How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/against-surveillance-capitalism/how-a-chinese-company-built-a-250-million-search-hijacking-empire-35f957566852 <comment><USER2> On a side note: when I accidentally viewed the Medium article in landscape mode the reference links at the bottom got a strikethrough...

</comment><comment><USER3> I used to work for a company that did desktop search hijacking. Looking back I can't believe how normalized it was internally.

</comment><comment><USER4> I can't read this article.

 _Error 410 This account is under investigation or was found in violation of the Medium Rules._

</comment><comment><USER5> My old comment still applies.

>After seeing all those sketchy or even fraudulent mobile ads by TikTok's parent company ByteDance, I won't be surprised if that SMS is a bait.

>But pretty much everybody does it in China, Baidu etc, like "You phone has 8GB of garbage, download us to clean it", "Download us to boost your signal by 4 times immediately", "This cutie just sent you a message, download us to repsond", basically anything to make you download their apps, and only political problems go punished.

</comment><comment><USER6> There is something poetic about Google allowing a Chrome extension to hijack search queries.

I'm loathed to install things like Grammerly, or Honey precisely because of fears like this.

</comment><comment><USER7> I can open the link right now.

</comment><comment><USER8> American companies built a billion dollar industries based on this : Ask Toolbars, Babylon and Yahoo.

</comment><comment><USER9> Cached link to the medium post.

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qwZu8OV...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qwZu8OV6ZtsJ:https://medium.com/against- surveillance-capitalism/how-a-chinese-company-built-a-250-million-search- hijacking-empire-35f957566852&strip=1)

</comment><comment><USER10> so many silent business ideas. It is a win-win situation. Customers want to hide themselves behind proxy, and the company make good money from big players. Very smart!

<comment><USER11> It's not legal whatv theyre doing.

<comment><USER10> I am not sure. It really depends on all small prints when you install their extensions I guess. All these extensions ask for permissions to work. It is very likely to be legal in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> DDG uses Bing results (+ some tweaking) for their search results.

Per their description here: [https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help- pages/company/ad...](https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help- pages/company/advertising-and-affiliates/)

They use Yahoo ad search syndication to put their own ads against them.

They also insert their own affiliate links onto results.

How is that materially different than what's happening here? That this company presumably doesn't have a backend search API agreement with Bing?

<comment><USER13> The user is intending to search with Google but the query never touches Google or shows any Google results. That's why it's different.

Thanks for the DDG link, though. I had no idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is there anything actually illegal about this? What laws are broken?

<comment><USER15> The Computer misuse act(UK) GPDR (EU) are just two

<comment><USER16> We have no idea what data they're actually storing, and everything the extensions does is stated in the description of the extension, I'm not a lawyer but I don't think the Computer Misuse Act is being broken here. We have no idea on the data they store so who knows if GDPR is.

But there's also the fact that they are not a EU or UK company, they are Chinese. Where the laws are far more relaxed about things like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hmm... I'm unable to access and read this article. Medium displays a 410 error and an ominous message: "This account is under investigation or was found in violation of the Medium Rules." Given the subject matter, I'm starting to get a little suspicious about why this article was taken down.

<comment><USER18> Maybe try [https://web.archive.org/web/20191211012207/https://medium.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/20191211012207/https://medium.com/against- surveillance-capitalism/how-a-chinese-company-built-a-250-million-search- hijacking-empire-35f957566852)

<comment><AUTHOR> Update: Medium has restored the article. The Chinese troll army failed to suppress the news for long.

Please see a screenshot of the full article here:

[https://imgur.com/a/uJxate0](https://imgur.com/a/uJxate0)

For the data table, go here:

[https://airtable.com/shrtyVQQG1DhaXIxx](https://airtable.com/shrtyVQQG1DhaXIxx)

It looks like this company is trying very hard to suppress this news. A media blackout might work in China, but not in America.

I am in contact with Medium to get the article restored. If anyone has a Medium contact, any help would be appreciated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So 7 million users equals a revenue of $250 million. Meaning 1 user is worth $35 on an annual basis. That's insane! No wonder Google is so huge.

<comment><USER5> Google doesn't push their shopping affiliate links as agressively.

<comment><USER20> Maybe not exactly in those terms, but effectively every Google ad is logically the same and even more lucrative, as google gets paid for _potential_ purchases unlike affiliate links which only pays for actual purchases.

And if you think Google is not aggressive, search "credit card" without ad block. It is insane!

<comment><USER21> Credit card is such a commercial term that it's bound to have a lot of bidding. I tried to search for "Campobello", the Canadian island bordering Maine, the other day, and was amazed that there were no ads at all. There still aren't. DDG on the other hands shows me three ads, two on top and one at the bottom. Make that as you will.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> ga-vu Title says "how" but it doesn't explain anything.

It just lists that they run two malicious Chrome extensions.

Talk about clickbait.

<comment><USER22> > _Genimous Technology Co Ltd, a public company traded on the Shenzhen Stock > Exchange under the symbol 000676, is the 12 billion CNY ($1.7 billion USD) > company that is behind these extensions [1]. Their ownership is concealed > through shell companies setup in offshore jurisdictions like Polarity > Technologies Ltd in Cyprus and EightPoint Technologies Ltd in the Cayman > Islands, but can be traced through analysis of the browser extensions terms > of service and contact information [2, 3]. Based on public filings, in the > first 6 months of 2019, Genimous made 900,296,410.76 CNY ($125 million USD) > from its overseas division, which generates its revenues from ads on search > results pages [4, 5 (page 15 of the PDF)] for a $250 million yearly run > rate._

<comment> ga-vu That's just a description of the company, probably copy-pasted from some stock market site.

When someone says "how they built an empire" I expect to read their history and modus operandi.

<comment><USER22> I don't think stock market blurbs have this:

> _Their ownership is concealed through shell companies setup in offshore > jurisdictions like Polarity Technologies Ltd in Cyprus and EightPoint > Technologies Ltd in the Cayman Islands, but can be traced through analysis > of the browser extensions terms of service and contact information_

In any case, it's a blog post summarizing ongoing reporting and developments of a new company that ostensibly operates below the radar. It seems obvious that it won't contain the kind of indepth, historical content that a book offers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Genimous Technology Co Ltd, a public company traded on the Shenzhen Stock > Exchange under the symbol 000676, is the 12 billion CNY ($1.7 billion USD) > company that is behind these extensions

If you're brave, short this. Shining a light on an edge of ethical/legal business has a good chance of making their revenue dry up fast.

<comment><USER24> >>> Shining a light on an edge of ethical/legal business has a good chance of making their revenue dry up fast.

Any previous case ? Having a hard time believing that a stock is driven by ethical issues

<comment><USER25> > Any previous case ? Having a hard time believing that a stock is driven by > ethical issues

There are plenty of examples.

See the recent case of Papa John's. The stock imploded by 50% over a few months in an ethical scandal related to the founder (John Schnatter) saying the N word among other things.

Schnatter had criticized the NFL's handling of the kneeling protests that went on in relation to Colin Kaepernick, saying that it had hurt Papa John's business (they were a prominent sponsor of the NFL). Schnatter took a lot of flack for that criticism.

On a call with Papa John's marketing firm, he said this:

> "Colonel Sanders called blacks n-----s," he said, complaining that Sanders > had never received backlash, according to Forbes.

> Forbes also reported that Schnatter recalled growing up in Indiana, where he > said people used to drag black people from their trucks until they died. > Forbes reported that Schnatter's comments were intended to demonstrate his > stance against racism, but that people on the call were offended by them.

Schnatter as the founder, and largest shareholder, was forced out of the company. Papa John's sales dropped for the first time in 14 years and they slid into losing money after being consistently profitable throughout their history.

Papa John's was tied up with the NFL in a marketing arrangement, that involved them being the official pizza company sponsor for the league. That arrangement was ended in the months following all of this. Papa John's same store sales promptly nose dived as their public perception was tarnished (they tried numerous promotions to prop that up and it all failed).

In total they lost about 15% of their sales. The company removed several executives and has been working to stop the decline plus repair their brand (they brought in Shaq in a prominent way as one example, he has sparred with Schnatter a few times verbally and Schnatter continues to run his mouth about the situation publicly).

<comment><USER26> Those are very public, very USA-centric examples. Some shady company on the Chinese market? I'm more inclined to doubt anything will happen unless Chrome bans their extensions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This doesn't feel completely clear cut. Users installed the add-on expecting their search to change. It changes their search. Presumably it's at least preventing Google & Bing from then knowing who made the search. Whether it's truly anonymous seems a bit of a stretch. (how do they define it?)

<comment><AUTHOR> These extensions do not simply change the default search in the browser. They actively hijack searches on the Google and Bing homepages. Test it yourself in a sandbox.

A user who literally types in Google.com or Bing.com into their browser address bar intends to conduct a search using Google or Bing. Their intention is very clear. It is not to have their search hijacked and taken to a "private" search engine.

They also use Bing to power their search results and ads so Microsoft is still able to collect the user's data.

<comment><USER28> It's still sort of doing what the extension says it is going to do. On the extension page it says

"Keep your searches private by redirecting searches that may be tracked to Search Encrypt, a privacy-focused search engine... For your privacy, Search Encrypt intercepts the requests if it's on our list of sites"

So it says it hijacks right in the description.

On their website for their "search engine" it says

"The Search Encrypt encrypts your search terms between your computer and searchencrypt.com. Search Encrypt is supported by sponsored ads featured on our search results page."

Which obviously (to you and me anyways, not to others) is also done at Google so there is no actual benefit other than Google doesn't get your data.

