The problem isn't the 'merit' it's the 'ocracy' (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-problem-isnt-merit-its-ocracy.html <comment><USER3> There is a sleight-of-hand in "meritocracy" evinced by the Scott Alexander quote--we ask "who should do surgery, the best surgeon or the worst?" and agree that surgeons should be chosen by "merit", or better yet, by their instrumental value to the task at hand.

The trick comes in when we switch without acknowledgement to describing _the system for the distribution of wealth and status_.

This kind of "meritocracy" is more like if we held an arm-wrestling tournament, declared the victor to be our new feudal lord, the next 6 runners up to be knights, and everyone else to be peasants. Our position in this new society was based on "merit", but that can't _necessarily_ justify the difference between nobles and serfs.

We could even re-run the tournament every year. We could make sure no child gets extra time in the weight-room because of her noble parents. We could decide that arm-wrestling is stupid and brutish and so, in a glorious revolution, switch to speed chess. None of it would address the question of justice.

<comment><USER4> > This kind of "meritocracy" is more like if we held an arm-wrestling > tournament, declared the victor to be our new feudal lord, the next 6 > runners up to be knights, and everyone else to be peasants. Our position in > this new society was based on "merit", but that can't necessarily justify > the difference between nobles and serfs.

Isn't that because the aspect of merit which is measured by an arm wrestling contest isn't the same as that which is relevant to running a feudal society?

A tournament for selecting a feudal lord would need to measure economic and strategic literacy, intelligence, moral compass, etc.

<comment><USER3> It begs the question to just assume there is a "feudal society" that needs to be "run". For instance, why not have a "first citizen" who is selected to manage internal coordination and external strategy, but must live in the worst house in the village and wear a hair shirt.

You _can_ say, well that wouldn't work! But now the idea is that _the structure_ of this model feudal society is justified by reasons like "people won't follow someone if they don't have a gold hat and a scary sword" and not by any process that led to selecting the _particular_ feudal lord.

<comment><USER5> This analysis is incomplete. Assume I am the best (objectively) at "managing internal coordination and external strategy" but I don't want to live in the worst house and I am allergic to hair shirts. Then I won't sign up for the job and the society is worse off for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I figure maybe I can offer some perspective on the ivy league comments, as I just went through the admissions process. No ivy I've seen claims to evaluate on objective criteria. Rather they've all switched to extolling their inscrutable "holistic admissions process". This is what allows them to frame their classes to fit what they want on a brochure. I had a asian friend who took seven AP classes in one year and was a valedictorian who was rejected from Harvard. When I toured, the guide was a farm girl from rural Oregon with precisely zero credentials (according to her) who said she applied on a lark to frame the rejection letter. Ivies are a terrible example because they don't even pretend to be objective any more.

The reality is there's a lot outside the bubbles of ivy league institutions and silicon valley, and this author clearly writes from inside them. I've seen meritocracy almost everywhere I go, even though I'm not from the sort of background the author described. I got hired at my current job because I was the best person for it, though it was un-conventional. I earned scholarships through merit, not because of a particular background. The list goes on. There's a whole world outside of this author's, full of mostly good people who just want good people to do good jobs.

<comment><USER7> I think you're missing part of the point of the article. Of the current nine Supreme Court justices, how many went to an Ivy League school? All nine.

Out of the last 10 presidents, how many went to an Ivy League school? Seven. (The exceptions are Reagan, Carter, and Nixon. If I had asked how many of the most recent 5 presidents, the answer would be five.)

How many of the current US Senators and Representatives went to Ivy League schools? I'm not going to do the research to answer that, but I bet it's at least the majority, and probably the overwhelming majority.

As the article said, it's the "ocracy" part. We want merit in those who run things. But in those who rule, we _also_ want that they understand where the rest of us are coming from.

<comment><USER8> I recall George W Bush tried to appoint a woman who had gone to community college to the supreme court and she didn't get appointed. Right, it was Harriet Miers. So instead Samuel Alito was appointed.

<comment><USER9> Harriet Miers didn't go to an Ivy League school, but she also never served as any type of judge, and had no other background in constitutional law like litigation or academia. Now, in previous generations people with no direct judicial experience were appointed to the Supreme Court and served well, like Earl Warren, but this has not been customary for quite some time, and Miers did not have massive outside accomplishments like Warren (3-time Governor of California).

Miers was just tremendously unqualified for the job and was nominated because she was really close buddies with GW Bush and GWB lived his whole life based on personal loyalties and relationships.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Meritocracy" always works backwards in practice - the "crats" are anointed as being the ones with "merit". Credentialism is just the most obvious expression of this - e.g., you get a Harvard degree mostly by being in the social class that goes to Harvard - but it happens at every level in every way, and nearly everything which purports to assess merit in fact launders social class.

This hits me, personally, hard, because my tribe is the thoughtful, the curious, the problem-solvers, &c., and so many such people take the stated aims of the prestige launderers at face value, only to be disappointed when being smart and dedicated means nothing in reality. To plagiarize a bit, I see the best minds of my generation destroyed by what amounts to a lack of class consciousness combined with the unforgivable sin of hoping that something in the world is fair.

</comment><comment><USER11> "The Ivy League admissions system is designed to select the most intelligent and studious students in the world. Even with legacy admissions and related scandals, the Ivy League has largely been successful in this. ... Has there ever been a higher concentration of raw intelligence and studious industry than exists right now in America's top 15 universities (and the few industries that selectively pull from them)?"

Ehh, the universities with the best concentration of talent are not the Ivies but MIT and Caltech.

<comment><USER12> > The Ivy League admissions system is designed to select the most intelligent > and studious students in the world

If intelligence can be measured, whether using IQ or SAT scores, I don't think this is true.

If intelligence cannot be measured, then this is just some grandiose perception that ivy schools have been successful at projecting.

<comment><USER13> My money's on the latter. A familiar example for me is the "Certified Scrum Master" racket. The only actual requirement for those was the ability to keep breathing throughout a short course. But they undeniably had an economic benefit for the holders, in that it made them more hireable by companies that needed some sort of blessing for their top-town control apparatus.

<comment><USER14> But I genuinely enjoy folks who put that crap on their resume. It's immediately a black mark.

Then again I'm mostly interviewing for the startup/small business scene, and I need people who can actually do things other than just "follow the rules".

I've had the pleasure to work with some truly talented folks, and I can promise none of them had the patience with bureaucratic bs to do certified scrum training.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This article has inspired me to read Andrew Yang's book.

As a silicon valley person, I have become part of this bubble. A lot of the things he said apply to me.

I've recently tried to understand what it looks like to leave Silicon Valley, but it is certainly not a simple thing to do. To somehow exit this so-called meritocracy and move to a place that is more focused on a holacracy (not in the Zappos way).

I'd like to go to a place where a person is not defined by the size of their paycheck, how many hours they work and how big their start-up exit is.

That said, I don't know how I can fit into that society; I don't know how I can move there. I don't even know where _there_ is.

<comment><USER16> I've often felt like I'm somewhere in between worlds - I'm studying at the "top" university in my country, working at a Fortune 500, etc., and on the other hand I know how to use a chainsaw, have done my fair share of home renovation, own a few guns, and hit the range on weekends.

 _There_ is pretty much any activity or community that doesn't exist within your sphere. If yours is anything like mine, the people around you play Ultimate Frisbee, rock climb, "hike", do photography, and are "foodies". Pick an activity or community that you don't see represented in your sphere, and that's probably what you're looking for.

As an aside: my girlfriend and close friends have commented that I speak differently when around, e.g., old boomers at the range. You can use whether you feel like you "fit in" as a litmus test, and if you don't fit in, rest assured you will in due time. In my experience, people outside of "meritocratic" (read: finance, tech, law, etc.) bubbles are very kind and welcoming.

<comment><USER17> > If yours is anything like mine, the people around you play Ultimate Frisbee, > rock climb, "hike", do photography, and are "foodies"

Hahaha. I can spot a "tech worker" (not even just developer—manager, sales, whatever) hiker at half a kilometer (yeah there are plenty I don't spot, but there's definitely a "look" that exists in clothing and affect and is fairly common and non-tech-workers _do not_ have it). If you tasked me with finding as many people as I could with rock climbing gym memberships but I wasn't allowed to go to such a gym to do it, I'd hit the coffee shops in our "startupy" district around lunch time on a weekday (well, not right now, but you get the idea). But I've been told I'm being ridiculous and that these activities don't have a class component to them because quite a few participants aren't involved in software companies or software development. Well yeah, but something doesn't have to be absolute to be a noticeable trend. Lacrosse, crew, skiing, squash—not technically limited to a certain social class _but I bet you 'd find some class-related trends_ among their participants, especially people who do or have done two or more of those activities with any frequency.

We like what we like in no small part they're the "right" things to like, among "our" people.

<comment><USER18> Heh. I have a lousy sense of direction. Once I was in the middle of San Francisco, utterly lost (this was in the days before ubiquitous cell phone maps), trying to make my way to a tech developer conference. I tried and failed to use a paper map. I tried asking people for directions and failed to understand or follow them.

Eventually I gave up and just _looked_ at the people around me. Then I moved backwards along the techie gradient, which took me straight there on the shortest possible path.

(No lanyards at the time, either. Or I was new enough at the game to not know to look for them? I don't recall.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The argument from surgeon is so bad that it's borderline eristic. Surgeon has a very clearly defined objective while politics is the total opposite.

