How Google Map Hackers Can Destroy a Business at Will - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/07/hacking-google-maps/ <comment><USER2> Several years ago my spouse and I took a vacation abroad and booked a tour with a local company. The guide was really shocked when I told him that I went with their company because they had negative reviews. All of the touring companies had fairly amateur web sites, but with the exception of this company, all of the Yelp reviews were glowing, 5-star, nothing-went-wrong- with-this-trip reviews. His company had fairly good reviews, with one or two one-star reviews from angry customers that cancelled at the last minute and didn't get their deposit back.

I expect a few bad reviews - nobody runs their business in such a manner that every customer is satisfied 100% of the time. If I see nothing but outstanding reviews, I'm going to assume they're all fake.

<comment><USER3> Especially key is also what the bad reviews are for. Like in your case, you identify the bad reviews are unreasonable expectations. Bad reviews with claimed reasonable cause may be worth a little more pause.

Also important is number of reviews. I'd rather have a solid 4/5 product with 100 reviews than a straight 5 star product reviewed only 3 times.

<comment><USER4> Well, if there is a bad review that has a response from the company, that reflects well in my opinion, unless there are a large number of them.

Not sure if it's possible for vendors on Yelp to reply to their customers in the forum, but I see this all the time on Amazon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you are running a popular place, whether you like it or not, you'll end up on Google controlled listings. Unfortunately, there's little help for a non- tech savvy business owner to fix problems with listings or fake reviews or even removal of genuine reviews. This is an area where they need to be held accountable. If you are wielding so much power, you need to handle it responsibly and error in favor of business owners rather than community. Most web companies prefer the approach of 'act now, apologize later' or maybe never to garner users.

I've had so many web services (including Facebook) create accounts using my email address without my approval (maybe because the other person used phone verification). Now if I want to claim back my email address on that web service, they put the burden on me to provide a photo ID. Using my email address is partially impersonating me because my contacts might have uploaded their address book and FB allows that willy nilly.

<comment><USER6> If it's your email, can't you just send a password reset?

<comment><USER5> With Facebook, no. My guess is that if you've verified with a phone number, they make it difficult to reset by an unverified email (they favor the fake user and assume that the email was entered incorrectly). Moreover, I don't want to take over someone's account if they've been ignorant about entering the email incorrectly. They still own the data. However I do report that I didn't create this account. Services like FB blacklist the email address in that case. As a result, I can't use that email in future without giving a photo ID (never gonna happen).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you have ever used mapmaker, and attempted to update/modify POI and roads, then you will be aware of the strange and unvalidated process of accepting and denying changes to Gmaps.

There are more than a couple bad actors that are Approved Google map moderators. I am not sure if their collective actions for denying and modifying changes are a net good or net positive. It has always seemed strange that someone from Washington state can deny a detailed and documented road/POI change in Florida.

I really enjoy editing/contributing to Gmaps, but the seemingly random/poisonous moderation process in that ecosystem is a huge turn off.

Sorry if this is a tad off topic.

<comment><USER8> Out of curiosity, have you tried OpenStreetMap? You get the same enjoyment of editing without the "random/poisonous moderation process", plus the data you contribute is open, rather than private property.

<comment><USER9> Do you know what OpenStreetMap has done to avoid the toxic editing community? Wikipedia also has a problem with a toxic community; are they doing something different?

<comment><USER10> Not so much what OpenStreetMap has done, but simply due to the nature of the project one big difference is, that OSM maps what is on the ground. So there isn't going to be a discussion if that river is relevant or not, if there is a river you map it. Other things like opening hours here are usually also easy to verify, IF you do so. So it will be more if it belongs into the database or not, but even if it doesn't there is often no big harm if tags aren't misused.

And then there are Quality assurance tools: [http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Quality_assurance](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Quality_assurance)

Right now most of them are more geared toward detecting accidental errors, but it is pretty safe to say that once OSM becomes more popular there will also be tools optimized to detect vandalism.

I also feel like it's a lot easier to get in touch with the community, at least here in Germany: [http://www.openstreetmap.de/community.html](http://www.openstreetmap.de/community.html) I actually still haven't found a simple German Wikipedia Forum where I could just discuss a page, which is something that really helps new users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In case any of you have a business w/ a physical location, yext.com sells a service that lets you manage these details (business hours, location, phone #, etc) across several different sites (Bing, Mapquest, Yahoo, etc + ~50 others), rather than handling them all individually.

(Disclaimer: my partner works there - but I don't get a commission or anything :-) Just seemed relevant to the discussion)

<comment><USER12> Can yext do anything to protect you from attacks like those mentioned in the linked article?

<comment><USER13> They can lock down the listing so that only you can edit them with their partner sites. But it wouldn't work in this case since they are not partnered with Google. We just had a presentation from them at my work a few weeks ago.

<comment><USER14> Officially "taking ownership" of a record with Google doesn't prevent community edits?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is an example of one of the major problems of crowd-sourcing: trust.

There is no way to verify that the integrity of the submitter, who could be giving wrong information due to malice, incompetence, or as a prank. There's entirely too much trust in crowdsourcing.

<comment><USER16> It works very well for Wikipedia though, but that's because Wikipedia has much more people that care about the information and maintain it. Google Maps lacks that community feeling of providing correct information, probably because it's owned and operated by Google.

Maybe local business organizations can provide help in this, have a few people dedicate some of their time to making sure all listings are correct. Alternatively, counties / local governments could take this responsibility upon them; after all, local governments dislike seeing local businesses go out of business or get less customers because they can't be found on Google.

At the same time, Google could do better in verifying changes; cross-check them with official address books and business registries and the like.

<comment><USER17> Except Wikipedia doesn't work "very well". It works OK for most subjects, but there are some areas and points of view that are no-go areas because of the prevailing values of the major editors, and even turf wars. Mentioned not to long ago here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7700546](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7700546)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Would this type of hack fall under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act? If so, it seems like an easy case to prosecute (the person committing the act has a financial profit motive, the public would like to see genuine bad actors get punished, etc). Or does the CFAA not apply because this isn't a protected resources?

<comment><USER19> Maybe it could count as "knowingly and with intent to defraud, accesses a protected computer without authorization, or exceeds authorized access, and by means of such conduct furthers the intended fraud and obtains anything of value".[0]

But they only bring out that kind of prosecutorial initiative and creativity, if you downloaded a bunch of academic articles after previously identifying yourself as a bit of a troublemaker (Aaron Swartz). Who cares about some old immigrant's restaurant? OK, enough cynicism for today..

[0] [http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030](http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> One more reason why I don't trust POIs I find on Google Maps.

I always try to find the actual business' page to check for phones and opening and closing hours.

<comment><USER21> You can't even rely on a business' website anymore, though. You have to actually call them on the phone and talk to a real person there, at the business. Too often even the business owner doesn't have time to update their website or get the "web guy" (read: his brother in law's son) to update the website in a timely manner.

<comment><USER22> If I were Google, Yelp, or Facebook, I'd give serious consideration to selling local businesses pre-created, theme-able web sites on a subscription basis. They already have essentially all the content such sites would need, and better designers than most small businesses would have access to.

I regularly run into local places that use their Facebook page as their _de facto_ virtual storefront, but that format could be much better customized for individual business varieties' needs, even putting aside the limitations of living in Facebook's garden.

<comment><USER23> They already do: Facebook and Google both have a "pages" feature which is designed for exactly that. Most businesses don't seem to want their Facebook/Google page to be their official website though, perhaps they think it looks unprofessional.

<comment><USER24> It is unprofessional.

<comment><USER25> It's unprofessional for a restaurant or a mechanic or a pet groomer to have their Facebook/Google page as their official web presence?

How can it be "unprofessional"? That's simply not their profession. Why should we judge them on that?

What an odd comment.

<comment><USER24> It's unprofessional for any business to use a Facebook page as their website. A business that wants to appear professional has their own domain and their own presence on the web; Facebook pages are for marketing, not hosting your website. A professional presence doesn't have another company's branding all over it.

Your comment is far odder than mine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It would seem to me these types of _hacks_ are very risky in light of the recent lawsuits involving bogus Yelp reviews.

Specifically, Yelp was forced by the courts to reveal the real identities behind bogus reviews, and further individuals have been held personally liable for defamation.

Though the Google Map _hacks_ may not fall under a cause of action for defamation (thought it may), certainly I could see rather large judgments under a theory of tortious interference with business contracts/business relationships. These suits permit not just damages for economic loss, but also punitive damages.

</comment><comment><USER27> Aren't there large-scale services to whom a small business owner can pay an annual subscription fee, where the service will monitor the accuracy of their Google, Yelp, Open Street Map, Wikipedia, Yellowpages, etc. information?

The article mentions some person on a retainer who does this on a shop-by-shop basis, but it seems to me that this is something that can be automated and scaled.

<comment><USER28> GoDaddy's Get Found does this; [http://getfound.com](http://getfound.com). Disclaimer: I work at GoDaddy on Get Found.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The yelp review paint a picture of 2010: Great food, great service 2011: Good to great food, horrible service 2012: Horrible food, horrible service

I usually don't trust yelp, but the decline is way too visible here.

<comment><USER30> What exactly is yelp telling you? I'm something of a foodie and am stunned at how inaccurate the reviews are for most restaurants. Most of the reviews seem to come from a minority "elite" users who are chronic whiners and come off as terribly immature. Its just incredible what people ding establishments for. "Fries came late, this place sucks! Zero stars!"