My conclusion is that, yes, they are scummy and taking advantage of fears of people to make a buck. But is it an outright scam? Not so clear.

<comment><USER29> your searches are not private though, since one they're decrypted on searchencrypt.com, they're logged as per chinese government reporting laws.

<comment><USER28> Private is a BS term, can mean just about anything. If it's private from the US gov but not China, that might be "private" enough for some, obviously not for others. But it's also nowhere near certain your assumption is true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> When Google pays Apple $10B a year to be the default search engine on iOS it's "business".

But when a no-name Chinese company redirects searches to Bing suddenly its "fraud" and "search hijacking" and a "national security threat".

All this really shows is the ridiculous amount of revenue search has that such a simple scheme is making 100M+

<comment><USER31> Yes? They're completely different scenarios. One is setting the default search engine, the other is actively subverting the user's intention.

<comment><USER32> The user's intention is to proxy the search results so it is anonymized. Based on their chrome extension description it seems to do that. It works not unlike duckduckgo.

Spinning it as some Anti-Chinese national security thing is probably unnecessary.

<comment><USER33> I don't think they anonymize the search, they just send it directly to Bing or Google. Anonymizing the search wouldn't earn them any money.

<comment><USER34> How does it earn them any money to begin with? I know the article claimed they have a revenue of $250 million a year, but unless they are somehow injecting their own ads, how does a simple redirection result in any revenue for them?

<comment><USER35> They do inject their own ads

> [...] a search for "airpods" on Bing leads to a Search Encrypt search > results page that has more ads than search results. A user would have to > have the stamina to scroll through 10 text ads from Microsoft and then 5 > image ads before coming to an organic search result

<comment><USER36> So is there an ad bidding system and marketplace they run with a separate user interface that requires ad buyers to login and purchase ads?

<comment><AUTHOR> They use Bing for their search results and ads. Microsoft does all the work to onboard advertisers.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Political Match Quiz with no data mining - <AUTHOR> http://insight.vote <comment><USER2> This project was started by me as a way for me to get better at type-level programming in Haskell.

If you're curious about how it was made the source code is available at [http://github.com/epeery/quiz](http://github.com/epeery/quiz)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> We also wanted to contribute a positive tool to our political process in order to help folks decipher amongst all the candidates and their positions.

In a trustworthy and unbiased way.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Let us know if you try it out whether you feel the match is successful. We would also love to hear any feature ideas or suggestions you have.

Father, son project. ;)</comment>


Twitter Closing Its $400M Secondary Offering Tomorrow - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/08/twitter-closing-its-400m-secondary-offering-tomorrow/

<comment><AUTHOR> Imagine if you worked at a company backed by millions of dollars from investors. Imagine that after a few years, you didn't make nearly enough money to pay those investors back.

Imagine that the investors then decided to give the company you work for more money, and you could take a bunch out for yourself to keep forever.

Welcome to Twitter.</comment>


App developers withdraw from US as patent fears reach 'tipping point' - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/appsblog/2011/jul/15/app-developers-withdraw-us-patents?mobile-redirect=false <comment><USER2> This really depresses me =/. How can our patent system be allowed to be so screwed up? It is seriously starting to stifle innovation.</comment>


Test-Case Reducers are Fuzzers - <AUTHOR> http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1284 <comment><USER2> how does this compare to delta debugging[1]?

[1] [https://www.st.cs.uni- saarland.de/papers/tse2002/tse2002.pdf](https://www.st.cs.uni- saarland.de/papers/tse2002/tse2002.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Delta Debugging provided a name and a generic algorithm for something that people had already been doing, but they hadn't been calling it anything and hadn't formulated it as an abstract problem.

DD just removes stuff. C-Reduce does lots more, such as inlining functions, rewriting the class hierarchy, instantiating templates, ...

More: [http://blog.regehr.org/archives/527](http://blog.regehr.org/archives/527)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Are "Test-case Reducers" different than "shrinking" in Haskell QuickCheck or Clojure test.check? I.e. are those libs useful for Fuzzing as described in the article?

<comment><USER3> Shrinkers, reducers, minimizers -- all are the same thing and all operate using the basic ideas outlined in the original Delta Debugging paper.</comment></comment>


Static site generator that pulls data from Airtable - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/postlight/liftoff <comment><AUTHOR> Uses Webpack for builds and React for rendering. Easy to configure and modify.

<comment><AUTHOR> Liftoff is similar in concept to Gatsby... generate static HTML from a data source... but Liftoff is simpler to get up and running for its specific use case. It does not support tags, searching, or other features that are supported by Gatsby's plugins.

[https://www.gatsbyjs.org/](https://www.gatsbyjs.org/)</comment></comment>


Post Scarcity Economics - <AUTHOR> http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/post-scarcity-economics/ <comment><USER3> We are already post-scarcity for pornography. Cracked Magazine said it best:

"If I gave you a budget of zero dollars and said, 'Get me as much Internet porn as you can for that amount of money,' how much porn would you come back with?

I'm thinking the answer is, 'All of the porn.'" [http://www.cracked.com/article_18817_5-reasons-future- will-b...](http://www.cracked.com/article_18817_5-reasons-future-will-be- ruled-by-b.s..html)

<comment><USER4> Yet you're missing the other half of the equation. The porn business still makes a crapton of money. Maybe not as much as in its heighday (it's hard to tell), and maybe not by the same sort of folks that were doing it a few decades ago, but it's still a thriving and lucrative business.

<comment><USER5> I knew a guy who paid for porn. The way he explained it boiled down to curation.

Those youtube-for-porn sites are pretty random, and places like usenet and bittorrent are even less organized, and require a bit of, er, delayed gratification. By paying a site to exercise editorial control he got exactly what he wanted with zero hassle or delay.

<comment><USER6> I run a few (very) small porn sites - throwaway account for obvious reasons, though I'm a regular contributor on my main account. The sites I run are single-girl sites owned and operated by a single model - I'm the technical and business side.

People are still very willing to pay for original, quality content that would not otherwise be produced. The value proposition is that you're not paying for porn that _has_ been produced, you're paying for porn that has _yet to be_ produced by making it lucrative for the models, photo/videographers, editors, technical folks on the back end, etc to stay in the market.

Without that sort of sponsorship, I couldn't stay in business, and the women that own the sites I operate wouldn't be in it either - they'd be stripping or working minimum wage retail - and there'd be less porn in the world, and some people are still willing to pay for that.

The main thing is that it's about the interaction - people can chat directly with the models, there are forums, requests are often fulfilled with no additional hassle, that sort of thing.

<comment><USER7> You assume the reasons for your throwaway account are obvious, but they aren't to me. Is it because you objectify and dehumanize women for money, or because the content you serve is addictive and distorts people's views on relationships? All of the above?

<comment><USER8> I suspect it's mostly because any association with pornography is considered to taint one's professional reputation outside that business, and at least somewhat because mentioning, without shame, any personal involvement in erotica or pornography -- be it tangential and innocuous as it may -- tends to provoke Internet feminists into hurling overheated accusations of being the next thing to a slave factor.

The former reason suffices quite well on its own, but the latter is not entirely inconsiderable, much as one tends to choose among the sturdiest of one's footwear when dressing for a visit to one's friend the chihuahua breeder.

(The sheer, blinding gall of flinging vitriol at a declared and justified sockpuppet, under the guise of an _un_ declared sockpuppet, I shall leave uncommented save briefly noting the fact of it; while I know your ilk of old and thus suspected your hypocrisy on the instant, readers lucky enough to lack such experience probably wouldn't be so likely to spot it on their own.)

<comment><USER6> > tends to provoke Internet feminists into hurling overheated accusations of > being the next thing to a slave factor.

If it ever actually became a problem, I'd point the women I work with at them. One of them is a gender studies major and perfectly willing to systematically dismantle "think of the poor defenseless women" arguments about the adult industry.

<comment><USER9> Sounds like she should write a blog post on the issue - it will probably be a very interesting read (totally serious here).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It is difficult to convince people that an abundance economy can work.

But these very people don't understand that they are currently enjoying one abundance right now: Free air.

The question is: How many things can we make as abundant as air?

OSS is there in fact. I would argue that electricity is next, then education (Khan Academy and the like), and one day fresh clean water.

We just have to keep knocking down one scarce resource at a time. The same way we don't take a single leap straight up the staircase, but instead take small steps to get to the top.

<comment><USER11> Is electricity really abundant, or about to be? I don't really see any options for plentiful energy in the future. Most people have a very negative attitude about nuclear plants, so those are a no-go. Solar/wind/hydro have relatively low output, in addition to taking a lot of land/resources and requiring very specific placement. Coal pollutes like crazy. In other countries, the electrical network already can't handle peak load, so they get occasional blackouts.

<comment><USER12> Nothing grows as fast and crazy as Photovoltaics right now. It's doubling roughly every 2 years (slightly less than 2 years). I don't know if we can scale up coal/nuclear at the same rate, but I guess that's not even possible.

So when PV prices fall to the bottom (trends indicate they will), electricity prices produced by PV will fall as well. Coal/Nuclear/etc will become unviable. What do we do then? Electricity will be basically free then.

<comment><USER13> No. What is missing is batteries. Remember, photovoltaics only work part of the day, and not every day. Same with wind.

In reality, what is happening is that because of "alternative" sources of energy, electricity is plentiful during the day, and scarce during the evening. Also, only turbines (hydro/thermo power plants) can be adjusted to keep current and voltage in the network constant, so we still need them, but because of the "green" sources, they are becoming less profitable for the operators.

