Google will lose $50M or more in 2018 from Fortnite bypassing the Play Store - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/10/google-will-lose-50-million-or-more-from-fortnite-bypassing-the-play-store/ <comment><USER2> The framing of this article feels weird to me. Google offers a service (distribution), and it just so happens Fortnite doesn't need it. It also completely ignores how much Fortnite will lose from people who don't install it because they can't figure out how.

A better way would be "Fortnite is big enough to bypass Google and still make $180MM", rather than acting like this is Google's fault. I mean, the fact that phone OSes get a cut of everything on their platform is already an insane racket.

<comment><USER3> In a few years the media (which has always been very pro-Apple) has internalized the idea, that all your software MUST come from a single corporation controlled walled garden and pay tax to them. The whole concept of being able to install software from a source you choose is now so foreign that they'll speak against it when possible.

And unfortunately, this seems to be the case with a lot of HN commenters as well.

<comment><USER4> I've been running open source, free, libre, etc software since the mid-90s. My firewall is openbsd. my laptop runs linux. I use emacs for most of my software editing. I want you to understand that I am a big open source weenie, and have been for decades.

I think asking consumers to evaluate risk of installing third party apps and manage permissions is insane. My phone runs iOS. My family the same. The volume of malware in the Play Store alone, much less in the sideloading community is mind boggling. If I ran Android I would only install software that I had written myself or come from a trusted vendor, and only use a browser (probably not Chrome even, but Firefox) for any third party content.

Any anti-walled-garden screed has to grapple with the fact that in the real world, the walled garden protects people from mass data theft and infiltration. Windows used to be like this, before many more users switched to Mac (which is harder, but not impossible) to backdoor. Replicating the internet security environment of the late 90s but on our phones would be a disaster for the technology-using world.

<comment><USER5> There's something to be said for having a known good source of software that you can trust. GNU/Linux of course follows the same model, where you're expected to get the majority of your software from the distro repository. So, I don't think this model is inherently antithetical to free software.

I'm a free software nerd and I run LineageOS-sans-Google on my mobile device. I get the vast majority of my software through F-Droid, which works like a GNU/Linux distribution - they build all packages from source and sign with their own key. Only time I would sideload a package is if it's not available in F-Droid (because it's proprietary - although I've since found out about Yalp and use that instead) or if I'm building it myself. It works well enough for me.

I think the objectionable part of a walled garden, at least to a free software nerd, is the walled part. I appreciate the option of being able to step outside if I feel I need to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I am still a big fan of Android´s openess (at least compared to the walled garden that is iOS) and I think it should the right of every company or developer to NOT use a closed platform to distribute its app.

However on the other hand, this move by Epic sets a dangerous precedent: Factually, Google get´s economically punished for being more open than Apple. This does not feel right for me.

From a business point-of-view (when sideloading becomes more common) the "right" move for Google would be to fork AOSP, make new Android versions as closed as iOS (while still distributed for free) and prevent any sideloading. No sane CEO who is measured by increasing shareholder value could justify stayig open if this jeopardizes the revenues without providing major benefits.

I, as a user, think this is a sad and alarming development. However, apparently most comments and media do not share this opinion? Are there any reasons why Google _deserves_ no revenues while Apple get´s 30%? When there are none, this situation can't be sustainable from an economic point of view.

<comment><USER7> > From a business point-of-view (when sideloading becomes more common) the > "right" move for Google would be to fork AOSP, make new Android versions as > closed as iOS (while still distributed for free) and prevent any > sideloading. No sane CEO who is measured by increasing shareholder value > could justify stayig open if this jeopardizes the revenues without providing > major benefits.

The problem here is that while Google controls the software, it doesn't control the hardware. All the real power is in the hands of the OEMs.

If Google wanted to close Android, they'd need to either:

\- Leverage/convince all the OEMs into adopting the closed fork

\- Watch as they lose control completely when someone else makes a dominant fork

\- Watch the Android ecosystem crumble as everyone throws out their own fork

I don't think this would work because the OEMs have no incentive to do it. They don't get any cut of the Play Store profits so they have no interest in its success. To the contrary, Samsung at least has its own store. Plus, Android's openness is one of the things differentiating it from Apple. If they closed it down, they have the compromised privacy of a Google device with the closed platform of an Apple device. Apple's closedness then ceases to be a problem and they can differentiate with their privacy-friendliness.

<comment><USER8> _\- Leverage /convince all the OEMs into adopting the closed fork_

You mean like they already force OEMs to use thier closed source apps and force them not to make any phones that are use Android forks?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > In the process, it's costing Google around $50 million this year in platform > fees, according to a new report.

It's not _costing_ Google anything, and they're not losing money on this either. It's revenue that they might have expected to earn, which they're now not going to be earning.

<comment><USER10> Also, what solution would there be? Allow other companies to bypass Google's revenue system in this area? How much will they lose from other companies who want to be treated equal to Fortnite.

 _edit_ : This is a question folks, I'm not sure why you're down voting a question.. ya'll are touchy as hell lol.

To put it differently, since I think my first attempt just confused you all in mass:

If Google were to lower it's take from 30% to 15% _(fake numbers)_ , for everyone, so that Epic would use their business - would that gain them money or lose them money?

It's a question, yikes ya'll.

<comment><USER11> I don't understand the framing of this conversation. Does other companies owe Google money by merely existing?

<comment><USER12> No, it's the same writing that frames piracy as "costing" money to the developers. If something costs you some money there's the implication that you had the money, and then you didn't have it after that something happening. As much as they'd like to believe it, projected earnings aren't money you actually have

<comment><USER13> I'd say that the piracy does cost developers something. Not every pirated copy is a lost sale, but there are some number of people who are capable of buying software that instead choose to pirate it for any number of reasons and would buy it if piracy was not an option.

I wouldn't say it's a high percentage, but it's not insignificant.

I'd count that as a lost sale.

But I do agree that this is a different situation. This is just a high profile application that has decided to forgo something completely optional.

<comment><USER14> > I'd count that as a lost sale.

It's a lost sale, but that's still not a _cost_. It's just money they never got. If it had actually _cost_ them, then I'd expect it would take away money they previously had, like I say lunch costs me $15 because after the transaction I'm down $15 (but up a lunch).

At best, it's akin to opportunity cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> CEO of Epic

>The 30% store tax is a high cost in a world where game developers' 70% must cover all the cost of developing, operating, and supporting their games. There's a rationale for this on console where there's enormous investment in hardware, often sold below cost, and marketing campaigns in broad partnership with publishers. But on open platforms, 30% is disproportionate to the cost of the services these stores perform, such as payment processing, download bandwidth, and customer service. We're intimately familiar with these costs from our experience operating Fortnite as a direct-to-customer service on PC and Mac.

[https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2018-fortn...](https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2018-fortnite- on-android-doesnt-use-google-play-confirmed)

And another interesting quote from him

>If you look at it, the stores on the smartphone platforms actually do very little. They'll put ads up in front of your game. When you search for Fortnite on iOS you'll often get PUBG or Minecraft ads. Whoever bought that ad in front of us is the top result when searching for Fortnite. It's just a bad experience. Why not just make the game available direct to users, instead of having the store get between us and our customers and inject all kinds of cruft like that? It's a general criticism I have of the smartphone platforms right now.