Politics is about deciding what to optimize for - "what should be" which just cannot be "meritocratically" derived from "what is". If somebody claims they have some special "merit" that makes them fit for this kind of decisions, you should ask them to walk on water or something.

<comment><USER20> Politics is also about deciding how to optimize for it. I don't know if it's a good idea that those are the same job.

<comment><USER21> In theory, they are not the same job. The actual decision making is supposed to be deferred to civil servants, who are (in theory) hired or appointed based on their technical qualifications.

<comment><USER22> Except that politics involves plenty of decision making. And the buck has to stop somewhere. So I'm not sure that there's a real distinction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Even this article misses the root injustice of meritocracy. Meritocracy is just another way to grant those born with advantages yet more advantages. The most fortunate people in a meritocracy are those born smarter and with greater capacity to learn, or those born into an environment to foster a mental framework that lends itself to success. Meritocracy rewards the fortunate with wealth and success just as much as a system that provides power by default to those born into wealth or beauty (though arguably the recipients of the benefit are more diffuse). The real difference on which to select such a system is not a matter of _justice_ then, it's a matter of which one provides better outcomes. Here, I agree with the article. The merits we select for in our version of "Meritocracy" are a poor proxy measurement for a measured and just leader.

<comment><USER22> Meritocracy does not "reward" wealth, beauty or other social advantages (except to the extent that humans will tend to reward those things under any social arrangement whatsoever); it rewards people who make consequential decisions, and are thereby held responsible for those choices. The ideal is that there _has_ to be some sort of flip side to every "reward", so that the arrangement is socially beneficial to all parties.

<comment><USER23> Again, many are born with inherent advantages such as innate intelligence, health, mental stability, and an environment that fosters success. The merit they are capable of developing is made possible by a combination of these things. That being the case, it is inevitable that Meritocracy rewards the fortunate for being fortunate. The difference between Meritocracy and other frameworks to select the powerful is that the people born with the advantages listed above tend to win instead of simply those born into wealth/power/beauty/etc. (Though those with wealth/power/beauty/etc. do actually tend to win anyway because this provides them ways to develop merit or proxies for merit or ways to circumvent merit).

There is simply no framework that does not provide someone with certain characteristics systematic advantages to gaining power.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "Today, thanks to assortative mating in a handful of cities, intellect, attractiveness, education, and wealth are all converging in the same families and neighborhoods. I look at my friends' children, and many of them resemble unicorns: brilliant, beautiful, socially precocious creatures who have gotten the best of all possible resources since the day they were born."

Yes this. I remember when nerds were outcasts, that really colours the situation. Maybe there's a dark kind of 'fairness' in that! No more! The cool, good looking popular kids now get the best grades! That's the most 'unfair' thing I can imagine!

And this: " Our specialty is light-commitment benevolence. We will do something to help but not enough to hurt us or threaten our own standing. We know better than to do that...."

This is brilliant.

</comment><comment><USER25> " _The remarkable thing about these numbers (and Yang provides lots of them) is that four of the six industries (consulting, law, finance, and_ academia _) are easily described as parasitic or predatory, secondary adornments to the actual business of human activity on the Earth._ "

One might suggest that one of these things is not like the others. (One might also suggest that a glance at the right column would be one reason why.)

</comment><comment><USER26> The problem is the complete lack of goals. (The meaning of life if you like)

Thus far people with this merit did a wonderful job subjugating the rest of humanity to their will. (I'm no doubt guilty for a wild share of this.)

The best part is where I convince you that I did you a favor! The challenge of it is in trying not to laugh.

So yeah, I have merit and you do not. It means you should trade everything you own and your labor for these mirrors and glass beads. You wont know why but you'll thank me later. You will just have to trust me. I mean, don't I look sophisticated with all this stuff I've traded for the beads from other folk? How could you think they all made the wrong choice? Look how many of them are working in my field?

Why do all of the other animals have such fun and interesting lives without any of those intellectuals? If people are poor enough there are no rent collectors. Dogs can still be fooled into employment. Cats are doing the exact opposite! With luck you can convince them not to do things. I conclude cats have more merit than people.

Now go for the down-vote button!

</comment><comment><USER27> The problem is the "meritocracy" is thinly disguised "aristocracy."

There's some minor inward movement towards the core for certain kinds of ruthlessly narcissistic clever types. But you're never going to be president of the US without significant aristocratic money backing you, no matter how good your SATs are.

The deeper problem is you can't define "merit" unless you know what your goals are as a culture. What are the long-term goals of the US? How about the planet as a whole?

It's fairly obvious that the US is caught up in a surreal game called "Make and keep as much money as possible." But what happens outside of that? Does anyone have a long-term plan?

If you don't know where you're going, how are you supposed to pick the right people to help you get there?

</comment><comment><USER28> Too many black and whites statements left to stand. I don't see 'class' in America as being the saving grace of the workers.

</comment><comment><USER29> Very good example of Facts vs. Truth, especially in the quote from Yang's book.

</comment><comment><USER30> The term "meritocracy", like the term "capitalism", was originally coined strictly as a means of criticizing the concept, yet the people doing the criticism don't really say that meritocracy is necessarily bad, just that they don't think we really have one. I have yet to see any suggestions on what to replace the current system with, though. Usually when somebody criticized meritocracy, they suggest stratifying everybody into a few broad categories: race, gender, sexual orientation, and then it seems to be implied that the meritocracy competition occurs within those categories.

</comment><comment><USER31> The main point about -ocracy is a really good one, but the article makes so many blanket statements without any real evidence that seem way off base. The Ivy League schools (and quite a few other liberal arts colleges that should be included in this argument) historically were playgrounds for the rich, with academics being one of the games. No, Texas elite weren't shooting for Baylor (unless they were of a particular religious stripe), the super-elites in Texas were shooting for the big Ivy's, and next category was Rice. (Or Vanderbilt in Tennessee, etc.) Stanford has been an important elite institution in the US for a long time.

Meanwhile, the Ivy's have moved in a dramatic way to be more inclusive with lots more minorities and scholarships. To the point about meritocracy, who cares? If you pick an -ocracy on a less discriminatory basis, it's still an -ocracy. I would argue that a less discriminatory -ocracy that's more socially mobile is somewhat better than a more racist one that's based more on accident of birth. Still possibly not good, but not as bad.

I'm sure there are companies where your job 5 years out of college still depends on where you went undergraduate, but really, you don't get a shot if you're not from one of the Ivy's? Hah. Most people are well aware that many public universities in this country offer great education to some or all of their students. Let's just mention UC Berkely, UCLA, Rutgers, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Texas (Austin) and so forth. Degrees from these and many, many more institutions can be an entry to very lucrative and powerful positions. And please don't forget Cal Tech, Purdue, West Point or Anapolis, etc. etc. (Oh, and maybe include YC) Yeah, there's something of a pecking order -- for several decades all of our presidents came from Yale, for example (well they were Bushes and Clinton) and certainly there's a gradient of prestige. My point is, all this stuff about the "Ivy's" is overstated and weakens the argument, which actually depends in no way on the assumption that the country is run by graduates of the institutions designated as "Ivy's".

Someone said that the Ivy's developed their "holistic" admissions policy in the 30's to prevent the schools from being overrun by Jews. That's a stretch. My uncle, a Jew, actually managed to be admitted to one of the two (2) spots open to Jews at MIT at that time. (Remember, open discrimination was perfectly legal back then) He turned it down, incidentally, and went on to build a very large chain of stores. It was quotas and open racism and of course raw exclusion of women that were used to keep people out in the 30's, actually. Today's concepts of diversity were set up to avoid letting the Supreme Court's Bakke decision exclude large parts of our society from the elite academic world, not to exclude those people.

I mention this because the Ivy League institutions are less discriminatory today. You can equate the admission policy today to the 1930's but it's just not the same. Yes there are still biases, but purposefully much less. No the perfect system isn't at all perfect. But going for perfection usually leads to disaster. As Voltaire said, "The perfect is the enemy of the better."

There are definitely problems with being ruled by an -ocracy, but what alternative is actually being proposed, other than doing what's practical and sensible to open the -ocracy to broader participation and trying to limit its inevitable excesses of power?

</comment><comment><USER32> TLDR: In a Meritocracy, the "most talented" rule over everyone else. But talented != good person. In other words, it may be the dictatorship of intelligent sociopaths.

But go read the article. It's easy to follow along, yet argues well.

<comment><USER30> > talented != good person

But we don't have any better measure of a "good person" than we do a talented one (outside of specific talents like playing piano or juggling chainsaws). We do have an imperfect way to measure intelligence, via performance on written tests and assignments.

<comment><USER33> Why are these talents and their adjacents excluded?

> playing piano or juggling chainsaws

<comment><USER25> I would certainly vote for the person who can play the piano while juggling chainsaws for King of Earth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Never forget that Meritocracy the term was created to mock the idea of it even being possible, now it's become a mainstream accepted thought. Usually the tragedy comes before the farce, I guess this time is different.

<comment><AUTHOR> Dunno why this comment started dead, so I vouched it.

<comment><USER35> Comments typically start as dead because the poster is "shadowbanned", for some string of particularly unconstructive comments in the past. (I don't know if enough vouches can cause a user to be un-banned.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This article looks one one tiny aspect of society (ivy league school attendance) while ignoring society at large, and tries to draw conclusions about _meritocracy_ from it. There is an ancient tale about a dozen blind met each touching parts of an elephant and describing it, some say elephants are long like a tube, others round like a ball, etc...

If you don't have a big picture view, it is best to be aware of it :) Meritocracy is just a politicized term for 'competence'. We want competent people running things, that's obvious.

