Three Things I Love About C - <AUTHOR> http://sigtrap.wordpress.com/2010/05/12/three-things-i-love-about-c/

<comment><USER2> So, let me get this straight: he likes two things that aren't really a part of the C language (inline asm and the preprocessor), and gives a terrible example of using pointers to justify how great they are? Well, I'm convinced. :P

To put it in a less snarky way, sure, inline asm is great, but it's just a compiler-dependent extension. Also, there are plenty of non-C language compilers that implement it.

The preprocessor, OTOH, is somewhat more of a necessary evil when dealing with C. Beyond giving symbolic names to constants without having to actually allocate memory for them, the only real, good use I can think of for it is conditional compilation (which, granted, is a pretty good use). Oh, and, as devinj points out, the preprocessor has nothing really to do with C.

Pointers, I'll admit, are a great feature, but did he really have to give such a lousy example? It was kind of like Fire Marshal Bill telling me how cool propane torches are, but without the funny.

</comment><comment><USER3> Macros are better because of _performance_? That's premature optimization if I ever saw it. OS-specific configuration / function definition is not going to be the performance bottleneck on pretty much any app I've seen. Maybe if you're writing a CGI program where it's run many times and has to do this setup each time, but then CGI is dead for a reason. Macros have plenty of problems that result in weird edge-case behavior, and I'd really rather not have them.

Oh, and finally, they aren't unique to C. You can use the macro preprocessor on any source code you like.</comment>


Is Obama's "Are You In?" app a bad marketing move? - <AUTHOR> http://jason77700.blogspot.com/2011/04/is-obamas-are-you-in-campaign-bad.html

<comment><USER2> The interesting part is at the end, when he talks about people being willing to "like" on Facebook, but perhaps not as willing to take the time to install an app.

It's a possibility worth considering as the concept of a Facebook app loses more and more traction.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just wait till Obama opens the floodgates on his marketing budget. I expect the app will pick up speed really quickly.</comment>


Care to beta test Sketchwrite? Feedback wanted - <AUTHOR> https://sketchwrite.com

<comment><USER2> Looks like you need to turn off development mode for your Facebook app: [https://www.dropbox.com/s/6w9xis7qx3tm33f/Screenshot%202015-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/6w9xis7qx3tm33f/Screenshot%202015-04-16%2017.11.32.png?dl=0)

<comment><AUTHOR> Womp womp... :-/

Thanks for letting me know! Working on that now...

Edit: Should be working now. Thanks again for the catch!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's a short summary if you haven't tried it out yet.

\--

Sketchwrite is a hybrid notepad that combines the free-form nature of drawing with a line-based text editor. This allows sketches to be placed anywhere while maintaining their relationship with lines of nearby text; all without needing to tediously drag things around or worry about positioning.

The way drawings and text relate may seem like a subtle change in perspective, but it opens up an entirely new way of interacting with digital paper. You can even draw around words for emphasis or pointing as you would in a physical notebook.

\--

Sketchwrite works on any device, so give try it from anywhere and let me know what you think (or if you run into any issues!).

Cheers, Adam</comment>


Huawei is now shipping smartphones with zero US components - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/12/huawei-is-now-shipping-smartphones-with-zero-us-components/ <comment><USER2> Here's what was interesting for me, what their supply chain consists of now:

\- Display from BoE in China

\- Cameras from Sony in Japan

\- RAM from SK Hynix in South Korea

\- NFC chip from NXP in the Netherlands

\- Battery from Huizhou Desay Battery Co. in China

\- Flash memory from Korea (Samsung) or Japan (Toshiba)

\---

..and I was curious about the software side, still on Android with:

\- Attempt at Huawei's own app ecosystem

\- No Play Store, Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, or any other Google service

\- No Facebook (+ WhatsApp and Instagram), Netflix, Amazon, Twitter, Uber, Lyft, and "a million others"

</comment><comment><USER3> This should be a wake up call to all nations. Your livelihood soon will depend 100% on a fascist country, it will brainwash your kids with pro-CCP ads, your data will be held hostage to a Beijing backed data centers, your politicians will be sold off to CCP agenda, you won't have a way to speak up, your locally made tools will be worse off, and the expertise to make such tools will die off.

I don't have a good feeling for the future. Stop buying Chinese-made goods. Boycott now.</comment>


Welcome to the Future: Leadership, Accountability & Swimwear - <AUTHOR> http://amlawdaily.typepad.com/amlawdaily/2008/12/welcome-to-the-future-accountability-swim-wear.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Paul Lippe is CEO of Legal OnRamp, a community of practice website for lawyers. I thought his observations on accountability were worth bearing in mind in 2009:

Legal OnRamp strives to simplify innovation and value delivery, primarily for in=house lawyers but also for law firms, both by providing tools to innovate and by sharing examples of success.

We have 7,000 members, probably 3,000 of whom have contributed content or otherwise added value. Perhaps 1,000 have contributed ideas on how to make our service better. Ninety nine percent of the good ideas and 99.9 percent of the work have come from someone other than me. More than 400 law firms and more than 700 companies are participating.

There are at least 100 things that need to go right; there are 200 things that could go wrong. When we started, 80 percent of lawyers thought we were nuts; 14 months later, 80 percent of lawyers think we're the future. I "control," in a formal sense, very little of this.

Still, if Legal OnRamp fails, it's my fault.

There are no words we love to hear more than "it's not your fault." Whether from our mother, our friend, our cleric, or our consultant, when something goes wrong, we cherish absolution.

So let's be clear: if you are running a law firm and it fails, it's your fault.</comment>


Philip Hensher stirs debate among authors after refusing to write for free - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/11/philip-hensher-author-refuses-to-work-for-free <comment><USER2> Well, it does seem unreasonable to call Hensher ungrateful; like anyone Hensher has no duty to write except when it pleases him.

But Hensher does talk about how this would affect those with aspirations to be writers and I don't think we should do anything to encourage young people to become professional writers. Yes, let's encourage them to write, but don't sell them on the dream of making their living that way, because for all but a few people, that's just not possible.

Simply, there are lots of people that want to write, but the number of people paying for writing isn't enough to support very many professional writers. No different than anything else. I may be a Tai Chi master and want to teach Tai Chi (I don't even do Tai Chi, this is just an example), but Tai Chi is something people enjoy doing and there are many other instructor level Tai Chi practitioners. But that doesn't mean there are enough paying Tai Chi students to support all of us.

</comment><comment><USER3> There was no link to the actual words each wrote in their conversation, so the whole brouhaha might be artificially amplified (eg. One party might have been rude or arrogant, the other might have just reacted).

Besides, there is a confusion in one of the arguments between getting content for free and getting authors to work for free.

</comment><comment><USER4> The profound sense of entitlement of professors like Webber can fairly be called disgusting. Some--make that many--successful academics have no compunction whatsoever about exploiting the time, energy and experience of others.

I recently left academia on account on account of the exploitative culture and then declared an eternal moratorium on low-academic-value, unpublishable or otherwise uncredited technical work for academia. Perhaps I should start a movement called Technologists Leaving Academia.

<comment><USER5> I will join your movement.

[http://sandwalk.blogspot.co.il/2009/03/profzi- scheme.html](http://sandwalk.blogspot.co.il/2009/03/profzi-scheme.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not sure how noteworthy this is. Ask any of us to work for free and you might get the same answer.

<comment><USER7> The noteworthy bit is that writers for such introductions are expected to work for free.

<comment><USER8> From the situations I've been aware of, I believe this is certainly true in the world of programming books. However, typically someone will write a foreword and have quite a bit of latitude as to what they do, so it's more an honor than anything.

I asked _why the lucky stiff_ to do a foreword for my Ruby book several years ago and he did a comic strip! :-) [http://www.rubyinside.com/why-the-lucky- stiffs-delightful-fo...](http://www.rubyinside.com/why-the-lucky-stiffs- delightful-foreword-for-beginning-ruby-4550.html)

With more academic books, I've noticed that the forewords are more substantial and will refer to the contents of the books and other research in a more precise way. As such, I suspect they're a lot more work, whereas you could bash out a good 3-4 page foreword for a programming book in a few hours if you had the relationships or experiences to lean on.</comment></comment></comment>


Chef Software Raises $40M in Series E Funding - <AUTHOR> https://www.chef.io/blog/2015/09/09/chef-raises-40-million-in-series-e/ <comment><USER2> > "Chef's business is growing exponentially with annual recurring revenue > growth accelerating as the company scales"

Makes me wonder why they needed the money.

> "This new round will allow Chef to extend its leadership in the DevOps > market by expanding Chef's operations globally and accelerating product > development amidst surging customer demand"

Maybe I'm just cynical, but doesn't really tell me too much.

<comment><USER3> This question, every late-series VC round. I think the answer is:

They ostensibly don't _need_ the money, but they've built a machine that takes a nickel and spits out a dime, and so the more nickels they can get their hands on, the more money they'll make.

<comment><USER4> But what are they going to do with all those dimes when they run out of nickels?

Seriously though, it does seem to be possible to buy revenue, buying profit is another matter. I suspect these companies are all hemorrhaging cash--while they can show strong revenue growth (btw is that growth linear or better with the amount of money invested? i doubt it), they still need the money to stay in business and support all the contracts they're closing.

Also, interesting relationship between money and terms. The more money you get, the worse the terms. The argument of "raise money while it's cheap" (IE, because you get better terms) works for what facebook in '07 when they got $240M for 1.6% from MSFT. For most of these big fundraising rounds though, that money is not cheap.