[https://venturebeat.com/2018/08/03/tim-sweeney-epics-ceo- on-...](https://venturebeat.com/2018/08/03/tim-sweeney-epics-ceo-on-fortnite- on-android-skipping-google-play-and-the-open-metaverse/2/)

<comment><USER16> How about the 30% of store tax must cover the cost of developing, operating and supporting their Open Platforms Operating System? Along with payment processing, download bandwidth, and customer service?

Google doesn't charge them a cent for using Android. As a matter of fact if you don't like the Google Store, Maps, and Search it has to offer for free, you could have forked the whole thing and tidy up all the loose end and call it something else.

<comment><USER7> > How about the 30% of store tax must cover the cost of developing, operating > and supporting their Open Platforms Operating System?

> Google doesn't charge them a cent for using Android.

Why should Epic care about Android's development costs? They don't pay Microsoft a cent for Windows, why should they pay Google for Android?

Google chose this business model, software developers certainly have no obligation to support it.

> Along with payment processing, download bandwidth, and customer service?

Epic has all this infrastructure already, they need it for their PC customers. Why overpay for Google's?

<comment><USER17> > Why should Epic care about Android's development costs?

He seems to care about console makers' costs and considers their 30% there reasonable, but he does not seem to consider them reasonable here.

> Why overpay for Google's?

I don't think he's under any obligation too, but it's interesting to see platforms like Steam gain traction despite not handling most of the investment in the platform, and that's on Windows where you can get an installer.

<comment><USER18> > He seems to care about console makers' costs and considers their 30% there > reasonable, but he does not seem to consider them reasonable here.

Because the absolute majority of Android devices are not made by Google, just like the absolute majority of Windows devices are not made by Microsoft. What if Microsoft took away 30% of revenue from all software developers publishing on Windows Store?

<comment><USER16> >Because the absolute majority of Android devices are not made by Google, just like the absolute majority of Windows devices are not made by Microsoft. What if Microsoft took away 30% of revenue from all software developers publishing on Windows Store?

And you have to paid for Windows License? Somewhere along the line someone will have to paid. Open Source isn't free.

Of course it is perfectly fine for EPIC to avoid the 30% charge. But to judge Google charging 30% as unreasonable while you are getting the ecosystem for free, and than compare the cost of console maker is just being hypocrite.

This is speaking as someone who doesn't like Google even before the first iPhone shipped.

<comment><USER18> > And you have to paid for Windows License? Somewhere along the line someone > will have to paid. Open Source isn't free.

Open source _is_ free. Android is based on Linux, just like Ubuntu, and smartphone manufacturers are major contributors to AOSP[1].

[1] [https://www.androidpolice.com/2012/04/26/key-android- enginee...](https://www.androidpolice.com/2012/04/26/key-android-engineer- weighs-in-on-manufacturer-contributions-to-aosp-and-update-rollouts-you-might- be-surprised-whos-on-top/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> That's a strange definition of lose. A third party doesn't contract with someone for their product launch, and that is considered a loss of money?

<comment><USER20> "Unlike Apple, which only allows apps to be downloaded from its own storefront"

So as i read it, the argument being made is: if Google had chosen the same path as apple did in their app store, Google would not have missed this opportunity.

<comment><USER19> So you're saying this publisher would have used Google's store, even though they didn't when they had the choice, if Google had locked down its phone?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's wild how a company distributing an Android app in the exact same way that they already distribute the PC version of the same program has blown up into this huge and controversial news story.

<comment><USER22> Yes, there are no headlines saying "Valve will lose $600M or more in 2018 from Fortnite"...

<comment><USER23> [https://thenextweb.com/gaming/2018/08/07/fallout-76-and- fort...](https://thenextweb.com/gaming/2018/08/07/fallout-76-and-fortnite- pave-the-path-for-ditching-steam/)

It is really impressive that these companies have been able to justify a 30% cut for running a hosting service with stripped down search engine and payment processor. It's like they say in real estate: Location Location Location.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "Unlike Apple, which only allows apps to be downloaded from its own storefront, Google's platform is more open."

Oh the irony. Android is more open than iOS and yet its Google that EU found to be at fault with Android. How is this not a classic example that, if anything, Android provides a more open platform?

<comment><USER25> Apple aren't doing anything to prevent competition with their platform. Google are/were. It's that simple.

iOS is a closed platform, and Android is a more open platform, but that's 100% orthogonal to Apple or Google's _business practices_. Closed platforms are not illegal, while anticompetitive behaviour is.

<comment><USER26> > Apple aren't doing anything to prevent competition with their platform.

This is a categorically false statement. I can point to a lot of places where Apple are doing quite a bit to prevent competition on their platform. I mean, browser engine choice is the easiest to see of dozens of ways Apple is doing something to prevent competition on their platform. Did you mean something else by your statement I do not understand?

Even if you mean "with their platform" vs "on their platform" as if users can go somewhere else, that's a far cry from "aren't doing anything" as they are in fact doing lots of things.

<comment><USER25> I do mean with their platform, which is why I wrote that and not on their platform.

Only offering your software on your hardware isn't anticompetitive. It's the default for almost everything - your smart fridge isn't anticompetitive because you can't install a different web browser, your modem/router isn't anticompetitive because you can't switch to openwrt, your smart toothbrush isn't anticompetitive because you can't install custom firmware, et cetera.

What is anticompetitive on Google's end has absolutely nothing to do with the software, and everything to do with the licensing. Google have a couple simple rules that make their behaviour anticompetitive. If you want to ship an Android phone with google apps, then:

1) You may not ship any android phones without google apps 2) You may not ship a phone with google apps and a default search engine which is not Google

So, if you're a new manufacturer, Smasung, and you wish to make an Android phone, you have two choices:

1) Use Google Apps and immediately get an extremely mature operating system with a very large software library, but you may not compete with google. Not even that you may not use _that device_ to compete with google. You're not allowed to make any Android-based devices which compete, even if those themselves don't use google software.

2) Develop API-compatible replacements for everything in Google apps, or you can't access the android ecosystem because of how tightly integrated things are. Note, some of these APIs are not clearly documented and have mysterious behaviour. This option is thus only really available to megacorporations who can afford to sink a couple years of development into the project before selling a single device.

This is fundamentally different from what Apple is doing, which is simply selling a product.

<comment><USER26> > Only offering your software on your hardware isn't anticompetitive

I'd say that it has been upheld that only offering your software on your platform has been ruled as anticompetitive if you are large enough. Same with prioritizing your results on your platform, etc. Regardless of if that platform is hardware or any other restricted area with a majority presence.

> your smart fridge isn't anticompetitive because you can't install a > different web browser

Unfortunately, I'm afraid if you have the vast majority of the fridge market, and you lock out development for it, you very likely will be accused of anticompetitive behavior.

> This is fundamentally different from what Apple is doing, which is simply > selling a product.

Yes, that is very true it is fundamentally different and the specific part about the Android licensing is anticompetitive for those reasons and Apple would not be subject to those rulings. Many of the other software installation practices that Google/Microsoft have been ruled anticompetitive for, however, are very similar to what Apple is doing and only their smaller market share prevents the violation. But we shouldn't pretend that Apple isn't doing anything to prevent competition here, just not in the way that Google did with the most recent Android ruling. Apple does plenty to prevent competition with their platform as do most companies. To say it does nothing is wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> On the other hand, Epic will lose out on the easy-to-access money that users have available on the Play Store through gift cards or google pay.

The only reason I downloaded Hearthstone on my ios device was so I could use store credit to purchase packs. Otherwise I would have just remained a solely F2P player.

