or doesn't cover mining cost - that's your "wall of worry" factor - now you buy.

Don't get me wrong gold will be a bubble. But that's in distant future. That's when I'll be selling. (if im right)

<comment><USER46> Thanks. Very useful stuff, the site looks good too. I have all my savings in a bank account because I have no idea what to do with them. One day I would like to invest part of it, but you know, you need to understand a bit what you are doing there.

<comment><USER45> Actually, investing can be absolutely fascinating stuff and learning can eat plenty of your time. There are many schools of economics and different people will tell you different things, sometimes on opposite sides of an argument, all can be very interesting.

Try finding some videos of Peter Schiff, Marc Faber, Jim Rogers, Kyle Bass on youtube. Or read them. They are all in favor of gold, hard assets. Now, there are plenty of others strongly disagreeing with them who are very interesting to listen as well.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykT3z2qy1LI></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do I start a teleportation startup? - <AUTHOR> 1. What does the MVP and/or V1 look like? 2. What subjects/research to follow/study?
A few design liberations: it can be pseudo-teleportation (eg travelling consciousness at near the speed of light is allowed) not just real teleportation (no travelling)
Have a good Friday :) <comment><USER2> Step 1. Invent teleportation device that actually works.

<comment><USER3> Step 3. Profit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This should've been on reddit.

</comment><comment><USER5> Watch Jetsons!</comment>


WeWork says it found cancer-causing chemical in its phone booths - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-wework-booths-formaldehyde/in-new-headache-wework-says-it-found-cancer-causing-chemical-in-its-phone-booths-idUSKBN1WT2H4 <comment><USER2> Matt Levine today:

"I don't understand what is happening here. Did WeWork founder Adam Neumann disturb a mummy and trigger an ancient curse? Was a WeWork built on a haunted graveyard, unleashing powerful dark energies and also elevated levels of formaldehyde? How do you have such a relentless parade of negative financial news and then find out that your phone booths cause cancer? "Our phone booths might cause cancer" was not an IPO risk factor.[1] Nobody had "phone booths cause cancer" on their WeWork Disaster Bingo cards."

</comment><comment><USER3> formaldehyde is, incidentally, my absolute least favorite chemical to work with.

Formailin (37% formaldehyde solution) is still used for tissue preservation and it absolutely _reeks_ to high heaven. The stink clings to my clothes, too. A good respirator helps, but it can only do so much.

Normally you have to have a few sulfoxide bonds in things to make them epically stinky, but formaldehyde finds a way to do without and still offend.

</comment><comment><USER4> Isn't formaldehyde used in basically every composite wood product (plywood, MDF, particleboard, etc)? Confined spaces with lots of new composite wood (see RV's, boats, trailers, temporary classrooms) always stink for quite some time until the offgassing subsides.

<comment><USER5> Yup! The phone booths don't have adequate ventilation, so fumes build up inside of them. It's very surprising that the phone booth manufacturers didn't consider this.</comment></comment>


AWS DNS services break qname minimization - <AUTHOR> https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=269116 <comment><USER3> AWS Engineer here. I haven't worked directly on Route 53 in a few years, but I wrote most of the DNS answering logic back when we built Route 53. Route 53 is a so-called "child centric" DNS server, in that it considers the child zone to be fully-authoritative for its own NS records. That's why the name servers for a parent zone reply with a referral, rather than in the answer, because from their perspective, they don't really "know" the answer. The proper thing a resolver should do is follow the referral and ask the child name servers.

I don't think that's in violation of what the DNS RFCs specify (though the older DNS RFCs are not great at being specific), and I remember making the decision based on what would work best, and be least likely to poison resolvers, in the event of domains being moved between customers, providers, or across accounts for some reason. Setting up the child name servers to say "have moved here ..." can speed those processes up.

I'm sure the Route 53 team will look at this and make whatever change is best, but I also strongly suspect that QNAME minimization may rest on under- specified or un-specified ideas about what authoritative name servers should do. I'd have it follow referrals if it doesn't already.

In any event, I think what's going in this case is more subtle but simpler, basically "ws.fdmg.org." isn't occluding "prod.ws.fdmg.org" when it should, but that takes a very convoluted edge-case set up involving two over-lapping delegations from the same parent zone.