<comment><USER3> I don't follow this comment at all. What does this have to do with profit and revenue? If I am profitably selling something direct in Chicago, and I have the choice of waiting for enough profits to accumulate to light up an NYC sales office, or I can take $5MM and light up NYC, SF, Atlanta, and London, then I am in fact in a position to "buy profits".

Similarly, if I'm doing mass-market promotion limited by budget and have a cost of customer acquisition that's far lower than my customer LTV, I can slowly accumulate enough proceeds from my business to gradually increase my marketing spend, or I can take $5MM to go nuts with it. Again: so long as the metrics stay steady, I am "buying profits".

It's not a mystery. There's no law that says that straightforward things you do with VC money can't generate profits. In fact, the premise is the opposite.

<comment><USER4> Sure, I can be more specific.

First I was suggesting that the money printing machine you allude to will sooner or later get too big to support its weight, at which point you'll be left with a bunch of dimes (or rather, companies that need to raise more to live but can't).

I also suggested that the popular narrative of "raise a huge round because money is cheap" is misleading and founders in these large rounds are actually giving up large amounts of control. That's more a general, purely anecdotal observation.

My point re: buying revenue but not profits... I think I'm more saying "More money will not make your business more profitable. But it can help book sales." If your metrics all work and you really are a profitable business already, that may be be made more scalable by more money. But if you're unprofitable, even accounting for "growth mode", more money isn't going to improve that by itself. My personal opinion is that many companies are showing impressive revenue growth but glossing over core profitability, and these companies will have a tough time fixing that.

<comment><USER5> > _" raise a huge round because money is cheap" is misleading and founders in > these large rounds are actually giving up large amounts of control. _

When the money is cheap it means they _aren 't_ giving up control relative to when money is expensive. There is a phenomenon in tech VC right now, which is the money is beholden to the tech talent and not the other way around. That's not usually the case, historically speaking. Not to mention, some of these rounds are liquidity events for founders who are looking to cash out personally (i.e. look at Groupon's $800m IPO raise and follow the money).

> _My personal opinion is that many companies are showing impressive revenue > growth but glossing over core profitability, and these companies will have a > tough time fixing that._

I see what you're saying, but don't think it's necessarily true. Branding and network effects are real things. That's why finance is loving tech right now...if you can buy your land grab and then created a castle with a moat over a 5-10 year time period, there are some serious rewards of establishing a new brand with longevity at relatively low risk.

There's going to be a time (soon) where profitability does matter, it's just not now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I didn't even realize they weren't called opscode anymore.

What an interesting space - the dynamic between Chef, Puppet, Salt, and Ansible seems to be a textbook example of healthy and productive competition.

<comment><USER7> I met their CEO a couple years ago - seemed like a good guy. It always seemed to me like their new name is an SEO nightmare, though.

<comment><USER8> A Google search for "chef" has them as the #2 hit (both logged in and in Incognito so it's not just because I'm a programmer). Seems like they have the SEO under control.

<comment><USER9> That's interesting that you saw them as #2 in incognito. I just searched chef in an incognito window and got them as #1.

I wonder if my assumption about incognito search results being non- personalized is false.

<comment><USER8> I think it's probably geography. I'm in Seattle FWIW. The number one hit is a movie from IMDB: "Chef (2014) - IMDb".

The SEO shouldn't actually be too tough because people are quite a bit more likely to link to Chef the company using the word "chef" than anything about cooking.

And hey, Google went with "Go" which is nearly impossible to SEO and it worked out.

<comment> vezzy-fnord _And hey, Google went with "Go" which is nearly impossible to SEO and it worked out._

Though they do have the benefit of being Google. A significantly smaller team might have had better success than the original Go!, but that's not saying much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I know people use Chef for configuring Docker,

but my feeling is that Docker killed Chef and Puppet mainly. Many people I speak to today think Chef and Puppet were in the end a unmanageable idea. Just what I hear.

<comment><USER11> Chef and puppet have great support for parameterization of software installations. Docker does not. Until such time as Docker properly supports parameterization, they still have a role to play, Imo.

<comment><USER10> I think either people use something like ectd for config inside Docker or configure Dockerfiles, sometimes with Puppet as a templating engine.</comment></comment></comment>


Russ' 10 Ingredient Recipe For Making 1 Million TPS On $5K Hardware - <AUTHOR> http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/9/10/russ-10-ingredient-recipe-for-making-1-million-tps-on-5k-har.html I recently joined the NoSQL company Aerospike (formerly Citrusleaf) with the goal of incrementally grafting AlchemyDB's flexible data-modeling capabilities onto Aerospike's high-velocity horizontally-scalable key-value data-fabric. We recently completed a peak-performance TPS optimization project: starting at 200K TPS, pushing to the recent community edition launch at 500K TPS, and finally arriving at our 2012 goal: 1M TPS on $5K hardware. <comment><USER2> Down because of the GoDaddy DNS thing going on now.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Link is back up as of 12:30 PDT</comment>


Android's Login Is Cool, But Is It Secure? - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/12/androids-login-is-cool-but-is-it-secure/

<comment><USER2> Right, 'cause Arrington definitely knows security theory better than Google engineers do.

In short: there are far more than 10000 possible patterns (the max for a 4-digit numeric unlock code) available with the Android login screen. I haven't looked deeply enough to insure that there isn't some minor error, but the analysis here looks fairly convincing:

<http://beust.com/weblog/archives/000497.html>

So, we get a 40-fold increase in the key space, plus an easy spatial mnemonic? Sounds like an improvement in both security _and_ usability to me.

Sorry, Mikey, stick to business plans and rumors. Leave the security to the pros.

<comment><USER3> What the? Did you even read the article?

It's actually quite a basic problem with the unlock screen and shows why ethnographic research is so important -- real world scenarios are very different to the lab. I can often see the smear of where I unlock my iPhone. It is not a stretch by any means to imagine you could see the unlock pattern quite easily on the G1.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is it accurate to call this a login? Or is it just an unlock screen thing? I can't tell from the video.

<comment><USER5> It's just the unlock screen.</comment></comment>


Malware Found Pre-Installed on Xiaomi, Huawei, Lenovo Phones [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://public.gdatasoftware.com/Presse/Publikationen/Malware_Reports/G_DATA_MobileMWR_Q2_2015_EN.pdf <comment><USER2> When I worked for a company that distributed malware (mostly desktop, but trying to break into mobile), we had relationships with a few people who would buy up android devices in bulk and then charge money to companies like ours to have our apps pre-installed. You could pay extra to have the app baked into a custom rom to make it non-removable.

The business model from our end is we'd find app developers who are willing to pay X amount per install (a conversion was usually tracked by the first time an end user opens the app), and then we pay Y amount per install to a shady phone re-seller to bake that app into the rom of their latest batch of phones. As long as X is sufficiently higher than Y to account for whatever our conversion rate is, we make our money back plus profits as the app developer pays us for conversions.

The shady re-sellers would take their phones with new roms and either sell direct to consumer or, in the case of the bigger guys, move those phones on to a big-box retailer.

<comment><USER3> instead of paying 10? 30% of your sleazy revenue to the middle man, why not offer one payment to QA manager at the factory?

ironically, the same economics that make it worthwhile to manufacture in country X, also makes it very cheap to bribe in country X (e.g. the guy that would drive to eastern europe to buy pez dispensers at the factory for collectors)

<comment><USER2> That's the kind of suggestion that would get you ahead quickly at a company like that (assuming you were also willing to personally follow through with it).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This seems to be the report referred to in the linked article: [https://public.gdatasoftware.com/Presse/Publikationen/Malwar...](https://public.gdatasoftware.com/Presse/Publikationen/Malware_Reports/G_DATA_MobileMWR_Q2_2015_EN.pdf)

<comment><USER5> It's interesting that the report states

 _" The G DATA security experts are certain that the manufacturers are not the perpetrators in the majority of cases. Renowned companies will not risk their reputation by distributing malware in the firmware."_

Manufacturers have no qualms about installing bloatware and even spyware onto laptops. It would be interesting to know what standards, if any are used to sift out the malware from potential bloatware candidates.

<comment><USER6> Clearly the author does not consider Lenovo to be a "Renowned company" given that they have form for doing that very act. Twice.

<comment><USER7> While SuperFish was a security risk it wasn't a "malware", there is a difference between various really stupid and blatant backdoors and other security risks and actual malware.

Lenovo didn't use it to steal user's data they could care less about it, but some one could abuse it to compromise users both through compromising SuperFish it self and by exploiting the fact that SuperFish will issue certificates to SSL websites even if the original certificate isn't really valid which will allow attackers to MITM SSL connections.

Sony also had distributed software that could be classified as backdoors or rootkits in it's CD's as DRM, many other companies also had similar incidents.

While it's a stupid practice and quite unfair to your customers you can't really call it malicious since they didn't really used it for that just never thought it quite true or didn't care enough in the first place.

The packages in this case seem to be actual malware and not some adware/unwanted software installed by the vendors which while might be a security risk wasn't intended to actually compromise the user.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well, this is a whitepaper from a company that wants to sell you mobile AV software... so IMO some independent verification (or better proof than what's in this PDF) would be good. Not that I doubt this goes on.

<comment><USER9> The comment above ("Rudism") appears to be exactly that.

<comment><USER10> A random comment is not an "independent verification"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In most cases it is most certainly the vendors who install custom roms before shipping to overseas customers. Any one who have ever bought grey imported chinese phones should be familiar with this; flashing official, custom roms yourself is a necessity.

</comment><comment> luke-stanley What's with security articles being in notoriously insecure PDF format? Can people not export HTML?