<comment><USER28> It's incredibly pain free to spend money on the google store. Just throw your fingerprint on there and who knows how much you've spent.

<comment><USER29> the fingerprint reading API (not sure the name in Google's world) isn't dependent on Google Play Services, is it? If it isn't, in theory they could still implement it to be the confirmation for purchasing I'd imagine.

<comment><USER28> Totally. I'm just saying google play is convenient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Next week on techcrunch, "Nintendo steals $50m by distributing games via cartridge and bypassing the Steam store."

</comment><comment><USER31> This article title bugs me because it implies that Google _inherently deserves_ to make $50m from a game that they neither developed nor previously offered through the Play Store.

IMO, they're not losing _anything_ - they're just not gaining the extra revenue they would have gotten had Epic chosen to go the "usual" route.

</comment><comment><USER32> I think this is a good trend. Not that I have much of an opinion on how much Google makes off any particular game but I'm glad people are willing to install programs on their devices without getting anyone's permission.

</comment><comment><USER33> What's crazy to me is that the 30% fee is standardized across every app in the exact same way.

As an Indi game developer, the 30% fee is totally worth the trade for help in discovery. The play store has received about $1000, for their distribution service with my game.

But a game like Fortnite receives almost the __identical servic __e from Google and is charged 50 million? Sure some costs scale, like bandwith.... so its not _exactly_ apples to apples, but WAY to close in my opinion.

Would Fortnite be on the Play Store if Google charged 5%, or even 10%. The real issue is the unreasonableness in this pricing structure.

</comment><comment><USER34> I can't imagine that 100% of the people interested in fortnite for android are willing to sideload the apk. I would be surprised if this wasn't having a net- negative impact on the total number of android users. I wonder if this is just to avoid paying a percentage on in-app purchases? What else could it be?

<comment><USER35> It will be available on samsung galaxy apps store, so for all Samsung users (quite a lot) no need to side install an apk.

<comment><USER36> Probably less discoverable there than on Fortnite's website to be honest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It was my understanding that Google / Apple do not charge a fee on in-app purchases which are not platform specific and which use third-party payment processing.

Never having played Fortnite, I assumed that in-app purchases are specific to your account and would carry-over if you moved from Android to iOS. Is that not the case?

</comment><comment><USER38> The funny thing about Google as a Gatekeeper is that it's already a Gatekeeper via search. Even in a world where there are no 30% distribution shares, most products still live and die by their ranking on search results for either brand searches or long tail keywords. It's not uncommon to see brands buying their own name as keywords just to rank #1 on search results pages that are more and more fully loaded with ads above-the-fold, including competitors who buy keywords against well know brands.

The Play store is just additional icing on the cake. They're not losing sleep over the one unicorn exception known as Fortnite. 99.9% of other companies do not have the word of mouth to overcome the various gates, whether it's Google or Apple or Steam.

</comment><comment><USER28> I wonder what sort of deal Samsung has - it's featured prominently on the Galaxy Apps main page.

</comment><comment><USER39> Rather have no mandatory middleman, fortnite made the right choice.

However the article is leaning towards a "google shouldn't allow this to earn more money" kind of view, but how much is this on the total that google makes from being a middleman?

</comment><comment><USER26> Alternatively, how much does Google gain by having a platform that allows companies to bypass the Play store? Myself, a tiny and possibly unrepresentative data point, counts as one customer who chooses them specifically for this reason.

</comment><comment><USER40> I hope this becomes a trend but there should be an easy way for non-savvy users to check keys & hashes to make sure they're not duped with tainted binaries.

</comment><comment><USER41> "Google will lose"

what?

They won't gain from that particular source. They'll still make _fucking BILLIONS_.

 _Epic Games_ will _save_ 50M$.

</comment><comment><USER42> I wonder if this becomes a norm in the Android freemium gaming community, will they start advertising more Android ads to iPhone users. Maybe even start offering free "trade-up" program if they spend enough.

If a user spends $1000, and 30% goes to Apple, that's $300 that could of bought the user a dedicated gaming device that will allow them to avoid that 30% tax.

I love Apple, but 30% for in-app purchases is something I will never find comfortable.

I get the exposure, but a game like Fortnite already has enough exposure.

Will freemium gaming companies eventually produce their own device to avoid this 30%.

Only time will tell, but I can say that if I had a game generating $300 million in revenue, and 60 million went to Apple, I wouldn't mind spending a few million in research on how to get out of paying that 60 million for the next year.

<comment><USER36> > If a user spends $1000, and 30% goes to Apple, that's $300 that could of > bought the user a dedicated gaming device that will allow them to avoid that > 30% tax.

How many iOS users willing to invest $300 on a low-end Android device to play Fortnite in order to start saving 30% after spending over $700 in in-app purchases do you think exist in the world?

<comment><USER43> Probably a significant amount

<comment><USER36> If you're rich enough to spend $1000 on mobile games, you probably don't care about a 30% saving.

<comment><USER43> But the company selling you those services does. Do you think the consumables are any cheaper just because they're not paying the 30% App Store fee? Think again

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I wonder how much Google regrets not being a walled garden like iOS.

</comment><comment><USER45> I wonder how many people won't buy Fortnite hats because getting their CC out is so much more friction than just charging it to your Google account.

</comment><comment><USER46> Amazon Video / Prime Video takes the exact same approach. You have to sideload Amazon's app store to install the player.

<comment><USER47> Looks like it's on google play right now, and I have it installed and don't remember sideloading.

<comment><USER46> Interesting. It wasn't always there.

[https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/splash/sd/t/appstore](https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/splash/sd/t/appstore)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Well, biggest apps are the ones strongarming platform vendors. Weixin, for example, threatened to quit apple app store because of in app purchases. Apple's Chinese C-levels were personally sent to Shenzhen appeasing Tencent when they began intentionally degrading weixin's functionality for users with Chinese IPs.

</comment><comment><USER49> I understand the perspective of most of the comments here. Yes, google is not really loosing 50 million bucks. But, isnt a major fraction of what would be spend on fortnite is a lost income which otherwise would have been spent on playstore? And this lost income would be significant since fortnite is massively successful?

</comment><comment><USER50> I doubt this would change anything for Epic Games because of Tim Sweeney's opinions on stores but what is a good revenue split between developers and Google?

</comment><comment><USER50> What would be a reasonable split between Google and app developers? Or is there a better method that Google should use, like charging X% for individual services?

</comment><comment><USER51> Just curious why in China there are several app stores for Android (Tencent, 360, Baidu etc), while the rest of the world uses mainly Google Play Store?

<comment><USER52> The Google Play Store is outside the great firewall and therefore probably unusable in China. Phone makers aren't going to ship phones with unusable app stores, so they need to use alternatives. It's the same reason UC Browser and QQ Browser are so popular in China.

<comment><USER51> I'm curious why there aren't more app store outside China, as evidently from China example, the app store business is sustainable, and Android outside China has a bigger market.

<comment><USER52> Samsung, Motorola, Amazon, etc. have tried. The trick is to convince all the developers to publish on your app store, so the users will use your app store. They're not going to bother if the phones also have the Google Play Store. The phone manufacturers need to include the Play Store or users won't buy the phones. There is a large first mover advantage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Did anyone else get a weird pop up add that you couldn't x out of?

</comment><comment><USER54> Great! For the odd app or two which can actually feasibly pull this off, it is good that it's on the table. I'm sure Google is not losing sleep over this (after all, they miss out on the expenditures as much as the revenues). "Lose" is really the wrong way to put it: it wasn't theirs to begin with.