Some people think the issue with yelp and google reviews is trust. Its not. Its entitlement and a lack of proper criteria. The types of people who gravitate towards these reviews and become frequent reviewers are often people with poor taste and a lack of understanding of what they are reviewing. They're not crowd-sourced Robger Eberts. They're your cranky local paper's film critic who thinks 'naughty language' is the most unforgivable sin.

If anything, services like yelp have made me appreciate the art of criticism and a lot of my dining decisions are now done via professional critics with good reputations instead of the usual gang of misanthropes and weirdos who dominate yelp.

<comment><USER31> Do you have any examples of awesome restaurants that have poor ratings on Yelp? Assuming a sufficient number of reviews, Yelp ratings are at least "directionally accurate". In my experience, a place with four stars is decent and two stars is poor.

Many Asian restaurants in the Bay Area that I like are 3 or 3.5 stars, though many others with that rating are mediocre. But on the low or high end, it seems very accurate.

<comment><USER32> Yelp seems pretty useless for mid-range or focused restaurants. Think of a Mexican place that is inexpensive, but has great food that comes out in plastic baskets. Their Yelp page will be full of complaints about the plastic baskets.

There's a great ice cream place near me that gets complaints about their customer service. You're buying an ice cream cone! It takes like 3 sentences; how much service do you need? No joke, there are 2-star reviews like "Stopped by after dinner; the line was out the door and the owner seemed tired. The ice cream was delicious though."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I always wondered about this, but now it's obvious: google doesn't make sure those business info are accurate, it might have a huge cost to verify those info, for example asking for some paperwork to check.

openstreetmap, on the other hand, seems much more trustful on this, since it's moderated a little like wikipedia is.

I guess if openstreetmap was more popular, you might start to see similar problems described in that article.

I'm sure even governments would not want to give the data of businesses opening/closing for free.

<comment><USER34> As a business owner, it's your job to make sure those listings are accurate, just as it would be you would want to make sure the yellow pages had your right phone number. There's no excuse for technological illiteracy or ignorance, and if you don't want to bother to be in charge of your online presence, you had better hire someone for the job.

<comment><USER33> > There's no excuse for technological illiteracy or ignorance

I know the internet is much more popular since the last 10 years, but I don't think everyone is really up to it. There are still big opportunities to scam people who don't have the minimum of tech savyness: viruses, etc.

The internet is still a jungle with not enough laws.

<comment><USER35> Why are laws the answer? If something is in a legal/moral gray area now, then how many people will stop doing it when it becomes a true illegality?

Why not just have better defenses against things like this in the first place, that work whether the activity is deemed "wrong" or not?

<comment><USER33> There are many areas of the law which have been untouched for decades, and only starts now to create new cases because of how the internet works. Couchsurfing for example. Also scamming has never been so easy with the internet.

I'm not saying you really need laws, but regulations might improve the situation. There's nothing really illegal there, but it would be nice to see google being liable for its data if it reach a certain size of audience. In this case it's false advertising of defamation (unintentional).

Google map is a product, even if it hides behind a free thing "use with caution". Most people can get along with it, but if it starts to have a big impact on society, people will indeed become wary and learn, but not everyone will do.

I guess you can say "let the nature do its work", but that's not always how government see things, and that's not why the government exists. Strong government can do big improvements, I think. It depends, that's a balance to find.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> To what extent is a weapon or a tool at fault, instead of the shooter or user? This reminds me of Google bombing (for example, the attack on Rick Santorum, a Senator whose ideas we can all disagree with).

It seems to me that there is a responsibility here for Google. Google has become in effect the only way for small businesses to get or not get exposure, and the way Google automates the process without authorization causes these fringe problems. Fringe for Google, lethal for the business owner.

I think it is in Google's best interest to improve the process through which they deal with the problems, and maybe even help prosecute those who created them. Unfortunately, I also think they see these as collateral damage in a battle to create the most automated system that works 99.99999% of the time.

On the other hand, it is a shame this biz owner had no computer expertise nor knew to take care of his online reputation and information. Just like people and Linkedin or github, businesses need to take responsibility. As in any transitions, some people will be left behind, and it seems there is not a lot we can do to avoid that.

<comment><USER37> The business owner needs to care what their online presence (including their Google Places) looks like.

There is nothing Google or anyone else can do, if the business doesn't care.

When the business does care, there are lots of options to clean up their online presence.

<comment><USER38> Did you read the article? This isn't a case of the owner not caring; he didn't know that google maps was incorrectly reporting his hours. It took a phone call from a customer. _And that 's the problem_ \- why would he ever think that people weren't coming to his restaurant because a map service messed up his hours? As is clear from this article, that was very low on his checklist of things that might be killing my business.

<comment><USER39> Yes, and more than that: he didn't know what Google Map is. He is 74 and can be excused for that. Fast forward ourselves into our 70+: how many new things we won't know or care about then?

<comment><USER40> I think everyone here is sympathetic to the idea that a 74 year-old shouldn't have to keep up with every new technology, but you seem to be forgetting the fact that he's running a business. Not knowing what Maps is is fine for a random consumer, but excusing a restaurant owner for not knowing about online map services is basically saying that he's no longer competent to run the restaurant.

<comment><USER37> ...or knowing that he doesn't know about "that online stuff," and hiring someone who does know about it to help him manage it. It's a cost of business.

<comment><USER25> "The known, the unknown, and the underknown" \- TMBG

"as we know, there are known knowns[...] there are known unknowns[...] But there are also unknown unknowns" \- Donald Rumsfeld

It's easy for business-minded techies to understand the impact of "that online stuff". It's very likely that a septuagenarian restauranteur simply doesn't fathom its potential impact.

<comment><USER37> Agreed, and unfortunately for him, his competition WILL understand it. It's survival of the fittest. The fit septuagenarians are the ones who listen to their grand-kids who tell them they have to get "online."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> if google is going to take it upon themselves to list a business they should be held accountable and the information should be accurate. google listed the business without his consent and it was incorrect information. i hope he wins... google listing a business that is closed on weekends could have been detrimental in this case. the business owner doesnt need to change because technology has evolved beyond his understanding, google should have never listed the business to begin with. google = giant scraper site of misinformation.

<comment><USER42> > the business owner doesnt need to change because technology has evolved > beyond his understanding

I agree with the general sentiment of your comment, but I disagree with that line in particular.

If you disagree, please sent your reply via the Pony Express to the Harlem Public House; I shall check with the barman therein to see if your letter arrives every other Sunday.

<comment><USER14> Note: IIRC, the pony express was a transport mechanism for the US mail service, which has the same API today. And if you do send a letter to someone C/O the Harlem Public House, said establishment still exists and is willing to hold mail, and you do check it periodically, you will very likely get the letter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> They were in business for 40 years... and Google maps just recently started incorrectly listing their hours.

I highly doubt that the google maps error caused or even contributed to the downfall of their apparently well established business.

</comment><comment><USER44> The world is a better place without a restaurant serving bear meat.

<comment><USER45> If you read the article you would see it no longer serves bear meat.

<comment><USER46> it was still serving lion, horse, kangaroo... Good riddance. Time has changed and the owner just didn't notice it. He blames it on Google while his business simply fell out of fashion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> "The Serbian Crown closed its doors after nearly 40 years in the same location." Oh sure... blame it on Google Maps telling people you aren't open on Sat, Sun, Mon. I guess your regulars, who you've built up over 40 years, don't know when you're open unless they look at Google maps. Even the owner himself says "If you're going there, it's because you've planned to go there." I imagine his problem could be more accurately blamed on the decor (it looks hideous on the outside and that doesn't bode well for the inside) and the low quality of food being served (unless there are lion,kangaroo and bear farms in Virginia than that meat has probably been frozen).

With that being said, Google maps is far from perfect. They really should have a way for business owners that they list to be able to update their store information, especially for small businesses. How hard would it be to implement a callback system that allowed an owner to make simple updates to hours of business or to delete false/inaccurate listings? I guess they're too busy trying to find places in their code base to replace 'if' statements with bayesian filtering.

<comment><USER48> From the article:

Demonstrating causation between a bad Google Maps listing and Serbian Crown's decline is going to be hard, though. For one thing, the restaurant's Yelp listing—also a big factor in choosing a dinner reservation—is packed with abysmal, almost frightening, reviews. And there are any number of reasons a restaurant—even an old, established one—can fail, as Google's lawyers pointed out an angry June 17 motion to dismiss the lawsuit.

People don't read anymore.

<comment><USER49> Does the article actually thoroughly discredit its own title? People don't write anymore.

<comment><USER48> The article didn't discredit anything. The title is "How Google Map Hackers Can Destroy a Business at Will" not "How Google Map Hackers Destroyed Serbian Crown".

<comment><USER50> But the article didn't support the title. The title supported by the article could be "How Google Map Hackers Can Contribute To The Demise Of The Restaurant On A Downhill Trajectory". This is just one sensationalist title.

<comment><USER48> Why so much hate on the headline? The article itself is perfectly reasonable, so just read and digest that. It sounds like you want to just read the title and understand everything.

<comment><USER17> I used to be a copy editor, back in the day when newspapers had copy editors. One of the jobs of a copy editor back then was to write the headline, and write an _accurate_ one. My chief editor was tough on me, too, and it was hard to come up with a good headline that fit the space and was accurate. She often changed just one word or tense and cleared things up, but now and then she'd can my headline entirely and rewrite it.

Today? Online news sites don't care about headline accuracy, just SEO and linkbait rating. They don't even really have to care about length, to an extent. "Subject That Will Blow Your Mind and Change the Way You See the World. Top All-time. You Won't Believe Your Eyes. Watch."