</comment><comment><USER12> related articles:

[http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/02/malware-targeting-android- on-...](http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/02/malware-targeting-android-on-the-rise- report.html)

[https://www.myhomegadgets.com/2015/09/07/smartphones-you- pur...](https://www.myhomegadgets.com/2015/09/07/smartphones-you-purchased- might-be-filled-with-malware-however-can-you-believe-that-read-the-story/)

[http://www.prweb.com/releases/2015/09/prweb12935451.htm](http://www.prweb.com/releases/2015/09/prweb12935451.htm)

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/android-malware-pre- inst...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/android-malware-pre- installed_55e6f2e8e4b0aec9f355271f)

[https://grahamcluley.com/2015/07/nearly-5000-android- malware...](https://grahamcluley.com/2015/07/nearly-5000-android-malware/)

[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

[https://www.gdatasoftware.com/](https://www.gdatasoftware.com/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Pretty light on technical details. I'll see if I have time over the next few days to pull one or two of the ROMs apart.

</comment><comment><USER14> Lenovo..</comment>


HTTPS Should be the standard - <AUTHOR> https://jellly.io/blog/2015/08/21/https-should-be-standard/

<comment><USER2> is this post from the future? Aug 21, 2015 btw good read</comment>


Ask HN: Where do you host your static site? - <AUTHOR> I know this is a bit embarrassing to ask in 2016, but I really want to follow through on my resolution to set up a personal website. I want to use Cryogen / Emacs to generate the HTML and then maybe cross post to Posthaven and Medium.<p>I'm considering github or gitlab pages. Or perhaps Digital Ocean. I'd like to use letsencrypt or another solution so that everything is passed over HTTPS as well. I can tolerate a hosting fee of maybe $5 a month, but would prefer free. Hence my interest in git{hub|lab}. Am I missing anything? What has worked for everyone else? <comment><USER2> I think you've got it. If free, github. Otherwise, DigitalOcean is a solid choice and it's only $5. You can do soooo many other things with you DO box too, if necessary.

</comment><comment><USER3> I use NFS. [https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/](https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/)

I have a static site hosted for a friends business that gets 300-500 hits/month and it costs me almost nothing. I think somewhere around $0.05/month

</comment><comment><USER4> If you are willing to set it up I suggest amazon aws which is also free for 1 year. If you don't want to set it up i think you should get nellify which also has a free tier.</comment>


Show HN: Why I share my failure at the risk of losing customers - <AUTHOR> https://blog.simpleanalytics.io/why-i-share-my-failure-at-the-risk-of-losing-customers <comment><AUTHOR> One of the things I don't like about Google is their decision to not be transparent to their users about their mistakes. For example with Google Plus [1]:

> Google did not tell its users about the security issue when it was found in > March because it didn't appear that anyone had gained access to user > information, and the company's "Privacy & Data Protection Office" decided it > was not legally required to report it, the search giant said in a blog post > [2].

As the owner of Simple Analytics I think it's super important to build user trust. It's impossible to not make any mistakes so if a company never shared any mistakes, it's probably not telling you any.

Let's change this fellow hackers and share our mistakes. That's why I wrote a blog post on a mistake I made last week where I lost some user data. Some people would argue if it's smart, but I see this as a moment to show transparency.

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/technology/google-plus- se...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/technology/google-plus-security- disclosure.html)

[2] [https://www.blog.google/technology/safety- security/project-s...](https://www.blog.google/technology/safety- security/project-strobe/)

</comment><comment><USER2> This should be the default method in which companies work, and honestly there are a lot that do and it seems to have gotten better in my career. But there will always be bad actors or those who wish to cover things up instead of being direct about mistakes.

Good on you for being up front and honest with the customers who were affected and for going the extra step and being willing to return funds. The offer is all that is needed for most businesses to see that you care about the product and their continued support.

In the U.S. years and years ago I read this same lesson from a small hospital surprisingly. They had a surgery go wrong, like amputated off the wrong limb IIRC, and admitted they screwed up directly and immediately to the family. They quickly paid compensation and didn't try to sneak in legal terms to prevent the family from suing. The family when interviewed said the main reason they didn't sue was that the hospital was up front, immediately tried to do what they could and didn't try to hide or sneak in terms preventing the family from suing etc. IIRC, the hospital also invited the family to sit in on meetings about steps they were taking to prevent similar mistakes from happening again.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for relating this to caring about the product and it's continued support.

The hospital you're describing sounds like a great example for others. It's great if you make it public, you also need to show you're taking actions on how to prevent it from happening (like they invite the family to their meetings). I do think the suing nature in the U.S. plays a part in people hiding their mistakes in for example healthcare.

Your hospital story makes me think of the book Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed which I red a few years ago. It's about how different the approach is in the airplane sector versus the healthcare sector.</comment></comment>


Free Water for London Commuters with On-Bottle Ads - <AUTHOR> http://www.springwise.com/marketing_advertising/soakmedia/

<comment><AUTHOR> Very creative way to build awareness of your website, non-profit, etc.

Think of this at events like SXSW.

<comment><USER2> Pretty sure I've seen branded bottled water given out as a promotional tool at trade shows and other events. The jump here is to the whole of London, specifically people using a form of transport that's hot and stuffy during a time of year that's hot and stuffy. Genius. Would love to see some of the stats they gather on the ads - must be quite a challenge tracking eyeballs, etc...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sends the message that you aren't very eco-friendly.</comment>


Mozilla's Uncertain Future - <AUTHOR> https://civilityandtruth.com/2020/08/13/mozillas-uncertain-future/ <comment><USER2> Personally and strictly my own ignorant and informal opinion, Firefox and by extension Mozilla Corp. was doomed the moment it decided to compete with Chrome by being more like Chrome. Firefox built its userbase by being _different_ than the dominant browser, then decided the only way to not die was to be exactly like the dominant browser except with less icky behind-the- scenes privacy behavior.

That was a fundamental mistake. The who's-got-the-biggest-version-number dick- measuring, the constant deprecation of power features and customizability, everything that was intended to _beat_ Chrome in a contest Google couldn't lose is the reason Firefox can't hold onto a decent market share. The 25% of internet users who wanted what Firefox offered ten years ago still want the same thing now, but Firefox decided it was worth losing that 25% trying to chase the 75%, and they lost.

<comment><USER3> > the constant deprecation of power features and customizability

They made ONE switch to a superior and standard extension model, and HN loses its minds. Do you really think you're in the majority here? Making it a more secure, faster and just better browser is just the only way forward. Without that Firefox would just be slow as hell, wouldn't play YouTube or Netflix videos, and not have any extensions left because no one wants to create an extension from scratch just for Firefox.

They tried their best and I hope it's been enough, even though the future looks bleak.

<comment><USER4> "Firefox would just be slow as hell"

Why is that?

The problem is they get into to web standards game which is driven by Google to create pressure everyone else to spend millions on the newest standards.

I don't need the newest standards, 2000 web works perfectly fine for me (except HTTPs).

Firefox is slow with many tabs open on Win10, Ryzen X3900 with 32gb of RAM (writing this from FF)

They broke exetensions several times without any benefit to users, but losing extensions on the way. One of the core features for power users dropped for nothing - well for their own fun rewriting the browser and rendering engine several times, I guess it was fun at least doing "interesting things".

<comment><USER5> > Why is that?

Because Firefox's "powerful extension model" basically constituted direct access to its internals, which prevented the Firefox developers from making the architectural improvements that were so sorely needed to make it performant.

> Firefox is slow with many tabs open on Win10, Ryzen X3900 with 32gb of RAM > (writing this from FF)

Admittedly I'm on Linux, but I currently have approximately 7800 tabs open (no, that is not a typo). Firefox is a little laggy in its UI, but Chrome has never even managed to have more than a few hundred open without becoming unusable, so I'd say that Firefox is doing fine here.

Interestingly, the slowdown actually seems to originate from rendering the tab bar, not from the tabs themselves.

<comment><USER6> Not judging you, but why do you have so many tabs open?

<comment><USER7> I also have no idea what they do with all these tabs. I routinely close my tabs at the end of the day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The mentioning of DoD contractors made we wonder: would the EU help fund the development of Firefox, in order to secure competition in the browser market?

Mozilla would need to restructure and move Firefox to the foundation, but MDN, Firefox and possibly Rust could be funded by donations, corporate sponsors and perhaps the EU, assuming the money could be directed correctly. It would require a management skilled in seeking out these funding options and a brutal focus on openess, but the latter IS something Mozilla knows how to do.

<comment><USER9> I think part of this deal must involve radically simplifying the web and reflect on the EU's sponsorship of W3C via ERCIM. We've seen web tech becoming more complicated all the time, with self-acclaimed "standardization bodies" (WHATWG) acting as fig leaf for Google's take-over of the web. Now with Firefox on the brink to drop out, like all other "browser vendors" (Opera, MS) except Google before, and failing to create a new browser engine in about 10 years of development (!) with highly competent developers, it must be clear to everyone there's something very wrong with trusting the web as the universal digital medium for accessing nearly every piece of information. It's also becoming extremely hard to find pages that used to be ubiquitous only 2 years ago, so we're heading into an information crisis (on top of information warfare). W3C may have acted in good faith, but in the end contributed to irresponsible CSS complexity (which, in turn, is the result of having no standing/statue and no representation but rather a "pay-as-you-go" sponsorship model). WHATWG have consistently denied including HTML/CSS profiles for simplified subsets (as eg suggested by MS). Time to stop playing this naive web march of progress game only benefitting very few US companies, at the expense of everybody else.

<comment><USER10> How would you "radically simplify" the web without causing breakage?