</comment><comment><USER55> Can't google just block installs from websites in a future android update?

I don't want my kid to install apps from websites...

<comment><USER56> By default it is blocked although it's usually one of the first things I turn off. I always have at least one or two apps that aren't on the play store.

I hope that Google doesn't block this feature and turn entirely into a walled garden.

<comment><USER57> As soon as they do, they die with users like me. I am pretty tolerant of the eco-system lock in because I can so easily opt-over the wall when I want to. If they change that, I'll go to the next platform that respects my ability to make choices for myself, even if they don't match what some people in power in California thinks I should choose.

<comment><USER56> If they make that change, there won't be another platform to jump to.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: LogDNA – Embed server logs onto any web page - <AUTHOR> https://docs.logdna.com/docs/embedded-views <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone, I'm a co-founder / CTO of LogDNA. We were in Y Combinator's W15 batch and launched our cloud logging platform last year ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074537](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074537))

From the beginning, we've always wanted to be able to embed logs (light log viewer with live tail) onto any web page and we've just released this! Let us know if you have any feedback or cool use cases.

So far we've seen these pretty awesome uses from early testers:

1) custom internal dashboards with 1 embedded log viewer tab per internal app

2) showing customers their own logs

3) show inner workings of their app

Screenshot: [https://files.readme.io/2351a3a-embedded- views.gif](https://files.readme.io/2351a3a-embedded-views.gif)

I'm happy to answer any questions you may have!

</comment><comment><USER2> I see this all the time with tech startups - the marketing copy on your website is technical and emotionless.

 _Pinpoint production issues instantly._

 _LogDNA is the best logging platform you will ever use. Learn why enterprises, startups, and hobbyist developers all love LogDNA._

This appeals to no emotion at all except maybe your vanity as co-founder. I took the liberty of rewriting it to make it more people focused.

 _All your server logs in one place_

 _Gain insights, find bugs, and monitor systems from one simple, ultra-fast dashboard. Fall in love with LogDNA along with a myriad enterprises, startups, and hobbyists alike._

(FD - I'm a techie trying to improve my communication skills to appeal to _people_.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds good! Yeah our site is definitely in need of some love. Just haven't had time (busy plugging tech debt and working on new stuff). Planning on major improvements next month along with onboarding.

<comment><USER2> I'd love to take a crack at humanizing your site in return for some endorsements. If you don't like the work, you can always hire a proper marketing consultant.

Email in profile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Isn't the example just a gif? The pause and open link are shown like it's the real deal but then it just opens up into a lightbox.

Where can I see an example of the actual embedded logs?

<comment><AUTHOR> Just created a live example: [https://logdna.com/frame_tester.html](https://logdna.com/frame_tester.html)

The gif was from our docs page which afaik doesn't allow js.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Congrats Chris, Lee, Ryan and the rest of the team on the launch!</comment>


A script picks a random location and posts the nearest photo daily. - <AUTHOR> http://stochasticplanet.tumblr.com/

<comment><USER2> Neat, but some background information would be neater.</comment>


Conversation with Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Founder of Ness Labs - <AUTHOR> https://womenmake.com/posts/O0si3BSw1v/ama-with-annelaure-le-cunff <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN, creator of Women Make here. Today I share an AMA with Anne-Laure Le Cunff, a prolific maker. You might know her through Maker Mind, her weekly newsletter talking about neuroscience and entrepreneurship, with science-based tips [1] [2].

She answered questions about her writing process, her perspective on indie entrepreneurs vs. VC-funded ones, how to find a mentor, her early days, and more.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20902948](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20902948)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20812786](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20812786)

<comment><USER2> Thanks, I enjoyed it. The fruit of discipline and accomplishment is the freedom to be humble and gracious.</comment></comment>


Why startups work, doing so much with so little is impossible to predict - <AUTHOR> http://www.victusspiritus.com/2010/01/09/why-startups-work-doing-so-much-with-so-little-is-impossible-to-predict/ <comment><USER2> The phenomenon of a startup succeeding is not very different from a poor person getting rich. These are very similar problems for which there is no known solution (despite the large number of how-to-get-rich books).

<comment><AUTHOR> Exploration by doing & measuring, versus theoretical research is the way forward. This has taken me a few months to appreciate. There's no prep or legitimate how to guide for building a successful business.

Many successful folks have their own best practices to share.</comment></comment>


The Constitution and U.S. Code on GitHub - <AUTHOR>

We now have the technology to participate directly (if unofficially) on optimizing the U.S. Constitution and Code. Instead of interacting with the legal system politically, by supporting/opposing archaic human "representatives", let's be hackers and fork the laws. We could first gain an understanding of the legal environment, then beat congress at their own game. The U.S. Code is published every six years; the last ratified amendment to the Constitution was in 1992 (and it was proposed 202 years earlier!). Can we do to Congress what email did to the USPS?
I don't have the time to get it started (plus I'm a total git n00b), but I wanted to throw the idea out there. Maybe others have done something similar, a cursory check on Google didn't return anything though. I registered this "laws" username on GitHub and created stub repos:
http://github.com/laws/United-States-Constitution
http://github.com/laws/United-States-Code
I'd be happy to hand over the account if somebody wants it. Anyone interested? <comment><USER2> Not sure how useful this is for existing laws, but for pending legislation it would be fascinating to see the forks and merges as lawmakers negotiate toward a final bill. Maybe the Sunlight folks are doing something like this?

</comment><comment><USER3> From [http://marc.info/?l=git&m=128077393712932&w=2](http://marc.info/?l=git&m=128077393712932&w=2)

 _I'd figured to play with Git in an unusual way: to create a repository for the U.S. Constitution where amendments are presented as patches._

What follows is an interesting discussion of getting git to represent the dates correctly. :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Hmmm... what we need is a virtual US on which to test changes to laws.

<comment><USER5> Canada?

<comment><USER6> this a great scientific fiction novel SIMULACRON - 3; 1964). Autor: DANIEL F. GALOUYE

that deals with that subject,

also Maze of Death by PKD touch similar isues

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I thought about doing this a few months ago and tried to register gitlaw.com but that domain was already taken (but inactive). Looks like someone else had the idea too.

However, I not only wanted to put the current US Constitution and Code into git, but every version going back to 1776. What an amazing data source that would make, to be able to see all revisions and additions to the US legal code since inception, how it grew and changed over time. The data visualizers could have a field day.

However, that's a massive project, and I'm not sure if all that data even exists in portable electronic format, or just the recent versions of the Constitution and US Law.

It's still in the back of my mind and if I figure out a way to do it I'll probably revisit it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Interesting hack. I'll point out a couple things you may not have thought of though:

1\. The U.S. legal system is _designed_ to go slowly. That's what checks and balances are for. It takes a long time to see the full implications of each law (look what happened when Glass-Steagall was repealed), and if the laws change every day, you can end up whipsawing with no idea what really works or not.

2\. How will the laws be evaluated? In the U.S, you have judicial review, where cases come before the courts, the facts come out into the open, a jury of your peers evaluates how the law applies to those facts, and then the appellate court system ensures the law was applied correctly. If the law is egregiously wrong, there's widespread publicity and then public pressure to amend the law. How does this same sort of fact-based discovery process factor into your system, and how do you avoid it devolving into a "he said she said" contest of differing opinions?