So yes, headlines have gotten useless.

<comment><USER48> The only reason I look at a headline anymore for is to see what the topic is. They're not useless for that.

<comment><USER40> Isn't the topic in this case supposedly "How Google Maps can Destroy a Business at Will"? A topic that isn't supported by the article content (as discussed upthread)? That seems pretty "useless" to me.

<comment><USER48> The topic is how local business is affected by Internet technologies. The given title conveys that perfectly well, at least to me.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What techniques do you use for gradually learning some topic? - <AUTHOR>

There was a recent post here about handy git commands, and some of the comments mentioned a few commands not covered.  It reminded me that I've been meaning to expand my git-fu, but have not gotten around to it.
Likewise with improving my vi skills, my German vocabulary, and some number of other things.
Since I often don't follow up on setting aside explicit time to focus and study and practice, I've been playing with background or ambient learning.  For example, I have a twitter account that posts a random German word, with English translation, each hour.  I don't check it all the time, but I do read it when I'm glancing over a twitter feed.   (I also wrote a desktop flash-card thing to do the same thing, sliding into view every N minutes.)
What techniques to you all have for gradually acquiring new knowledge of some domain, in lieu of actually sitting still and studying? <comment><USER2> I built a six-figure education company doing these four things:

* Learn and practice effective non-fiction reading techniques: <http://personalmba.com/10-days-to-faster-reading/>. Once you've got it down, reading a book takes 10-30 minutes with very good comprehension.

* Synoptic reading: read 5-10 books about the same subject from different authors in a short period of time.

* Note-taking: after synoptic reading, take detailed notes about the key themes and concepts, as well as noting ideas you have about how to apply or extend the material.

* Writing: once you've distilled the essence of the subject, write about it to lock it into your brain and share it with others.

The useful bits of knowledge often come at the intersections between topics, so exposing yourself to many sources of information is key.

It even works for technical topics: when figuring out how to set up my VPS, this approach helped me learn which combination of programs to install and how to configure them correctly, even though there wasn't a pre-existing setup checklist to use. By compiling many different resources instead of relying on just one, I got much better results.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I have found myself bouncing around books on a common topic because there is often no one book that explains things Just So. It's been that way with learning Haskell. While RWH has been a major help, prior (and now continued) dipping inro a few other sources helps flesh out the bigger picture and makes all of them more clear.

</comment></comment><comment> b-man * Don't force anything, have a list of different subjects that you want to learn (Ex: guitar, emacs, emotional intelligence, judo). Study what you feel like in this list.

* While reading, tag you book in interesting parts, but don't break you flow. Have the tags at hand.

* Use something like anki or mnemosyne to dump all your tags.

* Enjoy what you are doing. This is connected to the first suggestion.

* Sleep well, exercise at least 5 times at week, eat healthy, and socialize.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

"Study what you feel like in this list."

That's part of the problem. Some items crowd out others. And there are a lot of items. :)

Since I often don't follow up on setting aside explicit time to focus and study and practice, I end up focusing on some things to the exclusion of others.

That may be a way of telling myself the effort isn't worth it. But I think it's really me just doing what seems easiest. While it helps to enjoy what you're trying to learn, there are future benefits to things that may not be that enjoyable now (like practicing the violin).

That's why I'm trying out assorted "learn in the background" sorts of things. Like running a flash-card app or playing German language videos while coding; it's sort of on the peripheral, but I still pick up some things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've been slowly getting better with my bash skills by organizing it as a class on my learning website: <http://curiousreef.com/class/bash-scripting/>

It's useful because it helps me stay on track. I can take off a few days or weeks even and then go back and do a few bash problems out of that book. I know that I'm 38% of the way through it, and it's easy to pick up where I left off.

I don't think I've done the peripheral learning that you mention, but I think 30 minutes a week is still low-impact learning.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very cool. Better bash skills is also target for gradual learning. And 30 minutes/week seems quite doable, something not too hard to commit to.

One way I learn things is to commit to giving a talk. I learned a whole lot of Haskell while preparing for my Hubris presentation at MountainWest RubyConf, certainly much more than if were to just move along in my free time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4>
          (I also wrote a desktop flash-card thing to do the same
          thing, sliding into view every N minutes.)

I've looking for something like this for Japanese Kanji.

<comment> barry-cotter anki

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> the cutup method.

while reading a book, do a text processing project with it. extract and read a large subset of the sentences, phrases or words, that share some interesting properties--semantic, phonological, syntactic, etc.

it's a good way to get primed for a new subject. the dislocated language is strange and memorable, if not informative. you gain a kind of reflective facility with the language.</comment>


Why do computer science majors often dislike business majors? - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/Why-do-computer-science-majors-often-dislike-business-majors/answer/Michael-O-Church?share=1

<comment><USER2> Because, stereotypically, we do the work and they take the money and credit.

Case in point: ask the average person on the street to name a hero of computer science, odds are they'll say Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. To me, this is roughly equivalent to thinking that the greatest reporter in the world is Rupert Murdoch.</comment>


Twilio to Acquire Leading Email API Platform, SendGrid - <AUTHOR> https://www.twilio.com/blog/twilio-to-acquire-sendgrid <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18223645](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18223645)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I meant to post this link instead: [https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/01/twilio-closes- acquisition-...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/01/twilio-closes-acquisition- of-email-specialist-sendgrid-in-all-stock-deal-now-worth-3b/)</comment></comment>


Big Five Health insurers outperform S&P500 since first draft bill of ACA in 2009 - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1429041600000&chddm=594569&chls=IntervalBasedLine&cmpto=INDEXSP:.INX;NYSE:UNH;NYSE:AET;NYSE:ANTM;NYSE:CI&cmptdms=0;0;0;0;0&q=NYSE:HUM&&fct=big&ei=ZiotVaGnJ6SXsQelj4GQCw

<comment><USER2> This is no mystery.

If you want to make money, the best place to park yourself is between the government (on the one side) and the real world (on the other side).

Government causes friction and denizens of the real world will pay to remove or reduce friction.

Source: I am a tax lawyer. :-)</comment>


Lance Armstrong stepping down as chairman of Livestrong - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/cycling/2012/10/17/lance-armstrong-stepping-down-as-chairman-of-his-livestrong-cancer-fighting-charity/1638341/

<comment><USER2> Sorry, as much I care about this piece of news (I am, after all, a TC patient in remission and I'm literally wearing a LiveStrong wristband as I write this), this doesn't belong in Hacker News. Flagging.</comment>


Google asked to remove 100,000 'pirate links' every hour - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/google-asked-to-remove-100000-pirate-links-every-hour-160306/ <comment><USER2> Some of the "pirate links" are competitors to bigger corporations that have competing products and services. The DMCA is used to censor small companies and bully other companies.

The same thing happens with Youtube Videos, you use a scene from a movie or sound from a movie or song and get a DMCA takedown notice and your video is gone. Not the whole movie or song just a small part of it via fair use, if there is a fair use anymore.

A friend of mine used a scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey where Dave Bowman is removing memory storage from HAL 9000 and used a text to speech program to speak instead of having the movie dialog speaking someone's essay manifesto pretending to be HAL 9000. That video got a DMCA takedown notice as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> I find the whole process to be hilariously ineffective.

1\. Search Google for any movie name followed by "free online". The first page of results are all pirated streaming sites, and they work. So, what did the takedowns accomplish? Exactly nothing.

2\. Right at the bottom of the first page of results is a link to LumenDatabase.org with the list of all URLs removed. So even the URLs which were "removed" from Google results were simply relocated beneath a single additional click from Google's search results.

The whole thing is just a waste of resources. It doesn't even cause a dent.

<comment><USER4> In switzerland its enough to google a movie title and the first results are usually streaming sites, even before IMDB.</comment></comment>


Hacking an assault tank...a Nerf one - <AUTHOR> https://www.pentestpartners.com/security-blog/hacking-an-assault-tank-a-nerf-one/ <comment><USER2> > you will notice that the upper nybble of nearly every fourth byte is an "E", > these denote a number of different operations, including loading, storing, > branching and standard arithmetic. When you see a binary file with data > represented uniformly like this, you can be reasonably sure that it is > running ARM code.

The 'E' nybble doesn't have much to do with the operation code. What it really is, is that more or less A32 instruction can be predicated by a condition code. 'E' means 'always execute this instruction' regardless of the current state of the flags.

</comment><comment><USER3> _Fuzzing the tank within certain parameters made for entertainment. It would drive & shoot randomly. That was great fun, until it shot my wife. Oops._

Oh dear. From my experience in life, women and girls never find being shot with Nerf even remotely as amusing as the men and boys in their life think they will. "It was random, I swear," probably didn't help much. Great article though, does anyone know why the toy uses the full 32bit ARM instruction set instead of THUMB?

<comment><USER4> If someone I married was genuinely pissed off about an errant nerf dart, I would seek a new partner. I found the authors comment quite odd for a comitted fellow.

<comment><USER5> Sometimes I wonder if the SO in these kinds of comments actually get a negative reaction - or if it's just another dumb, outdated joke that women/girls are sooo sensitive

<comment><USER6> I thought it was a "joke" on how shooting your wife on accident actually would be really serious and sad, but it could be that too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was the target of the Nerf tank assault. I was winning until Dave picked up the tank and started aiming it at me ;)

Talk video should be up next month for those interested, which goes into a bit more detail about the process taken to reverse the tank. Good research, would get shot again!