<comment><USER4> > Route 53 is a so-called "child centric" DNS server, in that it considers the > child zone to be fully-authoritative for its own NS records. That's why the > name servers for a parent zone reply with a referral, rather than in the > answer, because from their perspective, they don't really "know" the answer. > The proper thing a resolver should do is follow the referral and ask the > child name servers.

> I don't think that's in violation of what the DNS RFCs specify

Agreed, and in fact it's pretty easy to see that the root and .org name servers behave exactly like Route 53 in this regard.

> In any event, I think what's going in this case is more subtle but simpler, > basically "ws.fdmg.org." isn't occluding "prod.ws.fdmg.org" when it should, > but that takes a very convoluted edge-case set up involving two over-lapping > delegations from the same parent zone.

Yes, that appears to be what is happening, and it breaks regular DNS resolution, not just QNAME minimization. If your DNS resolver has the NS records for ws.fdmg.org cached because you previously looked up a ws.fdmg.org hostname, you won't be able to resolve any prod.ws.fdmg.org hostnames, because your resolver will send the queries to the name servers for ws.fdmg.org. I don't know if this is a Route 53 bug or if the customer misconfigured their zones, but if the latter it would be nice if Route 53 could stop people from shooting themselves in the foot this way. To reiterate, this breaks regular DNS resolution, not just QNAME minimization.

That said, Route 53 improperly returns NXDOMAIN for empty non-terminals, which does break QNAME minimization (and violates RFC8020). For a proper example, see opsmate0._domainkey.sslmate.com and _domainkey.sslmate.com.

<comment><USER3> RFC8020 is an example of the DNS WG making backwards incompatible changes. The "NXDOMAIN" for an empty non-terminal has long been the behavior in DJB's TinyDNS.

That isn't what Route 53 is using, but I bring it up because there have been mailing list threads (or flames?) where folks complained about what DJB's software is doing, and he repeatedly asked "Show me where in the standards this is is specified or forbidden?" and no-one would come up with the goods, but folks still basically wanted "Just do what bind does".

Here's DJB's own mail about it, I had to forward it because his mails don't get through to the mailing list for some reason (that might be the fault of his own stupid qsecretary moderation system): [https://www.ietf.org/mail- archive/web/dnsext/current/msg1108...](https://www.ietf.org/mail- archive/web/dnsext/current/msg11084.html)

I generally sympathize with DJB in this case, because DNS really needs some robust and competing implementations. The standards should be tolerant of differences in behavior (as others are), rather than dominated by the proponents of one implementation. It doesn't help that the WG is toxic, at least in my opinion as someone who has been reading it (and mostly just reading) for over a decade. Anyway, I'm not trying to start an argument, just explain. In this case, the bind proponents did dominate, and we get RFC8020, which for some software is a backwards incompatible change.

This isn't the first backwards-incompatible change either. The invention of DNAME introduced a new kind of backwards-incompatible occlusion, and name servers "before" and "after" DNAME respond in different ways, for the same zone file.

Those kinds of changes place providers in a pickle: one of our golden rules is never to make backward incompatible changes or break anything that was working. A promise is a promise. So it means we have to lock things down (the previous paragraph is the reason Route 53 does not accept arbitrary literally- encoded RRs) and when changes come; either not make those changes, or exhaustively audit and determine how many zones, queries it might impact and whether that would change anything. At scale, you'd be amazed how small and subtle behaviors can end up being embedded as assumptions in customer scripts and so on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Heh, this is a fairly easy mistake to make when implementing a DNS server. I'm the person that had to fix this very same bug (and possibly introduced it) for a certain class of domains in the Cloudflare DNS server. "Empty non-terminal" still has an emotional reaction attached to it. :)

Also, pretending all NXDOMAINs are actually empty non-terminals is a backwards compatible hack to compress DNSSEC responses [https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-valsorda-dnsop-black- lies-...](https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-valsorda-dnsop-black-lies-00)

</comment><comment><USER6> Just to clarify, the qname minimization is a privacy technique used during recursion to only disclose what's absolutely necessary.