TL;DR: alternative energy sources cause us to have too much electricity during the day and too little during the evening, both of which is costing us money.

<comment><USER14> At some point the turbines may have to be treated as part of the infrastructure, rather than part of the production.

If you produce energy, you get paid for it, but also pay a levy depending on how well your supply fits the demand. The levy goes to whoever fills in the gaps.

<comment><USER15> Some deregulated markets are already paying for the turbines as infrastructure.

For example, the PJM interconnection holds an annual capacity auction. This essentially pays for the capital costs of keeping gas turbines around, at idle. The cost of actually running the turbines is covered by a separate daily auction for actual electricity production.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Reading the 'manna' link [1] was interesting in that it posited a way that a group might transition from a scarity economy to a post scarcity economy (Libertarian idealism aside).

One of the more interesting questions we will face is given the productivity leverage, how do we get there rather than a big apartment of rich people and a sea of slums.

[1] [http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm](http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm)

<comment><USER17> If the IQ-mutation load hypothesis[1] is true, the sea of slums problem will be taken care of by trivial genetic engineering. Smart people with good software are pretty good at entertaining themselves and making do with basic resources.

[1] The hypothesis is that the baseline human genome encodes a master race, but has been spoiled by a handful of mutations. Fix the mutations with "simple" proofreading and out pops a race of handsome, athletic geniuses.

<comment><USER18> Hi! Genetic engineer here. Your idea of "trivial" is weird: we have no way to replace chromosomes, or even edit them. All we know how to do is add things.

The idea is fascinating: although you're getting downvoted for saying "master race", the notion that the vast majority of random mutations are "bad" while the DNA we hold in common is "good" holds a lot of water. We have _no idea_ how to edit our own DNA, however. We simply can't do it yet.

<comment><USER17> Trivial in the sense that it would cost on the close order of $10 billion to figure it out, and the rewards would be in the $100s of trillions.

Trivial also in the sense that the general path to proofreading DNA is "obvious". Make a DNA segment that aligns upstream of the mutation. Glue a dicing enzyme to one end. This breaks the chromosome upstream of the mutation. Repeat for the downstream side, chopping out the mutation. Then incubate with the correct sequence and DNA repair enzymes. Voila, the mutation is repaired. This is nearly off the shelf. The not off the shelf part will be getting methylation and histone packing to come out right, otherwise you get subtle but appalling birth defects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think a basic income is a reasonable way of handling this sort of issue. Getting people to accept it is another matter altogether.

<comment><USER20> IMO, the best political solution there is to maximally decouple it from "government". Obviously this would be hard to do given the current organization of society and technology since tax revenue is the only sufficient source of money, and anything that relies on taxes is necessarily influenced by politics, but there are examples; Georgist systems like Alaska's oil dividend combined with endowment funds would be best, although we would need to actually create these institutions somehow. In the medium term, technological advances to make food, housing and medicine cheaper are probably the best bet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > From 1938 to 1945, war created that demand. From 1946 to 1981, prosperity, > rising wages, and advertising created that demand. From 1982 to 2007, debt > fuelled consumption financed by ever rising asset prices created that > demand.

The next phase of US prosperity will be fueled by Asian immigration. They want to spend their money on college fees and houses, cars and city apartments, legal fees and taxes. They kept Australia, NZ, and Canada afloat for the last 20 yrs, but they prefer America. By 2050, half of all Americans might be ethnic Asians.

<comment><USER15> Australia was not kept afloat by Asian immigration, but by digging up their land and selling pieces of it to China. 30% of Australian exports are to China. More than half of that is coal.

As for immigration, it is much easier to immigrate to the Commonwealth countries than to the United States. They all have point systems for skilled immigration.

It's possible to immigrate into the United States by making a $500,000 investment. But that policy really only captures the upper middle class looking for a backup plan.

<comment><USER22> I don't know what your definition of "upper middle class" is, but I am pretty sure even in the top 10% of the economy in any given western/industrialized country almost nobody has half a million $ laying around for investment (i.e. that isn't tied up in the homes).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My pet theory of today's economic problems (by 'todays' i mean approximately: since mid-1970s) is different. I think the problem is that approximately by that point, the pace of technological and therefore, economic and social changes exceeded the limits of average people's adaptibility. In part that was because of limits imposed by 'slow' institutions (like education), but mostly, simply mental.

Therefore, GDP growth have slowed (because most people are underperforming or doing wrong jobs as their view of the worls is lagging behind). Therefore, there is a redistribution of income to the top 1% because to all previously existing factors of success, a new a huge one added being the ability to adapt to change quickly.

Bad thing about this is that it is a permanent condition and is only likely to get worse. And, we don't want that to stop because there is little growth factors except technology left out (all free and good soil is taken 100 years ago, cheap labor is also gone, capital is abundant and cheap, too - we can't make it any better). Even change in how we grow children is unlikely and undesirable (imagine telling your child 'you don't need to be loyal or do a good job, just look where the money goes and follow'). So, this is here to stay.

<comment><USER24> Really? What kind of jobs do you think people are not adapting into? Twitter hashtag analysts?

I would that argue that since the 70's, technology has mostly improved the stuff at the top of Maslow's pyramid - entertainment, communication, computation - while the stuff at the bottom (housing, food, clothing, energy) has been fairly stagnant.

<comment><USER25> _(...) Over the last several decades groceries have been one of the real bargains in America, and the average rate of inflation on dozens of food items tracked by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has consistently been less than increases in the purchasing power of the average American family. As a result, the percentage of income that families devote to their food purchases has fallen sharply since the food inflation of the 1970s (...). Recent price spikes have done little to reverse years of moderation in the cost of food._

 _The good news started for most consumers in the 1980s and has continued since then. In the decade before, food prices rose at average annual clip of 8.4 percent, which was more than a full point above the overall inflation rate. But in the 1980s, the rate of inflation on food items declined to 4.6 percent annually, nearly a point below general inflation. That downward momentum continued in the 1990s, when food prices rose by a mere 2.8 percent annually, a trend that has pretty much continued in the new century until the last few months._

[http://www.manhattan- institute.org/html/miarticle.htm?id=301...](http://www.manhattan- institute.org/html/miarticle.htm?id=3016#.Uk6ge3jwDzo) (2008)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> According to the article, massive spending on _something_ , even war, will be beneficial to the economy.

Okay, Lets fund science.

</comment><comment><USER27> Capitalism's problem is this: it's totally goddamn imaginary. There _is_ no worker, no consumer, no manager, no government. When you get down to reality, we're all in this shit together - and that includes the non-human parts of the ecosystem and non-renewable resources that we're systematically screwing over. The profit motive has its place, but we've clearly demonstrated that it's not a viable, holistic modus operandi for the world at large.

So where to next? _IMHO_ what we need is less people looking backwards to theories but rather looking forward to systemic change that is more closely based on reality. A system in which tropical fruit in December is either produced locally, taxed in some way or otherwise socially frowned upon. A system in which a dildo that's imported half way around the world for a frigid, antisocial society of sterile worker-drones living in a fantasty of fear and loathing becomes unnecessary.

How do we get there? I think significant change in financial systems is the most realistic path. I think the way to achieve that is by systems that allow the exchange of new asset types that can represent social or environmental value, and also by allowing innovation in financial services (currently next to impossible), and by governments eventually wising up to grant tax or other types of incentives to parts of their community contributing to more educated, peaceful, sustainable, locally-grounded, holistic ways of life.

Put it this way: big capital which controls much of politics says _no_. Environment says _your days are numbered_. IMHO there's really no option but to engineer a more holistic/realistic modification of the existing system operating closer to reality - in which big capital can profit from environmental and social concern. Pure capitalism - selling fresh air - is not an option that will preserve biodiversity.

</comment><comment><USER28> The Affluent Society by Galbraith is worth reading on this subject.

</comment><comment><USER29> Wired's Chris Anderson wrote a great book called "Free: The Future of a Radical Price" and is relevant to this "post-scarcity" future.

He has a speech here and the book is on Amazon:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8l64NpaCnE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8l64NpaCnE)

</comment><comment><USER30> I keep wondering if he's missing the point of why deficit spending and putting money in the hands of the workers is also bad thing. When the consumers have limited money, they will spend that limited amount of money more wisely, and it will put the companies that rely on them buying things they don't need out of business. It will drive wages up in the right industries and down in the wrong industries. With deficit spending you will distort that information which could lead to even bigger problems. That said, deficit spending will always be more popular under democracies, because it provides a benefit to the individual voter first, so it's the easier thing to argue for and taken up by young people as they become political.

<comment><USER31> Unfortunately, your assumption that less money to consumers translates to wiser financial decisions is incorrect. It's well studied that quite the opposite behavior occurs and for good reason; more stress and less access to time saving goods and services. On top of the huge disadvantage that levies on a person, the things that person DOES need start costing more. In the vast majority of the states, having a car is a necessity to work. Loans cost more if you can even get one so you end up spending what little is there on a clunker and all the time and energy that goes in to that heap. Uh oh, now you can get to your job, but if you're working anywhere near minimum wage and have a family (that doesn't just include kids and spouses, but also elderly parents (whose social security and medicare aren't enough), you won't have the cashflow to keep everything going. So you end up with a payday loan and so on. I think everyone has the picture by now.

