$11M settlement reached with Google regarding terminated AdSense accounts - <AUTHOR> http://www.adsensepublishersettlement.com <comment><USER2> When I was in college I had a website that I ran google ads on. I let a balance build up over time so I could use the money to buy school books. When I attempted to cash out Google (which up until that time had no problem profiting off of my site) decided that I was part of a clickfraud ring and refused to pay out the money. There was no way to appeal.

Honestly, to this day, I am still far less likely to use Google services (I won't touch Google's Cloud, for instance) because of how bad that experience was. The stress of being a college student who needed that money was definitely a multiplier, but at the end of the day I don't think it's possible to expect Google to do the right thing when it comes to customer support- especially when they can directly profit by hurting them.

<comment><USER3>
      when it comes to customer support

Do they have customer support? Last time I used my google account (a few years ago) to attempt to buy a Nexus, my transaction was flagged as fraud and I was locked out of my account.. I tried for a few days to find a way to contact anyone from Google.. never happened..

I eventually gave up and bought an iPhone and it was ironically the best thing that could have happened in that scenario.

<comment><USER4> > Do they have customer support?

Their free services have no direct support channels, as expected. I wouldn't provide free support for free services either.

I've received excellent support from Google for GSuite/Google Apps and Google Cloud over the years, both via chat and calls, usually out of their Ireland office.

I live in Fiji and my account with them isn't worth all that much (~$100/month).

<comment><USER5> > Their free services have no direct support channels, as expected

Why is this "as expected"? Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon all have direct support channels for free tier customers. They aren't as prompt, but it's only Google who doesn't have these things at all.

<comment><USER6> Do they?

* I don't believe Microsoft offers support for their free products to people who haven't bought an O365 licence, and instead you have to use their god-awful Microsoft Answers forum (they seem to change this up every few years though so this might not currently be the case). It's community support so if you're having an issue with your account this won't help you, but if you're confused about how to use a product Microsoft makes you might get a response.

* Apple doesn't have any free products (even if you have only downloaded free apps and listen to free audiobooks, you have to run it on hardware you purchased from them).

* Similarly, Amazon requires you to pay in one way or another (Buying an item, paying for prime to watch prime video, etc) to use any of their services. AFAIK AWS doesn't have free support.

* Facebook has a "help center" that's marginally more useful than Microsoft's, but it has the same problem... it's all community support so nobody can "pull up" your account to fix any real issues (like being locked out).

<comment><USER7> Apple makes some software available for other platforms without charge, such as Safari for Windows.

<comment><USER6> Do they offer support for it? I am really asking, I have no idea. I would assume they don't

<comment><USER7> I have no clue. I don't know what support people would think they need for a browser, but computer illiterate people expect some crazy things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This one still stings, even though it was years ago. I built and ran a mobile sports news application, we amassed millions of users and were written up in several publications.

One day our AdSense account was disabled, no warning, no nothing. We had never resorted to a single 'trick' or 'hack'. Nobody at Google could even tell us what exactly we were supposedly accused of.

After months of escalation, the final word was "we cannot tell you what you have allegedly done, we will not re-instate your account, you may not appeal any further".

<comment><USER9> Did you involve legal council?

<comment><USER10> You need at least a coven or cabal to take on Google, council isn't going to cut it.

<comment><USER11> Well whoever filed this lawsuit seems to have succeeded.

<comment><USER10> Plaintiffs were represented by Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, a Limited Liability Presidium.

<comment><USER12> > ... a Limited Liability Presidium.

Shouldn't that have been Limited Liability Partnership? Autocomplete fail?

<comment><USER10> No.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This was years ago for me, but as bad as it is losing the amount earned, it was just the lack of response when trying to understand why you were terminated. I had no idea why I was banned. I didn't employ any shady tricks. The only thing I noticed in the few weeks prior to the account banned was a higher CTR.

I actually emailed Adsense support at that time to let them know that it was out of the ordinary for my site.

Additionally, I also had an account on the CPA affiliate side of things with the same account that was banned because it was tied with the Adsense email account.

<comment><USER14> Same for me here. The lack of response was ridiculous. I would have loved to been told what was wrong or why the ban so I could at least try to resolve the issue somehow. But the only thing I received in return was that the decision was final. I noticed a higher CTR prior to the ban, but nothing else out of the ordinary.

I had Webmaster tools and Analytics on site, so after the ban I could still research backwards, and could not find anything that was out of the ordinary other than the CTR was just a bit higher.

Eh, it seems this is still a bit of a sore subject for me. I lost a good bit of income from this decision, and it hurt at the time. Looking back, I'm glad I don't gain income from this any longer. It just seems like a scam. I started out using my websites as a place to teach and inform and the different subjects I have knowledge and interests in. But trying to blend keywords in so that Google and the other ads I ran could get high quality "eyeballs" on my content really became an inauthentic experience.

<comment><USER13> I'm glad I don't gain/depend on income from adsense any longer as well. Moved on to CPA and then SaaS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I get the "We think your business is a scam and so we are terminating our relationship" but I don't understand why "... and we'll keep the money." doesn't result in criminal charges.

<comment><AUTHOR> What's even worse is that they won't tell you what you allegedly did wrong. You can appeal, but you have to guess what you did wrong and provide evidence, but you can't even access your click data anymore since you're now locked out. It's like being in a relationship with a psychotic person.

<comment><USER16> Exactly and that's one of not-so-many reasons I'm so happy for GDPR to kick in!

Basically a big fuck you to Google: "give me all the data you have on me or I will report you and you may be on the hook for 4% of your revenue".

<comment><USER17> google.com/takeout

<comment><USER18> The reason you've been down voted is that takeout gives you all YOUR data that they hold, not THEIR data about you (which GDRP now says is mostly now your data)

<comment><USER16> Whats even crazier is that I used that tool and google took 4 hours to build my archives. Fair enough. Problem is... some files are not mine!!! clearly not my name not my email address not my correspondence. No idea how this is happening. I will reach out to this person but other than that no idea where to reach to google as their checkout page does not offer any "contact us". I am also concerned someone using this tool will get my own data!!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I worked in advertising and I saw how scared AdSense publishers constantly were of getting banned by Google. I understand that Google has to defend their business, but some times they were really harsh on things that were debatable grey areas. I always thought that Google was just needlessly giving itself a bad reputation as a business partner.

$11M is about 1 hr of Google's revenue (365 x 24 x 11/100000 = 0.96)

EDIT: This actually reminded me of that post a few days ago on HN, about the guy comparing foxes and racoons with some companies in the financial industry, and how some could be winning at the game but losing at the meta-game. Google should be more careful with its meta-game.

<comment><AUTHOR> 11 million is a joke really. I only lost about $250, but it pretty much killed off an otherwise promising potential startup.

<comment><USER20> Alternative reading: they did you a favor by showing you early on that they could kill your startup at a moments notice. That's a lot better than to have 25 people on the payroll and see your advertising contract go up in smoke (which happened to me).

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. It also taught me a valuable (and fairly cheap) lesson on not relying on a single source of revenue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've had friends that have lost $100k+ due to Adsense terminations on legitimate sites. I've personally lost about $10k. We'll see how much I actually get paid out from this class action (I think I read that they cap it at $5k)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes: "... Payments to each of the Class Representatives, not to exceed $5,000 each, as compensation for their active participation in the case on behalf of the Settlement Class ..."

EDIT: see below for correction

<comment><USER22> As your quote notes, Class Representatives mean people with "active participation in the case" \- i.e. the members of the class who spend their time dealing with the class lawyers and showing up in court as named plaintiffs.

This would be separate from anything that class members receive just by being class members.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good catch! From the agreement document: ""Class Representative(s)" means each and all of the named Plaintiffs in this Action: Free Range Content, Inc., Coconut Island Software, Inc., Taylor Chose, and Matthew Simpson"

So that clause means that the plaintiffs will get up to $5,000 on top of what they will receive as claimants, and there is no such limit on claims (but the total payments will not exceed 11 million, including attorney and class representative compensation).

<comment><USER21> Great to know! Here's to hoping they pay out the entire amount I'm owed.

Thanks, Guys!

<comment><USER23> If I were you, I would expect to receive literally pennies on the dollar.

Attorney fees will eat up a significant chunk of that $11MM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Years ago I tried to start a small side business on Youtube. I filmed and edited a dozen or so videos with great effort, and hid them until we could launch. While we were polishing things one of the guys that was working with me clicked on an ad, I believe twice. It was for a car or something and it was worth about $12 total. I almost immediately saw it on our account, and figured out what happened. I tried to disown those clicks and that revenue, but there was no way to do it and there was nothing I could do. It was obviously not a genuine users click because no one was watching our videos yet, and I'm sure the guy's account was associated to our project.

Sure enough, a few weeks later we were perma-banned from adsense. Destroyed all hope for my business. At no point did we get to communicate with a live person. Fortunately I had set up an LLC and used the Federal Tax ID from the company instead of my own SSN or I would have basically been blackballed from internet advertising forever. I disputed it, owning up to what happened and explaining how I couldn't undo it. The robo-response was that my dispute had been rejected, ban was permanent.

I bet this destroyed so many people's hopes and hard work over the years. When you have a million followers, it will take serious fraud to cause a problem. When you are a nobody starting out, figuring things out for the first time, you make one mistake and you are done forever. I realized that if anyone didn't like a less popular uploader they could just make a new account, and click on their ads until they got banned. Pretty horrible.