</comment><comment><USER8> Awesome read! Any tips or books on how to learn reverse engineering firmware? It's pretty overwhelming

</comment><comment><USER9> Is there a way to determine the instruction set automatically? Like you hit a button on the remote and it looks for a specific change in the hex instruction. Or is the only way to do it is through deductive reasoning and experience like how the author does?

<comment><USER10> You might try to disassemble the code for a bunch of ISAs and see if your disassembly produces meaningful function prologue & epilogue for that ISAs ABI. Automatically.

Not sure if someone is doing that. Our (commercial) disassembler for example is told by the user what target it's disassembling (and I usually look at the output, not the actual opcodes; so maybe that's not feasible).</comment></comment>


Physicists Discover Inorganic Dust With Lifelike Qualities (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070814150630.htm

<comment><AUTHOR> While Seti continues without finding anything interesting, the first aliens were discovered in 2007. We probably won't have much to talk about, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> After looking at the actual papers, it is more correct to say that the first aliens were _described_ in 2007. Or 2004, if you go off of the earlier paper on the topic.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Chatrooms/Social Networks for hospitals? - <AUTHOR> Do patients have some social tool to connect with other patients and chat with them? I imagine it would be a useful tool. <comment><USER2> This actually has bad idea written all over it.

I've spent lots of time on medical support lists. There is nothing worse than getting a bunch of cranky, miserable, doped to the gills sick people together who all want to demand that they be the person being accommodated because they are so fucking miserable, as if no one else's misery counts.

On some shitty, shitty forum I used to spend time, they liked to promote this concept of "comfort in, dump out" which posits that one person gets to play the victim card and everyone else must cater to their needs. It's a popular but totally broken mental model and it goes utterly kablooie when everyone in the group has a serious health issue.

In practice, you can't have useful, meaningful discussion about what works because everyone is walking on eggshells to avoid setting off the most incompetent and histrionic members who absolutely don't want to hear that if they did X, they might not be so sick because that's "blaming the victim."

Furthermore, there can be germ control issues with bringing your tech into a hospital setting. It introduces challenges to sterilizing everything while there and it can mean you carry hospital infections with you when you leave. Some wards will not allow you to bring in tech because it can interfere with their tech, like heart monitors.

People in the hospital having surgery or under quarantine for infections can be given a long list of restrictions for purposes of germ control while there.

Furthermore, the tech already exists. From Twitter to Facebook to email lists and more, there are plenty of online social spaces and I have done my share of virtual handholding for an internet friend stuck in the hospital with a direly ill child. You don't need a special space for this. In fact, a special space for this tends to be a worst case scenario. It's better to chat with your knitting buddies online or whatever than to impose on other sick people exclusively.

/2cents

<comment><USER3> Agreed, awful idea. Interaction with other patients is one of the last things anyone wants in a hospital setting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's an interesting idea. In the mental health out patient space there is Supportiv ([http://www.supportiv.com/](http://www.supportiv.com/)), but they are still getting off the ground. Good people.

For hospitals, I'd be nervous about the legal implications of implementing such a platform - specifically HIPAA, since you'd be facilitating the communication.

I like the idea, as it could be useful for building communities for patients that could otherwise become isolated and non social (which can effect health outcomes).

</comment><comment><USER5> Why is there a need for a specific tool for this, instead of just some facebook group, message board, Skype, Discord, etc.?

<comment><USER6> Possibly for a micro, campus-based local community that has something in common and temporarily are located in proximity to each other.

No necessarily "dating" or "by interest" groups - but it could be a great idea for someone who just admitted to "learn secrets" and ask questions to someone who been there for 2 weeks or so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think it's hard to be done reliably. it would be very useful if done.</comment>


Apple Rocketed Past Microsoft In Revenue This Past Quarter By Over $4 Billion - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/28/apple-microsoft-revenue/

<comment><USER2> _Naturally, it's important to note that Microsoft still has a lead in profit — $5.41 billion to $4.31 billion — but that's because one is mainly a software maker (huge margins), while the other is mainly a hardware maker (lower margins)._

But comparing revenue between the two makes so much sense... What a misguided post.</comment>


Low Interest Rates, Market Power, and Productivity Growth [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/ernestliu/files/lms_2020_revised_final.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> For the layperson (like me), here are some explanatory articles. How low interest rates can hurt competition, and the economy ([https://review.chicagobooth.edu/economics/2019/article/how-l...](https://review.chicagobooth.edu/economics/2019/article/how- low-interest-rates-can-hurt-competition-and-economy)), Low Interest Rates, Market Power, and Productivity Growth ([https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/low- intere...](https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/low-interest- rates-market-power-and-productivity-growth/)).

Here are some questions this conjured for me

1) Do you think low interest rates are the primary cause of long-term sluggish growth in the last decade or so?

2) What role has quantative easing had in accelerating this and should central banks stop quantative easing programmes?

3) Despite low growth (if the claim is true), have low interest rates been a necessary evil to avoid the 2008 Financial Crisis turning into a depression?

<comment><USER2> Looking at 2008 as a turning point obscures the fact that interest rates have gone down relentlessly since 1982.

Interest rates got cut in the crisis before the 2008 crisis and they will get cut in the next one, even if the cut is 'crazy QE'. Cutting interest rates in a crisis is normal, what is abnormal is that they can't raise them afterwards.

One aspect of that is the debt ratchet. One reason why house prices went up post 1982 is the falling interest rates. For a given monthly payment you can afford a higher cash price at lower interest. If students loan interest is lower you can afford a higher tuition bill.

If you believe interest rates are wacky, it follows that people paid wacky prices for everything expensive for the last 20 years. If interest rates go up in the slightest, the bankruptcies start.</comment></comment>


Why Sass And Languages Like It Will Triumph - <AUTHOR> http://wiseheartdesign.com/articles/2010/01/18/the-demise-of-css-why-sass-and-languages-like-it-will-triumph/

<comment><USER2> The demise of CSS seems a little dramatic. Sass looks sort of cool, and I'm glad it exists, but it seems more like a small nicety rather than a fundamental, web development game changer.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. CSS changed html dramatically. Sass most certainly does not do the same for CSS. If anything, imho, CSS will evolve to allow some of the "oh great and wonderful" Sass `abilities`.

Okay fine. I'll admit it. I'm hugely disappointed after reading a title like that- and an article like that. The exact phrase isn't coming to mind, but it's something like "All developers are excited about their new technology and think it will change the future" (But in reality it wont matter in five years).

<comment><AUTHOR> To be fair this isn't my technology. I didn't invent Sass. But having used it for over two years now I can say it is a huge improvement over CSS. And yes hopefully the features found in Sass will eventually make it into CSS, but if it replaces CSS or is incorporated into CSS isn't that the same thing?

<comment><USER3> There is a slight difference conceptually. The goal/concept of CSS is to simply html AND provide a means to generate advanced layouts (while keeping the simplicity). The goal/concept of Sass is to speed up the process of writing CSS because well, even if you know what you want, it's pretty damn time consuming. (Note: I say the exact same thing about html and will prove a `post script`.)

And when I said it would incorporate some of the features, I really meant "Eventually CSS may become a very primitive scripting language with variables and functions," but I didn't quite say that because at the same time I'm thinking "JAVASCRIPT!" So to be honest, imho, CSS will never incorporate anything from Sass- ever. However, there is a good chance _text editors_ (inferable via my `post script`) will.

P.S I recently pounced upon a project called zen coding: <http://code.google.com/p/zen-coding/>

Does pretty much the same thing, but with html. It's a plugin and there is support for different editors. It's pretty awesome- By does pretty much the same thing, I mean it allows you to write html code very quickly by writing in a "shorthand."

<comment><USER4> The next version of Zen Coding is going to support Haml: <http://twitter.com/zen_coding/status/7665962389>

They may look similar, but you quickly realise they're not if you actually give them a decent try out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I won't use Sass, Haml, LessCSS or things like that until I see Sass, Haml and LessCSS in Firebug or View Source (or whatever your choice of web development tools). The claimed benefits are nice in theory, but I think it is a debugging roadblock to have to mentally translate and associate your source code with what the web server serves.

If I code in CSS and HTML, that problem is practically nonexistent (excepting things like templating). The CSS and HTML the web server serves _are_ the CSS and HTML in the source code.

<comment><USER6> to further the point, when you EDIT styles in the browser, you are always working on the generated file. Editing styles in the browser is WAY more common than editing HTML in the browser, and because the tools with which you edit the CSS in the browser generate CSS, it becomes much more tedious, ironically, to do a lot of CSS work, then convert to Sass.

<comment><USER7> Perhaps it's just the way I work, but generally if I'm adjusting CSS in the browser, I'm previewing how some potential changes will work. I already know what the affected class is (since I'm editing it inline), and I've already targeted the CSS I'm about to modify, so once I'm done previewing it's a simple matter to go back to the Sass and change things around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Notice how similar this is to what happened when programming computers was made easier through the introduction of high level languages. CSS (and HTML) are the the Assembly Language of web page layout. The more standardized they become, the more it makes sense to use higher level abstractions in order to produce code. JavaScript frameworks which hide particularities of the different browsers are another part of the same equation. This is progress.

<comment><USER9> Heh. Someone didn't finish reading the article (including at least 5 others who thought this comment was insightful).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Someone should write an article on why technologists are so excited/desperate for the future in which they believe all the right things must surely happen because all the right reasons are in place.

<comment><USER11> I read the title and I thought "this is going to say 'because it's better'. When does that correlate with massive technology standard popularity?".