You mention that the 'right' industries will shrink and the 'wrong' will expand. Let's make that leap and follow it through, ignoring the pedantry of arguing what's a 'right' and 'wrong' industry. I get the point you're trying to make with that. There are two obvious paths. First, that as it stands now, increased corporate profits has not translated to increasing wages or employment. Regardless of whether the 'right' or 'wrong' industries expand, that still translates to less money in the hands of those that have the most need to spend it. The article does a much better job communicating the consequences of that. On the second path, I'll ignore the previous and just look at the overall growth consequences. If we assume that indeed only the industries producing things consumers need expand that eliminates a ton of research, development and source of unexpected discoveries (and jobs and wages and... I digress). How many 'useless' web apps and services are out there that also contribute to open source? Did consumers really need Google? Not at all, but damn if we don't all enjoy many of the things Google has contributed to our sector.

The following isn't in reply to you, Kokey, but I want to get it out there.

Of course government spending on things that don't contribute to real growth are a terrible idea. Government spending on infrastructure, education and healthcare, however, contribute more than the sum total of their costs. Most like to use the NASA example to illustrate that point, but how about finally investing in upgrading our power grid? A nationwide upgrade would put hundreds of thousands to work including a huge number of engineers and other knowledge jobs. Not to mention, we'd also be increasing our knowledge, expertise and intellectual property as a nation in a sector vital to every country on the globe during the process. What about using the next few billion we were going to subsidize telcoms with to upgrade our internet infrastructure (I don't know anyone who has been informed of the billions given to telcoms to upgrade infrastructure that wasn't used for that at all, that wasn't furious about it)? But what about healthcare? Surely that's just a money pit, right? A healthy population is more productive. Simple as that.

I doubt anyone reading this can't see that these kinds of large government spending projects and programs pay for themselves many times over in all sorts of varying ways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> It seems that we need to map and better understand the relationship between innovation and demand. If our basic needs (food, housing etc) can be satisfied for a fraction of what they used to cost due to innovation, where will the excess demand come from? We're left with population growth as our only growth factor.

If our basic needs as a society can be met by a small fraction of the working force due to innovation then we're left trying to expand the definition of what our "needs" are to create demand for the remainder of society.

As the author mentions, even the poorer echelons of society now have technology that didn't even exist a decade or two ago. It's the relationship between innovation, needs and demand that I find most intriguing.

<comment><USER33> >As the author mentions, even the poorer echelons of society now have technology that didn't even exist a decade or two ago.

Yet they're faced with ~2.5-4x higher costs for essentials like healthcare, education and housing.

I'd happily ditch my smartphone if I could reverse the price increases on those things.

<comment><USER32> >Yet they're faced with ~2.5-4x higher costs for essentials like healthcare, education and housing.

Good point. Interestingly education is one of the industries that seems to be least disrupted by technology.

The authors point somewhat still stands for healthcare, though. He uses 1939 as a benchmark. Penicillin was first manufactured in 1942. Today a generic antibiotic is just a few cents a pill. Some of the most essential healthcare that would have been just a dream in '39 is nearly free today.

Healthcare costs may be drastically increased in the US (although just $60/mo here in Canada) compared to what they used to be but the offering has changed completely as well.

<comment><USER33> >Good point. Interestingly education is one of the industries that seems to be least disrupted by technology.

Education is (see coursera), but the "educational reputation" industry isn't. Technology isn't killing off the rep of a harvard degree.

>The authors point somewhat still stands for healthcare, though. He uses 1939 as a benchmark. Penicillin was first manufactured in 1942. Today a generic antibiotic is just a few cents a pill. Some of the most essential healthcare that would have been just a dream in '39 is nearly free today.

Generic antibiotics may be a few cents a pill for a hospital but that's not what you end up paying for it as a patient in the US, and to get the prescription you have to see a doctor and the price of THAT has gone up, and the doctor will also do tons of useless tests (which increases the price still further).

<comment><USER20> > Education is (see coursera), but the "educational reputation" industry > isn't. Technology isn't killing off the rep of a harvard degree.

Coursera is not disrupting the reputation of a Harvard degree. Github is disrupting the reputation of a Harvard degree. There are plenty of businesses today that have absolutely no concern for your education of you have alternative proof that you can put out solid, high-quality results, and it's the internet's high information density that's making that possible.

<comment><USER33> Github has helped make programming a bit more meritocratic I guess, but it's not like it's destroyed the relative value of a degree from Stanford or Harvard.

And it's only made headway in computer science jobs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seeing gross misunderstandings of economics like this and the degree to which these ideas are popular (as witnessed in the very comments right here, including one implying that about 2/3 of the population of the world is "useless") disheartens me more than almost anything.

No, Keynesian economics is not how America recovered from the depression, nor was mobilization for wartime production (checkout the book "Keep From All Thoughtful Men" for a truly in depth analysis of the US economy during that period). No, abundance and worker productivity are not why unemployment is so high and the world economy is on shaky ground. None of these things are correct, and buying into these theories leads to erroneous decision making that will serve to exacerbate the problems rather than make them better.

Much of the problems describe are due to government action, not economic transformation. The labor laws that exist today are tightly coupled to a particular model of employment and work which is no longer dominant in the economy today, and the impedance mismatch causes a huge reduction in economic efficiency as well as misery and limitation of opportunity for many workers. Onerous regulation, as exists today in every aspect of economic activity, heavily favors the consolidation of economic activity into large corporations. And that disadvantages the individual worker in a variety of ways, as well as limiting the innovation and responsiveness of the market, down to the scale of the lone entrepreneur.

Add to that the deterioration of public education in America over the last quarter century (to such a degree where even basic literacy cannot be presumed of the holder of a high school diploma) forcing the escalation of credentialism for many entry level knowledge worker jobs toward college degrees. Meanwhile, the widespread availability of cheap, government backed student loans combined with the disruption of public funding for many public higher education institutions has led to a massive explosion in the cost of higher education. At the same time "trade school" education has become denigrated in society even though many of those jobs are high paying, well in demand, and the necessary education is often quite affordable.

Add to that the bursting of a real estate bubble of unprecedented size in the US and the follow-on worldwide financial crises. Much of it caused or exacerbated by the same reasons as above, regulation and government backing creating banking institutions that were "too big to fail", but not too big to gamble to the tune of trillions of dollars. The worldwide economy still has yet to fully recover from that disaster.

Add to that the profligate borrowing of the world's governments as if there was no tomorrow. Except tomorrow has come, and governments that have been collecting as much revenue as they possibly can and using it on social programs that everybody likes are finding that they've created a system with insufficient slack to deal with any disruption, even disruptions such as paying the debt they owe before it blows up in their faces.

It's facile to blame the economic problems of today on technology. It makes it seem as though these problems are some sort of inevitable consequence of advancement when in reality they are the product of specific choices that are now coming home to roost.

<comment><USER34> Thanks for your post. It's refreshing to hear more realistic opinions on this situation.

I opened up the Hacker News homepage to see if anyone was discussing the US debt crisis. (I'm not American, and I find HN a fairly good source of commentary on US events). There's a non-negligible possibility that the world is about to be plunged into another round of financial crises. I guess from one point of view the current state of the world economy is just a temporary downswing in our epic quest from the caves to the stars. But I'm becoming more inclined to believe that industrial civilisation has already passed its apex, and is now growing increasingly unstable as it attempts to continue infinite growth on a finite world.

What's the no #2 article on HN? How our biggest problems are dealing with too much abundance!

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I don't know why the author keep talking about world economy while the only examples he presents are U.S. only: mortgage crisis, debt fuelled spending, etc. In Europe there wasn't nothing like that and yet Europeans have been hit hardest by the recession.

<comment><USER36> We've got all that in the U.K.

<comment><USER35> Fine, U.S. and U.K., my point still sticks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This article basicly says that money printing is good and we should do more of it. If one increase the amount of money with 10% then your money and your wage has decreased by 10%. Those who get access to the new money first would be able to buy things for the old price before everyone is aware of the increase in money supply. In practice this is the big banks and their best customers (hedge funds). I would rather say there is no problem with demand, it is just the prices who are to high. Espesially with housing, gas and other fixed costs. Lower the prices and the demand will increase.

<comment><USER31> Not at all. While the author does end with a curve ball on the arts (which he then admits in the commments), the point is valid. Spending on infrastructure, education, reasearch, healthcare, exploration and the like contribute _much_ more than the sum total of their costs. NASA is a well known example of this. DARPA as well.

What you're describing contributes to a vicious cycle. Lowering prices means less revenue which translates to lay-offs, scaling back and cutting corners. That means worse quality and less demand, which means lower prices again - <USER2> on and so forth. Unfortunately, a simple supply and demand curve doesn't come close to describing a functioning modern economy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> This article, and some of the comments, seems to suggest that stimulating demand is the solution. It fails however to address if continuously increasing demand is realistic in a finite world.

Increasing demand and thus supply, requires increasing use of energy, land, raw material, etc. Which is at some point limited by the physical realities of our world.

There is a limit to growth. Have we reached it?

<comment><USER39> _There is a limit to growth. Have we reached it?_

Depends. Growth of what?

There are aspects of life I see as having unlimited growth. Evolution has a way of crashing through barriers and trampling anything that stands in its way. If humans somehow exhaust a resource, we'll evolve a new one, as we always have. Perhaps painfully, but it'll happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> "I said it before, and I'll say it again, Capitalism just doesn't work!"

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra Nitpick:

 _Send us back to ancient Greece... and startled peasants would worship at our feet._

Ancient Greece was not so much about peasants as about citizens. People with some capital and some position in their world. They aren't going to worship you, they would try to figure you out.

</comment><comment><USER41> The fundamental misunderstanding here is that a nearly steady-state economy is not a situation like the 1970's. It's a situation where 90% of the population is unemployed and unnecessary. Our expectations for a steady-state economy should be adjusted to mean the situation that existed from the fall of the Western Roman Empire to 1850 or so.