3\. How will you get public buy-in? Democracy's based upon the consent of the governed; when everybody writes their own version of the laws, each person could make the argument that they didn't consent to the other person's version.

4\. It seems like this would replace plutocracy (government by the rich and well-connected) with technocracy (government by the quick-thinking and technically savvy). As a technocrat, I'm all in favor of that. ;-) But it seems like you're just exchanging one set of masters for another, and in many ways, this new system is _less_ fair than the old one. What happens to the 95% of Americans who are not accustomed to thinking at Internet speed? They're already being left out in the cold by many economic developments; will you exclude them from the political process too?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. Maybe state laws would be a better place to start. It's more plausible that a hacker could get into a state house/senate/gubernatorial position and elicit change at a local level. Also, there's potentially more room for refactoring than feature changes.

2\. The same way software commits or Wikipedia edits are evaluated. Discussion and voting. As with OSS and Wikipedia, few would actually propose changes, but it's better than the current system (which is closer to the model of proprietary software and traditional encyclopedias).

3\. As ry's node is the official Node.js, "usgov" would host the legally binding repo, and individuals would simply have their own non-binding forks. Congress's role would shift to primarily merging in pull requests.

4\. I imagine most aren't interested in proposing laws any more than they are in editing Wikipedia. But everyone would benefit from a more succinct, optimized legal structure, as they do from a better source of information.

This is all really beside what I had in mind though. I don't think there's much point trying to do anything official, in cooperation with the current government. The way you improve Windows is by building a better operating system, not directly trying to change Windows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Haha - I'd totally like to see fully annotated, backdated diffs for each revision--also known as amendments (starting with the Bill of Rights)--and branches and merges for each HR/SR (by accounts that represent who authored said resolutions), and forks for countries whose constitution was based on the US.

That network graph would be AWESOME.

</comment><comment> T-R I think it would be more interesting to use github to devise a better language for law.

It could try to find a way to allow more specificity with less verbosity, and provide a standard way of creating abstractions that would allow for easy checking of conflicting definitions. Maybe even include a comment system for stating the intentions at time of writing, which could be taken into account when modifying the code.

</comment><comment><USER10> I applaud what you're trying to do, but it may be a tad idealistic. The US is filled with legacy code, and there are lots of vested interests in keeping it the complicated way. As programmers we are trained to be purely logical, but politics and governance is 99% emotion, 1% logic.

<comment><USER11> The first step in changing something is being able to understand it, and the first step in understanding it is to have it organized. The organizational component that is missing is, to put it in terms we at HN deal with everyday, to generate Changelogs and revision history (with attribution, down to the politician).

It would be nice to have all changes, including proposed changes, documented in a relatively easy to navigate format. Git, or any modern SCM, may qualify as a tool to provide that. Some of the most important metadata about proposed changes, even if they don't get included in the final, passed laws, would exist on branches; metadata like who proposed it and who signed off on it, who supports it. If anything, this would make The Daily Show's researchers' job easier.

While politics is 99% emotion, those emotions should include motivation, not frustration experienced early on when trying to grok the system. In a free society, the output of the governance should be accessible to all. One can debate if git is accessible, but it would definitely be a format that is more accessible, and maybe even more machine processable, than the current system.

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps MediaWiki (or similar) would be a better choice. The (incomplete) U.S. Code is up on WikiSource (<http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/United_States_Code>).

<comment><USER10> I actually prefer source code revision system more than wiki. Wikis are chaos. People can still fork your code, and submit pull requests. Moderation is still required.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why isn't the text on github yet, it just says "Nothing to see here yet. Move along."</comment>


Show HN: Realtime website analytics for ALL your sites - <AUTHOR> https://statvoo.com/ <comment><USER2> This tool would have got a much better traction if it would offer for free error tracking.

In the world of Google Analytics, you need to offer exceptional value to grow your user base and then try to figure out later on, on how to close the customers by listening to their feature requests.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the great feedback. We'd actually been thinking about doing this for a while and you rocked the tipping point!

Error analytics is now FREE!

Take a look here for the latest updates: [https://statvoo.com/plans](https://statvoo.com/plans)</comment></comment>


Coherent (early Unix competitor operating system) - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_(operating_system) <comment><USER2> I jumped on the UNIX track when I found Coherent 3.1 in 1991. It opened my eyes to a whole new way of thinking. Within a year or two, I used AT&T Unix SVR(3?4?) and then Novell's Unixware and on to SUN's Solaris. Then finally to Linux in 2001.

I skipped the whole 'Windows as Personal Desktop' thing. I had a look at Windows 3.x in the early 90s and classed it as 'useless' \- because I was already using the equivalent of Windows 2000 while everybody else was enthralled with non-networked Windows 3.0

So I have a very soft spot in my heart for Coherent. Without Coherent, I would have missed out on so much.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Coherent source code is available here (as of 8/11/2019):

[http://www.nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/source.php](http://www.nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/source.php)</comment>


What is a good open rate for your email newsletter? - <AUTHOR> http://www.launchbit.com/blog/what-is-a-good-open-rate-for-your-email-newsletter/ <comment><USER2> I run four weekly e-mail newsletters dedicated to programmers (in the JS, Ruby, HTML5, and 'general' spaces) with a total circulation of around 80,000 and Launchbit occasionally sells ads for me (though I'm doing more direct now, it seems).

My long term average open rates are 50.6%, 54.2%, 52.5% and 58.1% respectively - that's for weekly, curated news. They certainly drop a little over time and I've discovered two of the key reasons so far: people skipping some weeks due to e-mail overload and increasingly strict spam filtering.

What's a little annoying about this at first is that e-mail advertising is typically sold by CPM. So let's say I have 20k subscribers on a list and I can sell for $20 CPM (not unrealistic at all in e-mail).. that's $400. But that's $400 whether my open rate is 20% or 60%.

The most eagle eyed advertisers will ask for historical click rates and open rates but you'd be surprised how many don't. So in a way I'd rather charge per click but this doesn't seem to be accepted practice in e-mail right now.

Last, I've not found the word "free" to be too much of a problem. It's pretty common in mails and doesn't appear to be much of a trigger unless you all-caps it or add exclamation marks (e.g. FREE!!)

What absolutely _massacred_ one issue of a newsletter, though, was the "Do You Really Want to Be Making This Much Money When You're 50?" post that did the rounds on HN recently. I included it and that issue's open rate fell by over half! Why? It's about as spammy a title as you could get and set off a ton of bells. So now I do even more spam analysis with each issue I send ;-)

BTW, I'm always happy to answer questions about the e-mail newsletter game, so feel free. I could probably ramble here all day about it. It's fun!

<comment><USER3> I've been subscribed to your HTML 5 and JS newsletters for a couple months now. The content has been great overall. Enough so that I'm asking you where I can signup for the other two newsletters. :)

<comment><USER2> Great! :) <http://rubyweekly.com/> is the Ruby one and <http://statuscode.org/> is the one for programmers generally (covers algorithms, general advances in the field, generic tools, language agnostic articles, etc.)

<comment><USER3> Signed up! I don't use Ruby much, but I'm curious to see what I can steal from Ruby back to Perl. :)

BTW, you should include links to the other 3 lists on all the websites. I see that statuscode.org and rubyweekly.com have it now, but when I checked the JS site earlier I couldn't find a link.

<comment><USER2> Technically they're at <https://cooperpress.com/> but the whole idea of them collecting together as related newsletters hasn't quite gelled yet. It will take a little bit of work to do it right.