What's next for CSS? Probably CSS Current_Version+1, designed by committee, late, missing really desirable and important features and including really lame and awkward features, not exhaustively specified and not implemented completely by anything other than Opera, and not done in the same way on all browsers.

"Someone should write an article on why technologists are so excited/desperate for the future"

Nobody ever writes about a utopian future filled with backwards compatibility and design by committee. Is the future more rosy because it works as an imagined place without the thorns and caterpillars and fungi and drought and hay fever and pollen allergies and cheap imported roses and Monsanto seeds?

<comment><AUTHOR> "What's next for CSS? Probably CSS Current_Version+1, designed by committee [...]"

But this is the beautiful thing about popularizing the concept of compiling to CSS. Once you are liberated from the Browser's implementation a whole new world opens up. Experimentation can be conducted in languages that compile to CSS.

Right now the reason why we need a committee to decide what goes into CSS is that we all suffer the consequences if they get it wrong. With languages that compile to CSS, bad ideas only hurt that language.

Freedom for experimentation can only be good for CSS in the long run.

<comment><USER12> But sadly you have to consider the browser's implementation. Or are you referring to the little macros's or mixins or whatever they are called?

<comment><USER13> I believe jlong is referring to the functionality added by an abstraction layer. Sass allows people to experiment with additions to CSS, and it gives the CSS designers good insight into what people would find most useful.

<comment><USER12> Css has been thwarted by poor implementation that has led to confusion, and elitism. With regards to abstraction I don't see why there aren't any excellent WYSIWYG editors.

<comment><USER14> There is, it is called WidgEditor <http://www.themaninblue.com/experiment/widgEditor/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This reminds me vaguely of what Coffeescript does for Javascript (<http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/>). It's a nicer, more modern syntax than the underlying language.

The killer is that they both require a compile to make it usable by a web browser. It would be far nicer if the compilers were written in JS and processed the languages dynamically.

The final compile before deployment can still happen via command-line tool, but this lets developers work in a simple edit-save-refresh environment.

<comment><USER16> Or even better, a server-side module or component that Apache sends all .sass files to, and it outputs css.

<comment><AUTHOR> For development I like to use Serve: <http://github.com/jlong/serve>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I prefer LESS <http://lesscss.org/> because it does something SASS doesn't, it simply extends CSS with new features using the existing syntax allowing you to use it on your existing code without having to rewrite everything into someone else's idea of a simpler syntax.

It's much simpler to tell your designer "here, now you have x new features" than it is to tell them they have to learn an entirely new syntax and "on by the way, you need to rewrite all your existing CSS to use this."

<comment><USER13> Sass is coming out with a new syntax that's an extension of CSS. It's available to use right now: <http://github.com/nex3/haml/commits/scss>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't think the idea that people will use tools to automate generation of CSS is a new idea, nor is it worth claiming the "demise of CSS" over it since it's only a paper-thin abstraction over CSS anyway. People aren't calling web scripting languages "the death of HTML", afterall.

I'm not sure the analogy between languages compiling to machine code is a particularly good one. High-level languages compile to machine code because it's extremely tricky to create or update hardware to support high-level languages, and machine code is especially ugly. Neither of these apply to anywhere near the same extent to CSS, which significantly reduces the advantages of added abstractions.

I'd also be way of calling Sass a "programming language". CSS preprocessor would be more accurate.

<comment><USER19> I agree, CSS preprocessor is a more fitting term.

It does trivial macro expansion and arithmetic. No control or data structures.

<comment><USER20> That's incorrect. Your knowledge is more than 1 year old.

SassScript is Sass's built in scripting language and it is turing complete. Here's a stylesheet that calculates and displays the mandlebröt set using background colors:

<http://gist.github.com/280756>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> My company uses this and I write a lot of the front end web stuff. Personally, I can tell you that this is not that much better than plain css. It's great to have variables and what not, but the I think the biggest change is that you'll notice that you do more things like:

"+standard_padding"

Instead of adding what you would in css. The stuff I do with it is not perfect, but I was super jazzed about it at first, now, I don't really care either way. Sometimes it helps and sometimes it hurts. It's not really revolutionary. People who don't spend a lot of time doing front end html/css stuff or don't really understand how to write a good stylesheet will probably like sass more, it just shifts your thinking a little bit.

<comment><USER13> I suspect you aren't using it to its full potential. It's not enough just to take bits of CSS that are exactly the same and put them into mixins. When you start seeing patterns, places where you're using the same idea with slight variations, then you can make a mixin with arguments that you can use for that idea whenever you need it again. That's when Sass really starts to shine.

<comment><USER21> We have those all over the place. I suspect that you are right that we could be doing a better job of things though. It just seems to be another layer of abstraction which doesn't abstract enough for it to be worth it. Personal preference I suppose. I really do like being able to have 'functions' and variables though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I liked this article, but at the end, it seems like the author conflates dynamic and interpreted languages:

> Interpreted languages like Ruby, Python, Perl, and yes, even PHP, are now > replacing compiled languages...Yes I am aware Ruby, Python, Perl, and PHP > can now be compiled, but they will always retain their dynamic heritage.

As far as I know, it's only historical accident and ease of programming that has made them correlate.

<comment><USER23> You have to include a lot more in a binary to make a dynamic language compilable to machine language.

So there's some natural fit to running a dynamic language on a virtual machine.

That said, you're completely correct that you can compile dynamic languages to machine language, and that static languages (hello Java) run great on virtual machines.

His "history" of languages is pretty warped too. The original IBM Fortran compiler could produce code as efficient as assembler. That was a design requirement. The issue in the early days was that -- for those who were capable -- writing machine language was quicker than having to go through the additional step (on batch processing machines) of getting the code compiled.

Furthermore, the original FORTRAN compiler was designed to turn algebra-like expressions into 704 machine code. What really made HLLs take off was the idea that you could abstract away the particulars of the machine. This decoupled programs written in HLLs from particular machines, it also made the abstraction layer much thicker than existed in FORTRAN I.

For a long time, there was performance gap between code written with contemporary HLLs and hand-tuned machine code. If you had a particularly tight loop of a program, it might make sense to write it in assembly for at least some of the supported platforms, to avoid the gap. Actually that gap still exists in some situations, but compilers have gotten better and Moore's Law has reduced the effect.

He seems to think that there was some fundamental cultural shift at work -- when in fact it was a matter of a slow evolution of compiler and machine technology which eventually changed the engineering calculation such that hand-writing assembler code has become a very rare activity.

<comment><USER24> How would you classify Forth in terms of typing, and runtime binary size? :-)

The only reason dynamic languages need to do more to run on stock hardware is that mainstream processor design has been about optimizing for Fortran evaluation.

Algolish languages generate small binaries because their necessary runtimes are already pre-wired into the x86 :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is a localized instantiation of a much larger debate about code vs. data. Yes, the same debate that Lisp people go on about. On the one hand you have people who think that data should be dead, and on the other you have people who think that code should be freely intermixed with the data, which has the advantage of simplifying some things and the penalty of letting you go quite deep down the rabbit hole if you're not disciplined about it.

The only special thing about CSS is that usually the people insisting that it should be dead data don't mind if you generate the dead data with code, but somehow CSS fundamentalism has taken hold and the claim is that you should never write anything but literal CSS. Once you see it in context you can tell this makes no sense. If you're going to make CSS a dead data language, then you are practically begging people to generate it with other technologies, because it's the only way to solve problems.

Frankly, I've about had it up to here with CSS fundamentalism. We're up to a decade of CSS people lecturing about how you should do this and not do that and sometimes do the other thing while all the while the "official" stuff barely works. Arguing against generating CSS is like arguing against generating HTML. If it works for you, do it.

</comment><comment><USER26> While I understand the analogy, it is a bit extreme. The gap between C and assembly quite wide, while the work Sass is doing looks relatively trivial.

<comment><USER20> Trivial, from a technology perspective. Sass is not breaking any technical ground, that is true.

But Sass challenges the way stylesheet authors approach building and maintaining their code. And so from a work-flow perspective, Sass is incredibly disruptive.

<comment><USER27> I'm disappointed you didn't use 'paradigm', I almost had bingo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The CleverCSS Python module has a very similar set of features: <http://sandbox.pocoo.org/clevercss/>

<comment><USER13> CleverCSS has a significantly smaller feature set than Sass. It doesn't support mixins, dynamic selectors, and a host of other Sass features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Sounds like it should be integrated into the browsers although I won't hold my breath.

</comment><comment><USER30> sass is full of crap!!! I opened the link <http://sass-lang.com/> in IE6, after reading the front page comment "decreased IE headaches.", the simple front page is not rendering properly, download button is coming down... and lots of mis placing of the box... I tot to give it a try, if it solves my struggle with IE.... I felt it may be same like what jQuery for javascript ... but no luck!!

<comment><USER13> The Sass site has made the conscious decision not to support IE6, seeing as it only comprises about three fifths of a percent of its visitors.</comment></comment>


Bill Gates Funds Research Into Climate Hacking  - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/01/bill-gates-paying-for-climate-hacking-research/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29 <comment><USER2> Geo-engineering has about as much chance of gaining global acceptance as a global cap&trade system : ie, none. What will be interesting is if countries start experimenting with their own geo-engineering systems. Will Micronesia sue, say, Canada for loss of tourist dollars if they cool things down too much by imitating a volcano and spraying sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere?

The most effective use of money with climate change is adaption when and where necessary.