What we also want is for people who _were_ competent but no longer _are_ , to be replaceable - that's the real issue. If idiots from ivy league schools who cheated their way through school or were only good at taking tests got found out afterwards, attendance wouldn't be so hotly contested.

This works in sports - the minute LeBron can't play well, he will be replaced by somebody else who can and it doesn't matter that he _was_ the best player of his generation.

This doesn't work in politics and many other fields because the people evaluating their _competence_ are largely selfish idiots. If it is in your selfish interest to promote less competent people some of the time and you value your selfish interest above most things - we have a problem.

If it were a matter of intelligent people having trouble decoding what competence meant in various fields, it is something we could improve upon as time goes on as we get better at science. Our current problems, are problems of idiots being capable of attaining decision-making power (becoming wealthy, becoming high ranking officials in government, business, academia) _and_ holding on to it, regardless of their competence over time.

This is what people are usually mad about - they call it being a parasite, being the 1%, being a wasp, etc and they are right, while also being too dumb to know what to do about it :) People want to work hard to give their kids a better future, while not realizing that other people wanting their kids and _their_ friends to have a better future, is the same mechanism that leads to their kids' future being shitty!

People are so dumb - they think they're upset about corruption/inequality/whatever while the vast majority of them are simply wishing the power dynamics were in their favor :)

If you want competence over time, you need to abandon the idea of _anyone_ having power over others _regardless_ of their competence level. Georgism [0] is an economic movement that was aware of this problem in regards to land ownership - I'd go on to say it has to cut across all spheres of life - <USER2> getting to hold on to power regardless of their competence, is something most should agree upon, is a mistake. In order for most to agree upon this - they'd need to not be idiots. It always boils down to too many idiots folks :)

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism)

</comment><comment><USER37> That was really weird.

TL;DR: "If smart people govern they will do it badly."

I don't think I get it.

<comment><USER38> We have created a system that allows ivy graduates to truly believe they are the best humanity has to offer and therefore know what's best for everyone. Yet most of these graduates were raised in sheltered environments and therefore don't understand the thought process of the average person. Not only does this make it hard for them to solve the problems of average people, it also makes them less likely to care about those problems. While everyone chosen to be in the meritocratic upper class is patting themselves on the back for growing the stock market the vast majority of people aren't seeing the gains from that growth.

<comment><USER36> I didn't create this system, did you? :) I was born into it.

This subtle self-blaming via alignment with group-identity over self-identity is a dirty mind-virus.

Ivy league kids were _born_ into a system of their parents pushing them to go these schools and think a specific way. Solving the problems of average people is an impossible task, because an average person is a selfish moron that is largely interested in winning zero-sum games at the expense of those around them.

This is manifested as wanting to get laid among ages 15-30, wanting to make money, wanting power/fame. At ages 30-death it is manifested as 'a better future for my children' which is always measured up against other children, again a zero sum game.

How do you solve a zero-sum problem so that everyone wins? The answer is, it is impossible.

Sorry to burst that 'rich evil folks are the problem' bubble - the problem is much deeper - most people are morons who do what's best for them, without much thought for what's best for others. This worked in small tribes because the feedback mechanisms for being a selfish asshole were almost immediate and as a result, selfish desire to not get your ass beat by the tribe forced out obvious bad behaviour and aligned everyone to a common goal. Now that we live in big cities - the feedback mechanism is broken - we're living among Gordon Geckos of the world.

Only non-idiots like me who actually think about the big picture can even see the problem, the rest will forever be stuck playing zero-sum games without knowing it, until people like me either re-educate them, implant their brains to make them less idiotic, etc, or make them go extinct :)

<comment><USER25> " _I didn 't create this system, did you? :) I was born into it._"

But you do benefit from it, no?

" _Only non-idiots like me..._ "

It is the beginning of wisdom to realize you're an idiot, too. :-)

<comment><USER36> function unkownPersonOnTheInternetBenefitsFromSystemHeSheWasBornInto(person: Person) -> Boolean

Please provide the body of the function and a description of the type Person you're using to ask such a question. Is the body of your function equal to 'return true' by any chance? I shudder at your description of type Person.

Please provide your qualifications for making wisdom claims, other than presumably having read a bumper sticker you thought was clever that had words 'wisdom' and 'idiot' in it?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


This place is pryson - <AUTHOR> https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n10/mary-wellesley/this-place-is-pryson <comment><USER2> It is interesting that such religious hysteria was actually possible though.

Honestly at least personally this whole idea of enclosure is quite disturbing. I wonder if conditions were that bad such that this was the rational choice?

<comment><USER3> There are plenty of examples of other, arguably even more extreme forms of slow religious self-sacrifice:

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

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

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

<comment><USER4> Buñuel made a movie about Simon the Stylite:

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> catchy hook, but the paywall ruined it...

<comment><USER6> Indeed. I ran it through outline. It's a fascinating read. [https://outline.com/quXJhb](https://outline.com/quXJhb)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why Facebook is not responsive? - <AUTHOR>

Why Facebook has m.facebook.com instead of a responsive website? <comment><USER2> Facebook doesn't have a responsive design because their goal is to load the site and all the apps that hook into the platform as fast as possible with the least amount of overhead as possible.

</comment><comment><USER3> As a large application, it is too complex to make responsive. It will make bad UX. Instead of making large web application responsive., it is better to have mobile version of web or mobile app.

</comment><comment><USER4> Due to management reasons. For such a complex structure it is easier to manage single mobile pages.

</comment><comment><USER5> Because they want you to use the app, which comes along with permissions to access your data.

<comment><USER6> To be fair, one would think it would be a bit more complex than that. Think about how large their codebase is and how many different types of browsers and devices they support.

<comment><USER5> So does Twitter.</comment></comment></comment>


Russia and Venezuela's Plan to Sidestep Sanctions: Virtual Currencies - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/03/technology/russia-venezuela-virtual-currencies.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0 <comment><USER2> First Russia tries to ban Bitcoin now they make their own. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em I guess.</comment>


Show HN: USE Together - Collaborative screen sharing with multiple mouse cursors - <AUTHOR> http://www.use-together.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN folks,

I'm Julien, CTO at OPEXMedia. We have been working hard for the past two years on USE Together, a collaborative screen sharing solution: each user has his own mouse cursor appearing on your screen and can interact with your apps in real time, making you feel you are no more alone on your desktop! We have made it super easy to join a screen sharing session, from a simple web browser (Chrome and Firefox supported for now) without installing any software nor any plugin. We have also implemented hardware encoding (NVIDIA GPUs supported) to bring you a fast, low latency screen sharing experience as if you were physically in front of the screen.

We have seen many potential use cases for USE Together like:

\- Easy remote working

\- Project reviewing

\- Co-designing on Illustrator

\- Fixing some Powerpoint presentations

\- Pair programming, we even used the solution to develop it (when it was mature enough) and to do code reviewing (then an infinite loop occured)!

USE Together is available right now, as a free beta opened to all! You can share a Windows desktop (Mac and Linux support coming later) with 2 people. Just for you HN folks, I'll upgrade your account if you want to invite more people on your screen, just ask :)</comment>


Api.ipengine.dev (Free alternative to IP-info; ipinfo; ipapi; whoapi; ipstack) - <AUTHOR> https://api.ipengine.dev <comment><AUTHOR> Hello Reddit;

So a while back i found a website (app) called ipinfo and they provided ip info of a IP address and they are charging $50 for 250k lookups and me being a cheap ass i am i didn't want to pay for it and created my own one.

Its completely FREE. Works with both IPv4 & IPv6

        Personal Lookup: https://api.ipengine.dev
        Global IP Lookup: https://api.ipengine.dev/ip/18.104.22.168

If there is a demand for this ill add anything IP related users want.

Please give me some feedback.

<comment><USER2> > Hello Reddit

ಠ_ಠ</comment></comment>


Zach Will's GitHub "contributions" chart looks like the 1UP Mushroom - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/zachwill

<comment><USER2> I was impressed until I looked at his commit history. He used a script to do this: [https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti](https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti)</comment>


How do i reach advanced level of python? - <AUTHOR> I am just beginning to learn python.With so much resource peppered around the web, what would you recommend that helped you with learning and applying your python knowledge.Resource, books, vids..etc. Thank you! <comment><USER2> A lot of more advanced things can be found on [https://pythonspot.com](https://pythonspot.com)</comment>


The C++ bashing season is back - <AUTHOR> http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2009/10/17/the-c-bashing-season-is-back/

<comment><USER2> _µTorrent is written in C++, and you could never, ever, make it so fast and small using any other language._

Citation needed. I think it could be done easily in Haskell, or Erlang, or Common Lisp, or even Java. (Actually, I bet it would even be fine in Perl/Python/Ruby.) A bittorrent client's speed comes from an efficient TCP stack and some minimal userspace use of non-blocking IO (or lightweight threads). It's basically glue between epoll (or similar), some disk reads and writes, and a tiny bit of algorithmic code.

It is unlikely that C++ is the best choice for this sort of application. It will work and it will be fast, but it will probably be just as fast in safer languages too.

<comment><USER3> There are other languages you could make it small in, but those languages probably aren't among them.

Haskell: Hugs 98 is 723K, but it depends on /usr/lib/hugs, which is 7.3M. GHC can _almost_ do it; I compiled a "hello, world" program with GHC and it "only" came out to 366K, which is 84K bigger than μTorrent's reported size. With UPX, however, it packs to 130k. (ocamlopt's tax is in the same range.) Maybe Haskell would be an option? Or does it bloat up when you include the libraries you'd need for this?