<comment> c-smile Let's imagine a browser (UA) that supports basics of HTML (language portion of HTML5) and CSS (e.g. v 2.1).

Yet it has WebVM instead of JS. WebVM is a virtual machine similar to JavaVM but with DOM, CSSOM and layout APIs exposed in it as a runtime.

So if some site needs flexbox in its CSS then it can be included as:

        <link href=".../css-flexbox.bytecodes" rel="extension">

If JS then

        <link href=".../es6-compiler.bytecodes" rel="extension">

and so on.

This would allow a) keep browser small and maintainable and b) open room for innovations in Web technology beyond browser vendors and comities.

As an example: TypeScript can be compiled to WebVM bytecodes instead of JS.

<comment><USER9> Not bad an idea at all! Hadn't considered bytecodes for layout algorithms, though I guess it would work with regular js as well, and I AFAICS Project Houdini is about providing the necessary core rendering API.

<comment> c-smile > would work with regular js as well

In principle JS may work but it is too slow for that. Function calls are too pricey, no integer arithmetic, etc.

At least in my Sciter ([https://sciter.com](https://sciter.com)) element's layout controller must have three methods:

        void calc_min_maxes() // calculates min-content and max-content
        int layout_width(int px_new_width);
        int layout_height(int px_new_height);

so it is quite easy to add new layout modes. This way I've added ()

        flow:grid(...); // a la display:grid
        flow:horizontal; // a la display:flexbox
        flow:stack; // no alternatives in standard CSS
        etc.

Modern Java (and C# for that matter) are almost ideal for such things, especially considering modern effective JITs and VMs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does somebody know what the remaining ~750 people are working on? How many of them work on Firefox, Pocket, Lockwise, VPN, HR, marketing, ...? Is there somewhere an overview about that?

Many here disapprove with the recent layoffs and especially the areas affected by them, but I'd like to better understand how many people still work on Firefox (desktop browser, mobile browsers, dev tools, servo, ...), compared to topics like Pocket and VPN and supporting roles like HR or marketing, to get a better picture of how how I feel about Mozilla's future.

</comment><comment><USER12> A possible alternative source of income for Mozilla I think would be, and one I haven't seen mentioned before, providing consulting services in their areas of expertise.

For example, demand for Rust engineers seems to be steadily increasing[1] and I can't think of a better company with a larger concentration of Rust expertise than Mozilla. Perhaps the same could work for other areas (ex frontend), but I'm biased toward Rust. Due to lack of experience in this regard I'm not sure if this could actually work, but I could imagine allocating part of their engineering time budget to consultation, whose income would fund their core products.

[1] Besides all the articles popping up about starting to employ Rust by well known companies, my anecdote as a full-time Rust SDE is that I'm getting more and more requests on LinkedIn, and not just for the usual crypto roles.

<comment><USER13> There are so many ways for Mozilla to leverage their core competencies. Unfortunately failed management with no means to remove them means none of that will happen.

Executive leadership at Mozilla is a disgrace that has now caused a tangible negative result on the future of the internet. The fact that Mitchell Baker still leads this organization is insane. An absolutely inept failure somehow still leads Mozilla. It's absolutely crazy

<comment><USER14> You do realize that Mitchell has only been ceo of mozilla corp since January, right? And that almost all of the C suite has turned over in the last few years?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Yesterday I started donating $10/month to the Mozilla Foundation. TIL it's not the Mozilla Foundation that develops Firefox.

I stopped using Chrome when they added the "feature" that logging into gmail was the same as logging into the browser.

If there was a little notification to the top right in the Firefox with a link to "pay", even if it was optional, there is some proportion of users who would. And I would bet that your average Firefox user is an order of magnitude more likely to do this than your average chrome user.

So I wonder why they don't do this? I've had similar frustrations for other products I get for free that I wanted to pay for.

<comment><USER16> I had the same question. And what's even stranger is that the Mozilla.com (not.org) website has no way to send them money, and doesn't even mention the paid products like the VPN. At least Pocket gets a mention which I think you _can_ pay for.

<comment><USER17> Those who seek shall find. [https://donate.mozilla.org/en- US/](https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/) Got the link from the Thunderbird-site where [https://give.thunderbird.net/en-US/](https://give.thunderbird.net/en- US/) redirects to [https://give.thunderbird.net/en- US](https://give.thunderbird.net/en-US)

So yeah the link is out there but you really have to look for it. Which is actually s.th. quite nice. Imagine they would go about nagging people. You might say one of 2 things: a) So in their face, others are probably donating what do they need me for b) So in my face, that is indescent, I do not donate. Whatever the choice happy donating; I already did.;)

<comment><USER16> That's .org and the donation does not fund Firefox development or any other activity of the Mozilla Corporation.

<comment><USER17> When you go to [https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/](https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/) and you click on "Donate" you are directed to [https://donate.mozilla.org/en- US/](https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/) .

The sidebar on the donation-page clearly states:

"We are proudly non-profit, non-corporate and non-compromised. Thousands of people like ...."

So I think donations are in good hands there.

<comment><USER16> That's the Mozilla Foundation. Firefox is developed by the Mozilla Corporation, which is a for-profit entity wholly owned by the Foundation and with separate funding. In fact millions of dollars are transferred from the Corporation to the Foundation in royalties every year. Donating to the Foundation does not fund Firefox development!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Mozilla must put the advocacy bits aside and focus on the core product. Perhaps the problem with a non-technical CEO is that the advocacy and new shiny stuff is given as much importance as the invisible (and insanely complex) work that makes a browser fast and safe.

A total failure of strategy here - if the leadership couldn't find other revenue sources and partnerships in 5 years they have to fire themselves. Instead they axe the future of Firefox.

<comment><USER19> I'm not sure. I think advocacy is a core part of its USP -- Mozilla is privacy-friendly, and that's an important point, especially as all internet users, even average consumers, are being constantly hit over the head by how data-hungry these huge corporations are.

It's an uphill battle, sure, and there are a lot of things to overcome, but I'm not so sure I'd blame the leadership on this entirely.

I'd blame the market...for now.

<comment><USER20> Mozilla has so many privacy issues so that calling it privacy-friendly is misleading:

[https://brmlab.cz/project/spyzilla](https://brmlab.cz/project/spyzilla)

<comment><USER21> Mozilla is doomed when it's held to such an impossible standard (such as being "spyzilla" for supporting TLS PKI).

All this poo-pooing on Mozilla doing anything less than paranoid-extreme makes people leave for other browsers, which aren't any better, and often are way worse for privacy.

<comment><USER20> > Mozilla is doomed when it's held to such an impossible standard (such as > being "spyzilla" for supporting TLS PKI).

While some of these points are a bit extreme, most of them are pretty basic and could be avoided by simple maxim:

Don't call home and do not do communication with third parties unless opt-in or explicitly requested by user.

> All this poo-pooing on Mozilla doing anything less than paranoid-extreme > makes people leave for other browsers

Well, i still use Firefox as lesser of two evils, but i do not see why i should say to everyone how wonderful it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Does anyone know if the new stuff touted over the last few years (servo, webrender etc) is going to make it into the mainline Firefox release?

I moved back to Firefox back when they released Quantum and was really excited about the plans to make it even better - the blog posts from Lin Clark around parallel layout engines, web render etc. made me really excited about the trajectory of FF [1]

I know this stuff is complicated and they're working to get it right, but I heard in the recent round of layoffs most of the Servo team has been decimated. WebRender is only in the mainline releases for Windows and experimental everywhere else [2]

[1] [https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/11/entering-the-quantum- era-h...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/11/entering-the-quantum-era-how- firefox-got-fast-again-and-where-its-going-to-get-faster/) [2] [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/GFX/WebRender_Where](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/GFX/WebRender_Where)

<comment><USER23> Some of it already has made it into ff [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24164058](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24164058)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is completely anecdotal, and maybe I'm the only one, but native browsers have become so good that I've gone from decades of using Netscape/Firefox/opera/chrome/whatever to mainly using Edge and Safari. I don't really need to share a profile between my browsers as I use windows at work and Mac/iOS for personal use.

We've gotten to a point in time where the browser is simply really good, and I think that simply makes it hard to make a living if your primary product is a browser.

Even Microsoft abandoned having their own because they no longer needed it to be completely their own to sell their products.

<comment><USER25> They abandoned it because Edge team got tired to play catch-up, while still fixing IE 11 bugs.

Slowly but steady we will start seeing ads for Chrome developers instead of Web developer, ChromeOS has won.

<comment><USER26> Just the other day I saw a job opening for a "Chrome developer." First time I've seen that, and I thought to myself, "wow, we've really turned a corner..."

<comment><USER27> Was it for a position at Google?

<comment><USER26> No, it was at an SaaS company. I hope you get what I'm saying here...it wasn't Google looking for an engineer to work on the Chrome browser. It was for an engineer to develop exclusively on the Chrome platform.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > _In ten years it's possible that the Mozilla Corporation may be just a > memory, with the Mozilla Foundation surviving as a modestly-funded advocacy > organization._

Maybe I'm pessimistic here, but what exactly could a "modestly-funded advocacy organization" with nothing left but their brand archive against Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc?

Without Firefox, I don't see what kind of leverage they would have to continue their mission. Firefox also was what gave their brand relevance to the public.

The only thing I could see is them becoming a political lobbying organisation or "think tank", trying to advance their mission by pushing for more internet regulation. But even then, they will be pitted against vastly more powerful lobbies.

</comment><comment><USER29> FWIW, as a Mozilla employee, I think this is one of the best summaries I've read of the state of Mozilla.