I haven't been involved with adsense since, but if they don't provide the ability to disown clicks they should add that. There is a lot of testing that goes on when you are building a product.

</comment><comment><USER25> Seems most people here had the same experience. I do not understand why their practices are not actually illegal. We sent them tons of traffic (aka money to them) and they just terminated without any explanation or recourse. 11M sounds very low; we had a small company and we already lost several $100k.

</comment><comment><USER26> Frankly, the amount of power Google holds over small businesses is terrifying. It's incredible that a small bug in one of Google's algorithms could destroy your main source of income, with no explanation or recourse.

</comment><comment><USER27> I had a 12-months old AdSense account with 300 GBP to withdraw. After I tried to cash out, Google banned the account for click fraud. If they were able to detect it, why didnt didn't they do it on-the-fly and show my actual balance? This happened 10 years ago. Since then I was pretty sure Google is running a massive scam on the long-tail small publishers. Glad to know at least in US they lost a case...

</comment><comment><USER28> Almost everyone involved in content creation and tech has a story about being kicked from Google Adsense.

What sucked about Google Adsense doing this is everyone started using Google, then got big and they killed off smaller web ad networks. Then they ripped the rug from under content creators that chose them where they cut them off.

It was a bad move, I sometimes think it was a big data move only to get people's personal information and get free tracking across the web of user activity.

It was definitely evil and the brick wall they setup for clarification was unnecessary and very cold.

</comment><comment><USER29> Back in the early 2000s I ran Google ads, back when they were only text and small boxes. You had to earn $100 to get a payout I think, and after forever I still had like $12. I forgot about it and eventually pulled the ads. In 2011 I sold the domain to some Irish company that gave me $10k USD for it. ... kinda regret it now.

It looks like I have the same Google account (found the old e-mails for adsense on that domain) even though I have nothing listed under adsense right now.

I no longer run ads on any of my sites and probably never will, but it would be nice to get that fucking $12 for letting Google run all those text ads for those years.

<comment><USER30> Eventually Google will mark your adsense account as abandoned and transfer the money to the state where you can claim it. I'm a few months away before I can claim the $50 I have from adsense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> My first respsonce was, that's it? Even personal injury lawsuits get bigger verdicts than that, and this involves actual businesses and thousands of people. The lawyers and other fees will eat much of that. No wonder google does not have to worry and can act with impunity .

</comment><comment><USER32> I had an adsense account to profit from an IP address i randomly purchased from an ISP, which was formerly apparently a somewhat popular porn site. Racked up about $950 in a month, then they turned me off, something about violating terms etc etc.

It was a glorified 404 page with a google search widget & adsense ads on it.

<comment><USER33> Putting Adsense ads on pages without content is an obvious violation of the ToS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> 11 million distributed around is going to be close to nothing on a per- publisher basis. I wouldn't be surprised if the spread was more than 100 to 1 on owed vs collected. (so if you lost 100k from a terminated adsense account, I doubt you would even get 1k from this settlement)

</comment><comment><USER35> Google ads where for the little guys, those small blogs, and personal web pages, with only a few thousands visitors/months. And you earned just as much as the big guys per user. Now it's only for the big guys, good luck earning anything if you have less then 10,000 monthly visitors. And it's the same for advertisers, good luck getting any clicks on your ads (99% of clicks are bots) if your budget is less then $10,000. When more and more people start to use ad blockers, there will only be bots left. There's more money then ever in advertising. But you need to be _big_ in order to see any of it. I guess Google have tried to fight the bots, but it's an impossible battle with too many false positives, and small guys losing their hard earned ad money. I guess Google is too big to notice, they are one of the big guys, and they always get their share. I hope they go back to non intrusive text ads, show some love for the small guys, and kill the bot. Maybe add "captcha" to ads after you click them !? They need to do something drastic or their whole ad based business might crumble from beneath.

</comment><comment><USER36> When ever I read stories about adsense providers behaving like this, or even "banks" like paypal just closing accounts without any legal security whatsoever, or Websites themself selling user data and serving malware, I always think of situation Warez sites and their users were in a decade ago.

Sure, If you visited specific Warez sites, you could assume that the Ads served will likely infect your machine. And sure, the guys running the websites might not be able to cash out the ad revenue.

But the realization, that a lot of legit businesses today are in the same situation as sites who were run from shady servers in "digital no mans land" by guys concerned that some kind of law enforcement might ask who owns the site is either funny or deeply disturbing.

</comment><comment><USER31> So many stories of people who had their account terminated.

<comment><USER37> I wonder why they just wouldn't go to a small cases court.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> _> Payments to each of the Class Representatives, not to exceed $5,000 each, as compensation for their active participation in the case on behalf of the Settlement Class;_

$11M payout for possibly thousands of publishers is pennies.

<comment><USER39> Class actions provide an opt out for class members which allows them to retain their own right to sue for that reason. Of course, if you lost money and weren't willing to take the cost/risk of a direct action suit to try to recover it before, I don't know why you'd spit in the face of someone successfully for securing you a mechanism for some.(if small) recovery now for basically zero cost now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Amazon stole about 2k from me in an affiliate account, rejected appeals. Someone should file a class action against them too, not worth it for me to do it alone.

</comment><comment><USER31> A google search for " Free Range Content, " shows nothing. They probably went out of business due to being banned.

</comment><comment><USER41> Is the notice pdf text near-unreadable for anyone else or is it just pdf.js being messy? [http://www.adsensepublishersettlement.com/docs/notice.pdf](http://www.adsensepublishersettlement.com/docs/notice.pdf)

<comment><USER42> Reads fine for me in Safari.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> What the title has to do with the page? I could not find this $11M anything on that page!

<comment><USER44> >What the title has to do with the page? I could not find this $11M anything on that page!

It is on page #9 of the settlement PDF: [http://www.adsensepublishersettlement.com/docs/settlement.pd...](http://www.adsensepublishersettlement.com/docs/settlement.pdf)

"1.44. "Settlement Fund" means a cash fund of $11,000,000, to be paid by Google in accordance with the terms of this Settlement Agreement. "

and later on the same page:

"2.1. Settlement Fund. Subject to the terms of this Agreement, Google shall establish a Settlement Fund of $11,000,000. Google's total financial commitment under this Agreement shall be $11,000,000. "

Later there is the order in which this amount will be paid, the actual people which suffered from the thing will be paid last (only after deduction of expenses, services, etc. which it is easy to presume will not be "peanuts").

We'll see how much people that were affected will actually get back.

<comment><USER43> OP should have linked the PDF instead.

<comment><USER42> He was not the poster of this article.

<comment><USER43> Oh sorry. Corrected the comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> $11 million seems astonishingly small given the number of people that have been screwed by Adsense. If myself and one other friend received full payment for our closed accounts, we would consume about 2% of this fund by ourselves.

<comment><USER46> Have you not considered suing them yourselves?

<comment><USER45> We have, but it would likely cost more than we are owed, and take years. We _might_ also get attorneys fees, but that wouldn't be guaranteed, so it's kind of a "win the battle/lose the war" type of proposition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Why just 2010 to 2018? Mine was terminated back in 2008 with about $500 in it.

<comment><USER48> Mine was terminated before that, and to this day I can't open an adsense account, even with a site that gets a million views per year.

<comment><USER31> file an LLC and get an EIN

<comment><USER49> The LLC will be banned along with all it's employees. Google bans related accounts of banned accounts as it's considered ban evasion

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Seems like Amazon is learning from Google here... Or did they form a cartel on freezing accounts without any explanation or recourse?

</comment><comment><USER51> Ugh, yeah this brings back bad memories. Similar to and reminds me of all the PayPal issues in the past as well. What headaches.

</comment><comment><USER52> Does the settlement also apply to admob? They terminated admob accounts as well.

</comment><comment><USER53> Sweet. Can we get one for all the Amazon Affiliate accounts as well?

</comment><comment><USER54> This is quite a one-sided 'settlement'. I suppose $11M will be enough to pay the 'administrative costs'. What a joke, 'Hon. Beth Labson Freeman'. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

</comment><comment><USER55> That'll show em. I wonder if Google even had to move money from anywhere, or if it was fine to pay with profits from part of the day.

<comment><USER20> This is a rounding error to Google, they could not care less.

<comment><USER56> I think (?) op was being sarcastic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Does this also apply to admob?</comment>


If you read Boing Boing, the NSA considers you a target for deep surveillance - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2014/07/03/if-you-read-boing-boing-the-n.html

<comment><USER2> Why does this feels a bit like "If you read this you're stupid!" ?

<comment><USER3> It's more like "if you don't read Boing Boing, the fascists have won."

<comment><USER2> Or gave Boing Boing another visitor?</comment></comment></comment>


Valve's flat management structure 'like high school' - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-07/09/valve-management-jeri-ellsworth <comment><USER2> Ah, the tyranny of structurelessness: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessnes...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessness)

Seriously - in the absence of formal power structures, informal ones will always form, and they are often less accountable and fair than formal ones.

<comment><USER3> Our german Pirate Party is struggling with this as well. They desire to be a democratic party, where the officials just do as voted. Technology [0] is used to make this feasible. Nevertheless it hardly works out in practice and leads to lot of discussions and a high churn rate.

[0] [https://github.com/liqd/adhocracy/](https://github.com/liqd/adhocracy/) note the meaning of the name [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adhocracy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adhocracy)

<comment><USER4> As Burke says "Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion."