Erlang: My Erlang install is 97M. I don't know how much of that is minimally necessary to run things, but /usr/lib/erlang/erts-5.6.3 is 3.6M, 12 times the size of μTorrent. Stand Alone Erlang (<http://www.sics.se/~joe/sae.html>) is 1.5MB compressed.

Common Lisp: All the Common Lisp implementations are pretty big (SBCL, say, is 53M, of which 25M is the image sbcl.core), and they can't produce a standalone executable without including most of the environment. So you're starting at 25M.

Java: The JRE on my system is 98 megabytes, so a Java application to run on Win32 will be 98 megabytes plus the application code. Even if you compile your app with GCJ, libgcj is 33 megabytes.

Now, you could argue that the size of this stuff isn't relevant because it isn't specific to your hypothetical Common Lisp implementation of BitTorrent, but could also be used by whatever other Common Lisp programs the user has installed. But you would be treating a very-low-probability event as if it were normal.

Languages — or rather, language implementations — that _could_ make a 300k runnable BitTorrent client include not just C and C++, but also Forth, assembly, Pascal, Eiffel, and any number of other fatally flawed niche languages that don't require hundreds of kilobytes of libraries just to initialize a process and exit. There are probably also Scheme implementations that would work.

Just about anything that has a reasonably small bytecode interpreter and lets you package the rest of your program as bytecode would probably win. x86 code is pretty grossly bloated by comparison to a good compact bytecode. (But compressible. See comment above about UPX.)

The only other _practical_ alternative I know of would be Lua, which only costs you about half of your space budget for the interpreter itself. Lua's "bytecode" is actually wordcode, but presumably UPX or something similar would squeeze it down to a reasonable size.

It's my understanding that μTorrent does not need to ship with any shared libraries to run; the <300k of the executable alone is sufficient. You may think this is unimportant but I think that is an unconcern based in unusual wealth: you probably own your own computer to install software on persistently, probably several of them, you probably have several hundred kilobits per second of bandwidth to download software with, so you probably don't care how long it takes to download something or how much of a 256MB USB pendrive it takes up.

It's certainly true that there are any number of languages you could write a BitTorrent client in that would be just as _fast_.

<comment><USER2> But let's face it -- micro-optimizing the space of the image on disk is a completely useless optimization these days. You are also not including the shared libraries that the binary uses.

When making my argument in the grandparent post, I did not even consider the size aspect to be worth discussing. If this is somehow important to you, then my argument does not apply.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thank goodness -- the Java bashing season seemed to go on forever.

</comment><comment><USER5> While I am not even vaguely a fan of C++ (despite making my living writing it for at least 5 years back in the day) you can have readable multi-programmer code - look at webkit for example. Its a complex bit of functionality and there is a lot of it but I spend quite a bit of time knee deep in its code (for an internal project) and I find myself quite impressed with the quality.

Ok - so one data point doesn't prove anything but it does show that it is perfectly possible to make good C++ projects.

For me the thing that drives me up the wall is how much _work_ I have to do in C++ compared to Python to do the same things - I guess some of that is having not used C++ for a long time. That and the fact I keep typing single quoted strings in C++ and semicolon line endings in Python.

</comment><comment><USER6> _For someone the good parts of C++ are exceptions and RAII. For another it's templates and STL containers. Each one is picking his own subset, and no one seems to agree whose subset is better/safer/more comprehensible._

It would be nice to see some clear, thorough coding standards for C++ that chose a reasonable subset. I haven't found many publicly available apart from Google's Style Guide: [http://google- styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.x...](http://google- styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.xml) . Anyone know of any others?

<comment><USER7> It needs more than just coding standards. Someone needs to give C++ the same treatment Doug Crockford gave Javascript when he wrote _Javascript: The Good Parts_.

<comment><USER8> Kernighan & Ritchie have already written that book.

<comment><USER9> Only partially. C with vectors, strings, references, maps and algorithms added would be _"C++: The Good Parts"_

<comment><USER10> For you ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Fine by me, pick your latest toy language and demonstrate how you can write a toy webserver in 3 lines or a Fibonacci calculator in 3 characters.

When you need to get some real work done give me a call - I just put my rates up.

<comment><USER12> I wonder what a language with a three character Fibonacci sequence would be like. You'd probably need Unicode, if the language wasn't specifically designed for the Fibonacci sequence.

<comment><USER13> A "language" that has fibonacci builtin can do it 2 characters. fx. where f is the name of the fibonacci function and x is a single digit number.

A fibonacci DSL could do it in 1; if all input is expected to be an integral value and the machine only computes fibonacci values, then typing a single digit number would have the intended consequence:

       (loop
         (print (fib (parse-integer (read)))))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You say, Oh that language sucks. This is my favorite language. MyLang Rules!!!

OK you are a jerk.

You say, well I'm not a heavy user of that language. Actually I don't like it much. But this is my favorite. I like it because of this. Maybe you too like to try this :).

Hmm... You are great.

That's what I think about language bashing :).

<comment><USER2> I don't think anyone is "bashing" anything.

C++ has a weird niche. It's as fast as C, but is as high-level as Java... at first. It has exceptions, it has multiple inheritance, and it has "methods" (though C++ doesn't call them this, for some reason). This makes it the perfect language in many people's minds; fast and expressive. Unfortunately, the stuff that makes it fast is on all the time at the cost of making every function a potential foot-gun. (I can convert an integer to a pointer at runtime! I can remove "const", too...)

When you are writing code that needs to execute quickly, you don't want to do anything that's not related to the task at hand. You want to shovel bits into the CPU as quickly as possible. This means using native, unboxed types, not checking preconditions before every operation ("why would the preconditions ever not be satisfied?"), using trickery like integer-to-pointer casts, etc. C works this way, and lets you write code that runs very quickly. C++ works this way too.

The other half of a C++ app, though, is the complex glue code. Most sections of a "real application" are complicated, but they don't execute often enough for speed to be too critical. That's where you want safety; lots of self- checks, boxed types that don't let you misuse them, etc. There is a lot of complexity to manage, and a team of programmers can't do it; so you want your language and runtime to help you out.

Unfortunately, C++ doesn't help you out; you are expected to write the non- time-critical sections of your application they same way you write the critical sections. Ignore types, manage your own memory, skip polymorphism for speed, etc. Those are all the default behaviors, and they make it hard to write reliable code. (It is really worth overwriting random memory just to avoid a single comparison between an array's length and the index you are referencing? In a video decoder, yes. In the drop-down menu where the user picks the kind of TPS report to send, probably not. But guess what the default behavior is.)

The failure mode of C++ is also quite severe. In Java, flaky code that doesn't work just returns the wrong answer or dies. In C++, flaky code that doesn't work can corrupt other parts of the program randomly, and it can even allow malicious users to inject arbitrary code. There is no failure mode; the program keeps running incorrectly until something is so utterly wrong that the OS or machine kills the program. ("Segmentation fault (core dumped)".)

So basically, if you're using C++ correctly, for speed-critical sections of your application, you could just do it in C; and if you're using it for applications, you would be better off with anything else; Java, C#, Common Lisp, Haskell... all much better for higher-level code. You probably won't notice the runtime speed difference, but you probably will notice the lack of random crashes because your off-by-one bug overwrote some global state...</comment></comment>


Writing a Redis client library for Node.js - <AUTHOR> http://mihai.bazon.net/blog/redis-client-library-javascript-node

<comment><USER2> I can certainly understand writing this for learning's sake and probably your NIH.

What I fail to understand is why you cite lack of transaction support in my redis client as a reason to reinvent the wheel.

Transaction support (really, macros) is on my to-do list. Why not fork the project on GitHub, patch it to support MULTI/EXEC/DISCARD, and send me a pull request instead of being passive aggressive?

I have been quite responsive to issues raised on GitHub, but maybe a bit less lately as I have a new baby daughter distracting me from coding (happily!).

<comment><USER3> Congrats on the kid!

I came away with the impression that the focus was on trying something new in order to learn and that a lack of transactions in existing libs was merely the excuse to experiment. There is still the performance issue with his approach, which I am investigating out of curiosity, so I wouldn't worry about it replacing yours.

It's hard not to take criticism personally but there will _always_ be people who think you code is shit and approach all wrong.

BTW - I'm still running a patched version of the latest redis-client in production. Any thoughts about the patch to fix the internal buffer length calculations (changing "Math.max(currentLength * 2, atLeast * 1.1);" to "Math.max(currentLength * 2, offset + atLeast * 1.1);")?

<comment><USER2> Thanks!

Yeah, I saw this in my fork queue, among other things. I will try to get to them soon! Sorry!

"It's hard not to take criticism personally but there will always be people who think you code is shit and approach all wrong."

Indeed, I completely suck at taking such in stride!</comment></comment></comment>


Revealed: Mexico earthquake so powerful it cracked tectonic plate in half - <AUTHOR> https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1037011/mexico-earthquake-2017-cocos-tectonic-plates <comment><USER2> Better source: [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181025103348.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181025103348.htm)

and it's populistic counterpart [https://www.sciencealert.com/mexico- tehuantepec-chiapas-magn...](https://www.sciencealert.com/mexico-tehuantepec- chiapas-magnitude-8-2-intraplate-earthquake-ruptured-tectonic-plate-all-the- way-through)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm almost sure that the title should be "Mexico earthquake so powerful _because_ the tectonic plate cracked in half". Can someone with geologic knowledge confirm this?