BTW, there's a Perl Weekly as well which was inspired by the Ruby one. I don't run it but it's at <http://perlweekly.com/> and follows a similar formula to mine.

<comment><USER3> This is a massively late reply, but I've been signed up for the perl weekly newsletter from its inception. Thank you for mentioning it though! I'm sure Gabor is grateful for the link. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A few comparables:

My training list (need a better name for that) gets between 40 and 60% or so per mailing, long term average is 50%.

BCC typically gets about 40% on its "monthly" emails, although those are more like "semi-annually" these days -- didn't even send the Halloween one this year.

Clients' numbers are clients' numbers but, anecdotally, if you could wave a magic wand and get 40% from their lists they are interested in what you are selling and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

</comment><comment><USER5> I do not think open rate is a measurement worth tracking. The only way to measure an open is via image load, and this can fail in either direction. Almost every email client these days blocks images by default, so it can read low. But, many people use preview panes or open every email as a matter of process, even if they quickly discard it without reading--so it can read high. (edit to clarify--if they have opted to "always show images")

Clicks are a much more reliable metric of engagement because a click is always a click. Email clients can't hide them, and people rarely click through by accident.

If you engineer your email to be read all in one sitting (no clicking), then there is another option, which is to do what print publications do--pay someone to survey your readership and provide a statistical estimate of your active readership. This also gives you the opportunity to learn more about them, which might enhance your value proposition for advertisers--if you can show that the "right people" read your newsletter.

<comment><USER6> I agree. Open rates are a bit wonky. If your list is more or less static in size and domain distribution then looking at open rate deltas can be informative.

Regarding click rate, here's some cool research I got to do recently: [http://blog.mailchimp.com/what-good-marketers-can-learn- from...](http://blog.mailchimp.com/what-good-marketers-can-learn-from-v1agr- spammers/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There is one missing item in this analysis: Outlook and other email clients that let you push the down arrow to see the next email and continue on.

I think open-rate is a terrible and meaningless metric unless there is a filter specifying @yahoo, @gmail, and other email clients that force you to explicitly open the emails. Even with this metric added in, there is still phone email clients and email settings where delete automatically sends the person to the next email.

Even after filtering the data open-rate is still pretty meaningless compared to conversion. Conversion is very easy number to measure, but extremely difficult to increase. I'd rather have a 10% open-rate with 25% conversion than 50% open-rate with 1% conversion. A high conversion-rate allows the company to discover their customers and their behavior. Increasing conversion is an art-form. Increasing open-rate is difficult as well, but it should be secondary to increasing conversion.

</comment><comment><USER8> FYI that's not a bell curve. It looks much more lognormal or Beta to me (or even Weibull or Gamma could fit it, if you didn't care about how meaningful the parameters were, or wanted to get creative in interpreting them).

If you go with Beta, Weibull, or Gamma distributions, mean and standard deviation are the wrong vocabulary to use. Obviously you can't tell just by looking at the plot, but it's an easy test to show definitively if it's normally distributed or not. The difference here is meaningful, depending on how much you want to read into the distribution of open rates.

</comment><comment><USER9> In B2B emails, I've seen "good" defined as anywhere between 10% and 80%. It really, really depends.

One important thing to note is that "open rate" is a very fuzzy metric. It usually works by seeing if the recipient loaded images in the email... But aside from iPad and iPhone, pretty much all email clients do _not_ load images by default. If your message is mostly text, many people won't bother loading images and the "open rate" you're seeing reported is going to be a dramatic undercount. Perversely, crummy messages sent to the same list that are unreadable without the images loaded will get a higher _reported_ open rate even though fewer people may actually be reading them.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's all great, but how do they measure the open rate? From what I understand the only email client that leaks information (through css/img/font/etc back links) was Mail on iOS. Surely, you can't just extrapolate the open rate of Outlook users from that.

(edit) Or do they simply send a link to webpage and then count hits?

</comment><comment><USER11> How is "open rate" measured?

<comment><USER12> Of course there's no foolproof way to tell if someone opened an email. You can do something like embed a link to an image with a unique URL for tracking, and hope people's email clients automatically follow such links. (Yours doesn't, mine doesn't, but your grandmother's might.)

<comment><USER13> Or hope you have engaging enough content that they click through one of your links. For example, email newsletters like HackerNewsletter are essentially just links, so there is a good chance a person will click through and be counted as an "open" (as well as a "click").

And the tracking pixel of course. Some clients auto-show images, some don't. Some people allow emails to show images, some people refuse. It's all just a "best guess".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> We get around a 50% open rate on our newsletters (40k+ double opt in subscribers).

</comment><comment><USER15> This kind of question is like asking a baseball shortstop a hypothetical: What do you do if the ball is hit to you.

Anyone who tries to answer it definitively is probably not going to give a good answer. You need to get context out of the situation before you can answer it well. Just like you wouldn't throw the ball to first base if you could try to turn a double play, you wouldn't expect similar open rates between a list made up of young tech savvy users and a list made up of senior citizens. You wouldn't expect similar open rates between a list that you have to opt-in to on a preferences page and a list that you are automatically signed up to when you register for a product.

<comment><USER2> Very true. I've had people look at my ~50% open rates and think they were low.. but they were sending product updates to a dedicated list of people who wanted to learn about that product. And it's easy to look down on e-commerce folks getting 10-20% but.. they're sending mails every day and making 6 figures a mailing, etc.

It's so contextual it's ridiculous. Stats from companies like MailChimp try to break things down by 'industry' but it's still not all that useful to compare against. The type of mail is just as important (industry news, personal announcements, product promos, sales, etc.)

<comment><USER16> Here's a chart of stats by industry that MailChimp published - [http://mailchimp.com/resources/research/email-marketing- benc...](http://mailchimp.com/resources/research/email-marketing-benchmarks- by-industry/) for reference. As petercooper said the industry isn't the best breakdown to compare against. It's probably more helpful to benchmark your own campaigns using A/B and optimize for your goal.

<comment><USER17> To me, one big driver of whether I will open unsolicited mail is how often that sender sends something out. If I am getting email from you 3 or 4 times a week, it's almost guaranteed to be going straight into the trash. Not only am I not opening it, I'm not really even reading the subject line.

Once a week is borderline. Once a month is probably about right. Don't abuse your subscriber's time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've never gotten a 50% open rate (it's always been in the 10-15 range, and that's for people who voluntarily signed up) and I don't believe most people when they claim they get 50%+ consistently.

Funny thing is, most people do make that claim. They are the same people that say their penis is bigger than it actually is.

I think there's too many variables to say this is too small and that's too big (I'm talking about email open rates, stay with me here). Any information you get here probably isn't even worth considering.

Don't believe the hype.

<comment><USER19> Here's a graph of open rates and click rates for a newsletter I send out 1-2 times a month:

<https://www.dropbox.com/s/97lfk7clhj12flu/newsletter.png>

According to Mailchimp, the list has an average open rate of 58% and an average click rate of 20%.

EDIT: _hippo3_ mentioned actively unsubscribing people who are not opening, in order to get a list with a high concentration of people who consistently open. As my newsletters contain no third party ads or promotions, I don't do such pruning.