</comment><comment><USER3> He only uses his funds to crowbar people and orgs into his vision. This man is and stays a big self centered prick.</comment>


Facebook is a Ponzi Scheme - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jperla.com/facebook-is-a-ponzi-scheme-0 <comment><USER2> Obviously this guy doesn't understand what a ponzi scheme is. Perhaps if facebook took some of the money from new ad buys to purchase goods from slightly older ads so that they thought they were more successful a case could be made for it being a ponzi scheme -- this is in no way one.

If in fact they are selling a defective or useless product then they are in the lemon business -- a card dealership that sells crappy cars will stay in business until everyone realizes they suck.

Anyway, I've never purchased ads on facebook so this in no way relates to that; however, when you link to the definition of a word in your first sentence -- by god, use it correctly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Dantheman, you are right. It's not a perfect analogy. There's not really any closer analogy, though. I state this later in the post, if you read through the whole thing (including saying "like a Ponzi scheme"):

"Yet, their value and growth continues because they can use that money to grow their user-base more and assert profitability (in this sense it's not quite entirely a ponzi scheme, but there is no closer idea). It's possible that they do not even realize that they are like a Ponzi scheme."

Moreover, I recognize that Facebook isn't necessarily doing this on purpose (whereas in a real ponzi scheme a competent accountant has to scheme willfully).

Nevertheless, I hope you agree that the positive feedback, the bubble effects, and the _deceptive_ illusion of growth all have analogs to Facebook (if you assume the premise, of course).

I think you are right that I should have used "like a" Ponzi scheme throughout the post, but the writing and the point would have lost a lot of its effect in explaining that. The _metaphor_ is better than the simile.

My main motivation was to make people think about the reality of Facebooks revenue. It may be less solid than social proof makes it seem.

<comment><USER3> _I think you are right that I should have used "like a" Ponzi scheme throughout the post, but the writing and the point would have lost a lot of its effect in explaining that._

Yes, describing things in an overheated, sensationalistic way has a more powerful effect than describing them in an accurate way. Congratulations on figuring that out.

By the way, referring to a business as a Ponzi scheme is _prima facie_ defamatory. I don't think you have much to worry about, since I doubt Facebook will bother to sue you on the basis of a blog post, but you might write differently if you were more conscious of the fact that you're accusing someone of a crime.

<comment><USER4> I think it's pretty clear to anyone who merely reads the title and has some understanding of what Facebook is that the author isn't saying Facebook is literally a ponzi scheme, any more so than I would if I said 'Lotus Notes is a dinosaur'.

Everyone who uses Facebook knows it doesn't solicit, or give, money to/from its audience. There is zero question that Facebook is literally a ponzi scheme any more than it is literally a piece of shit.

The amount of comments here who say that the analogy is libel and which attack the author on this without responding to the points made saddens me.

I doubt Facebook, even if they didn't like the article, would wish to draw attention to the analogy contained therein.

<comment><USER3> I use Facebook, and I did in fact assume from the headline that the author was going to argue that it is a Ponzi scheme. It didn't seem like one to me, but one reason I read articles on HN is to be informed or persuaded of things I didn't initially believe.

By the way, I never called the author's accusation libelous. I called it defamatory, which it clearly is.

<comment><USER4> _shrug_ So you know FB doesn't solicit funds or provide them, but you expected proof that FB was literally a ponzi scheme in the article?

Libel is written defamation, as opposed to slander which is for transitory statements.

I disagree that it's clearly defamation.

<comment><USER3> _So you know FB doesn't solicit funds or provide them_

Facebook does, in fact, solicit funds -- from advertisers, and from users who want to send virtual gifts to their friends.

 _but you expected proof that FB was literally a ponzi scheme in the article?_

No, I expected some argument to that effect.

 _Libel is written defamation, as opposed to slander which is for transitory statements._

No, defamation is one of the conditions for libel, but there are others: falsity and malicious intent being the most important.

 _I disagree that it's clearly defamation._

Allegations of criminal conduct are among the clearest categories of defamation.

Shrug indeed.

<comment><USER4> Me> Everyone who uses Facebook knows it doesn't solicit, or give, money to/from its audience. There is zero question that Facebook is literally a ponzi scheme any more than it is literally a piece of shit.

Me again> So you know FB doesn't solicit funds or provide them?

You> Facebook does, in fact, solicit funds -- from advertisers...

You're not listening to me. So I won't listen to you.

<comment><USER3> I assume you're implying that I missed the words "to/from its audience" in your comment. But when I read the headline "Facebook is a Ponzi scheme," why would I assume the author was claiming that the audience, rather than advertisers, were the victims of the Ponzi scheme?

What's more, I wrote that Facebook solicits funds "from advertisers, _and from users_ who want to send virtual gifts to their friends." You chose to leave that last part out.

It's up to you whether you listen to me or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> <http://cdixon.org/2010/03/25/stickiness-is-bad-for-business/>

Chris Dixon posted on this recently:

 _Facebook is like a Starbucks where everyone hangs out for hours but almost never buys anything.

...

The vast majority of money spent on intent-generating advertising — brand advertising — still happens offline. Eventually this money will have to go where people spend time, which is increasingly online, at sites like Facebook. Somehow Coke, Tide, Nike, Budweiser etc. will have to convince the next generation to buy their mostly commodity products. Expect the online Starbucks of the future to have a lot more – and more effective – ads._

The problem, of course, is that nobody knows how, but we expect someone to figure it out eventually.

So here's a fun question to overcome your status quo bias. What if brand advertising is an artifact of one-to-many communications tech, and can't work in a many-to-many environment?

<comment><USER6> I suspect online advertising is undervalued precisely because it can be measured. I further suspect that "brand advertising" is a scam for all but the largest advertisers.

<comment><USER7> The largest advertisers became the largest because they spend a lot on brand advertising. So perhaps it's true that you have to spend a lot to make brand advertising effective, but it's not a "scam" in any conventional sense of the word. It is what it is.

If we're going to sling arrows at online advertising, I think we have to start with the fact that there are a lot more _publishers_ than there were back in the day, and virtually all of them have an undifferentiated audience of "eyeballs". It's still possible to get high CPM rates, as long as you've got a targeted audience and a sales team.

<comment><USER8> _The largest advertisers became the largest because they spend a lot on brand advertising._

[citation needed]

A famous quotation about the effectiveness of advertising, by a business person "considered by some to be the father of modern advertising."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wanamaker>

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."

<comment><USER9> That (sort of) substantiates the parent post's claim. If only 50% of your advertising money is effective, then spending _more_ will still be more effective, no?

<comment><USER8> If half is surely wasted, it still remains to be shown that the other half provides a good return on investment.

<comment><USER7> You're making an assumption of corporate stupidity that I find to be highly unlikely. Large companies do not become large companies by tossing hundreds of millions of dollars down dark wells without analysis.

I'm making the assumption that Coke and Nike, et al. are smart enough to have at least rudimentary knowledge of the effectiveness of their brand advertising. Is this an assumption? Yes. Is it a more reasonable assumption, _a priori_ , than the alternative? I think so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I worked on Facebook ads for the past year so I know that some of the claims in this article are just wrong, but I think the average reader can figure that out for themselves.

> People go to Facebook to interact with their friends. It is fundamentally > different from the ad platform that is Google.

All true, all what Facebook tells its advertisers. www.facebook.com/ads

> They spend hundreds or thousands or more on Facebook ads. At the end of the > first run, they see bad ROIs.

Because advertising on Facebook is not typically about buying something, it is often difficult to measure direct ROI in $. In this, it is like the _majority_ of all advertising.

> ...Facebook ads are worthless. Everyone I've talked to who has actually > bought Facebook ads knows this

Have you talked to Zynga? They make Facebook games. It is speculated they are making $300M+ a year. You can see their ads _all_ the time on Facebook. Either they are incredibly incompetent, or FB Ads delivers positive ROI for them. Search google for "zynga revenue estimate".

<comment><USER11> I always hear Zynga mentioned as the success story for Facebook Ads. If you had to name an example other than Zynga, who would it be?

<comment><USER12> As a PM at a company that uses Facebook ads extensively to attract users, I can tell you with absolute certainty that Facebook ads are worth it and the author of the article doesn't know what he's talking about. At all. End of the story.

<comment><USER11> That's not quite what I was asking. I generally believe that Facebook ads can be successful. I'm curious about what companies are effectively using them now at a large scale.

I also suspect that the effectiveness of Facebook ads has a lot to do with the nature of the product/service being advertised, and the ad itself (just like any advertising).

Your comment applies your specific experience (unknown to me) as evidence for an absurdly general statement ("Facebook ads are worth it") and an ad hominem attack on the author of the article. Classy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> When I get on Google and search, typically there are a few ads keyed to my search. These ads are selling real products, often the exact product I'm looking for, from legitimate and well-established companies.

When I get on Facebook, my sidebar is filled with ads. I would estimate 50% of them are scams. About 25% are for Facebook games, which I am not interested in. The remaining 25% are legitimate ads which are rarely targeted toward something I want, but even when they are, _I won't click on them because of the 50% of ads that are scams_.

<comment><USER14> This is the interest v. intent paradigm.

Listing 'photography' as an interest on a social network and typing it into google with the intent to research, purchase, learn, etc., represent fundamentally different mindsets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Facebook seems to overwhelmingly treat their users as just "metrics" instead of individuals.

Their short term revenue has been supported by:

a) Small businesses - like this story mentions - buying into an ad platform that performs on the low end of AdSense.

b) CPA scammers pumping rebill offers and breaking through FaceBooks meager ad-clearance department to get anything they can on there.

c) Sketchy fly-by-night dating sites & apps that take advantage of lonely hearts.

d) 25 - 35% of the ads are simply facebook app makers, who in turn sell users "credits" in a model more akin to selling addictive narcotics to addicts than anything else.