> _The report states the phenomenon, which shook the earth to its core, would > have taken only 10 seconds to occur._

This is between misleading and nah.

Looking at the other scientific stories, the level reporting of this newspaper looks terrible. But the original story looks interesting. Perhaps you can find a better source and post it.</comment>


How Much Are Your Words Worth – Literally? - <AUTHOR> https://blog.nested.me/how-much-are-your-words-worth-literally-596e98782ccb#.3aeb2k7u3 <comment><USER2> After reading the ad and visiting the website I still have zero idea what nested does or why it would be useful.

Get rid of the jargon.

</comment><comment><USER3> Somewhat disappointing. It's just a long ad for nested.

</comment><comment><USER4> TL;DR: the article doesn't even attempt to answer the question asked in the title :(</comment>


MongoHQ Acquires MongoMachine - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mongohq.com/post/8188292197/mongohq-acquires-mongomachine

<comment><USER3> This is the first I've seen in the PAAS space regarding MongoDB and I'm excited to see that it is available and maturing. Our team currently uses MongoDB in some production and evaluation roles for some of our offerings - <USER2> efforts in the MongoDB space are every exciting.

However, in reading this press release, I'm not able to ascertain why this acquisition took place. This is the meat of what I read:

 _We were impressed with MongoMachine's creativity and innovations and saw early on how well they matched our core values and direction._

But in all seriousness... seriously, what are MongoMachine's "creativity and innovations?" ..and To MongoHQ: what are your "core values and direction?" It would be awesome for you to mention to readers what this actually means.

I've never heard of either of you before, and I am a MongoDB user excited about PAAS offerings, yet this press release tells me nothing about either of you and how this acquisition helps (could help) my business.

I'd love to hear more.

<comment><USER4> The term "consolidation" comes to mind. There a fair amount of people using Mongo right now, but it's still a young piece of software. I'm not sure the market can sustain three (or even two) dedicated Mongo hosting vendors.

<comment><USER5> +1 -- I imagine it was a merging or at the least a talent acquisition.

Which I don't mean to downplay, having a strong, independent Mongo PaaS company is fantastic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For those who didn't know, MongoHQ provides a really nice web UI and pricing is decent. I've went with MongoMachine in production because it's cheaper to run multiple DBs on there.

Also, funny enough I've used MongoHQ's web interface to admin my MongoMachine instances remotely, so it's somewhat hilarious that MongoHQ is buying MongoMachine. They each really do bring something a bit different to the table, I hope MongoMachine plans stay around at MongoHQ.</comment>


The Gradual Disappearance Of Flash Websites - <AUTHOR> http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/04/12/the-gradual-disappearance-of-flash-websites/ <comment><USER2> _plenty of Flash developers will continue to be employed, and plenty of Flash advertising will be directed at those ready to ignore it_

Nice :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> Who needs Flash when you can do this in jQuery: <http://www.spritely.net/></comment>


Court dismisses Genius lawsuit over lyrics-scraping by Google - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/11/court-dismisses-genius-lawsuit-over-lyrics-scraping-by-google/ <comment><USER3> This is a bizarre take. The most substantial point is buried near the end of the article: Genius does not own the copyright to the lyrics. Yes, they may have taken billions of painstaking person-years to hand-transcribe them onto artisanal silks, but no matter how much effort you put into copying someone else's work, it doesn't make it your work, and you can't sue people over it. At best, you could claim your copy is a derivative work, but that only grants you protection for your additional creative contributions on top of the original work, which for a straight transcription is... well, nothing.

Genius knows this, which is why they didn't file a copyright suit. Instead, they claimed other things like unfair competition and breach of contract. However, Title 17 Section 301 of the US Code says that "all legal or equitable rights that are equivalent to any of the exclusive rights within the general scope of copyright [...] are governed exclusively by this title". To avoid this, Genius needed to prove that their claims weren't "equivalent" – ie weren't just copyright claims dressed up as something else. They failed to do this, and so their case was thrown out.

<comment><USER4> Aren't collections of facts copyrightable? So google has copyright over google maps and I can not copy that but I can go out and record exactly the same data since I collected it myself.

<comment><USER5> No, in the US you cannot copyright facts, only expression. So you have control over word-for-word copies of your article about a bird; but you have no control over dissemination of the facts you discovered about the bird. SCOTUS decided this in 1991, Feist v. Rural: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co).

You might be thinking of sui generis database rights, which DOES cover collections of facts. The EU, Russia, and Brazil recognize this right, but the US doesn't: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right#United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right#United_States)

<comment><USER6> The US does recognise compilations as copyrightable though (but there must be decisions made about what to include).

See [https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/images/6/6f/Protection_of_C...](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/images/6/6f/Protection_of_Collaborative_Online_Maps_under_US_Copyright_Law.pdf)

<comment><USER7> It could be a system, oracle, or network, which computes weights or votes, just as soon as it could be an individual or group casting ballots or deliberating. The deciding is key, perhaps not who decides. Some aspects of law are slippery like that though, where one set of rules applies to human agents, and a different, perhaps mutually exclusive set, apply to everything else.

For example, horse drawn carriages have the right of way even over pedestrians, because you're pulling weight, or more accurately, a beast of burden is pulling the weight. It's a living thing too, and it can't stop on a dime when it's got a load. It makes sense when you know the context and framing for why the law is so written today.

I'm sure there are similar examples in others contexts. Court cases and judges look at the law like we do whitepapers. Some docs are better than others, and there are some devs, and other judges' toes you'd be hesitant to tread on, especially if you have a habit of doing that kind of thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Regardless of what you think about the lawsuit, you have to give them credit for their watermarking method:

[https://imgur.com/IGs0sg7](https://imgur.com/IGs0sg7)

<comment><USER9> If I was going to scrape this data and re-purpose it, I would've absolutely cleaned up those apostrophes. The pivoting between straight and curly would certainly be a pet peeve. Unless there's a semantic difference between the two I'm unaware of.

<comment><USER10> The semantic difference would be important in a song like Baby Got Back by Sir Mix-a-lot, which includes both speech quotes and imperial measurements.

<comment><USER11> Imperial measurements should use the prime symbol and not straight quotes: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_%28symbol%29#Designation...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_%28symbol%29#Designation_of_units)

<comment><USER12> For lyrics, you should just transcribe the pronunciation, eg "six foot two".

<comment><USER13> I for one would impose metric... it may be harder to rap, but true talent steps up to a challenge...

<comment><USER14> "But I would walk 804 kilometres, And I would walk 804 more, Just to be the man who walks a 1,608 kilometres, To fall down at your door..."

<comment><USER13> It's so catchy! Perhaps: "16093.44 meters high" by "0.2286 meter nails"...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > LyricFind. LyricFind is a Google licensing partner, and may be the source of > the Genius content appearing in Google's search results. LyricFind published > an explanation on its web site Monday, saying, "Some time ago, Ben Gross > from Genius notified LyricFind that they believed they were seeing Genius > lyrics in LyricFind's database. As a courtesy to Genius, our content team > was instructed not to consult Genius as a source. Recently, Genius raised > the issue again and provided a few examples. All of those examples were also > available on many other lyric sites and services, raising the possibility > that our team unknowingly sourced Genius lyrics from another location. As a > result, LyricFind offered to remove any lyrics Genius felt had originated > from them, even though we did not source them from Genius' site. Genius > declined to respond to that offer. Despite that, our team is currently > investigating the content in our database and removing any lyrics that seem > to have originated from Genius."

[https://searchengineland.com/google-to-add-attribution-to- li...](https://searchengineland.com/google-to-add-attribution-to-licensed- lyrics-providers-318402)

The dismissal seems logical to me

<comment><USER16> Sounds like everyone and their mother is scraping stuff off Genius, not just Google; they went after Google specifically because they knew they couldn't just disappear and they had the financial means to pay for compensation, unlike the thousands of crappy lyrics websites.

That said, it would've been just if Google would pay for access to Genius' particular, well-curated, "source" database of lyrics, especially given that they're basically stealing traffic.

<comment><USER17> But it sounds like the issue is that Google really wasn't using Genius's data directly. The problem is that Google is sourcing from "The Internet," and everybody and their grandmother is 'stealing' from Genius.

Here's an interesting question: if Genius closed up shop tomorrow, how long would it take Google to become the primary source of song lyrics online (by rebuilding Genius's dataset from general Internet harvesting)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Google has a history of scraping content that they want, their business is built on the back of scraping other peoples content. The story I read just recently of what happened to Celebrity Net Worth was an interesting read where Google asked for an API, they refused and Google just scraped the content anyway. There was no lawsuit, but CNW put up fake content and sure enough, it made its way to Google.

It is all ironic given how aggressive Google are in blocking any attempts to scrape its content.

<comment><USER19> Probably a silly question, but why not just use robots.txt? That was designed for preventing exactly this.

<comment><USER20> Not due to robots.txt but you can see what happens to genius formerly rapgenius when they get removed from the index:

[https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/25/google-rap- genius/](https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/25/google-rap-genius/)

<comment><USER21> Wear a condom before clicking techcrunch.com links:

[https://archive.ph/9eUkv](https://archive.ph/9eUkv)

<comment><USER22> To be fair to TC, if you disable JavaScript you get a pretty good experience - just the full article, legible. Not like those sites that require JS to load the text and/or images.

<comment><USER23> But you need JavaScript to get past the "we value your privacy, so give us permission to sell it" banner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that only the copyright holder can sue for copyright infringement. I am pretty certain Genius does not hold the copyright to those lyrics. It's odd Genius brought this case at all. This is briefly noted at the end of the original article, but it seems like the whole point. Did I miss something?