Vast majority of people on unemployment, barely subsisting. People who have viable businesses dig in and isolate themselves (if necessary declaring independence). Ever-growing consolidation of power and every institution falling to the influence of ever fewer power centers.

Fortunately, a mere 10 years of steady state economy won't get us to that point. Today we're already at the point that something like 60-70% of the world's population is useless (if you killed all of them tonight, tomorrow there would be no visible difference at all). That number is increasing fast.

The cure ? Remove the scarcity of electricity might do it. Find something to do (the way some medieval economies solved it was to employ 70% or so of the population for building cathedrals - manually. Every last thing manually cut from stone. That could work). War is another option, used in the middle east did (well, one particular group, really). As long as they keep winning, their borders expand, their economy grows, and it can last quite a while in that state.

<comment><USER17> Ultimately you have to choose between a scarcity economy and systematic birth control. No possible technological advance can keep up with an exponential growth curve. And the birth control system has to have active eugenic measures, otherwise a genetic collapse can sweep through the population. (The AI servants do not care whether they look after 10 billion genius athletes or 10 billion brainstems in automated nursing homes.)

<comment><USER42> The growth rate is declining:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth#Human_populat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth#Human_population_growth_rate)

<comment><USER43> Came to say this. There's every indication that as humans get healthier, more educated, wealthier and live longer (more post-scarcity, in other words) they switch from "breed more backups" to "nurture one or two offspring", and steady-state popultion comes out of that.

The sectors of wealthy economies which _are_ still breeding fast are generally the poor (scarcity again) or people from social groups that were used to breeding lots, who are slowly getting the memo.

<comment><USER17> Prosperity does cause humans to move towards relatively fewer offspring, but only relatively. If the birth rate exceeds the replacement rate by even a tiny fraction _in any demographic_ , the result is exponential growth. And there are prosperous, well-educated demographics with ultra-high birth rates, such as Mormons.

<comment><USER44> That assumes the birth rates of other demographics don't fall sufficiently behind the replacement rate to compensate in the short term, and that demographics' birth rates are immutable in the long term. Will the _offspring_ of Mormons maintain their parents' birth rates? Well they're already falling...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Some of this is questionable. For example, he claims that "by the 1980s... saving became passe" but that doesn't make sense. If anything, saving was useless in the 1970s and earlier, when inflation was out of control at more than 15%. It's kind of weird to be in favor of soft money and deficit spending, as he clearly is, and then get upset about mounting debt.

There are a lot of reasons why a London home that was 300,00k in the 1970s is now worth three times that. More people are living in London now than then, and due to London's "green belt" policies and height and zoning restrictions, there just hasn't been a great supply of new houses.

Tom doesn't even mention things like the oil shock, the impact of technology and automation, or demographics. It's kind of hard to get a reasonable picture of the economy without considering these things!

I agree with the basic point that we should have more Keynesian spending, but the history felt like a distraction. Calling the 70s a "golden age" is just... what is this, I don't even. Yeah, with the Vietnam war, OPEC, Silent Spring, and the threat of nuclear war, it was a real picnic...

<comment><USER22>
        Houses on my block in the United Kingdom that cost £3000
        in 1970 are now going for over £1.5 million.

was this a typo? Because that's a 500-fold increase, and I can't imagine inflation in the UK was _that_ bad since the 70s?</comment></comment>


HippyVM – an implementation of the PHP language in RPython - <AUTHOR> http://hippyvm.com/

<comment><USER2> 2x faster than Facebook's HHVM on a suite of php benchmarks</comment>


YouTube Future-proofing: 4K Support - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/09/youtube-moves-solidly-into-the-future-by-supporting-4k-content/

<comment><USER2> Sounds like a really good idea however who got the screens to support that much resolution?</comment>


Thanks Serbia - <AUTHOR> https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sr&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Ffacyber.github.io%2Fsr%2Fhvala-srbijo%2F&edit-text= <comment><AUTHOR> This is a story about a death of a young teen boy, because of corruption, incompetence and lack of morals of the doctors and nurses and people of Serbia in general. Auto-translated by Google, written about his brother by the Mozilla Serbia's designer and translations manager.</comment>


30.9% of Sleepers Report an Increase in Sleep Disturbance During Covid Pandemic - <AUTHOR> https://myslumberyard.com/blog/study-sleep-disturbance-covid/ <comment> globular-toast I actually had my first nightmare in a long time a few weeks ago. I woke my girlfriend up due to moving in my sleep. Trouble is it's not very scientific because although I don't think I've had a nightmare in a while, I'm not sure because I don't record them.

</comment><comment><USER2> Anecdotally I can say this has been the case for me. Particularly when the lockdown first started. I think it's because my daily routine changed dramatically all of a sudden. I had friends tell me they experienced the same thing.

<comment><USER3> Lockdowns can be terrible for our health.

If you ever have to stay at home for a long period of time again, make sure you work out. It doesn't have to be a heavy or intensive workout. Anything with a medium intensity during 30-45 min is a game changer.

Yoga helps a lot as well.</comment></comment>


The iPhone is Not the Internet: A Product Management Essay from a Developer - <AUTHOR> http://www.gaiagps.com/news/article/The%20iPhone%20is%20Not%20the%20Internet

<comment><USER2> I've been writing mobile software for a few years and I'd wholeheartedly agree with the first two. The third I would be less religious about... you should always listen to your customers, but you should be driving the buss, not them. Good article, mobile in general is very much not the web, or anything else really. Further, writing software for the iPhone and Android is several orders of magnitude easier than writing Brew or Java ME software for the ability to easily publish updates alone.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good article, but the well-worded headline and the article point out that release early, release often won't work here.</comment>


Support US Privacy Bill - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2016/02/encrypt-act-2016/ <comment><AUTHOR> This bill is a first step toward protecting privacy rights in the US. Please take the time to understand the bill and express your opinion on the topic to the community.</comment>


Why Developers Hate PHP - <AUTHOR> https://www.jesuisundev.com/en/why-developers-hate-php/ <comment><USER3> > Most developers who hate PHP hate it out of elitism or ignorance. Either way > it's dumb. You have to choose a technology based on what you need. PHP is > highly useful and powerful in many scenarios. And taking it out of the > equation just because of its reputation is not a good idea.

When I conduct hiring interviews, one of the questions I like to ask regardless of the language for the position, is the developer opinion on PHP.

It's not uncommon for some to start massive rant based on outdated or outright wrong statements about PHP. Most of them never even used PHP.

It's a nice question to filter out elitists. The best candidates usually answer either "can't say because I have never used PHP" or state pros and cons of PHP based on their experience.

edit: quick -3 downvotes. I suspect I hit a nerve in some elitists who would not get that Rust or Haskell position because they would have baselessly trashtalked PHP in my interviews.

<comment><USER4> its fun to trash talk PHP who cares if statements are accurate. PHP sucks because of the dollar signs everywhere. From a distance Wordpress code looks like Nigerian Prince emails.

And crazy coding conventions like mysql_real_escape_string. Really PHP?

<comment><USER5> mysql_real_escape_string() comes from the MySQL C library binding: [https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/mysql-real-escape- st...](https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/mysql-real-escape-string.html)

<comment><USER4> this actually makes sense. Maybe I was wrong about PHP. But maybe not :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think there's something people miss when looking at PHP as a system - <USER2> fact that it's a collection of hot swappable logic modules (pages)

PHP pages themselves can download packages of additional PHP pages and extend functionality as the website runs. For example the user can install a message board from the UI in WordPress, and PHP files themselves will download additional PHP files needed for a message board, and boom your site now has a message board - no recompile, install, or deploy. Your running system has extended itself in real-time with additional functionality.

Maybe I'm crazy, but I think there is something special about this that our typical compile/deployed applications aren't designed for.

Before the web, applications tended to carry their state in memory, but with the web we stored state in the database. Our logic really only needs to take the request from the user and either pull or modify data from the database and return. A lot of web apps today feel hollow as we rarely store state in them, we just pull, manipulate, and render database data. What if each major code path was its own binary? That's kind of like what PHP is.

With PHP the application is almost living as it is never really turned off/on, just modified over time. If there's a bug in one page, I just need to fix that one page. And a single page is lightning fast to deploy to my servers. The rest of the system keeps humming.

Now the language itself might not be the best, but do you see how this system is fundamentally different from single binary web applications?

</comment><comment><USER7> There was a tech talk I saw on Youtube a few years ago that I really liked that argued that Facebook succeeded _because_ of PHP, not despite it.

IIRC, the main argument was that despite its flaws, PHP has one killer feature, which is that it lets you have really tight iteration loops for web development. This made developing in PHP extremely productive.

I searched around for the video, but couldn't find it.

<comment><USER8> The type of developers FB wanted were already using PHP and that made it good fit

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I know it's cool to hate PHP but I can think of other languages (Perl, VB6, Groovy) I dislike more. For a language to be so hated it has to be used a lot, and that's the primary virtue of PHP: it runs damn-near everywhere. Not only web scripting/apps but you can use it for shell scripting, Lambda/Azure Functions... there are even frameworks for creating native mobile applications with PHP. And I wouldn't be surprised if it compiles to JavaScript as well.

<comment><USER10> > For a language to be so hated it has to be used a lot, and that's the > primary virtue of PHP: it runs damn-near everywhere.