<comment><USER5> Even if you do subscribe to that point of view, modern politicians neither pay attention to their constituents' opinions nor exercise judgment for the good of the same. The reality-relevant betrayal is the application of the representative's judgment for the good of himself or his sponsors; that people are attempting to replace this but going about it in a way that might not be ideal might be an overreaction, but I'd argue at least it's a mistake they can learn from rather than a total abandonment of principle.

<comment><USER4> Oh I agree most politicians do not follow Burke - but when I have been in the potion of being a democratic representative I took it very seriously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Jeri Ellsworth, for people who don't know, does really interesting hardware stuff.

"TSA body imaging at home" ([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDyo_OQFdAc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDyo_OQFdAc))

"Home made EL wire" ([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RKBGxJJmwg](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RKBGxJJmwg))

"Recording Audio onto floppy discs" ([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xpr7B-7BFP4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xpr7B-7BFP4))

"Home made transistor" ([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Qph8BNrnLY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Qph8BNrnLY))

"Homebrew NMOS transistor" ([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_znRopGtbE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_znRopGtbE))

<comment><USER7> I stay in my parent's basement so I don't have to be subjected to TSA body imaging, why would I want to do it at home?

j/k it's more of a tin-foil covered shed, but there may be some evidence that tHz radiation causes "resonance effects" resulting in DNA depolymerization:

[http://www.technologyreview.com/view/416066/how-terahertz- wa...](http://www.technologyreview.com/view/416066/how-terahertz-waves-tear- apart-dna/)

[http://www.biomedproofreading.com/Hintzsche.pdf](http://www.biomedproofreading.com/Hintzsche.pdf)

So get the pat down folks, your genes will thank you!

<comment><USER8> She did that as a protest against airport scanners, I believe.

<comment> at-fates-hands You are correct. It was to demonstrate they were wasting absurd amounts of money paying for these when they can be built fairly easily for quite a bit less.

<comment><USER7> I guess my point, from the links provided, is that we shouldn't be bombarding ourselves with the radiation these devices produce.

<comment><USER9> It's about the same as what you get from eating a banana AFAIK. At any rate, people routinely subject themselves to much higher doses of radiation.

<comment><USER10> It's actually higher than a Banana Equivalent Dose, and you can't always directly compare radiation exposure like that based on dosage.

<comment><USER11> I honestly thought that you and chc were joking about the Banana Equivalent Dose. But it turns out that it's a real concept!

1\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose) 2\. [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15288975](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15288975)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's very disingenuous to say that Valve backstabbed you when they willingly handed over all the legal rights to your project when you left.

[http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/18/4343382/technical- illusion...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/18/4343382/technical-illusions- valve-augmented-reality-glasses-jeri-ellsworth-rick-johnson)

Granted, a firing is never a graceful affair, but Valve could've done much worse if they wanted to.

It seems to me that Valve was cutting some losses and her project wasn't showing much promise compared to other things they had going on, so they let her go.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's all starting to make a bit more sense.

Democracy tends to weed out bad ideas but moves at a snails pace. Tyranny is the opposite. It moves at blazing speed but the mistakes are massive. This explains so much about Valve. It's products are high quality but it's a slow company. They're release games very slowly for a company with their money, their source engine is inferior to modern ones, and (not that it matters to me but for some it does) their graphics aren't exact top notch. I think that's why Half Life Episode 3 is delayed for so long, they're working on a new engine to compete with EA's Frostbite 3.

Before EA came out with Origin and Valve starting hauling ass to add features to Steam, Valve didn't look like it was really pushing any new steam features. There was the redesign and that was all. Then as Steam had more competition they starting added Screenshots manager, greenlight, software, source filmmaker, community hub, walkthroughs, big picture mode, linux support, etc...

It feels like the company is trying to stay small and stay the same despite desperately needing to be restructured in order to keep up with competition.

Maybe "staying a startup forever" doesn't work as good as we thought.

<comment><USER14> Valve is really not a slow company. I've heard this expressed before and never really seen it. Please see this list of IP developed by valve:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation#Games](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation#Games)

That's not an insubstantial amount of games for one company.

This doesn't even take into consideration that they currently run the biggest online games store in the world which is a huge undertaking, and all the moonshot developments they have running that might not even see the light of day.

Valve are not a slow company. They're a savvy company. It's hardly surprising that they don't really have a flat power-structure, but they do seem to have some kind of structure that allows them to continue to innovate in a variety of areas.

<comment><USER15> The only significant game they did since 2007 is Portal 2. (1 game in 6 years). Left for Dead was acquired and the sequel was done basically by the same team.

Valve has Steam and, with it, a very nice income stream (they're basically rich). While they do try stuff with F2P (dota, tf) personally i doubt Valve is a top tier game maker anymore. It seems to me they don't have the ambition anymore and live the good life while Steam provides.

<comment><USER16> Dota 2 is the #5 PC game being played right now according to Xfire and is only growing. It's pretty unreasonable to call it insignificant.

<comment><USER17> IIR, DOTA was a mod for Warcraft III, and Valve hired the mod team on to build the sequel based on Source.

from WP "According to Valve's founder and managing director, Gabe Newell, the company's investment in Dota was sparked from the collective interest of several veteran employees, including Team Fortress designer Robin Walker, programmer Adrian Finol and project manager Erik Johnson, all of whom had attempted to partake in team play at a competitive level."

So it might be a _popular_ game, but it's not a major development for Valve in the sense that Team Fortress, Portal 2 or HF2 was...and also demonstrates some of the internal culture issues Valve has.

<comment><USER18> Team Fortress was a mod for Quake, and Valve hired the mod team to build the sequel based on Source. That doesn't make it less of a major development.

<comment><USER19> Wasn't it a mod for half life 1 (team fortress classic)?

<comment><USER20> Heh. What do you think "classic" means when it's part of the title of a product? It means that it's a derivative of something else, and wants to capture some reflected glory. Don't go thinking that "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein", the 1994 movie, is the original.

Team Fortress was a mod for Quake before HL1 was a twinkle in Gaben's eye. TFC was someone saying "that sure was a fun gameplay mode, but I can't get anyone to load Q1 any more... maybe I'll recreate the same thing over again"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why is Jeri still whining that her job at Valve didn't work out? As best I can tell she was treated fairly but she was just not a good fit in this rather unique company. Maybe this was news in February when she was fired but now it is either a childish grudge or a cynical PR move or both.

Listen to the Grey Area podcast if you think this is wrong.

<comment><USER22> Exactly. There were a number of comments on Slashdot[1] that pointed out that Valve may not be the problem here, but that Jeri did not fit into Valve's culture. If you read here Wikipedia[2] page, you'll see she dropped out of both highschool and later college (college due to "cultural mismatch"). Reading her wikipedia page reads like someone that may not play well as part of a team (I haven't fully listened to the Grey Area podcast yet, so I could be totally wrong here).

Jeri couldn't get buy-in for her projects at Valve so they failed. For a project at Valve to succeed you need to convince a number of other people at the company that your project is a good idea and that they should help you work on it. It sounds like she wasn't able to convince others at the company to come help her on her ideas (maybe because she didn't put forth the effort, she wasn't good at selling it, or no one thought her ideas were worth it).

Valve has a very specific culture and you have to really have a certain personality to fit in. Sounds like maybe she wasn't a good fit.

[1] [http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/07/09/0214225/former-v...](http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/07/09/0214225/former- valve-hardware-designer-recounts-management-difficulties)

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

<comment><USER23> "A very specific culture and you have to really have a certain personality to fit in."

Sounds a lot like high school to me :-)

<comment><USER24> But still, you have to take it as a "no hard feelings" thing and move on. The company I work at has an extremely casual attitude and some similarly extremely casual personalities. We've had a few employees that could do the work requested, but clearly didn't fit the culture. Nothing against them; it just didn't work out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This person must have gone to a much different high school than I did if the biggest problem was hires being vetoed by old-timers and trouble reaching consensus. "Like high school" to me implies that the place is full of idiots who hassle you because you're actually productive, and you can't really leave.

This seems like a nitpick, but it makes it hard for me to take the rest of the article seriously....

<comment><USER26> Agreed (at least assuming there aren't regular fistfights in the hallways at Valve).

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The problem isn't the structure. The problem is the size of the company. And one should not live in the delusion that office politics is the result of a structure. Rather its a result of size.

In any case a structure, though not official always exists. Somebody on the top is always going to ask his trusted lieutenant when it comes to doing reviews, 1-1, appraisals, deciding hikes and promotions etc.

Your best bet is to keep yourself to a small company. Nothing you are likely to do to a large company can bring about genuine change.

<comment><USER28> > Nothing you are likely to do to a large company can bring about genuine > change.

Unless, of course, you're near enough to the top of its structure, formal or informal...

<comment><USER27> Even that will not help much.

To bring about change in any large company, you need some partner in the high- mid level management who can assist you in bringing about that change. Now this is the problem, if the system is rotten to the core, simply firing the low level solves no problems. You really need to clean the mid level management, and you will never get a true picture of what is going on. All you will see is numbers that will those guys look fabulous.

One of the reasons why Jack Welch got tremendous success with stack ranking was because the managers were subjected to same kind of measurements some one at the bottom was. There fore he was able to clean up a good deal of crap in the management layers.

Unfortunately this is not possible to implement in most companies as either they lack a 'real' leader or the ones implementing, make the process such that they exempted to be judged as a part of it.

<comment><USER28> I think your definition of "genuine change" is much wider-reaching than what I thought was meant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> She said it herself:

"...There are popular kids that have acquired power in the company ... I was struggling in the company to make a difference"

There IS a always a hierarchy and she failed climbing it.