<comment><USER25> Genius claims that Google's actions caused a decline in traffic to its site. The lawsuit was probably a way to assuage nervous investors (who have poured >70M into the company)

<comment><USER26> $70M for lyrics not even owned seems absurd.

Still, Google is being very fucking evil here. It's as if they stole that $70M for themselves.

<comment><USER27> > very fucking evil

Your abuse of words is a heinous crime against humanity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think it's important to point out that when you license lyrics, you don't actually _get_ the lyrics. I know, sounds ridiculous. You'll get the license to display them, and when you ask the rightsholders of these lyrics (the publishers) for the actual lyrics they'll tell you "oh, we don't have the actual text, just the rights. You need to find the text somewhere else."

As a result, creating an accurate lyrics database like Genius has done is an enormous amount of work, and my non-lawyer gut-feeling says that in this case, Google is screwing over Genius big time. Too bad the legal system doesn't support that.

<comment><USER29> It's for this sort of thing that Google had to get rid of their "do no evil" spiel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> If Google can scrape my site, am I allowed to scrape Google results? Could I create a Google clone by scraping?

If I scraped the most common search results from Google, front page only, and removed all the ads what would Google's argument against that be?

On one hand, so many sites make finding information difficult, on the other it feels pretty scuzzy that Google prevents searchers from clicking through to the site that put the work into generating content.

<comment><USER31> Google was pretty unhappy with Bing for doing just that.

[https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies- google/](https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/)

<comment><USER32> The amount of Google captchas that you needeed to solve when searching on Google from Microsoft office made me think that it was some kind of psychological warfare.

<comment><USER33> tbh sounds petty enough to be true

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I wonder if it's even possible to fix Google search in the framework of a for- profit company. It seems like the trajectory of any ad-supported service eventually lands it in a "don't let the user out no matter the cost" phase. Perhaps such a service really does need to operate as a non-profit foundation of some sorts.

There was a post about regulating Google like a public utility recently, but perhaps we should also consider looking at other less conventional internet "public utilities" \- things like the Internet Archive, Wikipedia or essential open source projects like Debian. I think a search engine that's transparent both in terms of its logic and how it's maintained and managed might be the only way.

<comment><USER35> The other option would be strong antitrust enforcement; allowing competitors to emerge and compete with incumbents.

<comment><USER22> How would that work? What should an antitrust order demand Google to do in order to allow competitors to emerge?

<comment><USER36> Well in this case, not steal their content. It's wrong for Google to siphon other businesses work for their own profit.

Google shouldn't steal Genius or Yelp content. Facebook shouldn't steal YouTuber's content, etc. etc.

It's not hard to see how if you were in the little guys shoes you'd feel screwed over. We need to innovate our laws to reflect that.

<comment><USER22> It's not Genius' content. It's the musicians', who actually wrote the lyrics. If it _was_ their content, they could sue for copyright infringement. Google has been sued on those grounds, and forced to change how they do their business (e.g. provide ContentID to handle copyright infringement on YouTube).

But I suppose we could say "don't scrape and present content outside of a regular search result". But then again, Google claims they haven't done so - that they got those lyrics from LyricFind, a lyric licensing platform - <USER2> Genius didn't present any evidence that this wasn't the case. So I'm not clear on how could any laws help here.

Finally, the question was not about Genius, it was about allowing competitors to _Google_ to emerge. I don't see how would this help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The rest of the stack:

8 months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21781668](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21781668) <USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21700866](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21700866)

June 2019: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20194952](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20194952)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20201139](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20201139)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20204625](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20204625)

</comment><comment><USER38> What does a GPT-3 future look like? If I ask it to fill in lyrics for a song or facts about companies and this comes from the knowledge it gained by "reading" a vast corpus, how is this different than a person reading the Genius site, memorizing the song, and the transcribing the lyrics?

Too me this is the endgame for all of these complains about search not being ten blue links anymore. Future knowledge engines will be vast AIs that have assimilated information into internal self organized structures, and will synthesize requests for that knowledge "in its own voice"

Unless AIs are lifting content by overfitting and making exact replicas instead of expressing the same facts in an entirely new way, I don't think people will be a able to sue especially when the process by which the answer arrived is a massive Rube Goldberg contraption with 100 billion parameters.

GPT-3 for example can already extract information from SEC EDGAR reports, a service other companies often charge money for.

</comment><comment><USER39> Techcrunch article left too many questions for me so I looked up and found [https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/genius- law...](https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/genius-lawsuit- google-922666/) which seems to be a much more detailed and nuanced explanation of what is going on here, with backgrounds on who, what, etc.

</comment><comment><USER40> >A state court

>Eastern District of New York

Ugh. Basic legal literacy can no longer be expected in the media?

EDNY is a federal court, not a state one.

<comment><USER41> This was confusing to me as well. I saw EDNY and was confused about why it was booted due to federal preemption. Considering the importance of this procedural aspect, it seems like a pretty big deal to get this wrong.

The real story here is left completely untold: why didn't they bring a copyright claim? Could they bring a copyright claim in the future? Could one of the owners of the copyright bring a claim? These are the questions that matter.

<comment><USER42> They couldn't bring a copyright claim because they don't own an exclusive license.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> What will google steal when all the other websites are dead?

<comment><USER44> Nothing, because then you are on google sites all the time and google gets all the ad dollars.

For some reasons, google wants to become AOoL, introducing the A with their AMP service (or with Applied Semantics).

This rises the question: Will content owners create their own content network? If Google steals your content on the internet, why put your content on the internet? Why not have an app that delivers content to paying customers? Now each content provider tries this on his own with his own app. why not combine the efforts and just offer a browser for their closed network or embrace the Brave browser? If all content producers pull this off together, the audience will be there.

Facebook could offer a Facebook content network on their own because they already have the audience, and Genius and all those Recipe sites could publish their content in a secure way. Maybe Instagram with its text pictures is already the predecessor.

It seems like Google was taken over by Applied Semantics in the same way that Boeing was taken over by McDonnell Douglas because in the long run, nobody offers up his content for search if it is ripped off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Thank goodness. I'm happy that google gives me lyrics and I don't have to go an add covered lyrics site.

It perfectly fits their mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful".

<comment><USER46> I enjoy using Genius. People, including the artists, leave commentary on lyrics that give me a deeper understanding of the lyrics.

<comment><USER47> I enjoy Genius too.

Genius with it's annotations is much more interesting than just the lyrics in plain text.

Also Google makes you click the big down arrow before showing the complete lyrics, which makes me irrationally annoyed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Interesting to see the roles reversed.

Didn't Google complain that Bing was copying their results a couple of years ago ?

Is it possible to have a middle ground ?

I can see both points of the argument :

\- Genius does not own the lyrics, in most cases these are entered by users afaik. A similar example would be somebody adding an address/info on Google Maps.

\- On the opposite end, associating a query like "that song written by blue haired 80s singer" to an actual result sounds more like a transformative work (although google owns user entered information as well here with the database of all the queries entered by users).

Would it be possible to have a framework where you can purchase such data at a fair price ?

</comment><comment> Digit-Al I can't really understand why Genius cares. If Google didn't scrape from them they could scrape from one of dozens of other lyrics sites with pretty much the same results.

The value add of Genius is not the lyrics anyway. I never go to Genius to just look up lyrics because the site is fairly heavy. I use another site that is lighter and has a nicer lyrics format.

The only reason I go to Genius is for the real value add - the song annotations; and these are added by volunteers.

I rarely use the Google version of the lyrics either to be honest.

</comment><comment><USER49> > Defendants made unauthorized reproductions of Plaintiff's lyric > transcriptions and profited off of those unauthorized reproductions, which > is behavior that falls under federal copyright law.

Does this mean Genius still has grounds to sue, as the copyright protections are on their "work" which is the transcription?

It also seems to mean a ToS is not useful for protecting content, only determining legal users interaction with it (Excluding loading the page). A webpage is a work rendered through a browser, kinda makes sense I guess.

<comment><USER50> Is the transcription actually copyrightable? Just because genius wants it to be doesn't make it true.

Compare to the whole word perfect clip art lawsuit

<comment><USER49> I think that's their case to make, but from what I could find the answer seems to be probably not.

Derivative works are copyrightable (Translations, adapting a book to a movie), but it might be hard to argue an exact copy of the song lyrics are "derivative" as they aren't an original creation, but simply a subset of the old work.

<comment><USER50> See also [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Remember when Google punished Genius (then known as Rap Genius) by removing them from search results entirely?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6963365](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6963365)

[https://searchengineland.com/google-has-officially- penalized...](https://searchengineland.com/google-has-officially-penalized- rap-genius-for-link-schemes-180777)

Pretty funny that Google depends on them for content now.

</comment><comment><USER52> This all seems odd to me. Publishing song lyrics on the Internet seems like a small feature of a search engine and not an entire company with millions of dollars invested.

</comment><comment><USER53> Genius does not hold lyrics copyright but the site business model depends on traffic generated by lyrics which is in this case hijacked by Google.

<comment><USER54> They license lyrics however and, critically, often times lyrics and their copyright are not a package deal. many songs don't have lyrics provided from the publisher. Genius allows users and artists to upload the lyrics. Google has the copyright but blatantly steals the content. This obviously is not protected in US law but it is elsewhere (see news sites and such in some countries requiring google to pay). Google then uses their search results to leverage their position.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Just a thought experiment: If Google releases paid version of search where it won't show ads, personalize based on your click-through history and do not copy content from source for presentation, won't share your data with anyone, would you opt for it?