"Runs damn-near everywhere" is true of nearly all contemporary scripting languages, though, no? It's definitely used a lot, though I don't know how that compares to Perl, Ruby, Python... Without digging in harder, I still think it came at about the right time and had a killer feature: a dynamic nascent web with an incredibly low barrier to entry. You could create a form and ask for a persons name and have it respond "Hello, $name!". I feel like it got entrenched and never gave that up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> That "article" spent half its time leading up to explaining why PHP is bad and half its height on GIANT MEMES. The actual content was half a paragraph about how PHP lacks strong conformity... needless waste of bits

<comment><USER12> I thought it was entertaining had a good bit of history. It does a good job of empathizing with the reader and then shedding light on why they might want to change their opinions on PHP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here to see how many comments don't bother reading the piece and just react to the title.

<comment><USER14> I didn't, skimmed.

> PHP is the most widely used language in the world for websites.

Being served does not equate to being used to develop new things.

Is there really that many new websites, website features being authored in PHP? Sure there is maintenance work and some popular platforms are written in it. But beyond that? I haven't seen a job posting in long time.

<comment><USER15> I'm using it at a fresh start up. Having used node, internal Google frameworks, python, and dart previously, I would highly recommend PHP for new projects. Laravel is what makes it worth it imo.

<comment><USER16> Laravel is pretty sweet, I recently scoped it out (been in Flask land and itching to try some Elixir/Phoenix) and it's got everything, exploring the queues now. I really like the helpers for accessing array elements through dot notation. Example:

      $data = [
      'more' => [
          'complex' => ['my value']
       ]
      ];

      if (array_key_exists('more', $data) && array_key_exists('complex', $data['more']) && array_key_exists(0, $data['more']['complex'])) {
      echo $data['more']['complex'][0];
      }

You can do this:

      echo Arr::get($data, 'more.complex.0');

Plus the bog standard php null coalescing operator "??" is pretty sweet.

      // fetch the value of $_GET['user'] and returns 'not passed'
      // if username is not passed
      $username = $_GET['username'] ?? 'not passed';

Just some little things off the top of my head. *Formatting.

<comment><USER17> Arr::get($data, 'more.complex.0'); is much nicer, I agree.

I do think better languages do it better, for example in Elixir I can extract multiple elements out of an object at the same time.

      object = %{nested: ["my value"], other: "some element"}

      %{nested: [first | _], other: other} = object

first now equals "my value" and other now equals "some element".

PHP sucks because of the legacy it pulls with it that keeps it from being simple and elegant. It also fails pretty hard when you use it outside of it's niche, and a multi-purpose language > single purpose language.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, still just checking it out, getting an auth system working with oAuth in about 15 mins via Socialite was fun. I want to test out the Lambda deployment which seems sweet. I use Serverless for that ATM with JS and Python. Elixir pattern matching is fantastic and I miss being able to call functions by arity. I don't know which deployment process I prefer, yet. They all suck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I write very little PHP but I work on a PHP extension written in C for a security product that integrates tightly with the language and some of the reasons I hate it are:

The Zend APIs suck, and they have non-existent or severely outdated docs. For example, one of PHP's main internal data structure, zend_hash, is a weird hash table with a string / int union key type and is awkward to access or iterate over.

Memory issues. I've had to debug segfaults caused by memory bugs in the language and core libs more than once. For example I hit an uninitialized read error in mbstring, it's been in their bug tracker since 5.x and never fixed. I understand the normal way to deal with memory errors in PHP is to shrug it off because processes are short-lived but if you are security-conscious it is concerning.

Compared to that, working on similar integrations for Python, Java, Node.js, the number of times I've hit such bugs is exactly zero. PHP just seems to have lower quality and worse design overall.

EDIT:

CVE database agrees with my assessment, so many more memory issues in PHP:

PHP: [https://www.cvedetails.com/product/128/PHP- PHP.html?vendor_i...](https://www.cvedetails.com/product/128/PHP- PHP.html?vendor_id=74)

Python: [https://www.cvedetails.com/product/18230/Python- Python.html?...](https://www.cvedetails.com/product/18230/Python- Python.html?vendor_id=10210)

Java: [https://www.cvedetails.com/product/19117/Oracle- JRE.html?ven...](https://www.cvedetails.com/product/19117/Oracle- JRE.html?vendor_id=93)

<comment><USER19> Huh, this is one of the first times I've heard critisism about the implementation of PHP, rather than the language itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I couldn't find a date on this article, but I don't think this line is accurate anymore:

"Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Flickr, Tumblr all these sites run in PHP and welcome millions of users every month without flinching."

Facebook dropped PHP for their own language called Hack, which I think is based on PHP but with a lot of the things people complain about changed.

<comment><USER21> > but with a lot of the things people complain about changed.

and some of those things have changed in base PHP as well too.

<comment><USER12> I think it might even cross compile in some fashion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I "hate" my experiences in the aughts debugging other peoples PHP code, which put me off. But I primarily use JS now, and I feel like it's just as hated (but maybe more loved?). But I can't imagine how much people would hate JS if node came out in 2001, could you even?

<comment><USER23> I wonder what people would think of Node if it came out right before the tech bubble burst and the company hosting all the package repositories sank without a trace, taking the packages with it. _That_ would have done some lasting damage to the web development world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> [https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad- design/](https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/) is a classic of this genre.

<comment><USER25> pick a random language, ruby, python, javascript etc etc and you'll find similar rants/complaints. Yet I think right now it's cool to shoot on PHP therefore everyone is more vocal

<comment><USER26> _Yet I think right now it 's cool to shoot on PHP_

This is not a recent thing, it has always been cool to mock PHP. It's not _entirely_ unwarranted, but most programming languages have their own warts.

For example, for some reason, creators of dynamic languages think they need to mess with variable declaration, to make it more accessible, or whatever, instead of staying with tried and true lexcially-scoped block-level variables with explicit declaration. As far as I can tell, the result _always_ ends up worse.

<comment><USER27> I don't know if that has to do with dynamic languages. Elixir _reduced_ the scope of variables so that, for example, you must export it out of if statements, which irritates devs coming from most languages but which I think is a fantastic feature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> For a few years now I have been using PHP as a thin-client UI layer on top of C# Web API (dotnet core) projects running on Ubuntu/Docker. In my experience this has worked out very well, and has been easy to separate the areas of responsibility between Software Engineers and Designers.

All of our sophistication and unit tests live inside the C# back-end projects. While the PHP in the UI layer is limited to very simple code like for loops and templating; otherwise they're mostly design projects centered around HTML/CSS/UI/UX. Keeping it so simple makes it rather easy for designers to pick up on and work with.

I started a small website to document this pattern:

[http://rapstack.io](http://rapstack.io)

I have advocated for its use on most of my projects, but obviously the mere mention of PHP stirs up a lot of knee-jerk reactions.

</comment><comment><USER29> The article is correct in stating that PHP has moved quite a bit in the last ~10 years; even back when I was using PHP in the 5.1/5.2/5.3 days things were already steadily improving.

But ... that doesn't mean that PHP is a good language, or that people hate in PHP "just because it's cool". There are still many issues that remain. For example the very loose typing checking remains an issue and source of real bugs; e.g. a while ago a SAML library could be bypassed because it forgot to add the flag to in_array() to enable strict comparisons.

Much of the problems in PHP are with the standard library, and this is not easy to fix. Even the mysql deprecation (in favour of mysqli/PDO) took ages. I wrote a thing looking at fopen() in PHP a while ago, and I think it's a good example of the problems that remain in PHP: [https://www.arp242.net/php-fopen- is-broken.html](https://www.arp242.net/php-fopen-is-broken.html)

There are still many issues with the standard library like this which are clumsy and just plain design errors, and many of them are too fundamental to work around or fix. Has PHP evolved? Sure, and that's great! But that doesn't mean it's now an especially good language. In general, I'd rather have a poor language with a good standard library than a good language with a poor standard library.

Aside: one weird thing about PHP's stdlib is that it's _all_ written in C; I don't know any other comparable language where all of the standard library is written in C. I think this seriously hamper's the evolution of PHP's stdlib to a more modern experience.

There is no easy fix for any of this btw, because a revamping of the stdlib would likely lead to a "Python 3 scenario", so I don't blame the PHP devs for not fixing it (although I do blame them for introducing new flawed parts to the stdlib, like the whole DateTime fiasco), but that doesn't mean it's not a problem.

</comment><comment><USER30> I don't like having to hold 'shift' while pressing '4' all the time. Other then that I don't think the language is bad and where you cannot do what you're needing to do. If only I could get rid of the need for $ signs everywhere.

<comment><USER12> at least you don't have $ # and @ to determine object vs list vs. hash map like perl5. :P

<comment><USER26> Found the non-Perl programmer (the sigils for scalars, arrays and hashes are $, @ and %).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> PHP is my favorite language to write SQL injection vulnerabilities, just like C is my favorite language to write pointer bugs.

(Disclaimer - The last time I used PHP was over a decade ago, and the last time I used C was in college)

<comment><USER18> You don't have to write pointer bugs in PHP, they are already included for free in the language implementation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I will say this for PHP: Its interaction with my brain had such a nearly- disastrous impact on my life, that it finally allowed me to finally get the mental health treatment I'd been seeking for a decade, and to realize the fundamental and unfixable weakness of my marriage.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

If you enjoy eating pad Thai, that is great for you. I do too. But different people are different and the effect of peanuts on some people are quite dramatic yet real.

Choosing not to work with PHP is no more elitist than choosing not to eat gluten or peanuts.

<comment><USER12> There's an obvious difference between choosing not to use PHP and shitting on an entire language based on a decade's old idea of the language is.