<comment><USER30> The article effectively uses 'popular' as a pejorative but doesn't really explore is the extent to which the 'popular kids' have achieved power through merit. If someone is popular because they are a good manager, with good ideas, able to listen and adopt better ideas from talented team members, then I have no problem with this form of hierarchy - it's a meritocracy.

<comment><USER29> I think the same way about this. But life is not fair. You see systems and you exploit them. If you gain fame by merit when interacting with one of those systems, that's nice. But not all systems work like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It's also worth observing that "culture" tends to mean "people similar to myself", unless more explicitly defined. So it's no suprise that the people who declared not to "fit" are a woman and a skilled manual worker (machinist).

The totally uniform power distribution idea only works if you have totally uniform employees. As soon as you have signifigantly different skillsets and workflows - which you need to do different kinds of work - then employees become uncomparable and shortly afterwards unequal.

The size of Valve is also over Dunbar's number, so they're beyond the range of what can be organised with informal social operations anyway.

<comment><USER32> It seems a bit unfair to claim that it's because she's a woman -- how many women work for Valve?

Also, Valve, being a game company, has always had a diverse set of skills with artists and software engineers being the most obviously different. Their success has been a lot to do with efficiently integrating these together.

<comment><USER31> I don't know, how many women work for Valve? It's not public or easily googlable information.

<comment><USER33> You should definitely assume it is none then and blame sexism for her project being rejected. That makes perfect sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Related discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6015182](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6015182)

</comment><comment><USER35> I wonder if it would be possible to create temporary hierarchy, like you have on video sets. You have cast/directors/animation, etc. They form only for purpose of making the film after which they are dissolved. Or is this how Valve already works?

<comment><USER36> Video sets are really projects, with a different set of lingo that a "PMI- style" project.

So they have to have something like that, otherwise nothing would ever get done. People don't just magically do things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Dudes, the word for "non hierarchical" or "structureless" is "anarchist". Either a social organization is a hierarchy or it's an anarchy (or a mix of both).

A corporate culture is certainly defined by its political structure: some companies are monarchies if not tyrannies, some are democracies and some like Valve are closer to anarchies. This is decided by the founder's preferences.

</comment><comment><USER38> It sounds like the informal style of a small company didn't scale.

I've heard various #s between 50 and 160 batted around as optimal sizes of organizations, after which you need more structure. The challenge is that interpersonal relationships grow n^2 with organization size. This is in part why the Mythical Man Month tells us to not add bodies.

A high level summary of some the research is here -> [http://jstrande.typepad.com/blog/2004/07/optimum_organiz.htm...](http://jstrande.typepad.com/blog/2004/07/optimum_organiz.html)

Intuitively this makes a lot of sense. At some point you have to say, "You do your part, and I'll own mine, here's the deal we're setting up to get each of our parts done, but we each have some autonomy in how to do it."

</comment><comment><USER39> Any time you have more than a handful of primates in a room, you're going to have politics and hierarchy.

Valve does appear to try very hard to avoid enshrining hierarchy. No org charts. What people work on can be very fluid.

Doesn't mean it's nirvana.

</comment><comment><USER40> GitHub also claims to be a flat "no bosses" organization. Can anyone here who works at GitHub, or knows people who do, describe how this actually works? Can this scale to a large multi site combating?

</comment><comment><USER41> It is fully expected, and Gabe probably did not intended this to happen.

It is only human nature: to strive for authority, to build little exclusive clubs around it, and to suck up to such authoritative group of people for a sense of security if one not part of such a group. Decades and decades (centuries and centuries?) of human society has trained people in this mechanism regardless of race, gender or religion. So ValveSoftware, even with good intentions, is fighting against a trait that is part of being human. Regardless of how flat Gabe wants it to be, some people will become more and more important on the part of the company they are working on as their time goes by at Valve. And they will form old-timers club who will feel like they are on the next level, and start to form the barrier from the rest.

Only viable solution towards truly flat structure would be to not give anyone a chance to become an old-timer, a.k.a., one too important/authoritative: recycle people to different parts of the company as soon as arguments like this one arises: "OK group, what you all are suggesting for this product's next phase is really great and all, but we will need to ask Mr. X because he had been working on the product since the first iteration, and he knows about it all, so he knows what is best for the product."

</comment><comment><USER42> Reminds me of CS Lewis's The Inner Ring - mostly the quote from War and Peace:

"When Boris entered the room, Prince Andrey was listening to an old general, wearing his decorations, who was reporting something to Prince Andrey, with an expression of soldierly servility on his purple face. "Alright. Please wait!" he said to the general, speaking in Russian with the French accent which he used when he spoke with contempt. The moment he noticed Boris he stopped listening to the general who trotted imploringly after him and begged to be heard, while Prince Andrey turned to Boris with a cheerful smile and a nod of the head. Boris now clearly understood—what he had already guessed—that side by side with the system of discipline and subordination which were laid down in the Army Regulations, there existed a different and more real system—the system which compelled a tightly laced general with a purple face to wait respectfully for his turn while a mere captain like Prince Andrey chatted with a mere second lieutenant like Boris. Boris decided at once that he would be guided not by the official system but by this other unwritten system."

[http://www.lewissociety.org/innerring.php](http://www.lewissociety.org/innerring.php)

</comment><comment><USER43> I'd heard similar stories about Valve. Unlike many games studios they have a continuous revenue stream in the form of Steam. Would be interesting to see how this 'you have no boss' mentality works during the difficult times.

It also largely explains why we haven't seen HL3 (which I don't really mind as long as there's another Portals soon).

</comment><comment><USER44> Seems like a case of misaligned ideas of what constitutes an environment like Valve. Of course there will be a hierarchy any time humans are involved. The idea of Valve's workplace, is that the hierarchy will establish itself naturally and hopefully merit based, rather than imposed from above like in "normal" companies.

Lots of projects in such a company will die. But I don't believe for one second that it's due to some elite clique trying to hold everybody else down.

The much more obvious reason is that the concept was mediocre, hence why it couldn't get any backing internally.

It's of course always easier to claim conspiracy and unfairness, than it is to realize that whatever concept you thought up was no good.

There's a lesson in this situation about facing facts early, not being blinded by your own perceived brilliance and not brushing off criticism too easily.

</comment><comment><USER45> Article is 1/3 advertisement for naked women with nipples artfully tucked away behind arms. Stay classy wired.

<comment><USER46> Targeted ads? What other pages have you been visiting?

<comment><USER47> Sandwiches!

[http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/10/20](http://www.penny- arcade.com/comic/2006/10/20)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I guess that we talk a lot about how a leader is not the same as a boss, and how people should lead and not command. It seems that Valve have created an environment that make leaders, well, to lead and to make decisions... Does any of this remembers "Lord of the Flies"? (Of course, without all much drama, and being able to leave it)

Of course, the risk of that kind of approach is that there's no really a way of make external decisions, as there is no way of disrupting the spontaneous organisation (because there's always going to be some organisation), so consensus with "the group" (meaning basically the leaders) needs to be reached. And that can be very difficult.

</comment><comment><USER49> One thing that always bugs me about the video game areas of Reddit is their universal love of Valve, and their belief that Valve's management structure and corporate policies is the CAUSE of their success. I think Valve succeeds DESPITE their structure since they can stay afloat merely from Steam revenues.

I would like to know (and never will) if Valve's game development arm balances out financially, or if it's just a loss leader to get people onto Steam, which will provide them with more distribution revenues down the road.

Also, I didn't think Half-Life 1 or 2 were that good, so sue me. :)

</comment><comment><USER50> Does anyone know if the other companies emulating the Valve corporate structure - particularly I'm thinking of Github - also have cliquish dynamics?

The only company I've seen in-person that was trying it is Basho, and while I got a really bad impression of their culture, I think that had more to do with their "Topgrading" cargo-cult hiring practices than with their structurelessness

</comment><comment><USER51> Take a look at this quote:

 _Let 's say you and I have a chat in the corridor or the conference room and the result of this chat is that we converge to the view that we need an additional software engineer or animator or artist or hardware person._

The people dealing with software were called "engineers", and the ones dealing with hardware "persons". Huh.

<comment><USER52> -shrug- As far as I'm aware, it's generally considered bad style to use the same words twice in a sentence.

<comment><USER53> >As far as

<comment><USER54> as and far are barely words; just redundant filler

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> robert-wallis interview video [http://www.twitch.tv/jenesee/c/2488434](http://www.twitch.tv/jenesee/c/2488434)</comment>


End-to-End Encryption in the Browser and how we did it in Excalidraw - <AUTHOR> https://blog.excalidraw.com/end-to-end-encryption/ <comment><USER2> Nice approach to sharing the key! I didn't know the the part after # in a URL doesn't get send to the server. Everything makes much more sense now. :D

<comment><USER3> _I didn't know the part after # in a URL doesn't get sent to the server._

While that is technically true, please know that it is not true in a way that is meaningful for many threat models. The JavaScript running on the page can trivially detect, inspect, and log changes to the location hash.

More information here:

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/WindowEvent...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/WindowEventHandlers/onhashchange)

<comment> j-f1 Isn't this true of any client side site? If the client side JS has access to some information, it's always possible for the server to inject custom JS that returns the data. Theoretically this setup provides little additional security but it does allow (for example) people to use a client pinned to a version they've verified to not leak information and collaborate without worrying about leakage. (Excalidraw developer here)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the interesting post. This isn't a critique or evaluation of your work and you did mention that the client side JS can read the location hash.