Root cause of most of the issues seem to be monetization model of Google where they are optimising people to stay within their ecosystem.

<comment><USER56> It's an interesting question. I don't trust Google, and a fast pivot to another product/offering wouldn't change that overnight, so I would lean towards no.

I paid for Youtube Red, even though I never signed into the service on Youtube and even though I already got all of the Youtube-specific benefit in the form of adblocking and NewPipe. I did that purely to try and signal to Google, "I will pay for content, I want you to have revenue sources outside advertising."

But ultimately Youtube Red seems to have been a failure, my signal hasn't changed the course of the company, and the parts of Youtube Red I did get value from (say, Music) have gotten noticeably worse over the years. I'm planning to drop my subscription in September. I think it would be tough for me to buy into another product like that from Google, my experience trying to buy products from Google to get around advertising/tracking has been both a practical and moral failure. Certainly I won't sign up for a paid GSuite account now.

But I do already pay for Email (Fastmail), bookmarking (Wallabag), and a few other "free" internet services and apps today. So I might pay for search if a company like DuckDuckGo offered it instead of Google. But I would need to see what their offer actually was.

I mean, heck, I'd be giving recurring donations to DuckDuckGo today if they accepted them, they're on my list of companies I want to exist. So paying 5$ a month for a "premium" search experience wouldn't really be that different, even if I never signed into it.

<comment><USER57> > I mean, heck, I'd be giving recurring donations to DuckDuckGo today if they > accepted them, they're on my list of companies I want to exist. So paying 5$ > a month for a "premium" search experience wouldn't really be that different, > even if I never signed into it.

[https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help- pages/company/do...](https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help- pages/company/donations/)

They seem to want you to enable their ads. Is that something you would ever do?

<comment><USER56> Unfortunately no.

Different people have different reasons for disabling ads. Some people only care about egregious ads and privacy violations, that's fine.

I am against ads in general, I noticed a sharp quality of life increase when I started blocking ads universally everywhere I could, regardless of whether or not I was on the web. That's a longer conversation, I'm not going to get into it now. I respect that other people have different opinions, but I also feel reasonably strongly about my own.

I do spread DuckDuckGo to other people, but I also spread uBlock Origin, so I'm not sure I'm a net positive there either. :)

It's again, an interesting question. I've been pushing pretty hard in my personal life to financially support Open Source software that I use, projects that I really care about. DuckDuckGo is one of the few companies that I _really_ like that I haven't ever really supported in any tangible way.

I do feel guilty about that, but not guilty enough to allow myself to be turned into a product. There is likely no company where I would ever feel guilty enough to turn on ads. But given that DuckDuckGo isn't going to allow donations any time soon, I could see a lightweight 'premium' DuckDuckGo product effectively being a way for me to just give them money without it feeling to them like it's a donation.

Actually, what I should do is to look into some of their merch and see what they offer and if they actually make a profit on it. I _thought_ at one point DuckDuckGo sold shirts or something, but I don't know if they still do. Again though, this all kind of ends up being a messy proxy for donations. I'm not super-jazzed about walking around as a living billboard either, even for a company I like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Let's not forget that at one point Genius launched a product that would scrape your site, re-host it, then overlay comments on it -- 100% without your control.

They have played the game and lost and now they are desperate. They should have got some adults in the room before it was too late.

<comment><USER59> What would be different today if on day one they had all the necessary licenses in place?

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Curious if anyone can shed some light on what this would mean for the "featured snippet" feature of search results. Google has been scraping web pages, and showing answers to users queries using unique content directly on the search results page.

</comment><comment><USER61> Well, as they say in TV shows, there's the truth, the law, and what you can prove. (And I guess taking that tack, what's fair.) The content of the article is about one of those things, but the court case was about another.

</comment><comment><USER62> Turning information into knowledge is impossible without humans and thus would invalidate Google's business model if it had in any way to pay for it. Looking with fresh eyes you could say Google is the biggest leech ever created.

</comment><comment><USER63> Does this mean that scraping is allowed, regardless of TOC as long as you don't distribute copyrighted materials?

Basically it sounds like the court said "scraping data against TOC and publishing scraped data at best amounts to a copyright violation"

<comment><USER64> I think that was the decision of the LinkedIn scraping case about a year ago. It held that you can't have a page that is accessible to the public but not to your competitor's scrapers.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn)

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Is this court arguing that it's legal to scrape a website regardless of theirs ToS? That copyright is the only law that matters on the web for this sort of thing?

<comment><USER66> From my 5-minutes-reading-the-comments understanding, this is fairly specific to lyrics because they're not your invention, even if there was work involved in transcribing them. I don't think this applies to scraping different kinds of content. For example, a map is similar but different: no creativity involved (just map what's there) but lots of work. Yet that falls under sui generis database rights (which Wikipedia says the USA doesn't have, but Wikipedia also says they signed a treaty and so they have it... It's complicated) and Google can totally sue me if I copy their map data into OpenStreetMap. (Yet we can't sue them if they use our open data as a distinct but invisible/unlabeled layer.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Google has been doing this for a long time.

Rich snippets are all stolen pageviews. To make matters worse, they now don't let the site which is featured in the snippet have a secondary ranking further down the page.

They keep adding schema, which SEOs eat up because it provides a secondary level of content optimization but it's not as effective as it used to be for increasing CTR on your serp results.

The one positive of this is I no longer have to goto recipe sites which overload my screen with ads and put the ingredients 50% down the page. Google just scrapes the content and displays it in the snippet box.

</comment><comment><USER68> Why not write some original lyrics that Genius would own the copyright to, wait for google to scrape them, and then sue over that?

</comment><comment><USER69> Serious question: why is Google allowed to scrape websites with impunity, but other, smaller businesses and individuals aren't?

<comment><USER54> If you don't want to be scraped, just say so in your Robots.txt!'

It's leverage to force companies into picking being stolen from or being never seen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Is it not possible for a copyright holder to give the power to sue on their behalf to a licensee?

</comment><comment><USER71> So if I scrape Google search page and remove the ads and show it on my page, that's ok now?

</comment><comment><USER72> Remember when Horowitz gave this company $10 million just because he liked rap music? Good times.

<comment><USER54> In fairness, their product is fantastic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> When your "moat" is a non-exclusive license, and your competition is in FAANG...

</comment><comment><USER74> It's not just copyright. Because of Google's monopoly what they are doing is stealing a revenue stream from Genius. This is another case of Google leveraging their search monopoly.

They need to be declared a monopoly and put on a very short leash here. I hope something comes of the hearings in Washington late last month.

</comment><comment><USER75> Does the US not have anything like database rights for collections of data? What about unfair business practices?

At the end of the day, Genius has probably spent thousands of man years collecting the lyrics and Google free rides on that getting it all in seconds.

</comment><comment><USER76> what about OHHLA.com, which genius scraped ?

</comment><comment><USER35> Did Genius hire someone overtly ambitious or simply incompetent lawyers?

</comment><comment><USER77> Didn't genius get caught using black-hat seo manipulation?

</comment><comment><USER78> They pop champagne in Mountain View every night.

</comment><comment><USER45> To me this is as simple as some people made an easily copied site that provides very little value (there's 50+ lyrics sites). Google, rightly, adds lyrics results to search. It's part of their mission.

Sucks to be Genius but if they want people to visit they need to provide something more than "facts".

As for the idea that Google scraped the site, as pointed out elsewhere, they didn't, their contractors may have, the contractor pointed out to Genius that the same results Genius was complaining about were on many other sites (maybe those sites copied from Genius as well). The contractor offer to remove many copies anyway, Genius didn't respond.

Further, this is exactly the kind of thing that is probably not too far from automating via speech recognition and/or ad partnering. If it was me, I'd consider trying to partner with the music companies, send us the lyrics and we'll link to your site/band/videos...

<comment><USER79> > To me this is as simple as some people made an easily copied site that > provides very little value (there's 50+ lyrics sites).

Spoken like someone who's never looked up lyrics online before. Genius is to lyrics what Stack Overflow is to programming questions. In both cases there were/are other sites doing the same thing, but they are ad-riddled, inaccurate, incomplete, and sometimes paywalled.

<comment><USER80> The 285th Rule of the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition states that "No good deed ever goes unpunished."</comment></comment></comment>


How to Monetize a Web Site: A Real World Tutorial - <AUTHOR> http://wschroter.typepad.com/blog/2009/10/how-to-monetize-a-web-site-a-real-world-tutorial.html <comment><USER2> The problem with many of these ideas is that they can alienate users. For a content site, there are few options available for monetization beyond ads, which most of those points are variations of. I personally shy away from businesses that have advertising as a primary source of revenue.

For new business and services online, the site or service should built with a business model in mind, even if it does not launch with one. And the best business model is simple -- find something people value and charge them a fair rate for it. The hard part is figuring out what that is.

<comment><USER3> _For a content site, there are few options available for monetization beyond ads_

I run a number of content sites in my niche. They're all monetized through promoting my software, which means that even if 97% of the people who come to the site never pay me money I'm still sitting pretty.

In my case, the software antedates the content sites, but one could just have easily made the transition from publisher to software vendor as the other way around. (Or hired someone to make you the software, or made an arrangement to white label previously-existing software, etc.)

This doesn't help if your content sites are pitched at a market which does not pay money for goods and services, of course.