<comment><USER32> The PHP project experience which cost me a job that I loved, nearly got me kicked out of my home, and prompted multiple evenings of suicidal ideation, and led my wife to be filled with anger at me even 7 months later is from the end of 2018.

I am responsible for how I manage my mental health. Part of exercising that responsibility is my firm choice I will never again work with PHP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm a PHP developer and I really don't like this language. Right now it's paying my bills but I hope my next job won't be related to it. People are saying that PHP has become better and that's very true. But still far behind modern languages like Go, Python, Rust, Elixir. PHP is full of inconsistency, legacy code, and missing features. Core developers are doing great by adding a lot of new stuff and optimizations, but caring too much about backward combability disturbs the language from becoming better IMO.

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm still not entirely sure why, in plain 2020, PHP seems to be the only language missing a debugger able to run in a shell.

Python, Ruby, Javascript and others have a "debugger;" statement of some sort that, when hit by the execution flow, will pause the code and let you type stuff in your shell, letting you inspect the code, step forward, etc...

Why does PHP need me to configure an entire IDE or my browser? (I'm looking at you, xdebug). Why can't it have a cli-debugger?

</comment><comment><USER35> > Most developers who hate PHP hate it out of elitism or ignorance.

I don't think I'm an elitist. I inherited a system that was written by a pretty bright guy without a lot of programming experience: thousand-line files mixing logic and presentation, that sort of thing. It was a bear to maintain, it was a bear and a half to secure. It gave me a distaste for PHP, yes.

I don't hate PHP, I'd just rather use something else.

</comment><comment><USER8> > PHP is an old man who doesn't want to sell his land. An old man who > continues to dance insolently.

But in this case he is terribly ill and not actually dancing but having a condition called Chorea that is often mistaken for dance like movements

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

</comment><comment><USER36> > Developers hate PHP because you are more likely to get errors with a > language that allows so much freedom.

Ruby gives you much more freedom than PHP. You can reopen classes, you can use _any_ kind of object as a key in an associative array, you can write code that will execute when the class (not the instance) is being created. And yet I find it much easier to write stable code in Ruby.

> Developers hate PHP because it is the opposite of hype driven development

Does C# gets so much hate? Or Python? I don't think either of them is an example of hype driven development, and yet they are rather respected languages that don't get so much hate.

> Developers hate PHP because they believe the language has been stagnating > for 20 years.

Again, I don't think that's it. I've been using PHP7 for the last few months and yes, it is different from PHP4. You have optional static typing, you have better tools, a lot has changed. Yet deep in its core the language is still badly designed. I constantly find some weird behaviours that just don't exist in other languages.

Example:

      $array = [1,2,3,4]
      array_filter($array, function($x) { return $x %2 === 0; });

In every other language I've used, such function would return [2,4], but not in PHP.

      array_merge(
        [ "a" => "w", "1" => "x" ],
        [ "a" => "y", "1" => "z" ]
      )

In every other language I know, it would return [ "a" => "y", "1" => "z" ], but PHP returns [ "a" => "y", 0 => "x", 1 => "z" ]

I know, these are just random examples and every language has its quirks. The problem is that in PHP there are so many quirks I keep checking how each function works, because after half a year I still can't remember them (and I don't remember whether array is a first or a second argument, because it depends on a function).

I wouldn't say that I hate PHP. It's another tool that I know and am able to use. I just think in 2020 in most cases when you start writing a new web application, there are plenty of better options. So maybe that's where the hate comes from? That there are simply many more consistent languages that just remain less popular than PHP?

<comment><USER25> php > $array = [1,2,3,4]; php > var_dump(array_filter($array, function($x) { return $x %2 === 0; })); php shell code:1: array(2) { [1] => int(2) [3] => int(4) }

what's the problem with array_filter then? That keys are not reindexed?

<comment><USER36> Yeah, an array essentially becomes an associative array. For example in another language I could do something like:

      if (!empty($filteredArray)) { print($filteredArray[0] }

But in PHP I need to remember that after every array_filter, after every unset etc. I need to reindex the array, because [0] element might not be there

<comment><USER18> It was an associative array all along, PHP just hides that from you. The Array is such a quirky data structure, it takes int or string keys, but numeric string keys ("1", etc.) are silently converted to int. It's never a real array, the implementation under the hood is a hash table.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Did anyone here start learning PHP in 2020? How were you introduced to PHP? Are there any good resources to start with?

When I was introduced to PHP everything was still in a single file, PHP, HTML, JS, CSS.

</comment><comment><USER38> PHP being awful annoys me so much more than javascript being awful.

At least for the latter the use became mostly unintentional. For PHP, the problem is that it came about at just the right time to be picked up by WordPress and Facebook, hence encrusting itself in most of the web we see.

I dislike WordPress the same way I came to dislike Visual Studio or any other monstrosity. It's a slow, massive, lumbering mess but it's also by the most mature tool for the job it does.

There's no reason to pick up PHP for a new project. Except, I guess if you're just doing simple CRUD and PHP is what you know.

Languages don't matter that much for simple CRUD apps and PHP is a sub par, annoying, inconsistent language that will get the job done.

<comment><USER39> > For PHP, the problem is that it came about at just the right time to be > picked up by WordPress and Facebook, hence encrusting itself in most of the > web we see.

That's backwards in my opinion. PHP was successful among non-CS-people, and those people started building things they were interested in. That gave PHP the initial success (especially on the web, were plenty of people didn't have a CS background unlike in enterprise software), which lead to people like Larry Sanger and Jimbo Wales using PHP to build their first version of Wikipedia. And it also lead to PHP being the go to thing for websites, pushing aside Perl, which meant that when Zuckerberg wanted to build a site for fun to rate coeds, PHP was a natural choice. Quick to build, easy to deploy, not a lot to worry about.

I'd be surprised if somebody back then planned to invest a huge sum of money and create some giant system _and_ chose PHP. But PHP just being there, highly available, and people using it for all kinds of random stuff and then some of those things taking off and PHP just remaining at their core because of inertia, that's not surprising imho.

<comment><USER40> The first version of Wikipedia used usemod, which is Perl.

The "phase II" version in PHP was written by Magnus Manske (who is indeed a non-CS-person).

<comment><USER39> Oh, I was not aware of that, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> ugh. You lost me when I saw the first of several huge gifs and memes inserted throughout the article.

</comment><comment><USER42> I haven't used PHP since 2012 so I don't know if any of the stuff that made me hate it still applies. A lot has probably changed since, but I don't know to what extent.

Surprisingly, the technical inconsistencies isn't what I hated most about it. It's rather the fact that questionable practice was rampant and largely left unchecked in its many communities. The only way to realize this is to join another community where peer review is severe enough and bullshit detection high enough that mediocrity is rarely given the opportunity to infect your practice for long and fester. A proper community is supposed to nurture you into becoming a better programmer, so that you can take those lessons and carry them with you wherever you decide to go next. By contrast, my experience with PHP over the 6 years or so that I used it was that you learn 3 things today and you'll have to unlearn 2 tomorrow. Eventually I got fed up of the cyclical learning pattern and I moved on.

Some years after my move away from it, I decided to take a look back at some of the code that I had written with PHP. I was freshly appraising the sum of my past experience. I remember thinking that the language seemed to have a crisis of identity. It was dynamically and weakly typed, but with serious Java envy and so some of the less desirable aspects of Java were basically just cargoculted in, but in a shitty incomplete way. Private, protected, public class members, what a joke. If you're a PHP programmer, did you ever ask yourself why would Python or Ruby programmers somehow be able to get by without this shit and not you? Do you know that because of the way its interpreter works there are some technical benefits for Java to have these besides the fallacious architectural "advantages" of hiding access from the programmer? Does the same thing apply to PHP? Interfaces and inheritance, without the possibility to overload methods, which can cause a lot of grief when a zealous and inexperienced library designer hasn't properly thought things through (which happened more than I'd like to remember in PHP projects). That was just at the language level, but many of the big frameworks followed suit with the Java obsession, by implementing a slew of circuitous patterns aimed at convincing programmers that they were now coding "Enterprise Style". Front Controller, Action Controller, Dispatcher, and a whole other lot straight out of pattern catalogs. When you think about it, most of those efforts were fallacious in PHP. If the problems that you were trying to solve were beyond the constraints of what PHP is typically good for, namely cms-type admin web apps, then you were probably better off with another language. On the other hand, if they applied, why bother with all the enterprisey bullcrap? _But, but, but Facebook..._ Ah, shut up! Even Facebook had to _invent_ a whole other language to fix that mistake. The other projects that didn't buy into this sort of architectural zeal went the other extreme, with their own experimentations and idiosyncrasies. Bastardizations of concepts that someone had seen somewhere else, but only half-understood, was common. Lots of Rails envy and no shortage of fame-driven wannabes that had failed to make a name for themselves in other communities, but somehow always found a way to shine in PHP. Ensued just more bullshit.

Anyways, that was a long time ago. I hope things have changed. I'm not sure I'd be back if they did, in hindsight what PHP has for it is one of the easiest "hello world" tutorials, but you end up paying for years the half-hour you saved to see these two words on a web page. And for what it's worth there are worse languages, but there are better ones too.

</comment><comment><USER43> There is no web framework out there which comes with such elegant concepts, syntax and feature-richness like Laravel. I have seen them all - Laravel is incredibly good, especially for small - mid sized projects! And this statement comes from a python guy.

<comment><USER44> Why do you prefer it over say, Flask or Django?

<comment><USER45> Laravel performs way better than Django, I also prefer the migrations/model styles that resemble Rails a bit more.