That's all bad enough, but the complete disregard for user privacy through their continued "opt-out" policy is out of control.

Through each update of Facebook we've seen bolder and bolder violations of user data , and I think that will ultimately be Facebook's undoing once people recognize just how much your typical advertiser can uncover with your profile.

References:

Zynga - <http://www.businessinsider.com/gossip-2009-11>

Zoosk - [http://manybodytheory.com/777/ive-spent-over-5-million- dolla...](http://manybodytheory.com/777/ive-spent-over-5-million-dollars-on- facebook-and-all-i-have-is-this-t-shirt/)

<comment><USER16> _low end of AdSense._

I'd be freaking ecstatic if my Facebook campaign had performed on the low end of my AdSense performances. Instead, I ended up paying about $50 for each signup to my _free trial_ of a _$30 product_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Some data instead of "I have a friend who..." anecdotal evidence would be nice. The author doesn't make a very strong claim as to why facebook ads don't work which is the whole premise of the article.

<comment><USER18> I lightly approve of anecdotal posts like these. Facebook controls all of the data needed to make informed decisions, and they're not going to share if the OP's claims are accurate. Lots of bad press about CPM and cost/click will force Facebook to publish data proving the worth of getting Facebook ads that transcend the 'case study' nonsense. If they continually ignore lots of bad press, that's a big tell that the only party that benefits is Facebook, even though it's not a smoking gun.

I've taken this approach with PayPal. I'd use them for person-to-person finances, but I've heard so many small-business horror stories that I'd invest the time to make a merchant account if I made a startup. It's not exactly scientific, but PayPal's not exactly flooding the market with data either

<comment><USER19> I agree for the most part. The only problem I see in this post is that it mentions one specific form of ad (and one example) and then vaguely expands it to cover all forms.

It should be immediately obvious that the specific example mentioned is going to have a _very_ poor ROI. Who sells on Facebook?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Have you ever bought a Facebook ad? I have. I have talked to many, many > people who have. We have spent hundreds, many have spent thousands or even > more, experimenting with Facebook ads. They are worthless. Nobody ever looks > at them, and nobody ever clicks on them.

Somewhat damning, if true... Has anyone here had a different experience?

<comment><USER21> Yes, I have had people click on FB ads. It's not clear to me if they are more effective than alternative ads, but people are clicking on them. The ads are not traditional, though.

I have an ad campaign running now on Facebook encouraging people to go to <http://join.marrow.org/gosusan> . ("My sister has cancer. Help her and people like her beat it by donating your bone marrow! Click here to sign up!" )

Short answer is I've yielded 6 people signed up out of ads from Facebook, Myspace, and others. The signups could be improved, but it looks like at least one of these methods is recruiting donors.

Overall Facebook campaign since 9 March 2010:

4,801,855 impressions 803 clicks CTR 0.017% Average CPC $0.99 Spend $796.99

My banner ads on MySpace ("A CANCER KILLA IS YOU! My sister has cancer. Help her or someone like her kill it by donating bone marrow. Click this ad to get started!") overall have these numbers:

973,774 impressions 452 clicks CTR 0.05% Average CPC $0.45 Spend $203.00

At first blush MySpace looks like a better deal (compare the CTR). The thing is, for targeted geographies, I am seeing a lot more clicks, faster, from Facebook than from MySpace. That is, while the clicks from Myspace are cheaper, I'm seeing fewer of them.

My most recent campaign is targeted to south Ohio and south-east Ohio. (Turns out this is where a lot of people with similar heredity as me and my sister live. Therefore I expect these people to be more likely to have a matching bone marrow type). The Facebook ad for this geography has yielded 95 clicks in the last two days. The MySpace ad has yielded 10 clicks.

<comment><USER22> Maybe I'm outdated - but I find it disturbing that such a cause should be promoted in such a way.

<comment><USER23> Serious?! I thought it was real good out-of-the-box thinking.

<comment><USER22> Serious. It is good out-of-the-box, but that's not the point.

What I find disturbing is that the burden of enlisting potential donors falls on the shoulders of those in need and that they are forced to use such inefficient mechanism. Sorry if it wasn't clear.

<comment><USER21> My apologies for not being clear: Facebook ads is far from the only method in use for enlisting potential donors. Furthermore, families in need typically do not need to do anything because of the resources available. In my case I choose to do more because I am fortunate enough to be able to do so.

In the United States, the Be The Match Registry, operated by the National Marrow Donor Program, employs full time recruiters to encourage people to sign up for the registry. One of those recruiters, Magda Silva, has been tireless in her efforts to find new donors for my sister and others. For example she organizes marrow drives on at least a weekly basis where people can sign up to have their tissue type tested. Immediately after hearing about my sister, she worked to set up a drive a Noisebridge, a San Francisco hacker space.

In addition, transplant centers, such as the one at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance where my sister is being treated, have resources to find potential donors. For example, because our family has significant Hungarian background, the transplant center is reaching out to the Hungarian national donor program. These searches are targeted for the patient in need and carried out by doctors who are intimately familiar with the search process.

These efforts are amazing and have paid off for thousands of people in need, including my sister. The Be The Match registry is a nonprofit, supported by generous donations. The transplant center is supported by health insurance and also by generous donations. Neither my sister nor I have been required to do anything special to find donors with these resources.

Indeed, after I began the ad campaign, the transplant center found a partial match for my sister. My family and I are so grateful that someone decided to voluntarily donate their marrow for a complete stranger. We are also grateful to the registry and our transplant center for all their work that made this possible. (What's more, someone even donated cord blood that matches her, which is another, more experimental alternative.) Thank you, whoever you are!

So why bother with online ads at all?

0) When I started, I didn't know if we had a match. I could do _something_ by using these ads, and I was sure it would not duplicate existing efforts (see below). I am lucky enough that I can afford it.

1) Targeting for my sister's marrow type. The existing recruiting is by necessity broad-based, trying to bring in as many donors as possible from as broad a spectrum of people as possible. To the extent there is targeting, there is an emphasis on bringing in minorities because they are critically under represented in the registry. If you are African American and need a marrow transplant, you are likely in serious trouble.

In contrast, I can target ads to geographies which are most likely to have people matching my sister's tissue type. For example, there are many people of Hungarian descent in Ohio, our family has a heavy concentration of Hungarians, so I can target ads there.

2) Potential to scale up. Despite the best efforts of the registry and transplant centers since 1988, only 7MM people __total __are signed up in the U.S. registry. The in-person drives I mentioned above typically bring in between 30 to 200 people per drive. Roughly 12K sign up per month, principally through in person drives, with a smaller portion through the web form.

This means if you don't find a donor immediately, the chances that a donor will appear while you wait are small. The promise of online ads is that they could potentially scale up better than in-person drives -- with a large enough advertising campaign, we could acquire more donors per month than is feasible with current methods. How large a buy is needed of course depends on the conversion rate (i.e. signups for the repository) of ads. That conversion rate is one of the things I am learning through this experience.

I do not mean to suggest that ads could or should replace the traditional in- person methods. Certainly they will not. What they can do is offer an additional tool to attack this problem (and hey, maybe an effective way for some large advertising company to donate in-kind to a good cause).

Does that address your concerns? Again I'm sorry for not being clear that this is not the only method available to our family for finding donors. Don't hesitate to ask any follow up questions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> You can target facebook ads amazingly well. I can reach only under-30 single programmers in San Francisco.

I have friends who've built businesses targeting exactly who they wanted to reach, in a way that would have been prohibitively expensive (and less effective) via AdWords. I'd love to share their specific stories, but I don't have permission (yet?).

Edit: I guess I can elaborate a little. What these businesses had in common:

1\. You could nail down the interested demographic in facebook to reach ~0.01% of the population who would be _immensely_ interested in your service.

2\. The service itself made sense in a social context. I don't know if advertising a plumbing business would work, despite being able to drill down into local married people of homeowning age.

<comment><USER25> _...What these businesses had in common:

1\. You could nail down the interested demographic in facebook to reach ~0.01% of the population who would be immensely interested in your service._

So perhaps Facebook isn't bound to take over the whole of the Internet. It's just bound to take over as advertisement infrastructure for the easily categorizable subset of the Long Tail.

<comment><USER24> It's a good point, but we're all unique, so we all might be part of the "easily categorizable subset of the Long Tail".

Take the most average guy you know, and he still has unique qualities, and lives in a targetable location. Add any hobby or interest, and now he's part of some long tail group.

<comment><USER25> Perhaps "easily categorizable" is the wrong way to put it. I suspect that there are lots of long tail demographics that are online, but still exceedingly hard to reach or market to unless you are an insider. In terms of groups that I am a part of, Facebook doesn't broaden my reach. It only acts as an address book. If Facebook advertising could effectively give access to a lot of insider's address books, I'm still not home free. I still have to figure out a message that will reach everyone without coming across intrusively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The author's thesis is that Facebook ads are bad because they can't harvest demand the same way Google ads can (no purchasing intent), so once Facebook has exhausted its share of 'gullible' or 'naive' businesses who give ads a try, their profitability will fall like a house of cards.

This is flawed in two important ways:

1\. Just because people don't click on banner ads doesn't mean there isn't a place for advertising.

2\. Facebook isn't only monetizing with ads. For example, they've proven themselves to be a killer platform for social games and Facebook Credits seems to have a promising future.

</comment><comment><USER27> I've been thinking this for years, glad someone articulated it.