I think there are a few reasons why our newsletters are well read:

\- The content is very specific to our niche

\- The target audience is members of our services

\- Even though most readers are customers, they still have to opt-in to receive the newsletters

\- I don't send newsletters out often, only 1-2 times a month

\- The newsletters are sent out at pretty regular intervals, usually on Tuesday morning in the third week of the month

\- The newsletters aren't very long, readers have to click through to read the entire articles

<comment><AUTHOR> Great comment, Samuel_Michon. One thing that is interesting to me is that your newsletter requires ppl to click through to read the entire article (as does Peter's newsletters). This probably also helps with the accuracy of open rates. Even if a reader doesn't display images, Mailchimp (as well as other email service providers) will know if he/she opened the email via the click. So, it may be a more accurate count over an email that doesn't have any links in it... (just some speculation)</comment></comment></comment>


The future of Raphters, a web framework for C. - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/DanielWaterworth/Raphters/wiki/Architecture

<comment><USER2> Personally, I'd want to have a --disable-v8 option. If I'm writing a web application in C, I must have had tight speed/memory/code size requirements; a JSON-based v8-backed template language doesn't seem to fit very well. (Yes, v8 is pretty fast, but if it's fast/small enough for what I'm doing, I wouldn't be using C.)

<comment><AUTHOR> You will be able to disable v8.

<comment><USER3> Have you considered LuaJIT instead of v8? Given you are using v8 as a target VM for compiling another language to javascript, and lua is quite similar, although if other javascript libraries are used that could be a major factor. (This is assuming you are writing Chrysalis/Stencil)

<comment><USER4> Bump! Lua is small and sweet. Zed Shaw picked it for his framework, not _that_ unlike Raphters in some ways: <http://tir.mongrel2.org/home>

<comment><USER5> Specifically, the lua _jit_ implementation is known for being ridiculously fast.

<http://luajit.org/performance.html>

<http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2009-06/msg00071.html>

<comment><USER6> Normal Lua's performance is also quite decent (especially compared to its peers: Python, Ruby, and Perl), and has a very clear path for moving hotspots out to C. LuaJIT's performance is just a bonus. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Previously: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2407334>. The author seems to have taken a good look at some of the suggestions given there - or am I just imagining that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I've certainly studied the suggestions made in those comments. This design document represents a sharp change in design.</comment></comment>


Theory that challenges Einstein's physics could soon be put to the test - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/11/161125084229.htm <comment><AUTHOR> Here is the link to the theoretical paper: [http://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.94.101...](http://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.94.101301)</comment>


Craig Wright calls himself to the stand in billion-dollar Bitcoin lawsuit - <AUTHOR> https://decrypt.co/7634/kleiman-craig-wright-courtroom-showdown-florida <comment><USER2> > It all stems from a year-long lawsuit initiated by the estate of Dave > Kleiman, a computer scientist who, according to the complaint, helped Wright > "invent" Bitcoin under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. The lawsuit claims > that when Kleiman died in April 2013, Wright engaged in a scheme to deny > Kleiman of 1.1 million bitcoin that the former business partners jointly > owned.

This is comedy gold. A letter purportedly signed by Kleiman references a bizarre trust scheme involving a million bitcoin:

[https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2644014/Tulip- Tru...](https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2644014/Tulip-Trust- Redacted.pdf)

The judge's request is apparently based at least in part on this letter.

The letter references a "Key with ID C941FE6D," a PGP key Wright used to fabricate evidence of being Satoshi.

[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jpgq3y/satoshis-pgp- keys-...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jpgq3y/satoshis-pgp-keys-are- probably-backdated-and-point-to-a-hoax)

As such, the letter seems fake as a $3 bill. Hilariously, the Kleiman family seems to consider it real. It's now being used to force Wright into proving he controls the corresponding private keys.

We've been here before back when Wright said he'd provide cryptographic proof of being Satoshi and furnished instead technobabble, mind games and deceit.

Instead of fleecing some technically illiterate folks out of cash, the consequences here for deceit are legal sanctions against Wright to varying degrees.

What goes around.

</comment><comment><USER3> The moment of... truth?</comment>


Regulators: open source software might constitute "predatory pricing" - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/nov/15/google-legal-perfect-storm-android

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, I'll cop to the fact that I've given this a slightly sensational headline, and it's only part of the story, but I'm a bit worried by the idea that the concept of "predatory pricing" might be applied to open source software.

I'd really like to hear from people who know more about the regulatory bodies in the US and Europe, as this story could be FUD, but it's hard to be certain. If it's true, what might the implications be for open source/free software?</comment>


A tool for thought - <AUTHOR> https://swannodette.github.io/2016/06/03/tools-for-thought <comment><USER2> I do Clojure and Clojurescript full time. Love the ideas, but we as a community need to step up our game when it comes to how easy and fun it is to get started. Setting up a Clojurescript project is even worse than "modern javascript".

The only worthwhile way is using Martin Klepsch's "Tenzing" template, but using a template is not a solution.

[https://github.com/martinklepsch/tenzing](https://github.com/martinklepsch/tenzing)

I worry about this since the power of Lisp and Clojure is how easy it is to experiment. Starting a C project is just doing a basic Makefile, a javascript project is just `npm init`.

<comment><USER3> It seems to me that setting up clojurescript project is extremely easy. Basically you need to know only one "build" system(leiningen/boot), as for javascript you would have to know at least few(broccoli/npm/bower/gulp etc). And with leiningen you can do `lein new` as well, although I prefer boot and creating my own files:

      ├── README.md
      ├── build.boot
      ├── resources
      │   ├── index.html
      ├── src
      │   └── cljs
      │       ├── sample
      │       │   ├── core.cljs
      │       └── main.cljs.edn
      └── test
          └── cljs
              └── sample
                  └── core_test.cljs

<comment><USER4> As an (embedded at the moment, but I've been around) C and sometimes C++ developer, considering that tree to be "easy" just seems absurd.

I'm sure everybody knows this, but here's "hello world" on the command line using GCC in e.g. Linux:

        $ echo -e '#include <stdio.h>\nint main(void) { printf("hello, world!\\n"); return 0; }' > hello.c && gcc -o hello hello.c && ./hello

The most complicated thing here is probably the bash quoting/escaping (which explains the double backslash inside printf()'s arguments).

The above command line spawns two processes, one of which is a full C compiler, and it runs in _3 milliseconds_ on my embarassingly old home laptop (Core-I5 M480 at 2.7 GHz).

I'm not trying to be the old fart claiming that everything was better back in the day, but this (to me) almost makes C seem as approachable as BASIC on the old 8-bit machines, when looking at the relative complexity.

<comment><USER5> Compiling trivial programs with ClojureScript is equally trivial:

        java -cp cljs.jar clojure.main -e '(require (quote [cljs.build.api :as b])) (b/build (quote [(ns foo) (js/console.log "Hello world!")]) {:optimizations :advanced})'

But I'm not sure this is actually telling us anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's interesting to observe how almost all mainstream dynamic languages move from "who needs types? types are very very bad and just get in the way!" to some sort of gradual typing or runtime type validation.

* Javascript has Flow/TypeScript

* Python has PEP 484

* Perl6 has some sort of types

* Clojure/Script has core.typed, schema and now clojure.spec

* Don't know about Ruby, but I've seen articles on type checking/annotations

* Erland has Dialyzer (although this is not a recent development)

<comment><USER7> I have a bit of a theory on that, which I bet will be a bit unpopular but is based on some social things I have seen. A dynamic language gets popular[1]. As more people show up, they want to bring their way of doing things (e.g. "prototypes are stupid, we need classes") instead of fully adopting the language. Improvements are cool but some of the changes alter things in a fundamental way (e.g. dynamic to static). Sometimes it leads to second systems (e.g. Objective-C to Swift) and is often accompanied by "the need to grow up". Then we get a new language.