<comment><USER30> Any recommendations for second best summary?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The google contract seems totally at odds with mozilla's privacy focus.

And there seem to have been too many off-target projects recently.

IMHO, they should keep a focus on privacy, and the core browser, adding VPN and perhaps CDN services, all bundled as a subscription. Maybe also ad-free search; perhaps duckduckgo should buy mozilla, or vice-versa? I think a lot of people would be willing to pay for a 'safe, private portal' to the internet.

I think advocacy alone is almost worthless when it comes to defining standards and ensuring they're open. You have to have code (and users) in the game.

</comment><comment><USER32> I have to say this is one of the instances where I'm glad Apple's hunger for profit and privacy engineering intersect. On Mac at least with Safari there is a privacy oriented browser left.

Maybe Apple could revive Safari on Windows?

<comment><USER33> What about Chromium isn't privacy focussed? It was my understanding that all of Google's grubby code isn't present.

<comment><USER16> Chromium still depends on Google for certain features. [https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium#feature- overvi...](https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium#feature-overview)

<comment><USER34> Those are easily removed and can also be disabled using their policy engine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I am really surprised they did not go for the VPN offer way sooner. It's a massive market in which all that matters in how much you trust your VPN provider. And the only insurance you've got is your VPN provider telling you they don't collect data which is hard to believe considering how much money user data is worth. The only thing Mozilla has plenty is people trusting that they are fighting for greater privacy as they've always have. It seems so obvious that I would like to know if there's a reason they did not go for that sooner. Consider also that integrating a user-friendly Mozilla VPN manager in the browser could bump Firefox downloads. So why?

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm less worried about the product than the organization.

IMHO, Mozilla as a company has never really had a credible business model beyond Google (mainly) choosing to compensate them for directing some search traffic to them (and general ass coverage when it comes to allegations of monopolist behavior). The layoffs are a consequence of their strategy for finding alternate revenue streams being simply too weak to produce tangible results. Certainly not anywhere near levels that would allow them to justify having the ambitions of a big VC founded silicon valley based company with offices in e.g. the middle of the real estate bubble called Mountain View (as well as several other premium locations world wide).

What they do technically with their browser product is fine however and worth protecting. I just don't see that costing in the order of hundreds of millions/year. A couple of million goes a long way to keep a world wide collective of developers going. Many OSS projects manage with far less. It doesn't require maintaining offices in the downtown areas of SFO (in addition to Mountain View), London, Paris, Portland, Berlin, Taipei, etc.

I use Firefox exclusively; like many other users. The wider community of Firefox developers and users has plenty of ways to keep the project going long term in one way or another.

Same with Rust. Rust will be fine without Mozilla. It's widely used and loved by engineers useful to quite a lot of companies. IMHO the rust community is actually much less dependent on central management by anyone (including Mozilla) than the Firefox browser. Most long lived OSS projects need independence like that and thrive because of their independence.

Luckily, Mozilla has a very decent licensing policy ([https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/license- policy/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/license-policy/)) that crucially does not include any copyright transfer. That means their role is strictly as a facilitator of development; not as an owner of the copyright to the code. That means that in principle there is room for other companies to get involved or for independent developers to get involved.

Which is why I'm not worried about the project surviving the drama of their mother organization imploding or not. I hope it leads to some sensible changes in the Mozilla Foundation.

</comment><comment><USER37> Revenue well north of $200 million every year since 2011. How hard would it have been to do the obvious thing and build up an endowment?!

<comment><USER38> I don't think that would have made sense: Mozilla stays relevant by producing a browser that lots of people want to use. This requires substantial investment in developer salaries, or else other browsers get better and you don't.

If they had taken your approach, I think they wouldn't have been able to get out Quantum, and then Firefox would be much smaller now, and be even less able to influence the direction of the web.

<comment><USER37> But they only spent a fraction of the cash on developing Firefox features like Quantum that people want, and essentially wasted the rest of crazy projects (FirefoxOS), buying things that their users hate (Pocket), and outlandish C-level salaries. They could have paid the core developers _and_ had the endowment.

If they wanted to do the non-core stuff, that's something that the foundation that managed the endowment might have done with x% of its capital, simply by investing in companies that align with Mozilla's mission.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Mozilla can take government grants or even subscription money to become a Cloudflare for consumers. Enable uses to content rate any content including youtube videos and protect each other at massive scale. As a parent I would pay for a safer browser experience for my kids. The Disney of browsers if you will. Provide a leader board of sorts for top contributors who have given time to rate content, money to the foundation, code contributions, etc. They don't have to sink down the advertising hole either. This is just the tip of the iceberg of ideas I saw in 5 minutes. A corporation paired down to focus on consumer problems or government contracts related to internet security can be nimble and beat the FAANG model precisely because they don't have to bend to the will of advertisers.

</comment><comment><USER40> I have to chime in... Mozilla seems to pull back on its investment in web standards and browser engine development for revenue reasons. Instead focusing on Pocket, VPN services and similar stuff, all the while keeping up a dubious privacy-advocating public image. Pocket, Mozilla VPN etc might look like they promise more short-term revenue. My view is that Mozilla wants to complete its metamorphosis into a near-irrelevant Opera clone. Gecko/Servo, Firefox and MDN are the valuable parts of Mozilla (to me). Introducing paid premium membership to MDN would have been acceptable. Now I fear that I have to revert my Chromium->Firefox switch. Also, people might not be as gullible as Mozilla thinks regarding their pro-privacy stance. They recently did a billboard and train ad campaign in my area (germany) about tracking and how they claim to prevent it. I doubt that won over significant numbers of users.

Sure, they struggled to survive going down the developer-centric "poweruser" road. I don't dispute that.

What they're missing is revenue-generating consumer products on a large enough scale. Still, I fear that on the basis of their current portfolio and corporate image they won't be able to become competitive in that area. Introducing paid products focused on more niche markets (e.g. developers) would have seemed more sustainable to me.

<comment><USER41> > Sure, they struggled to survive going down the developer-centric "poweruser" > road. I don't dispute that.

Did they really go down that road? The general perception is that they've just been copying Chrome for years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Revenue is secured. They have another deal with Google worth ~500M a year for the next few years.

But for growing it and for the future of the browser that's TBD imo

<comment><USER43> Why would google fund a direct competitor unless they thought it was to their advantage?

I don't see how this helps Firefox Users.

<comment><USER44> Google's business is search engine and advertising, not browser market share.

Also helps with an anti-trust case.

<comment><USER43> If you don't think Crome is a substantive part of google's core business, I think we're gonna talk past each other this whole time.

<comment><USER45> Chrome is a loss leader though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I always felt that Mozilla should have seen nodejs as their future, and in kind tried to build a gecko powered version (and therefore could have a real successor to XulRunner - electron before its time) I think this may have been a seriously missed opportunity to unset v8. However quantum may have been a little late to the party.

I'm not as vehement against their other moves, though. Pocket could and maybe can be a real business, if they focused on delivering a top tier experience. I thought it could have been a better feedly and/or pinboard alternative, I just haven't seen enough compelling features there as of of yet. After all, Mozilla Needs alternative revenue streams beyond their search deals.

I also think they could have been an internet identity broker, bringing a unified web identity via their Firefox account service. Alas that may have been too big to crack.

May need to reinvestigate Pocket, but aside from that and just using Firefox as my main browser, I feel like they lost a lot of steam and some goodwill with the developer community.

</comment><comment><USER47> > But as the number of Firefox users decreases (due to the growing market > dominance of the Chrome browser), and those users click on fewer online ads > (for example, because they're spending less during the COVID-19 pandemic), > the willingness of Google and other customers to pay the Mozilla Corporation > for those users decreases accordingly.

> Thus when COVID-19 hit and the Mozilla Corporation hit a brick wall in terms > of search engine revenue...

Did the pandemic really have an impact on search engine revenue? From what I can tell, users are spending more time online, viewing (and maybe even clicking) more ads and searching for more things online. Google's stock is back to its pre-pandemic peak level, so they seem to be doing fine.

Did Google play hard-ball with Mozilla during their contract negotiations, and manage to lower the cost of their default search engine deal? If so, I feel like that should've generated a bigger outrage than some Chrome UX/Security people tweaking the URL bar. Especially with all the antitrust stuff going on.

<comment><USER48> Companies are spending less money for ads, some even went bankrupt. People also have less money to spend, or are just careful not wasting it in uncertain times.

Though, yes, in most countries it normalizes, but the dent in income is visable.

<comment><USER47> And yet, Google's revenue only decreased by 2%, and Facebook's increased by 11%. I can see Google making an argument not to increase the amount of money they pay to Mozilla this time, but not to decrease it.

<comment><USER48> Not really? Revenue in Q1 and q2 for Alphabet were sinking. What went up were other areas than advertisment, as also they were doing some budget-savings, to reduce the actual fall of revenue, saving some costs at the end.

<comment><USER47> Hmm, yeah I was talking about total revenue, but "Google Search & other" revenue went down by about 13% between Q1 and Q2. Which is not great, but the market seems to think this will be a temporary thing (their stock is trading at February prices).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> > I doubt that Mozilla management or employees are interested in the Mozilla > Corporation becoming a DoD contractor, and it's unclear to me how much > government or foundation funding Mozilla could attract as an R&D lab focused > purely on civilian applications in the Internet and web space.

I think there might actually be some interesting opportunities here. Consider:

\- Digital Propaganda and Misinformation are increasingly seen as key national defense issues

\- COVID-19 has accelerated digital transformation and exacerbated the digital divide

\- FAANG is under increased anti-trust scrutiny

\- USG has strong mandates for web accessibility that current web tech makes very difficult to fulfill

\- Privacy implications of AI/ML is getting more attention

Mozilla is well positioned to contribute to positive solutions in all of these areas.