I agree with your comment. I just don't want anyone to think that a key stored in the location hash is somehow truly protected from ever getting back to the server, which was how the comment to which I responded sounded to me.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Uber sued for wrongful death of 6-year-old - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbdlaw.com/Uber/

<comment><USER2> If this is the case, then my employer is also responsible for actions I take while I'm on-call (with the important distinction that my on-call is not opt- in and is per the terms of my employment contract).

If I break the law and hack someone's wifi for internet access in case I need to log in and fix something, that's on me. Likewise, Uber didn't make this guy drive without regard for others safety (or even suggest it for increased availability), so he alone should see the consequences of his actions. I sincerely hope that the Uber X driver has criminal charges brought against him.

<comment><AUTHOR> What was interesting to me, though, was this bit: "Applying the same law which holds taxi companies responsible for the injuries caused by their drivers, whether or not they have a passenger at the time of collision, Christopher Dolan, the Liu family attorney, states that the change in technology doesn't change the legal liability for Uber."

If that's the case, and the law states that the taxi company is liable irrespective of whether someone is in the car, why shouldn't Uber be held to the same standard?

<comment><USER2> Uber doesn't have the same model as a taxi company -- what would stop a driver from staying logged into the Uber application whenever she's running errands? Taxi drivers drive shifts in which they're using cars that are the property of their employers.

<comment><USER3> The key bit in the lawsuit is that Uber's business model depends on availability of drivers in a certain area. Those drivers are required to look at their cell phone while driving.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


We built a Twitter bot that replies to people who share fake news - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@einkoenig/we-built-a-twitter-bot-that-replies-to-people-who-share-fake-news-d23127c1ed15#.qa3i7xfzd <comment><USER2> This Fake News hysteria seems to be driving a bunch of false concern about protecting the unsuspecting masses from perceived bad information. The problem is manyfold though because fake news can be very subjective, and who will be chosen as the ultimate authority to determine what is fake and what is not.

I believe that there will always be a certain number people that will still believe falsehoods even after they have been given the correct information. I believe it is a bad idea which will weaken societies collective ability to think on their feet and to be able to discern fact from fiction. Let's move this one into the history books for the sake of everyone.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally agree with you! This is why we selected only sources that have created obvious hoaxes in the past. I've been thinking a lot about actually writing this post, because I didn't want to add _another_ post on fake news. However, it was interesting for us how people reacted. And that most didn't care at all about the trustworthiness of the stuff they're spreading

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> " So we decided to use 21 sites that were flagged as obviously misleading (not satire, not opinionated, just fakes and hoaxes) from this list."

"this list" goes to [https://docs.google.com/document/d/10eA5-mCZLSS4MQY5QGb5ewC3...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/10eA5-mCZLSS4MQY5QGb5ewC3VAL6pLkT53V_81ZyitM/mobilebasic) which i've seen before, but I can not find any actual list! Just an article about how to analyze sources. Where's the list?

<comment><AUTHOR> My bad! Here's the link to an article covering the list. The list was updated a few weeks ago because the creator received death threats [http://www.dailydot.com/layer8/fake-news-sites-list- facebook...](http://www.dailydot.com/layer8/fake-news-sites-list-facebook/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> From the write up:

 _" Randomly tweeting at people is considered spam by Twitter. However, this went through so fast that I believe several accounts who spread the news on purpose didn't like our bot. And thus reported it ..."_

Yes, oddly enough if you threaten people's income streams they will tend to react badly, and quickly.</comment>


Big data and R - <AUTHOR> http://minireference.com/blog/big-data-and-r/

<comment><USER2> Anyone interested in processing large datasets with R should look into Julia (<http://julialang.org/>). It's still new and missing some features, and it's a long ways off from the package availability that CRAN offers, but it's converging at a remarkable pace.

</comment><comment><USER3> You forgot to mention in the tittle a very important piece of information: beer! :-)

(Original title of this entry was "Feed a man pizza and he will blog about your startup")

<comment><USER4> now the article suddenly makes sense to me

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> So it looks like they're pulling their data from MySQL. Is it feasible to use R on data "big" enough that it makes an RDBMS impractical?

</comment><comment><USER4> TL; DR?

<comment><USER6> Of your four comments on HN since you created your account yesterday, two of them are "this" and "TL;DR?"

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

<comment><USER4> I haven't found a rule that would forbid asking for a summary, or in this case actually if there is anything in the article the submitters wants us to learn. The article has an interesting title but the so what evaded me when I read it. the link you posted doesn't cover comments so I'm not sure what is you point?</comment></comment></comment>


Mixpanel's YC application in 2009 - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@suhaild/mixpanels-y-combinator-application-in-2009-34b5d30dbc12 <comment><USER2> "We currently already have a alpha build with a variety of clients saying they will or have integrated including some YCombinator companies: Posterous, TicketStumbler, and HeyZap."

Brilliant.</comment>


JSON isn't a good configuration language - <AUTHOR> https://www.lucidchart.com/techblog/2018/07/16/why-json-isnt-a-good-configuration-language/ <comment><USER2> I want to point out Jsonnet[1] - It's a language that renders to JSON, it's simple to write, functional, and has good tooling for Kubernetes[2].

[1][https://jsonnet.org/learning/tutorial.html](https://jsonnet.org/learning/tutorial.html) [2][https://ksonnet.io/](https://ksonnet.io/)

<comment><USER3> We have been using jsonnet for Amazon ECS service and task definitions, works quite well.

<comment><USER4> Does it look anything like [https://github.com/dan- compton/ecsonnet](https://github.com/dan-compton/ecsonnet)

How are you managing the registration of service and task definitions?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I surprises me that the author doesn't list XML as an option. XML has been used for configuration for 15+ years where I work with little or no issues. It is easy to use and easy to read and because of that I will continue to prefer XML over the alternate format listed in the article.

<comment><USER6> > I surprises me that the author doesn't list XML as an option.

The author points out that in his opinion the fact that JSON objects are sandwiched between brackets makes the language overly verbose. By the same reasoning this makes XML an unusable absurd mess of a language, even without taking into account all the boilerplate code.

<comment><USER7> Well, when it comes to object notation XML is actually _less noisy_ than JSON. It has more characters (maybe), but fewer special symbols. For example, let's imagine a notation to describe a chess party:

        <party xmlns="urn:mycompany:games:Chess">
          <move white="e4" black="e5" />
          <move ... />
        </party>

        { "__type": "urn:mycompany:games:Chess:Party",
          "moves" : [
            {"white": "e4", "black": "e5" },
            { ... }
           ]
        }

Compare the lines to describe the moves:

        <move white="e4" black="e5" />
        {"white": "e4", "black": "e5" },

The one for JSON is actually two characters longer and (in my opinion) is harder to read because of all these noisy symbols to enclose and separate values. Lets' look at them in isolation:

        XML  <=""=""/>
        JSON {"":"","":""},

This is indeed boilerplate.

Also note that XML includes the element name, while with JSON we are supposed to know the object structure. (And while I'm at it note that this XML name, despite being just a generic "move", is actually _globally unique_ so when you process XML with any tools you'll never mess up two different "move" elements from different XML dialects. With JSON our best shot is to have an in-house convention of how we mark object types and roll our own tools to check this.)

At the end JSON kind of becomes more concise compared to XML:

        ]}
        </party>

I don't think it's such a huge win, especially because these are again special symbols. Besides, being overly concise is not always a virtue. Compare, for example, the syntax of functions in Ada:

        procedure Test
        ...
        begin
        ...
        end Test;

Note that the designers of Ada decided to require a qualifier after the generic "end" to clearly mark it as the end of a specific procedure. It's interesting to read Ada Design Goals[1], which clearly mentions this in the section "Concern for programmer: Language is small and consistent. Readability favored over writability".

JSON has its strong points compared to XML, but for some reason every discussion about XML is riddled with over-the-top negative generalizations like "unusable absurd mess of a language", while in fact XML is a very solidly engineered thing. Just like Ada :)

[1]: [https://www.radford.edu/~nokie/classes/320/designGoals.html](https://www.radford.edu/~nokie/classes/320/designGoals.html)

<comment><USER6> > For example, let's imagine a notation to describe a chess party:

In that example XML is missing the XML declaration. Furthermore, JSON doesn't require a type field. That skews the comparison quite a bit.

Furthermore, the amount od symbols is irrelevant. Otherwise brainfuck would be considered exemplar wrt clarity.

> Also note that XML includes the element name, while with JSON we are > supposed to know the object structure.

Exactly, that's another way JSON is simpler than XML as it requires no boilerplate code to convey structure.

That is particularly obvious in the sort of application covered in this discussion.

<comment><USER7> XML declaration is optional (in 1.0, which everybody uses). My point was not that JSON is longer; JSON is noisier. XML in this example is longer, but easier to read because it has more content and less visual and cognitive overhead to convey _the same structure_ (plus extra: element name). Some structural symbols are necessary, of course; we cannot just write "whitee4blacke5" (we can, in fact, it's parseable), but JSON uses more than XML.

XML element names are not boilerplate, they're type names. Maybe configs do not need types, but who knows; maybe they do. Types are there for a reason. E.g. if users write configs, it would be totally cool to verify they're at least syntactically correct before using them. With JSON there's no standard way to do this; with XML there is. (And users write configs all the time; I, for example, being a user of Make and Apache routinely write Makefiles and .htaccess files.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My workplace is bought pretty heavily into Azure, which I generally love. However, the specification for any given Azure resource is stored in a JSON file called an ARM (Azure Resource Management) template. This is usually okay, except for two main problems.