Incidentally, the economics of advertising your own product versus CPC ads are quite compelling. I routinely pay Google $2 CPMs for inventory on 3rd party sites, so let's accept that as typical in my market. Of that $2, Google keeps a buck or so, so the content publisher sees less than $1.

My own effective CPM (sales / visits * 1,000) bounces up and down depending on what flavor of search terms I'm doing well on, but for many of my content sites it is in excess of $20. As much as I'm indebted to AdSense for giving Webmaster Welfare to the folks who send me a lot of my traffic, I'd have to be insane to put it on my own sites.

As an added bonus, its easier to get a link to a site that doesn't have AdSense plastered all over it, because it can be seen as non-commercial even if is essentially one gigantic ad. (This was somewhat surprising to me, but there you go.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Minus the fact his ( Wil Schroter ) article is littered with links to his own sites he has made which makes it slightly of a big subliminal ad. Im going to assume a lot of his claims come from these very sites he links to.

Wouldn't it be nice in an ideal world if he and countless others who churn out these types of articles. Backed it up with stats on the incomes etc. I know im asking the world there. But it would help give them credibility and won't leave you or I wondering, is this just copied and pasted or is this something HE has actually done.

Lead Gen:

Anything which doesn't compliment the site is going to irritate. So with that in mind, I would imagine this train of thought will actually help you lead to creating business partnerships with other companies, websites.

</comment><comment><USER5> Does annual-based subscription really have that low of recurring rates? Seems like it would be a rather moot point => off-set by lower transaction fees for processing cards once per annum instead of every month.

<comment><USER2> Not only that, but an annual subscription is basically equivalent to 12 months of guaranteed monthly renewals. I would be interested to see comparative attrition rates of how 12 months of monthly renewals compare to attrition rates of yearly subscriptions from a popular site that uses both.

We are struggling with this issue with my current startup, whether to do yearly or monthly only, or both, and what the comparative rates would be.

<comment><USER6> You're assuming that people are willing to pay for your product up front for 12 months. If your price point is so small that an annual subscription is under $20, then it doesn't really make sense to charge monthly. I was speaking mainly for higher priced items.

<comment><USER5> Both are good points, would definitely like to see more research on the topic. I definitely agree there is a threshold when it comes to monthly vs yearly. I know you just tossed out a number but $20/year seems a little lower than I was thinking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 'Porn sites work because you get the point.' -this is mentioned in regards to asking for subscription.

Maybe putting up a paywal on a porn site would have worked well in the late 1990s or even early 2000s, but there are so many you tube like porn sites for completely free which makes me wonder whether anyone pays for porn anymore.

</comment><comment><USER8> These days, no business model but advertising would work since the market is so competitive.(free service is everywhere) I would focus on building more effective advertising method than ever rather than creating new business models...</comment>


Save Data Directly to B2 with Backblaze Cloud Backup 6.0 - <AUTHOR> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/save-data-directly-to-cloud-storage/ <comment><USER3> > No More Connecting Your External Drives Every 30 Days

Or maybe just don't be so eager to purge your paying customers' backups in the first place? It's not like we stop paying your subscription fees as soon as we disconnect a drive.

I was a happy Backblaze customer until one day when I went on a month-ish long vacation, took my external hard drive with me, and came back to find the entire backup gone. If the drive went bad or if I were to lose it during the trip, I'd have been shit out of luck.

Switched to Crashplan and never looked back. Even now that they're double the price of Backblaze (since they discontinued the consumer plan, I've moved to their business plan) I still find it a much better value proposition because of their _much_ more flexible versioning and retention policies:

[https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/6/Configuring/Specify_v...](https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/6/Configuring/Specify_version_settings)

[https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/6/Restoring/Retain_and_...](https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/6/Restoring/Retain_and_download_deleted_files)

None of this "we delete your backups if we don't see them for 30 days" bullshit.

Versioning and retention is _the_ core value proposition of a backup product imho, and Backblaze is laughably inadequate in this area. Stay away.

<comment><USER4> Just this week logged on to Backblaze to restore my external disk which kind of died. Was a little late and no backup there :(

I still hope that the HDD is alive but perhaps USB controller is dead and will try to revive it.

<comment><USER5> You can try a product called SpinRite (grc.com) - it can help revive the drive to get your data out of it.

<comment><USER4> My computer doesn't see that drive. Once I connected it saw it for a moment, files were there.

It's not the USB cable - same with different cable. Data recovery software (like photorec) wouldn't be problem. I'll try to hook it directly to a desktop PC

<comment><USER5> it's not meant to be data recovery, it's positioned as a harddrive maintenance software. The drive may be failing and this will help fix some of the problematic things to get the drive working.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> And it is still very much Desktop based, I wonder if Blackblaze will one day have a Consumer No Fuss NAS along with B2 Subscription model. ( Something I wish Apple had done with Time Capsule and iCloud )

So I just set, forget and pay monthly knowingly the Data should be safe.

<comment><USER7> Synology and FreeNAS support backing up to Backblaze B2, both easily configurable in their respective GUIs. Many other popular NAS solutions allow you to install Duplicati, which will allow you to do the same.

<comment><USER8> Will the nas connecting count for the 30 days?

I've been thinking about having an external backup of about 5 TB of images, video and documents in an encrypted form but I have issues finding someone who can do it properly.

For now I just have a 2nd nas at my fathers house that mirrors my data.

<comment><USER7> I've always backed up my NAS to B2 since its early days, and honestly have forgotten about the 30 day deletion limit. I've never encountered the limit in various NAS setups, even when I backed up using cronjobs using the B2 Python client library.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm having trouble finding supported operating systems for the tool - <USER2> Backblaze support Linux yet?

<comment><USER10> I'd recommend using Restic ([https://restic.net/](https://restic.net/)), it supports backing up to Backblaze B2 and generally is the best and most innovative backup tool I've ever used.

Backblaze has a Restic howto: [https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en- us/articles/115002880514-Ho...](https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en- us/articles/115002880514-How-to-configure-Backblaze-B2-with-Restic-on-Linux)

<comment><USER11> And if you'd like something more accessible for regular desktop usage, check out Relica which makes use of restic under the hood. Author is Matt Holt, the guy behind Caddy server.

[https://relicabackup.com](https://relicabackup.com)

<comment><USER12> Big restic fan here, will check this out. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The reason why Backblaze and Crashplan have various restrictions is due to being all-you-can-eat. At some point, they have to create an arbitrary cap. So, the snapshot is a curious feature, but seems to be implemented poorly.

It doesn't seem to be snapshot system, but an archive system. A snapshot is usually a point in time represented by a series of changes. By being a series of change, it would deduplicate redundant files between snapshots. It appears that this is a full archive backup, which is fine but have some limitations:

* Need to upload the whole archive every time. * No deduplication. * Need to have double the space to restore (download then unzip). * No partial restores. * No encryption of personal files.

If you have any technical willingness, consider restic. It is a command line utility that has the ability to backup to many backends, including B2. Being a CLI, it can be scripted. Files can be arbitrarily backed up and restored. It has encryption that the servers can never see. I also hear Duplicati is similar, but have never used it.

If you want an easy way to just make archives locally and store it on B2 for cheap, consider a cloud mounter, like Mountain Duck. You can treat B2 as a drive and upload/download files as needed. Note: B2 is a _very_ simple store, so simple that it doesn't support renaming files (must download, rename, and upload). But, it is fast and inexpensive.

</comment><comment><USER14> I see BB pushing B2 more and more and it makes me sad. Instead of a Linux client (which I can't imagine would be that difficult, ultimately, after this many years) they're putting all resources on the pay-for-utilization model. Good for them, bad for us waiting for a Linux client.

CrashPlan is garbage. Bloated client, keeps breaking down and I get reports my devices aren't backed up but then they say they are, after backing up 30+ TB (it took years) it says my original backup had to be reset so I had to restart the entire thing, just not a lot of confidence with them. But it is the only unlimited Linux option out there.

Also, they just removed their personal plan and do business only and per device now. If they could make their client not suck, and give better confidence in their platform, I wouldn't complain.

</comment><comment><USER15> I use duplicati with AES-256 for exactly this on backplaze (and another different SFTP target)

<comment><USER16> Duplicati is still very much in beta, and from personal experience I would not recommend it for larger or critical backups. It does seem really promising though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is a pretty useful feature. It goes some way towards solving the problem of keeping a backup of my photos. Rather than having to keep buying more physical storage I can archive off photos in batches to B2 from my regular Backblaze backup.

<comment><USER18> Wouldn't that remove an additional layer of protection?

When you move from physical storage + backblaze backup to B2 storage, B2 becomes a single source failure, right?

<comment><USER17> Yes, that would be correct. I guess a better idea would be to fill the drive up, lock the physical drive away in a fireproof safe, then archive the files from that drive's Backblaze backup to B2. Buy a new drive and repeat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Very cool feature release. Is it possible to generate a public link to a snapshot?

<comment><USER20> Yev from Backblaze here -> There is no way to give a public link to a Snapshot. But you can "share" a single file from your Backup with a public link!

<comment><USER21> Yev, can I use the Backblaze Cloud Backup to just do selective backup with B2, without requiring a full computer backup subscription? I know numerous clients already support writing to B2, but would be great if there was an official client to do just that, again, without a backup subscription.

<comment><USER20> No this feature requites the data to already have been sent to Backblaze via the Backblaze computer backup application - so it's not quite a 1st party app for B2 (still requires the subscription to get the data uploaded). We vet all the integrations listed on our site and there's some really simple ones that do a good job of sending the data over to B2.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wonder how this works with encrypted Backblaze backups.</comment>