Traditionally if you're querying www.google.com, you'll:

1\. ask root name servers for www.google.com and get list of com name servers 2\. ask com name servers for www.google.com and get list of google name servers 3\. ask google name servers for www.google.com and get the response

With qname minimization you would:

1\. ask root name servers for com TLD and get list of com name servers 2\. ask com name servers for google.com and get list of google name servers 3\. ask google name servers for www.google.com and get the response

The AWS DNS servers don't strictly follow rfc and don't provide correct responses in specific cases

</comment><comment><USER7> I had honestly never heard of the term qname minimisation before, but this blog post gives a pretty clear explanation of the benefits and issues

[https://blog.verisign.com/security/minimum-disclosure- what-i...](https://blog.verisign.com/security/minimum-disclosure-what- information-does-a-name-server-need-to-do-its-job/)

<comment><USER8> See also ("experimental") RFC7816 [0] for all the gory details.

[0]: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7816](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7816)

<comment><USER9> well I'm not sure if it's sane to implement this rfc. it's experimental since march 2016. and I do not think that privacy should be a concern when resolving... I mean what is private about the dns system itself?!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Try counting number of DNS queries for all lookups every day. The software I wrote for myself does this and I can attest that sites using AWS nameservers in almost all cases require more queries than others, including those using similar managed DNS services. The number, which does _not_ include queries to the root can be quite high, e.g., eight. No matter how fast the response times, that delay adds up.

root.zone data is reasonably static. Having a local copy of this data, resolution can be done in two queries: 1. tld ns 2. auth ns, which is the case for many, many www domainnames (the majority, perhaps), or even one query (I think some .mil domains used to be a well-known example). As a user, I view every added query as an additional cost.

It is possible to minimize queries via other means that are under _user_ control and do not rely on third parties.

Running a root locally. Custom stub resolvers with tld ns IPs compiled in. Storing RRs for common nameservers in local zone. Storing DNS data in bulk for important sites that will be revisited, copying to HOSTS and updating the data periodically. I have been using techniques like these for many years. And, it is getting easier every year as more bulk DNS data is available, e.g., internet scans of DNS, TCP DNS services that accept pipelined queries, etc. (If I am not mistaken, the author of the "qname minimisation" draft also was the one with the "DNS looking glass" idea.)

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dnsop-qname- minimisat...](https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dnsop-qname-minimisation)

Despite usual mailing list/forum comment/blog memes and mantras, if one surveys _all_ websites (not just popular ones), DNS data is mostly static. That provides great opportunities for speedups by avoiding querying ICANN DNS for the same data 24/7/365\. Cue Schopenhauer quote about truth. Someday maybe we will see an internet draft about "DNS minimization" for _users_.

Did AWS forums start requiring an account for read access?

<comment><USER11> > Did AWS forums start requiring an account for read access?

No but if you timed out from a session with your account through the console, you might see something about not being signed in. Clicking the "log out" button (or hosing cookies) should rectify it.

<comment><USER10> I do not have an AWS account.

The reason I asked is because forums.aws.amazon.com redirects to signin.aws.amazon.com, and generates some faked up OAuth credentials.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> AWS DNS is all kinds of fucked. They have implemented a range of undocumented rate limits both to their own DNS server and to external (!) DNS, presumably to reduce amplification attacks. These things have hobbled our services many times, which rely on making thousands of DNS queries per second.

<comment><USER13> I'm curious about your architecture. What requires you to make thousands of DNS queries per second against Route 53?

<comment><USER9> if you have thousands of services and use route53 as your internal dns service and use it for service discovery, this could be a problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Tangentially related, DNS quirks show up in lots of places.

For example, FB's graph API doesn't work with FQDN:

      * https://graph.facebook.com./v2.8 - returns 500
      * https://graph.facebook.com/v2.8 - <USER2>

(I filed a bug for this, but it was closed as "working as designed").</comment>


Are Negative Twitter Messages Contagious? - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2013/04/26/negative-twitter-messages/

<comment><USER2> This study needs further studies for it to be accepted. Remember that human emotion is not easy to determine since all of us have different motives, different personalities and different perspectives. How much more when we study a certain behavior in social media. True that there are various metrics and analytic to show a consistency of result, however this result will often change in due time since social media such as Twitter and Facebook are quite dynamic.</comment>