One is the lack of comments that is always brought up when criticizing JSON.

Two is the fact that Azure provides a way to access certain keys, IDs, etc. of resources in an ARM template, but it's very clunky. It's basically a specification for a service call, often involving mod operators or looping, in a single line of JSON. Such specifications are unreadable and unavoidable when provisioning any mildly complicated Azure resources, and they make ARM templates much more difficult to maintain.

If it's wanted, I can provide examples of what I mean.

</comment><comment><USER9> TOML is probably my favorite.

<comment><USER10> I personally like ucl[1], but toml is pretty decent too.

[1]: [https://github.com/vstakhov/libucl](https://github.com/vstakhov/libucl)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> JSON is a great configuration language. I find it far more human-readable than Toml or similar ini-styles, while being more restricted than YAML.

Since config files ought to be version controlled outside of the application and delivered as an installable artifact (yes even your local Postgres conf file, etc.), it means end users can customize options solely using the 12-factor approach of storing config in environment variables, and _never_ fishing around to change them in a hand-edited config file.

This pattern is really pleasant to work with, especially using container definitions or shell scripts to define different combinations of config (as ENV vars), instead of needing to maintain a mapping between random and often scattered files into their meanings for reproducing certain environments or settings.

A nice side effect is that you'd truly never want or need comments in the config file. They would be in a man page, user guide, etc., explaining why defaults are chosen and how to override with ENV vars (and you're still free to add comments to _environment_ definitions like Dockerfiles or shell scripts).

After working this way for a while now, I've come around to realizing it is so much superior to relying on modify local files and especially better than needing to fish around for in-line config comments (that are just as prone to get out of sync as anything else) in scattered config files. I was resistant to the 12 Factor config best practices for a while, and I think I was foolish for it.

In the end, JSON is really compact, scoping and nesting are immediately easy to read, data structures are immediately obvious, and there is a ton of mature tooling for it.

JSON really is a great config language.

</comment><comment><USER12> YAML is even worse. Meaningful whitespace should die.

<comment><USER13> YAML is a superset of JSON, so you can use JSON-style braces if you prefer. Just FYI.

<comment><USER14> JSON with significant whitespace is just everything bad about JSON and a little bit worse, though.

<comment><USER15> But YAML supports comments multiline. You can't just say everything bad about JSON while neglecting the article's intentions in the flaws of JSON

<comment><USER6> The lack of comments is not a flaw but one of JSON's many virtues which takes into account the many lessons in life on how comments are used ans abusef to extend a basic format with ad-hoc directives. Evenso, anyone who wishes to support comments in JSON is free to do so by employing a filter.

<comment><USER14> If we removed every useful feature of a language because it could potentially be abused, we wouldn't have any features in any languages.

Removing comments from JSON because some people might use them for parsing directives was an overreaction. The alternative always presented is to pollute your objects with "comment" values which, unlike actual comments, take up space and need to be parsed or filtered. Just imagine how silly it would be in any other language for comments to be replaced with variables.

And... nothing is stopping people from adding parsing directives in JSON itself anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Like the article briefly mentions at the end, I'm really a fan of Webpack's approach to configuration -- exporting the configuration from an executable script. It gets around most of the problems outlined here (numbers, comments, multiline strings...) while keeping all the JSON niceties. It no longer becomes cross-language, but seems like exporting a config object from an executable is a good alternative.

<comment><USER17> I agree. Webpack's approach is great, but only for JS projects.

For Scala (or any other JVM environment) I use [https://github.com/lightbend/config](https://github.com/lightbend/config). It doesn't get better than that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This post is wrong on soooo many levels, mentioning all of them would explode this comment, but just to proof one of them: JSON does NOT "requires curly braces around the entire documen". In fact, you can enclose a document with [ and ] as well, which is why you need curly brackets to write configuration files. This has nothing to do with a JSON "require"ment.

<comment><USER19> Just a primitive like a string, number, boolean etc is also valid json.

<comment><USER20> What does that have to do with using JSON as a configuration format? Having a single primitive (or for that matter an array) is not very useful as a configuration file.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> { json5:"should be the new standard" // _really_ / }

</comment><comment><USER22> Any configuration language which is not easily humanly readable is not a good option in my opinion.

There is nothing wrong with JSON as an intermediary format it just should not be used as the base format to store the configuration information in.

</comment><comment><USER14> I absolutely support using Lua for a configuration language.

Yes, you have to load a parser, but it's tiny, and the syntax is everything people like about JSON but without any of the listed drawbacks, and even simpler.

<comment><USER23> Lua was created as a (dynamic) configuration language and I think it's great for that. It is as full featured as any modern language, complete with lexical functions, and the only thing it lacks is a thriving ecosystem. Its current ecosystem is not as enthusiastic and active as most others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wrote a little library for building DSLs in JavaScript [0] because of this very issue—JSON is not good for this kind of stuff. I want to be able to create small DSLs to solve problems rather than squeezing the language into a JSON format. I want the full power of a language AND the ability to serialize the semantics to send over the wire. Maybe we'll move toward that one day.

[0] [https://github.com/smizell/treebranch](https://github.com/smizell/treebranch)

<comment><USER14> But you shouldn't want the full power of a Turing complete language in a config language. All of that belongs in application-space, configuration is supposed to be simple and static, with as little logic as possible, preferably none.

<comment><USER23> That's exactly what Lua was created for, to be a Turing complete configuration language. You can remove the whole standard library though, leaving only the built in operators, variables, functions, and control flow. To some it may seem ugly to define a configuration this way but it allows configurations to reduce duplication and add more dynamism. It's a trade for, power for simplicity. But I guess the logical end of that is to end up evolving the configuration into a scripting language which is how Lua got where it is today.

<comment><USER14> >You can remove the whole standard library though, leaving only the built in operators, variables, functions, and control flow.

I just choose not to use them, and limit myself to tables or an API that generates tables when using it for config files.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Yaml tab formatting is terrible</comment>


Offline mobile maps from Mapbox - <AUTHOR> https://www.mapbox.com/blog/offline-mobile-maps/ <comment><USER2> I use maps.me on my phone.

[url: [http://maps.me/en/home](http://maps.me/en/home) ]

Plus, it's open source. [https://github.com/mapsme/omim](https://github.com/mapsme/omim)

<comment><USER3> This is for developers, though.

<comment><USER4> There is also an open API for developers: [http://maps.me/en/api](http://maps.me/en/api)

<comment><USER3> Ah, cool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >A turn-by-turn app that _pre-caches_ the route as soon as you ask for directions, ensuring that you'll get to your destination even if you drive through an area without cell coverage.

That's not what I call "offline". HERE is offline, this is useless.

<comment><USER6> Hello! I work at Mapbox.

Pre-cached directions are just one use case for offline maps. Our SDK gives developers the control to download arbitrary bounding boxes for any purpose.

<comment><USER5> Hello! I was looking at it from a user's point of view though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like that this has topo maps. I'll have a look at it for that alone.

Also worth trying "Here" Maps for pre-download mapping. This is the old Nokia maps, now Microsoft. Its surprisingly good. I use it as my go-to for driving as the spoken directions seem to time better plus the interface is much cleaner and easy to read at a glance. Also they include speed limits + your GPS speed which are both useful. I still prefer Google Maps for looking up a business as they have better information.

<comment><USER8> They also have walking directions that work offline as well as transit schedules.(Also, MS never bought HERE, it's an independent company)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Previous versions of the MapBox SDK had offline tile caching, for both Android and iOS. Worked really well if you could know which tiles you needed to download in advance.

This update is for the new version of their SDK, Mapbox GL. When they first announced it, there was no offline map support, so I couldn't bring my apps over to it.

For anyone who's interested, I used the offline maps in a trail/hiking app that needs to work in remote mountains, and for a "back seat driver" app for kids in the back of cars on road trips.

</comment><comment><USER10> Why not just use OsmAnd~? Completely offline, including search, navigation, etc. Downloads are per-country.

<comment><USER11> because competition.

Get OsmAnd~ from Fdroid: [https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=net.osmand.plus](https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=net.osmand.plus)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Do you know a good android app that uses OSM with offline mode ? I am actually using [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.skobbler.f...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.skobbler.forevermapng) which is working perfectly but its last update was a year ago ...

<comment><USER13> Osmand

<comment><USER14> I actually thought this would be the obvious answer, instead it's near the bottom of the thread. Odd for the best open source navigation app I've ever found.

<comment><USER15> Just downloaded OsmAnd after switching to maps.me 6 months ago. They've made a lot of changes (for the better). Thanks for the suggestion

<comment><USER13> Yeah, it went from super nerdy to quite user-friendly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looks interesting for hybrid apps in particular. I notice Mapbox have plugins for NativeScript and Cordova. There's an experimental plug-in for React Native.

If anyone from Mapbox is looking, do you know if a JavaScript offline version is in the works, or being considered?

<comment><USER17> Hi, Mapbox developer here. We've gotten a few requests for offline for mapbox- gl-js[0], but haven't put a priority on it yet. We need to do some investigation to see if this is something that's feasible to build with Web APIs such as IndexedDB.