Django might be better w/ 3.3 or whenever they fully integrate async into the view/db layer, but w/ laravel I can plug in swoole and go from 110 reqs/sec to 4600+ on my dev pc - w/ 12 threads and 200 connections hitting a post api logged in, updating the database and the caching layer, and queuing notifications.

Just ran some big benchmarks on laravel w/ php-fpm vs swoole last night...as an aside. I also don't like some of the ways django handles auth. If I were to use python, I'd definitely go w/ FastAPI, it seems much more joyful a framework.

I'd also love to do something like go for sessions/auth/jwt and hasura, postgraphile, or postgrest or some sort of api from postgres, and then most of the logic would simply be postgres functions/triggers/etc...there's also some nice 'built-ins/ecosystems stuff that even rails lacks'.

Auth is built in, vs devise (being almost a requirement). Message queues, notifications, .env, events/listeners, are also all built-ins. Eloquent is nice, though repositories using straight sql or the DB class are probably more performant, but you lose a lot of the magic that makes laravel nice, so there's trade offs. Also all the many drivers for caching/queues/etc and telescope is a very beautiful way to debug and so is ignite for error pages.

Horizon is nice to manage queues/etc. I keep trying to move to another framework just for the sake of 'something new' and boredom but after 8 years on laravel, I still keep coming back. Wordpress is a totally different story, I charge 35% markup on my normal rates just to touch wordpress because it sucks so bad and hurts my brain to work w/ it. Also, I don't really need to worry about how to setup vue or react, laravel-mix pretty much handles all the webpack stuff w/ a few exceptions if I'm using Tailwinds or creating aliases for paths, etc...</comment></comment></comment>


Robustness Principle - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle

<comment><USER2> Postel's law is a good principle when your threat model is nature; it leads to robustness in the presence of random failures. But it is _not_ a good design principle in an environment of intelligently malicious failures, i.e., the internet. In other words, for reliability in uncertain but benign conditions, yes---for security, no!</comment>


Easy screenshot sharing with Dropbox and Hazel - <AUTHOR> http://zacharypinter.com/2009/05/01/easy-screenshot-sharing-with-dropbox-and-hazel.html

<comment><USER2> Sounds like you need Skitch, which does this and a lot more. It's one of my five must-have apps.

<http://www.skitch.com/>

<comment><USER3> What are the other four?

For screenshot sharing there's also GrabUp, which is simpler and quicker than Skitch but doesn't have any editing features.

<comment><USER2> I should have been clearer: it's one of my top five productivity apps. The other four would be:

Textmate, Omnifocus, Balsamiq Mockups, Yojimbo

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seems like you could do this just with some AppleScript. Doesn't OS X support running a script when a file is added to a folder. There's a name for it too...

</comment><comment><USER5> Very clever combination of two of my favorite utilities.</comment>


Java swapping large objects to disk automatically - code-dog http://nerds-central.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/fully-automated-large-object-disk-swap.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This title is misleading. I the article title is "fully automated large object disk swap manager in java". I thought this would be about something which java did automatically.

Ignoring that, the article is quite interesting. The author is, slowly rediscovering techniques which have been used in maps for years, and if he wants to create lots of smallish objects on a file system, I am not entirely clear why he did not just make them separate files, rather than faking his own file system!</comment>


This Physicist Says Consciousness Could Be a New State of Matter - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencealert.com/this-physicist-is-arguing-that-consciousness-is-a-new-state-of-matter <comment><USER2> I think the cause for this belief is the particle nonsensium</comment>


"Tunneling Under" the New York Times' Paywall - <AUTHOR> http://www.zaccohn.com/2011/03/tunnel-under-the-nytimes-wall/

<comment><USER2> I don't understand this at all. What is it you want from the New York Times, exactly? A more restrictive paywall so that you _can't_ view things you find on twitter? Or just no paywall at all, and a pony?

<comment><USER3> The way I see it, the point is that the NYT convoluted and overpriced paywall is no better than any other "DRM" on copy-protection: crackers will always find a way through.

If you look at the movie and music industries, antipiracy measures have constantly failed to stop people from "stealing" their products. They want the people to go back to "the way it was before" when you bought your newspaper every morning and rented videotapes. All it did is give more troubles to legitimate buyers and give more incentive to go bittorent.

Netflix, Spotify and others try to move forward and find new ways to monetize the media, by actually adding value over the "old way" and by making illegal download actually _less_ convenient than their legit services. I believe the NYT and all the other news conglomerates need to find their Netflix, not try to make things more difficult for users and give us the feeling we're losing something.

<comment><USER4> _"Netflix, Spotify and others try to move forward and find new ways to monetize the media, by actually adding value over the "old way" and by making illegal download actually _less_ convenient than their legit services. I believe the NYT and all the other news conglomerates need to find their Netflix, not try to make things more difficult for users"_

Riiiight. Because Netflix, Spotify and others will be doing just _dandy_ with their paywalls when it's as trivially easy to download a pirated, DVD-quality movie as it is to download some text and images today.

I love the logic, though: it's not that you're annoyed that you have to pay for something that you think should be free; it's that the DRM isn't _onerous enough_ that it makes it more convenient for you to pay.

<comment><USER5> It doesn't seem to me that people enjoy pirating or not paying for goods. The ITMS volume or seeing how piracy in US has been declining steadily are good indicators.

People go towards piracy when the system doesn't satisfy their requirements. Downloading a pirated movie is not as easy as it is to pay Netflix $10/month to have a vast catalog of instant streaming options. There is no comparative service that is free (legally or illegally). It's also argubly easier since you don't have to choose the format of the movie you are downloading or the encoder or several other options while being unsure wether it will play on your PS3 or XBox.

If you create an intuitive and reasonable system for consumers to operate it's very likely that they'll stop looking towards a sub-par alternative like pirating things.

A couple of examples:

Why should I care, as a consumer, that Hulu hasn't reached a deal to stream some TvShows to my PS3 but did reach it for the Web site? It doesn't make any sense to anybody but those who profit from this. How can this be helpful? People got Hulu Plus with the idea that everything would have been available on the PS3 and then some more, but this wasn't the case. This is a frustrated consumer whose demand couldn't be met not because of lack of technical capability or just impossibility. It's really just because of obscure business deals that have nothing reasonable attached to them from a consumer point of view.

The same could be said about music releases that are not international. What is the point of this? How is it that a UK consumer can listen to a given album while a US consumer can't (and vice-versa)? Provided both want to pay its full price.

People go towards piracy as a last resort, not as a first step, it's almost a precious feedback mechanism that tells the market what people really want.

You can of course dismiss all of this by simply saying that the consumer has no right to decide whether he agrees or not with the business decision. It's true, but that's not moving forward the discussion in any useful way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't think anyone posting about how easy it is to circumvent the paywall understands the point: it's not targeted at you. The NYT knows that if they create a completely restrictive paywall they will die, so they're trying to let just enough people in and annoy them just enough to get people to pay for their service. Whether or not somebody with basic technical knowledge can bypass it is not the point. After all, they don't even ask you to register an account and yet they expect to stop you from reading x numbers of articles per month -- why would anyone expect this to be secure?

</comment><comment><USER7> just fake the "Referer" HTTP header to <http://www.twitter.com/something> using one of many extensions available for Firefox... Much more easy than messing up with yahoo and rss..

<comment><USER8> Yup. Doubtful anybody could simply make use of this: <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/refcontrol/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Boy, there are certainly much easier ways around it than this. The thing is, I'd really like to not have to use them. I'd love to give the Times $5 a month for access to something more than 20 articles but less than infinity. Sadly that's not an option.

</comment><comment><USER10> It is indeed unusual that this paywall has quarks.

</comment><comment><USER11> if the nyt is selling ads based on number of twitter click-throughs then this article won't displease them very much.</comment>


3 Ways to Improve Employee Engagement in 2014 - <AUTHOR> http://www.thecrmprocess.com/2013/12/10/3-ways-to-improve-employee-engagement-in-2014/#.Uuvrgbpjz0g.hackernews <comment><USER2> "Employee engagement can't be mass produced." that was my favourite quote of the piece. In a previous place where I worked they would make little individual gifts for everyone for new year. It was usually a small thing like a cardboard statue of you, or a plush doll based on something you liked. It was really such as lovely touch, that imo it moved people on an emotional level and help retain folks much more than a lot of other things. I think it's super important, especially in a super competitive environment for talent to pay attention and invest in those little things.</comment>


Show HN: Combine volatile incomes into a steady paycheck - <AUTHOR> https://trycushion.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN, My name is Will and I am a co-founder of Cushion ([https://trycushion.com](https://trycushion.com)). Cushion helps you ensure you can always make ends meet by combining various incomes into one steady paycheck. This allows smooth transitions in times of plenty/scarcity and guiding you on how to strengthen your financial foundation.

We think the way people talk about saving for emergencies needs a refresh, the "rule of thumb" mentality is clearly suboptimal as many of us have different risk levels dictated by our lifestyles. By automatically adjusting to global & individual risk levels, your "cushion" will adapt, increasing and decreasing in its target size.

For us, COVID-19 was just another wake-up call that we need to prioritize protecting our finances, and with the pace that the world currently moves at, uncertainty may just be the new normal.

We strive to build the tools to help people optimize their emergency funds, to help freelancers, moonlighters or any individuals with volatile incomes manage their cash flows, and to help us all sleep a little easier.

A little about us, I have the pleasure of working with a passionate team bolstered by years of experience in both finance and technology and an overarching vision of simplifying some of the complexity that litters the world of personal finance - and hopefully, make a difference in some people's lives.

Any/all feedback is welcome and appreciated!

Will</comment>