</comment><comment><USER50> How are the expenses of Mozilla increasing at such a pace without having a sustainable business model? Seems like poor management.

</comment><comment><USER51> I like the comparison to Bell Labs and Xerox PARC. Like those organizations, Mozilla was being kept alive by corporate money (primarily Google's) and never developed the ability to be a sustainable business on its own.

</comment><comment><USER52> Five years ago it was clear that possibly the best thing that could happened to the future of Firefox, Mozilla, and the Web would have been for Mozilla Corporation to have gone belly up. But we're past the point where that might do any good with respect to salvaging Firefox or Mozilla's name.

Mozilla Corporation's role today is to siphon away any attention or enthusiasm that might otherwise be directed towards the ideals that Mozilla was originally created to facilitate. The Mozilla Corporation was supposed to have been set up to further the ideals of the then already extant movement that had been operating on a shoestring budget. The imprimatur should have been to direct its paid staff towards doing the boring work that unpaid (but highly effective) volunteers weren't interested in—not to wrench control away and consolidate power within a (now-proven ineffectual) company making ill- conceived commercial plays while trying to fit in with the culture of the Valley and squandering billions.

In the early 2010s, I attended a conference—one sponsored by Mozilla—and brought in on their dime, having been a fairly involved contributor for a few years, but not someone on the corporate payroll. Another guest and I mentioned how poor a job the travel agency had done, essentially fleecing Mozilla and doing much worse than if we'd arranged for travel and accommodation ourselves and then forwarded the bill. "Mozilla has _a lot_ of money" was the response. After the better part of a decade, Mozilla's revenue has only grown, and so has their propensity to squander money.

The best option we have now is for folks to wake the heck up, to realize that the Mozilla that exists is not the one portrayed in either its messaging or fixed in the minds of casual slacktivists, to start a grassroots effort (a la early Firefox) to work on an independent browser—where, unfortunately, the best bet at this point is probably in leveraging WebKit against Chrome and Blink, given what an untameable mess the modern Web has become (not helped by the FirefoxOS efforts; nor the mess that Gecko codebase has become)—and most importantly _never allow that effort to be subverted in the way that the Corporation managed to cannibalize and take over Mozilla_.

But that's not going to happen, because Mozilla continues to position itself as the organization where folks with a casual interest in the health of the Web are supposed to direct their good vibes, while thoroughly proving itself to be unworthy and incompetent at upholding the principles it's supposed to be fighting for, and while time and time again, the public have proven themselves to have short attention spans on the order of months—so, by the end of the year Firefox and Mozilla will be back to being perceived as your old chum that's fighting the good fight, instead of being steered by a bunch of clueless, well-salaried Bay Area devs LARPing as some motley crew with your best interests at heart, all while the term "non-profit" gets bandied about in public discussions, much to their delight.

<comment><USER53> _> unfortunately, the best bet at this point is probably in leveraging WebKit against Chrome and Blink, given what an untameable mess the modern Web has become_

Is there a maintained OSS browser based on Webkit? Do you think it's viable for a new Webkit-based OSS browser to become sustainable by user donations, assuming initial sponsorship by other non-profits or EU?

<comment><USER54> Konqueror[1] can toggle between KHTML and Webkit at runtime.

GNOME Web (formerly Epiphany)[2] is Webkit based.

Surf[3] (By the suckless st/dwm people) is WebKit based.

That said, Surf would be unlikely to move to chromium from my perception of the views of the suckless group, and their opinions of how software would work are really opposed to mainstream appeal, Konqueror undoubtedly will eventually replace QtWebkit with QtWebEngine for at least the Webkit support (if not dropping KHTML entirely - KHTML's own readme suggests not using it), so that leaves Gnome Web as the one open source browser aimed at a wider audience using Webkit.

[1]: [https://kde.org/applications/internet/org.kde.konqueror](https://kde.org/applications/internet/org.kde.konqueror)

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

[3]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surf_(web_browser)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surf_\(web_browser\))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I have been forcing myself to use Firefox the last two months. Ignoring some performance issues on Google branded sites, I have yet to experience any incompatibilities.

The reason I am going back to Chrome is bookmark usability and Chromecast support.

Posts on the r/Firefox subreddit and official Firefox support pages mention that Chromecast uses proprietary API's, and can/will not be reverse engineered or implemented. I never noticed how often I use the ones at home or work until the ability to cast wasn't available.

As per bookmarks, I love not having my bookmarks visible in my main while browsing, and having them on the new tab page in Chrome is wonderful. I tried to pin my bookmarks to my Firefox top sites, but felt clunky using a hotkey or the menus to view all bookmarks.

</comment><comment><USER56> It's easy to criticize from the outside. The question we should ask ourselves is what _we_ should have done, and can still do, to help Mozilla's mission. I just set up a monthly donation, as I should have done a long time ago.

<comment><USER57> That won't help: donations to Mozilla don't go to the development of Firefox.

<comment><USER56> They could though. If enough of us start donating, maybe the leadership will make the necessary organizational changes to make donations go toward Firefox development. It definitely won't happen if we don't do our part.

<comment><USER58> Why are we to blame?

We can't just start donating massive amounts of money and hope that management funnels it to Firefox.

The same management that receives almost half a billion dollars per year from Google is the management that just fired Servo, MDN and Dev Tools staff.

<comment><USER56> The question for me is not who's to blame, but what I can do, since I can only control my own actions.

<comment><USER58> I don't think lack of funding is the problem but rather a lack of management.

More money is just going to incentivize their current malpractices.

I think what we could do is support a Firefox Foundation if/when it eventually exists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> This thread, paired with the Google/deprecation thread, feel ironically aligned.

Mozilla seems to be deprecating parts of their organization, and Google deprecates products constantly... except for Chrome. Chrome has had a fairly reliable and well maintained product path.

I used to use Firefox constantly, but between Safari being excellent on my Mac, and Chrome being preferable for work related things -- and their decent profile synchronization, I find myself a little mystified every time I go back to Firefox for a spell. Just little things, but they definitely feel like the 3rd wheel now.

</comment><comment><USER60> Hey author of the posted blog, as a Baltimore resident (and librarian!), I love the shout out to the Howard County library's "choose civility" campaign![0] Nice site.

[0] [https://civilityandtruth.com/about/#about-the- name](https://civilityandtruth.com/about/#about-the-name)

</comment><comment><USER61> I'm starting to sincerely hope there'll be a fork of Firefox or at least a separation from Mozilla, and for Quantum/Servo to be separated and made an easily embeddable. The inability to donate directly to projects has imo has had a direct result of requiring Google money.

Firefox and Quantum don't need 100M to survive. That's that just absurd. Even if you had 250 people working on it for 100k each, you still wouldn't get to anything as crazy as 100M. 100k for working on open-source is a pretty good salary.

There's no need to branch out and make all kinds of other side projects that have to fit under the Mozilla umbrella. Splitting focus like that just makes it become a juggling game of who needs the money more, shifting focus between projects and making it difficult for donators to comprehend where the money is going to.

When I donate to KDE, it's doesn't come as a surprise that I can't request my donation to be earmarked for something. The project is for a desktop environment after all. It's in the name and it's the flagship product. But when your flagship product is a browser and you don't provide people the possibility to donate to that product... well, what's the point in donating?

Even the argument of "I know better what to do with your money than you do" sounds incredibly pretentious. We hear that all the time from politicians and we clearly see where that money goes to: their pockets, their friends pockets, some other project we never heard of and THEN it goes to the project we thought it would go to. If I wanted to give my money to an institution I didn't believe in, I'd pay more taxes.

<comment><USER38> _> 100k for working on open-source is a pretty good salary._

The kind of people you're trying to hire have the option to earn 3-4x as much working for a FAANG. Being excited about working on something you believe in can get you a long way, but that's still a lot to ask.

(See discussion above: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24157803](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24157803))

<comment><USER61> If money were everything, nobody would be working on opensource.

I'd jump at that opportunity. Earning a third or a even a quarter of what I earn now would pay for every single one of my living expenses and even allow a comfortable life. There's no way that salary would be OK for a corporation, but for doing something I truly believe in? It's friggin' great.

<comment><USER38> _> If money were everything, nobody would be working on opensource._

A large majority of hours spent on open source are paid, though. Developers working full-time on open source projects at various large corporations. I was in that category from 2012 to early 2017 working on mod_pagespeed, for example.

There are many small labor-of-love open source projects, but large ones are uncommon.

 _> I'd jump at that opportunity._

There are definitely people who would be happy to make that trade; I'm not claiming that you're the only one or something like that. Instead, what I'm saying is that there are a lot of people who are willing to take a modest pay cut to work on a public-benefit project like Firefox but aren't willing to take a ~60-75% one. And, further, Mozilla isn't going to be able to make a top-notch browser without hiring many of these people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> The unstated thesis of the article seems to be that Mozilla lacks a _killer app_.

So what are possible killer apps, given their history building user-facing internet infrastructure?

(I love FF and never touch Chrome except for testing, but <10% market share is not killer.)

</comment><comment><USER63> It's really interesting that Mozilla doesn't funnel donations to software development interests. There are successful open source projects that do so, such as Linux Mint [0]. Maybe what's really broken is the idea that a browser needs a backing corporation to fund it?

Personally, I can see no better way to keep an open internet than through the development of meaningful software that serves that purpose.