[0]: [https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-gl- js](https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-gl-js)</comment></comment>


Interesting research related to social sites: Manipulation resistant recommender systems (PDF) - <AUTHOR> http://www-personal.umich.edu/~rsami/papers/recsys.pdf An interesting paper on making recommender systems manipulation resistant by computing rater reputation (you reputation as a rater goes up if you could correctly predict whether the target will like recommended product, and vice versa).

<comment><USER2> Thanks!

I can't vote your article up or down until I read the associated PDF, but I look forward to reading it this evening. It's definitely a topic that's important and interesting to me. I appreciate your locating it for the group.

<comment><AUTHOR> No problem. It's something I'm interested in as well.</comment></comment>


What languages/skills to master to progress from senior to principal engineer? - <AUTHOR> (Edit: or, really, how to keep going once you are a senior engineer? particularly in terms of earning potential).
I have been coding for several years, in several languages -- general purpose, mostly data pipelines as well as server infrastructure.  Language-wise, I did some C++ early in my career. I've actually been working with functional languages for several years hence, along with a smattering of Java, Python, etc.
I'm of the opinion that functional languages (and also Java) are not enough in and of themselves for me to continue to progress professionally at this point.
I've been thinking about next steps, and I'm considering throwing my energy into one of three directions:
1) C++ --  I've gotten the impression that doing C++ server infrastructure would allow for significant headroom in terms of earning potential (Google, finance), so I've been thinking of taking up C++ again  and really becoming competent in it.
2) Machine Learning -- On the other hand, machine learning also seems to be all the rage, and that seems to center around Python, R, Matlab.... as well as stats and linear algebra.
3) Distributed Systems -- or I could dive deeper into distributed systems, which has its own set of concepts and practices to master.
Each of these seem like distinct directions to take. I only have so much time on the evenings and weekends so I want to leverage those chunks of free time well, and focus my energy in a profitable manner.
Opinions? <comment><USER2> In my (naturally limited, anecdotal) experience, "principal" engineer suggests skill with building (or "architecting") large systems, and understanding every facet from estimating effort to design to code to test to documentation, coupled with an ability to delegate chunks of work to other people and to mentor them.

From the technical skills you posit learning, distributed systems seems to me most in line with "principal"-level thinking, though machine learning seems pretty popular and ostensibly lucrative at the moment.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for your thoughts.

the term 'principal' might be a misnomer; i'm really just brainstorming how to keep growing professionally, in particular in terms of earning potential.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If the goal is continued growth and to make yourself more valuable to your employer the key improvement in this step is underatanding the business extremely well and helping the VP and CTO to guide the work of the engineering team in a way that is beneficial to the business as a whole. That seems uninteresting to many but it's these people who turn their employers into successful businesses.</comment>


Facebook Users Are Fans of Entertainment - <AUTHOR> http://20bits.com/2008/05/19/facebook-users-are-fans-of-entertainment/

<comment><USER2> Fans of entertainment? So they're entertained by things they find entertaining. Great headline!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the constructive feedback. Both your wit and your insight serve as examples for all.

<comment><USER2> No need to be so caustic. You wrote a redundant headline. Learn from it and move on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Any thoughts?

<comment><USER3> Here's the real question -- when will Facebook let me customize my profile with a Tila Tequila themed background?

<comment><AUTHOR> Tuesday.</comment></comment></comment>


Monkey controls robot hand through brain implants - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2012/02/monkey-controls-robot-hand-thr.html

<comment><USER2> If you can do stuff like that, why not speed up your nervous system by directly connecting the brain to your arm and hands, skipping the slow neural network altogether?

</comment><comment><USER3> This is not new technology. A company called cyberkinetics commercialized this 12 years ago and made it work in humans. See their coverage in wired from 2003.

<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/brain.html>

<comment><USER4> Of course it's not new, the article (as brief as it is) states that this work builds upon the electrode based efforts that you referenced from 2003.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am sorry but that doing experiments like this on a living, breathing primate is sick. Surely there is somebody working on a way to develop mind-computer interfaces that doesn't rely on inflicting this kind of suffering on intelligent social animals?

</comment><comment><USER6> They'll be working in call centres next year.

</comment><comment><USER7> This has been done before at Nicolelis Lab at Duke. I did a rotation there during grad school:

[http://touchlab.mit.edu/news/documents/ScinetificAmerican_20...](http://touchlab.mit.edu/news/documents/ScinetificAmerican_2002.pdf)

[http://www.thinkartificial.org/machine-interfaces/monkey- bra...](http://www.thinkartificial.org/machine-interfaces/monkey-brain-makes- robot-walk/)

Also other US universities have been working on this stuff for 5-10 years.</comment>


See the Arctic Refuge's Fragile Beauty (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/proof/2017/12/arctic-national-wildlife-refuge-wildlife-photos-anwr-protection/ <comment><USER2> Apparently this is from fall 2017. See this link [1] and the reference in the article to whether the Democrats will take control of Congress in 2018

[1] [http://www.campionadvocacyfund.org/protect- wilderness/floria...](http://www.campionadvocacyfund.org/protect- wilderness/florian-schulz-in-nat-geo-see-the-arctic-refuges-fragile-beauty/)</comment>


Is Rapid Mobile Development Worth Your Time? - <AUTHOR> http://insights.dice.com/2015/06/24/is-rapid-mobile-development-worth-your-time/

<comment><USER2> > _What we're seeing now is like what we saw with website development 10 years > ago," said Derek Dodge, Vice President of Product at Snappii, a Rochester, > N.H., company with a cloud-based platform that allows users to visually > create mobile apps. "Early on, building a site was difficult and expensive, > then tools like Dreamweaver came along. That's happening now in mobile dev. > We're kind of like Dreamweaver. We generate native code, but you don't have > to write it."_

Right and DreamWeaver and all those easy-to-use tools have disappeared and we're right back to developers doing everything and designing tools for themselves. Building a site is just as expensive as before and you still have to educate clients on the true costs.</comment>


Mixcrate shuts down - <AUTHOR> http://www.mixcrate.com/ <comment><USER2> It's disappointing that, before trying to shut them down with legal threats, record labels don't try to partner and monetise sites like Mixcrate. While I'm making an assumption here, I think it's very likely to be the case.

No one is going to hear a track in a DJ mix, then NOT buy it because they heard it in a mix. It's just not a substitute for anything that labels are selling. In fact, the opposite is true, that people are much more likely to go and buy a track because the mix helped them discover it.

A large number of folks uploading mixes to Mixcrate would be amateur, making no money from whatever promotional value using a track may give them. They do it for the love of it. Some would have been DJs who do mix for profit. I'd suggest some low-cost licensing system, paying a few dollars a month to use licensed tracks would be a decent solution for both.

Sites like Mixcrate closing down kills two revenue streams for labels, 1) referral/discovery purchases and 2) a direct licensing model.

<comment><USER3> Whenever labels do this, they offer egregious terms that render the business unsustainable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Such bullshit. They're shutting down, not because of any real lawsuit, but because of a _threat_ of a lawsuit. Is this really what America is about?

It wasn't even a real threat of a lawsuit. It was an _email_ from someone high up in the music industry. That's all it takes.

I love the United States, but fuck, it really disappoints me sometimes.

<comment><USER5> It is. My views on contracts and law suits changed when we got a trademark infringement suit against us.

It became a function of "how much is this going to cost us?" We ended up changing the name of our company even though we didn't think the accuser had a case. It wasn't about who was right. It was about how much money did we think they would be willing to put up because we'd have to match it.

<comment><USER6> > _we 'd have to match it_

But how is that?

Is it that the party with a lot of money can file many briefs and that the other party has to respond to them? (and what if they don't? Do they lose by default?)

And could it not be fixed by limiting the number of possible briefs, by law (depending on non-hackable criteria such as, amount of damages awarded in similar cases, etc.)?

<comment><USER4> So, if you're fighting the government, you have an advantage in that it costs the state money to enforce a judgment. The weight of precedent means that the government has to enforce laws against _everybody_. If what you're doing is politically sensitive, then you could find the hammer of the law dropped on you fast, but if you're in a political blind spot, then you can get away without getting slapped for a long time.

Fighting the music cartel, on the other hand, that's a completely different animal. They can afford to pay big teams of lawyers to slap you silly, and _keep_ doing it for as long as they want. If they want you out of business, they're going to find a way.

Picture all the people trying to make the world a better place as a bunch of ants. Fighting the government is like fighting a bear. The bear can crush a few of you but not all of you. Fighting the music industry is like fighting a hoard of dragonflies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I hate how we use the political system to fight progress. I feel like a majority of startups end up facing this. Uber, vidangel, mixcrate. To paraphrase Russ Roberts, progress isn't made by the union getting you an extra two dollars an hour, it's made by inventing a bulldozer and letting one man do the job of 50.

<comment><USER8> Weekends and 40 hour work week and no children working and health insurance aren't progress? But seriously this isn't about unions, this is about how money influences processes. Those with money get to make the rules because they can afford to go to court when others can't. You want progress, I'll take either a liberal or a libertarian solution to that BS.

<comment><USER9> The comment you responded to isn't about unions either. To re-paraphrase it: "Progress isn't made by small increases in quantity, but large changes brought by doing something completely differently." Or "Progress doesn't usually happen iteratively, but in great bounds when fundamental assumptions are challenged".

The things that you listed are examples of that kind of progress.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Would be interested to know if specialised companies exist that invest in these particular scenarios. Good product, decent number of users but without the financial means to face a lawsuit (that has some chance of winning). Essentially a lawyer service who take a chunk of equity if they win.