1) Facebook's demographics suck. The people on there the most are broke college kids and younger. Sure older people check the site, but your average college kid is on all day - because they don't work.

2) When people look at an ad on Google, they are looking for something and the ad might be the answer. When I'm looking for something on Facebook, it is a picture/event/person/comment, the ads will never be what I'm looking for.

The one area I disagree is that I'm not sure a FB+1 will be able to undercut FB on price alone. If FB goes with a freemium model where only the people with 500+ picture and 200+ friends have to pay and businesses with fan pages have to pay, the "regular" users will probably stick around and keep FB the leader because of the network effect. The resulting revenue wouldn't match their valuation at all but it would probably keep them profitable.

<comment><USER28> "I've been thinking this for years, ... The people on there the most are broke college kids and younger."

Years are funny that way: things tend to change as they pass.

Facebook has 400 million active users, where "active" means the account has been used in the last 30 days. 200 million of them have logged in in the last 24 hours.

<http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics>

To put those numbers in perspective, the Internet itself has about 1.67 billion users. Even assuming, for the sake of argument, that many of those _daily_ active users are duplicate or fake, for facebook's demographics to suck, the Internet's demographics must suck.

(Disclaimer: I work for facebook.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Ok, so possibly (though not empirically proven) there is some misleading going on. Bad, I agree.

But a Ponzi scheme? I think that damages his argument because it doesn't really resemble a Ponzi scheme - indeed it sounds like an attempt to rationalise what _is_ going as something illegal and thereby win support for the argument.

Bad rhetoric.

</comment><comment><USER29> I manage over $100k/month in adwords advertising spend for clients who demand results. I've also spent a few thousand dollars on Facebook ads for those same clients. Facebook ads do not work as a direct response type of advertising.

However they work fabulously well for sending traffic to your company Facebook fan page and building your fan base. You can typically get new fans for about 40 cents to a dollar a fan. These are people who you will be able to influence on a daily basis for years to come, and although you won't be able to directly track sales/leads/whatever to your Facebook advertising, I also believe there is tremendous value in interacting with your fans in this more personal way. It's a lot harder to convince clients of this value, but it's real.

<comment><USER25> I don't ever recall being influenced through Facebook by anyone I'm a fan of.

<comment><USER30> I think he means that you are signed up on the fan page's mailing list. Companies of which you are a fan gain access to your social inbox, which I would assume allows them to garner much more of your attention than if they reached for your spam-filtered, labels-and-filter-ridden, adblocker-protected email inbox.

Another intangible but real benefit is the backchannel that fan pages open from the users to the company, and the other fans. Hard to quantify indeed.

What I am curious to see is hard data on acquisition cost of fans vs. mailing list subscribers, and subsequent mailing conversion rates.

<comment><USER25> Yeah, I've not become a fan of too many big corporate entities. I tend to ignore lots of FB stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> He's somewhat incorrect. Facebook ads work great for some things, and those things are where most of the money comes from. Right now it's games (which I have much experience with first hand, having spent somewhere in the 6 figures in ads) though I'm assuming also t-shirts and dating sites given the number of ads I see for those long-term.

</comment><comment><USER32> The article assumes that Facebook will never change or evolve, which I think is wrong given Facebook's history.

For one thing, Facebook does have extremely valuable data, and they're not too shy about starting to sell it to the highest bidders: <http://social.venturebeat.com/2010/04/22/facebook-lobbying/>

<comment><USER33> Totally agreed here.

I have seen too many articles lately that examine Facebook's strategy and business model based on the present. FB has been extremely agile for a large company, and they have proven this fact again and again. They are not afraid to throw things away and try new tactics.

Even if they aren't doing well with their ad system right now, there is a big chance they will stumble upon an even bigger goldmine through their concerted and iterative effort (ie. Zynga + social gaming).

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This feels like a 1960s article stating:

TV ads don't work because people change the channel when commercials are on!

<comment><USER35> In the 60's you couldn't prove it

<comment><USER34> The point is television ads have been incredibly good at generating revenue for 50 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Part of the motivation for putting 'like' buttons all over the web is to gather more granular behavioural data on users, which is eventually going to enable much better targeted ads. They aren't stupid. That said, I'm still mystified by the low quality/relevance of the current ads given what they already ought to know about me.

</comment><comment><USER37> Well, not literally a Ponzi scheme, but I guess I get the point. He means to say, simply, that advertisers will eventually catch on and stop using facebook ads because they're ineffective.

The analysis suffers in trying to shoehorn facebook's biz model into google's. Facebook is relatively young and may very well find different ways to make money. If their push to be a major platform pans out, they're in a powerful position.

</comment><comment><USER38> Facebook ads serve a different sweet spot than Google ads. The latter excels at capturing purchase intent for the obvious reason that people will run a search specifically for something they want to buy -- it's a no-brainer.

Given that people do not hop onto Facebook to buy things, it is the ad purchaser's fault for expecting great direct sales from their product ad on Facebook. Use the right tool for the right purpose. To be fair, the article doesn't give details on the book promoter example, but given the statement "nobody ever clicks them", I feel safe assuming that they did not use all the social features you can build into ads. I've used FB ads and achieved excellent click-through rates. With FB (unlike Google) the promoter could have made a fan page for the book and attracted users to like the page by a) targeting people who would like the book based on demographics and b) showing "your friend Foo liked this page" sort of teasers. Once someone likes the page, you can get stories into their newsfeed for free, which is a pretty darn good return on your ad investment.

</comment><comment><USER39> "A useless product is never sustainable. I wish I could short Facebook."

Knowledge about lack of sustainability is not enough to short. Even if you are sure about the imminent collapse, they might skyrocket before that point. In this case you are forced to cover at a huge loss.

<comment><USER38> Buy a put option instead of shorting, and you are protected against rising share price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> But this week didn't Facebook take one big step closer to their own version of AdSense? Put those social ads all over the internet, where they aren't just hanging out with their friends, and it's a whole new ballgame.

</comment><comment><USER41> I think to work a facebook ad can't be trying to directly see something. Providing a link to a game or a fan page or anything the person wants to do I think would be the way to succeed. I've seen figures before for a direct sell type campaign, they were horrible, the cpc was a lot higher than the usual long tail adwords stuff and the ctr was a lot lower.

I think if nothing else brand advertisers and facebook app advertisers would keep them going, I can see how it would be cheaper continuing to shove something like coke in our faces on facebook than TV ads.

</comment><comment><USER42> Pay-per-performance is only one type of advertising.

Brand advertising is the big elephant in the room and might make fb a tonne of $ going forward.

</comment><comment><USER43> The author basically says that ads on Facebook are a Ponzi scheme as it is often taken up by newer advertisers who then dump it as it produces no results. He estimates Facebook will make about 10 billion doing this.

$10 billion is a lot! by the time they run out of the ad based ponzi they can well find another scheme and keep making huge returns!

</comment><comment><USER30> It would be interesting to have figures backing these assertions. What sort of conversion performance did you see Joseph?

</comment><comment><USER44> Facebook is well aware of this, that's why they're experimenting with payment platforms and credits as a form of making money.

</comment><comment><USER45> Seems like no one could tell how they would return an investment. Of course, their exit strategy could be an IPO, but it seems too late - looks like they were reached their peak, and in-browser social networks in general is not a so cool thing anymore.

They got the hype, the users, and the data. The data is what someone might want to buy when users start to shift to some new emerging service (something truly mobile and location-based, I guess).

So, it is an established communication platform for people across the globe, but they still unable to make a profit from it, while it is already on the peak.

It that sense it is a true Ponzi scheme. For investors. =)

</comment><comment><USER46> What isn't a Ponzi Scheme?

\-- Sorry I edited my question, and then reverted it back.

<comment><USER47> Anarchy.</comment></comment>


Wire (wire.com) client is now fully open sourced - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@wireapp/you-can-now-build-your-own-wire-client-ea9ed9214e26#.kw9ppwet3 <comment><AUTHOR> Wire (wire.com) is now fully open sourced. You can build your own client from [https://github.com/wireapp](https://github.com/wireapp) and use it to talk to other user using the official clients.</comment>


Ask HN: Should I care to support IE6? - <AUTHOR>

According to the latest browser statistics (link below), the IE6 has a 17.1 market share. How many of those folks may care about the Web2.0 platform we are writing? May be about a fifth? So overall for those 2-3% of the entire market, is it worth spending your valuable cycle, which you would rather spend on features of your site. (also save on Tylenol expenses) <comment><USER2> You have _no idea_ if a fifth of IE6 users will use your products: for all you know they could _all_ use it.

My advice: support IE6 entirely, launch, iterate, then once you have users (= market) then make the choice to scale back IE6 development.

As a young startup you'll have plenty of reasons why users won't stick - don't make browser support (eg, something you can fix and are aware of) another reason.

<comment><USER3> Good advice. I would suggest that the OP also encourage users running IE6 to upgrade.

You might want to take a look at the IE6 Update code (<http://ie6update.com/>) for ideas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If it's easy, dedicate a little code to give them a reasonable experience. But any substantial effort in that arena would be a waste of time: Focus instead on creating a great product that will bring forth a few more people who use updated browsers.

</comment><comment><USER5> As a data point, we see 53% of our traffic from some flavor of IE with a breakdown (for IE) of:

IE-6 / IE-7 / IE-8

39% / 55% / 6%

For us, this sadly means that supporting IE-6 is mandatory.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Browser statistics link: <http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp>

<comment><USER6> From w3schools : "our data, collected from W3Schools' log-files"

And as they say : "W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user."</comment></comment>