[0] "Donations are usually quite high after a release and Linux Mint 20 is no exception." [https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3953](https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3953)

<comment><USER64> The problem is that Mozilla Corporation needs to exist for various legal reasons, and that it's impossible for Mozilla Foundation to channel funds to Mozilla Corporation for other legal reasons.

Whereas Linux Mint literally just operates a Patreon / Paypal / Bitcoin account and distributes the funds between a couple of people.

<comment><USER65> > _that it 's impossible for Mozilla Foundation to channel funds to Mozilla > Corporation for other legal reasons_

Do you know details about that? I can imagine that there'd be tax complications, but would have expected a foundation could buy things/services from an entity it owns.

<comment><USER64> I'm not a lawyer but I can only imagine it's quite tricky when the Foundation is a tax-exempt charity and the funds in question are being used to the primary benefit of a for-profit entity which it owns. It would be a bit like having your cake and eating it too, in terms of the legal provisions of the tax code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Very happy Firefox user here.

Google can take a jump. Chrome was relevant (in terms of quality 10 years ago). Irrelevant now.

</comment><comment><USER67> Q: What do most regular people consume on the internet?

A: Video.

Q: What does Firefox suck the most at?

A: Video.

</comment><comment><USER68> When you tie your horse to google you will go out of business.

</comment><comment><USER69> How is it legal that the financial report of 2019 is unavailable? It's at least a big red flag, I doubt they did such a practice the other years.

<comment><USER70> I think about a year of lag is normal, e.g.

[https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/11/21/state-of- mozilla-20...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/11/21/state-of- mozilla-2018-annual-report/)

[https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/11/27/state-of- mozilla-20...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/11/27/state-of- mozilla-2017-annual-report/)

<comment><USER69> You're right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Rust is dead!

</comment><comment><USER72> On the graph at 2014 on the x-axis, is this the "real" reason why Brendan Eich had to resign as CEO of Mozilla Corp?

<comment><USER34> No, it was due to him donating to Prop 8

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> Why is it uncertain? They'll get acquired or wind things down. They've had a good run.

</comment><comment><USER74> I still don't understand how they spend 500M a year with so little to show for it.

What's the last innovation they dropped on the world? Nothing.

I still can't copy urls From multiple selected tabs without an extension.

What we need is a group to step up, create a new browser, capture the 500M/year payday and put the money to work.

<comment><USER75> > What's the last innovation they dropped on the world?

Rust, Wasm (although a joint project, inspired by asm.js which was purely Mozilla) come to mind.

Also, I consider keeping the focus on privacy in an age when huge behemoths of companies are determined to steal every aspect of our lives for profit to be truly important work, much more important than any tech innovation.

<comment><USER58> Mozilla employs (or employed) 2 "Rust devs". If that.

steve could chime in to be more precise. But I'd say Rust is a merit of the people involved much more than Mozilla.

If anything Mozilla just fired servo folks who contributed to Rust so it's not like they even pretend to support it.

I hope Rust gets a foundation and I hope that Mozilla transfers the "Rust" trademark to them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> If Mozilla wants to have a future it needs to:

\- Realize it lost the browser wars, abandon FF and base it on chromium. It might upset the average FF geek on HN but you're not paying for FF development - Google is. As FF user base keeps dropping Google is not going to be interested in funding their development. No one cares about FF enough to actually fund it. Google just is because they want to push you ads.

\- They need another revenue model. Probably focusing on B2C products. They should start acquiring more companies to buy growth.

They've really squandered a huge opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER77> Inventing an entirely knew programming language with new concepts that is aiming at smart people and basing critical components of the web browser on it.

It is this kind of decision which freaks out the ordinary HN reader but is otherwise an alarm bell to any sane business responsible.

That was the nail into the coffin.</comment>


Bountii - New YC Startup - <AUTHOR> http://bountii.com/ Linked on paulgraham.com <comment><USER2> Deal-scouring isn't a new idea by any means. Nonetheless, I've been playing around with it, and I'm very much impressed with the speed and ease of use of the service. Well done.

One suggestion though that may or may not be helpful at this point. Perhaps when a user searches, you can have a "short list" that lists the most popular products in that search, so that the search can be narrowed to a single product.

For instance, when I type "bluetooth headset," a short list of headset models could come up on top of the results. When I click on one, it limits it to, say, H700.

Also, I searched for "Playstation 3." I was looking for the console, but got one console result and a bunch of games. Perhaps categories like "Playstation 3 Console," "Playstation 3 Games," "Playstation 3 Accessories," etc.

The former would be much easier to do than the latter I'd imagine, but both types would be helpful.

<comment><USER3> Right now, you'll find that our results for relatively specific searches (e.g. LG 42" Plasma - [http://www.bountii.com/search.php?item=lg+42%22+plasma&s...](http://www.bountii.com/search.php?item=lg+42%22+plasma&sort=price_asc)) are really good.

However, like you mentioned, a broader search- "Playstation 3", yields more than consoles. We're working hard to improve the quality of our results for broad searches like this. For now, we decided to make the price filter very accessible to people. When you get back more than consoles for your "Playstation 3" search, we hope you'll narrow your results to those "> $200" to skip over the games and accessories.

<comment><USER4> The price filter isn't always good enough though. For instance, searching for "laser printer" brings up printers and cartridges, but on the low end of the price scale the prices are similar. Could you improve the search so that adding "-cartridge" eliminates cartridge results?

Really nice product search engine though. I got great results for the Nokia N800.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Instead of just listing what the top searches are, why not put pictures of the top items and their prices on the front page? People like pictures. Pictures are pretty.

As long as you only show a few of them and still have the search box as the most prominent thing on the page, it shouldn't end up being too cluttered.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is incredibly superficial feedback - the gradients on those two dots over the i's really make me cringe. Just make them solid green.

<comment><USER3> Dots are now solid green. Thanks for the suggestion!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> whether or not the idea itself is impressive the technology seems to be very much so. The sight is lightning quick for what it does.

<comment><USER8> Yes! I was stunned by the speed. Maybe one of these days, you'll share your secret (if there is one).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Take half a day and learn about SEO.,, It could be a pretty huge driver of traffic and customer acquisition if you guys tweaked a few things. Drop me a line if you'd a few SEO bits of advice. (no, I'm not a consultant)

</comment><comment><USER10> It seems to have the same drawback like all similar sites I've seen, s.a. Froogle, etc.

I search for Dell Inspiron Laptop and the first pages only contain batteries and accessories. I guess if you sort by price it will always happen like that. You'd either need to label products according to what category they actually are, or just throw out results that are clearly ridiculous: $5 for a laptop.

<comment><USER3> For your particular search, "Dell Inspiron Laptop", I would expect our current product to return a bunch of batteries and accessories. Only because Dell sells computers like J. Crew sells clothes. That is, if you want to buy a J. Crew Sweater, your best bet is to walk into a J. Crew store.

Sony is a different case. You'll see their systems at many retailers. So, if you search "Sony Vaio"- <http://bountii.com/search.php?item=sony+vaio> , you'll find our results are more than adequate.

The major strength of current product is that it is great at finding the best prices for people who know what they want. We're in the process of improving our browsing capability as that's the way a lot of people like to shop. And, since we also want that to be one of our big strengths, we'll have to include "Dell Inspiron Laptops" from Dell in our index.

-John

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I know this is cliche, but it wouldn't hurt to add social networking capabilities. This is actually an idea of mine I applied to YC with two cycles ago. It was a social network for product reviews and product prices where users would gather in interest groups (gaming pc's, music rigs) and bookmark the products they have, or want, on their profiles. Users would then jump from user to user to see what set up others are using. Each product would have it's own page with a rating, reviews, and scour the internet for the best prices. Not only would you index new products by scouring the net, but users would be motivated to find new products and submit them to your site.

More realistically, however, I think a feature that allows users to bookmark products and receive alerts when new lower prices have been found would increase stickiness. Imagine a user coming to your site, bookmarking a product and sort of forgetting about it, only to find an email alert telling them a lower price has been found, and they're back.

<comment><USER3> We did something trivial along those lines and added a Facebook icon to our product pages. If you like a product, you can click the Facebook icon and the product name, image, price and store will show up in your "Posted Items". Yes, nothing spectacular, but we like it :)

-John

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just to throw out an idea, why not track historical prices and graph them in the same manner that finance websites graph stock prices? People do this all the time, but don't really have a tool for it. Seems like it would be fun, and (if it caught on) would result in an awful lot of repeat visitors.

...of course, it would be trivially easy for google to reproduce that.

</comment><comment><USER12> Search 1: oral-b sonic complete toothbrush Google: [http://www.google.com/products?q=oral-b+sonic+complete+tooth...](http://www.google.com/products?q=oral-b+sonic+complete+toothbrush&btnG=Search&hl=en&show=dd&scoring=r) Bountii: [http://bountii.com/search.php?item=oral-b+sonic+complete+too...](http://bountii.com/search.php?item=oral-b+sonic+complete+toothbrush&submit.x=0&submit.y=0&price=&shipping_zip_code=)

Search 2: oral-b sonic complete toothbrush head Google: I got 2-3 links to eBay and couple of other sites Bountii: No results found

Search 3: gillette MACH3 razor Google: [http://www.google.com/products?q=gillette+MACH3+razor&bt...](http://www.google.com/products?q=gillette+MACH3+razor&btnG=Search&hl=en&show=dd) Bountii: No results found

Edit: I know these searches may not be the most popular searches. But still these are not hard to find products...

<comment><USER3> Hi Karthik- Thanks for including those searches!