<comment><USER4> They weren't even threatened. A lawyer didn't write the email. They just got spooked and decided to quit. You can't fix this problem with anything other than "changing the climate of the music industry" as they wrote in their letter. You're going to need a lot more than a new legal service to fix this.

If you want to make money and have an impact, do goddamn _anything_ but try to do it through or with, or anything around music. You can make money, or have an impact, but fuck you if you try to do both. The music industry and the world Hacker News was birthed in are at complete 180 degree odds with each other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It seems like a reaction based on some very conservative legal advice and a nasty cease and desist letter. I hope they have a strategy to negotiate and if no quick progress then name and shame by publishing the letter.

</comment><comment><USER12> Looks like they weren't making money, it was a passion project, and the burden of seeking legal help just to protect a site that may not have had a future was just too much. We've all been there. See you around Mixcrate folks! Somewhere else, some other time...

</comment><comment><USER13> Wait a second... Why don't we have completely anonymous companies whose technology/app cannot be shutdown (at least not by armies of lawyers) -- Is there such a thing?

<comment><USER14> The most common thing that stands in the way of that is when you start accepting money.

The payment processors tend to cut ties if you do things that are deemed illegal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Since Mixcrate is an LLC, why didn't they just wait it out? If the other company really sued and bankrupted the LLC - so be it. Shut it down. Why shut it down because of a "letter"?

<comment><USER16> Is there any risk that the LLC owners would be held responsible for the company's actions?

I have zero knowledge about this stuff, quick googling returned a result[1] which says the owner might be held personally liable if "intentionally does something fraudulent, illegal, or reckless that causes harm to the company or to someone else"

[1] [https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/llc- basics-30163.htm...](https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/llc- basics-30163.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This was a bomb site! Sux to see it taken down! For @2ndIInoneproductions, is there another site that I can listen to your tribute to 'King Sun' mix. That was a bomb mix! Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER18> The only place I get my music now I don't know no other site to download I am devastated really I am

</comment><comment><USER19> I hope this isn't a harbinger.</comment>


Vulnerability #319816 – npm responds - <AUTHOR> http://blog.npmjs.org/post/141702881055/package-install-scripts-vulnerability <comment><USER2> Isn't the point of the report more that npm publish will work using save credentials rather then that arbitrary scripts can be run?</comment>


AWS NVMe to Block Mapping - <AUTHOR> https://russell.ballestrini.net/aws-nvme-to-block-mapping/ <comment><USER2> This was very handy. For future me searching for this someday on HN: "ebsnvme- id"</comment>


The Worst Computer Bugs in History: Race Conditions in Therac-25 – Bugsnag Blog - <AUTHOR> https://www.bugsnag.com/blog/bug-day-race-condition-therac-25 <comment><USER2> The Reinhart-Rogoff spreadsheet error, given its influence in supporting "austerity" policies around the world, is a less obvious example of a computer bug with horrid consequences. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt#Metho...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt#Methodological_flaws) and [https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22223190](https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22223190) and [https://theconversation.com/the-reinhart-rogoff-error-or- how...](https://theconversation.com/the-reinhart-rogoff-error-or-how-not-to- excel-at-economics-13646) as starters.</comment>


Tell HN: The Grocery Store is Watching You (and it's brilliant) - <AUTHOR>

I just saw this quote in an article here and wanted to highlight it. If I had a blog, I'd have written it up there but I thought it was too interesting not to comment.
> It's one thing if I trade my personal sales habits to a grocery store chain in exchange for a percentage off the final sale. That's a choice I'm making, consciously and knowingly. (By this point, if you haven't figured that out, you're just deliberately hiding from the fact.)
I just did some thinking on the discount cards that are common at grocery stores, at least in America and England (not sure about elsewhere). It doesn't just track your personal shopping history, it also tracks when you buy things on sale - so they can see who exactly changes goods to a more premium version at what discounts, etc. Really brilliant stuff - when you offer "premium cookies" at $2 off, do people add them that wouldn't otherwise? Do they drop the cheap, normal cookies in favor of premium? Do premium buyers stock up, then buy less next time?
With some good analytics/datamining/statistically minded people, a grocery could make some intelligent guesses on how gross and net profit would change by offering sales. Maybe they'd even see that offering a certain discount on only one day of the week would do well! Wow...
Quote really got me thinking, wanted to share my thoughts with the rest of us here. I know the Tell HN isn't standard operating procedure, but I was totally intrigued and felt compelled to share this. <comment><USER2> I think posting that here is perfect--I actually like these more "forum" type posts. I wonder what size grocery stores use these analytical techniques though. What you describe here is, in my opinion, a pretty sophisticated analysis, so I can only really see the large chains being capable of pulling this off.

Regardless, I think this sort of practice is one that easily transfers from traditional retail to the web sphere. I've seen some pretty impressive analytic apps released recently, and thats exactly the kind of information you'd need. Maybe companies such as Clixpy could take their product to the next level with these type of statistics?

</comment><comment><USER3> Forget intelligent guesses--what about the profit to be made from handing some control over to machines. Put a machine in charge of making tiny price changes (and reacting correctly to the resulting changes in demand) to blindly suck every last util of consumer surplus. We're trading some savings now for a permanent information advantage.

edit: I'm sounding a bit like Art Bell here. to bed!

</comment><comment><USER4> My evil grocery store (Tesco) already sells packets of 5 and 3 so you have to buy too many or not enough.

They offer price comparisons (a legal requirement) in 100g or 1kg (to make the expensive stuff look cheaper).

I don't think for 1 second they would use it to the direct benefit of a customer.

So, er, fuck them and btw., you :></comment>


Ask HN: Pocket Wifi Recommendations - <AUTHOR> I'm looking to purchase a pocket wifi device for my trip to Europe at the end of the month. Any recommendations on some reliable/quality pocket wifi devices? Thanks! <comment><USER2> I recommend you rent it, not buy it. If you want to receive renting offers from multiple companiest, try rent-wifi.com for free. You submit a request and wait for offers. Have a great time in Europe!</comment>


How India Pierced Facebook's Free Basics Program - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/backchannel/how-india-pierced-facebook-s-free-internet-program-6ae3f9ffd1b4#.r2kfhc1x1 <comment><USER2> The domain in parens next to the title says "medium.com", but the link is actually on "[https://backchannel.com/how-india-pierced-facebook-s-free- in...](https://backchannel.com/how-india-pierced-facebook-s-free-internet- program-6ae3f9ffd1b4#.y3rp1jv9m").

Curious how that happened.

<comment><USER3> Run: curl -IL [https://medium.com/backchannel/how-india-pierced- facebook-s-...](https://medium.com/backchannel/how-india-pierced-facebook-s- free-internet-program-6ae3f9ffd1b4#.r2kfhc1x1)

It is because of a "301 Moved Permanently" response code. The URL shows as "medium.com", because thats the URL saved in the HN database. However when you open it, your browser follows the redirect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Calling this free Internet is really giving Facebook too much credit. It was free access to a select few websites.

<comment><USER5> When this first launched in India a couple months ago, the realization of what was going on really hit me. I was already opposed to it for net neutrality reasons, but in practice the program just rolled out Facebook and a few apps without data charges to everyone, not just the unconnected, which was extra flagrant. I wrote this: [https://medium.com/@firasd/facebook-s-internet-org- free-basi...](https://medium.com/@firasd/facebook-s-internet-org-free-basics- zuckerberg-elides-the-facts-95001d7a0a59)

Also see this: A data-driven argument on why Marc Andreessen is wrong about Free Basics [https://medium.com/@sumanthr/a-data-driven-argument-on- why-m...](https://medium.com/@sumanthr/a-data-driven-argument-on-why-marc- andreessen-is-wrong-about-free-basics-c472184b9682)

The reporter in the main linked article couldn't find one person using Free Basics who hadn't been on the internet before.

<comment><USER6> Can somebody translate the above post into English? I can't understand a single sentence.

<comment><USER5> Okay…

1) When Free Basics launched India, the problems with it turned out to be even worse than I expected. I wrote about how the local marketing ('Free Facebook') and Zuck's post ('farmers getting weather information') had completely different messaging.

2) I pointed to another article that dove into these issues about who actually uses Free Basics.

3) The reporter who wrote the article this HN thread is about ("How India Pierced…") couldn't find a single person who was introduced to the internet through Free Basics.

Does that help?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC by John von Neumann (1945) - <AUTHOR> https://sites.google.com/site/michaeldgodfrey/vonneumann/vN_First_Draft_Report_EDVAC_Moore_Sch_1945.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> Also in easier to read format: [https://sites.google.com/site/michaeldgodfrey/vonneumann/vne...](https://sites.google.com/site/michaeldgodfrey/vonneumann/vnedvac.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER2> This report is commonly referred to just as "The First Draft Report", and was widely distributed enough in its 'first draft' form to constitute as a publication in a later patent dispute (that is to say that one of the reasons the patents were invalidated was because they were filed over a year after this report got distributed).</comment>


Exploring ES6 - <AUTHOR> http://exploringjs.com/es6.html <comment><USER2> If you're adopting ES6 into your stack, you may as well go all the way and support ES2017 features.

<comment><USER3> If you stick to ES2015 features that Node 6/7 support, you can skip transpilation node-side though. Depending on the project, that can be quite convenient.

<comment><USER4> I always felt transpiling on server side as unnecessary overheard, Node 6/7 support most of new features it's too much to transpile for 1-2 features.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Everything has moved to ES2015.</comment>