Currently we index prices for consumer electronics. If you look at products in this category, you'll find our results are better than our competitors- Google Products, Pricegrabber, Yahoo Shopping, etc.

-John

<comment><USER12> Hey John - That explains the results I got. Maybe you should include this information in the homepage. But otherwise I like the way the results are presented and the feeds (Google still doesn't have this).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Just a thought, but why not implement a clustering algorithm to disambiguate products in the search results? Suffix tree clustering should get you pretty close...

Are there any product search engines which do this yet? I know froogle doesn't, but proper disambiguation seems like it could be a killer feature if done right.

</comment><comment><USER12> The site looks good and does what it says. But I compared a few products with Google Products search (formerly Froogle) and I got more deals from Google than Bountii. Of course, you don't have a large index as Google (yet), but ultimately the question is how is it different from Google Products?

<comment><USER14> Can you include links to the searches you tried? A lot of product search sites seem to have lower prices than Bountii because they don't include shipping. (This happened with the test searches Techcrunch did, and they mistakenly concluded that Bountii was not the best.)

Maybe the Bountiis should break down the prices into product and shipping when they display them...

<comment><USER15> To give another data point, before reading your comment I tried "50" plasma" on Bountii and the best I got was 999 ([http://www.bountii.com/search.php?item=50%22+plasma&subm...](http://www.bountii.com/search.php?item=50%22+plasma&submit.x=33&submit.y=13&sort=price_asc&results=9&min_price=1000&max_price=7000&start=0))

I did the same search on froogle [http://www.google.com/products?q=50%22+plasma&btnG=Searc...](http://www.google.com/products?q=50%22+plasma&btnG=Search+Products&scoring=p&price1=700.00&price2=1,000.00&sa=N&lnk=next&start=60) and found this: [http://www.jepago.com/store/view- item.php?p=834.6&src=F3...](http://www.jepago.com/store/view- item.php?p=834.6&src=F31&sku=PDP5016H-R) and thought "Well, 834 sure beats 999" I did see the hefty shipping charge but I didn't see the zip code option until you mentioned it. It seems obvious enough once you see it but I think the results are too eye grabbing to get everyone noticing it by accident.

Overall I think Bountii had much better results once I got past all the mounts and brackets and stands. Relative to froogle bountii does a much better job of sticking to results that actually matter (froogle had a nice price for a plasma in Yorkshire and for one that didn't turn on).

My experience was I clicked on the 1000-7000 filter and got nine clean results and great prices from reliable vendors (at least in the sense that newegg >> jepago?) but i just wasn't sure that i wasn't missing out on a TV at 930 without doing some more less pleasant digging. I did figure out pretty quickly I could do a price highest to lowest search on < 1000 and make sure it was just false positives below but maybe there's a way to make that a little more intuitive.

I think it's really important to get the users clear on the shipping taxes thing so here's my proposed solution. On the front page immediately to the left of the search box put a two item checkbox labeled "with shipping" and "without shipping" with "without shipping" pre-checked. Then everyone knows 1. the prices don't include shipping 2. the prices could include shipping if you want. If the user clicks the "with shipping box" it expands to be the zip code text box. This way 1 and 2 get done but it still only takes typing+enter to get to the results if you don't want shipping. It avoids asking for the zipcode on the front page which might come off as creepy unless you know what it's for.

<comment><USER3> Thanks so much for taking time to do a thorough write up of our product!

"nine clean results and great prices from reliable vendors"... This is exactly the experience we want people to have when they use Bountii. Shoppers shouldn't have to spend 12 hours figuring out whether to give nearly $1000 to a vendor like Jepago (2/10 rating on resellerratings.com), when they can pay the same amount or less for the same product from a top retailer like Newegg.

Based on your feedback and others, we are working to make ZIP code entry more prominent, as it's something everyone should be using everytime they visit Bountii.

-John

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hey guys -- very slick implementation... I'm wondering though, what is the major differentiating factor from what's out there already?

It's lightning fast & the UI is incredibly clean; that could be enough right there.

<comment><USER3> We do a few things to show our shoppers prices that other engines cannot: 1\. We pay users to submit pricing information. This ensures that our price index is complete as there are some things that cannot be automated. 2\. We show you all the hidden prices ("Click to See", "Add to Cart", etc) from all of our stores. 3\. We include rebate and coupon savings in prices.

-John

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Damn

[http://bountii.com/search.php?item=blow+job&submit.x=0&#...</a></comment>


Ask HN: Two days before 2013, is Google Calendar still misparsing 2013 dates? - <AUTHOR>

Go to Google Calendar's create an appointment screen:
https://www.google.com/calendar/render?pli=1
In the date field, type "1/1/13". Does it change this to "1/13/2001" for you? Does it change "2/8/13" to "2/13/2008" for you?
If others are experiencing this, to whose attention can this be brought, given that we're talking about a date as near as Tuesday, now?
If it's just me, can any friendly soul suggest where I might start fixing this? <comment><USER2> Yep, reproducible. Quick add parses them correctly though. Eg, "meeting on 1/1/13" gives you an entry on 1 Jan 2013.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interestingly enough, it doesn't appear to be showing up in everyone's Google Calendar ... which would explain why Google seems to be utterly quiet on this issue. _sigh_</comment></comment>


India: Funding Startups Could be Classified as Income - <AUTHOR> http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/no-startup-tax Petition to oppose this clause, India startup envt.<p>Details: http://capitalmind.in/2012/03/angel-investors-beware-funding-startups-could-be-classified-as-income/ <comment><USER3> This is insane!

Indian Government will tax startups 32.5% on any angel funding received. But, they give tax holidays to larger companies under SEZ scheme.

It can be cheaper and more viable for Indian startups to incorporate in Singapore or US.

<comment><USER4> Probably a hold over from the technocratic centrally planed socialist economy of the 70's.

Taxing capital investment is an insane idea I expect the Lib Dem part of the ConDem coalition to be lobbying for it (in order to bribe the mums net members whos family income is > $120k with tax credits)

I am only slightly joking about the last part.

<comment><USER5> How does that help them at all? You'd think those "mums" would be have been potential investor for her son who studied in the US and returned to start a company?! (or another child starting up a corner store.)

Now the government is planning to tax the money she invests in him!

<comment><USER4> It's a reference to the way in the UK "hardworking families" as complaining about losing some tax benefit when they have 3x4 times the median income.

Of course this is paid for by taxing single people (and potentialy pensioners with large houses) and screwing sevely disabled peopels benefits - <USER2> forcing Termanaly ill cancer patients to work for free for large supermatkets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Internet connectivity in India is increasing almost exponentially and in next five years half of the country (500+ million) is going to be connected to internet. In such times, when ecosystem is changing, market is getting bigger and there is an unprecedented growth of user base, there will be, sooner rather than later, when many very good startups will be visible in the Indian market. However, a regulation like this is surely going to adversely affect the Indian startup environment. It's not going to benefit anyone, and now founders have to bother to pay tax when they could be writing code and working on their product. Who will explain the <ignorant+foolish> government!

</comment><comment><USER7> So the US won't give them visas and India won't let them take investments. Where are Indian startups destined for now?

<comment><USER8> This is a really good opportunity for other countries to jump in and provide a "startup haven" of sorts for non-US citizens. Any of the other anglophone countries (Canada, Australia, UK) come to mind, as well as Northern European countries, where English is widely spoken as well. The only problem is the high cost of living there.

<comment><USER9> I applied to startup chile. But didn't get selected last time. I think such programs are really the middle ground. Not valley like lavish and high profile but also not India like absent startup genome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If more countries try anything like this it might make a real argument for <http://www.blueseed.co/>

</comment><comment><USER11> Solution: Take investment as a convertible note (loan)? Or sell shares at a fair market value, as contrasted so standard? This law seems like it just closes a loophole where a founder could take investment as personal income, which would rightly be a fee for service (salary), not actual investment; or closes a loophole where an investor makes a gift of cash to the company or for founders.

Consider YC: If you spend your $11K on your apartment rental, that's income. If you spend it on Heroku access, that's a business asset that adds value to the company.

Based on the unclear language in the petition, I don't think the only writer understands the law.

</comment><comment><USER12> Thanks - I wrote the original post ([http://capitalmind.in/2012/03/angel- investors-beware-funding...](http://capitalmind.in/2012/03/angel-investors- beware-funding-startups-could-be-classified-as-income/)) and have a few more that the recent Budget has introduced, at <http://capitalmind.in/category/startups/startuptax/>

</comment><comment><USER3> An iPetition will only fall on deaf ears of Indian Government. We should probably organize a real protest and take this to streets.

Retailers protested against FDI and forced Government to reconsider it.

</comment><comment><USER13> By putting a damper on startup growth, any gains in revenue would be far more than offset by decreases in corporate and income taxes collected in the future. Such a terrible idea.

</comment><comment><USER11> Can Indian businesses deduct expenses from income? That would solve the investment tax problem.

<comment><USER12> They can, but that hurts if you make any real revenue. If I invest $100 in a business, it spends the $100 but makes $60 as revenue, then the $40 is a loss. (And can be offset by profits in future years)

With this new clause, the calculation will be: income = $100 (investment) + $60 (revenue) = $160. Expenses = $100, profit = $60, and you'll pay tax.

It's like taking a loan from the bank and being taxed on the money as income. You still have to pay the whole thing back! (Effectively, any equity investment is a "liability" on the books; any investor will demand return on his whole investment, not just the portion that wasn't paid as tax)

<comment><USER11> If the investor is entitled to return, the investment amount is not in excess of the share value, and hence there is no income. If revenue is spent on growth expenses, there is no income.</comment></comment></comment>