1) could actually be any language that doesn't fit the mainstream mold

<comment><USER8> Which is why what Rich Hickey did with clojure.spec is so important...

He acknowledged the deficiency, but worked through it to understand what the problem actually is. Then he created a solution that solves the real problem, in a way that avoids diminishing the character of the language.

Have a read through the rationale on the design of clojure.spec to see what I mean.

[http://clojure.org/about/spec](http://clojure.org/about/spec)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The fact that folks in the comments are complaining here about Clojure's error messages here tells me that the implications of this post might not be obvious. Up to this point, it has been really really hard to give good error messages from macros, and a lot of the core functionality of Clojure (let, defn etc etc) are from macros. What Clojure.spec means (if I'm correct) is that in the future, not only will the Clojure language itself be able to have sane error messages, you'll be able to easily create sane error messages for yourself from your own code. This is a HUGE HUGE deal. It is quite possibly BETTER than any type system. [http://clojure.org/about/spec](http://clojure.org/about/spec) Also, the idea that you'll be able to get generative testing FOR FREE, is just totally insane.

</comment><comment><USER10> I hate to harp on this issue, but I tried Clojure for about a year on and off. I just couldn't get over the really crappy stack traces. I would break something and then spend 10 minutes tracking down whatever I broke. I'm happy with Kotlin for the moment, but would love to get back into Clojure if only it would get sane error messages.

<comment><USER11> Clojure is designed to be a practical language. Part of that is interop with the host VM (JVM in Clojure's case). The "crappy" stack traces are definitely NOT crappy when you're using Clojure in a complex JVM ecosystem. The raw-ness and simplicity of it is actually refreshing. The Clojure Java source is remarkably simple, and it doesn't take much time to get used to and appreciate the Java stack traces when writing non-trivial Clojure code in a Java world.

<comment><USER10> I just don't see how it's remarkably simple. In other langs with good stack traces I get exactly the error at exactly the line on which it occurred. In Clojure, I quite simply don't. I do absolutely love the rest of Clojure. I also realize there are tradeoffs to being hosted. Nevertheless, to deny that the fact that the stack traces aren't ideal seems a bit of a stretch.

<comment><USER11> I'm not claiming they're "ideal", which is a really loaded word. Just that they're practical, and in my opinion they make the right tradeoffs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I appreciate what clojure.spec is trying to do and think it's a good step! If this kind of thing interests you though I suggest looking beyond the code and learn the mathematics -- logic, predicate calculus, and the ideas behind formal methods! It's a wonderful tool for thinking and well worth encouraging.

Try looking up TLA+, Event B, Unity, etc, etc. They've been working on some neat maths and the tooling around it these days is amazing!

For more hybrid language/spec approaches Agda and Idris are super fascinating.

</comment><comment><USER13> Another "tool for thought" essay, about J: www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm

<comment><USER14> I guess different people speak different languages and have different tools of thought.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "In my humble opinion clojure.spec is the most VPRI-worthy feature Rich Hickey has shipped since delivering fast persistent data structures." Love this quote

</comment><comment><USER15> i often like dnolen's blog posts for the links as much as the nominal content ..

i thought "tools for thought was a dennet ref, but no,

[http://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/](http://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/)

also, i'm now aware of

[https://github.com/ghcjs/ghcjs](https://github.com/ghcjs/ghcjs)

although uncertain how to compare it to purescript..

<comment><USER16> I believe that "tools for thought" as a phrase comes from Ken Iverson's "Notation as a tool for thought" paper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hmm, I wonder what all this means.

<comment><USER9> It means you may soon have amazing error messages when working with Clojure. You'll also be able to write your code in such a way that it gives you amazing error messages when some part of it breaks.</comment></comment>


Generation Whine – Why I'm Relieved not to be a Millennial - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/10/dont-care-how-i-want-it-now/

<comment><USER2> Agreed. All this defining people by their age can't be done consistently.

Most people want many of the same things regardless of age, sex, race, religion, culture, or political affiliation. They have varying ideas of how to get there, usually based on experience or some belief system they adopted. Yet, despite all of us as a whole being similar and yet each of us being individually different, some people keep trying to group us into year/day of birth, political party, race, sex, etc. It just doesn't work though. We don't really fit into those groups. We are a whole and we are individuals. There are social groups (families, friends, work, etc.) and people that share the same experiential and adopted knowledge. But, there is no such thing as a Millennial.

</comment><comment><USER3> Paul Carr Hates Millennials too? Join the club. <http://twitter.com/#!/Jason/status/12621363849></comment>


How the "Down-Vote" Leads to a Vicious Circle of Negative Feedback - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/data-mining-reveals-how-the-down-vote-leads-to-a-vicious-circle-of-negative-feedback-aad9d49da238 <comment> aaron-lebo > Curiously, authors that receive no feedback, are more likely to leave the > community entirely.

Ding ding ding.

I think, aside from the issues with downvoting, upvoting by nature slowly creates hivemind, circle jerk communities that quickly start to lack any real critical thinking.

Go check out just about any subreddit and it becomes very apparent what illogical silly ideas dominate. If you are logical but uncontroversial you'll get ignored which is just as bad as the controversial opinions which get downvoted to hell. You start to wonder if the confirmation bias we are all building towards is more dangerous than just being uninformed.

There's lots of research on voting behavior in political science, I'm slightly surprised more hasn't been down with it.

<comment><USER2> Why go to a different site? You can see the "hivemind, circle jerk communities" phenomenon right here. I'm not trying to be cynical but HN certainly displays the same criticism you levy on reddit (as does apparently any community that allows voting).

<comment><USER3> Can you point out some "hive mind" ideologies here on HN?

I think we actually strike a pretty good balance. There are clearly large contingents of Apple, Google, and Microsoft fans/employees, all of whom tend to balance each other out. Then there is a large group of younger civil libertarians/libertarians as well as a large group of liberals. And then there is a large group of older, traditional "MIT-style" hackers.

I guess that there is some technophile group think that goes on, and it's true that among the SV contingent, there's a certain amount of ignorance about the state of the country outside of Silicon Valley. But all in all, I think there are enough counterbalancing ideologies and interests here on HN that the hive mind tends not to occur to the same extent as on subreddits, which are by definition single-interest groups.

<comment><USER4> Your description of balance illustrates the problem.

Lets say you have two groups of people, one of which thinks you should put sugar in bread, and the other which thinks putting sugar in bread is blasphemous. On the issue of sugar in bread, you will get a rigorous debate for the affirmative and negative.

However, if someone posts something to the effect of "Humans shouldn't be eating bread", both of those groups of people will vote that comment down, regardless of the argument presented.

Apple, Google and Microsoft fans all agree that computers and software are 'good things', it is the implementation details where they disagree, so any dissenting opinion to common ground that those groups share will be prejudicially downvoted into oblivion.

It is this common ground where group think is created and reinforced.

<comment><USER5> Exactly. I spent a couple weeks building up my little HN points once. Then I made a comment like "That was a very interesting article!" and was downvoted to hell. I asked why, and that was downvoted to hell. Negative karma after working on positive for two weeks.

So fsck you very much you guys. Every last one of you with your little down vote button. Now when I feel the urge to post here, I create a single use throwaway account, say whatever I feel like, and then log out.

HN is very much a hivemind. It's easy to see when you're not worried about your negative internet points.

<comment><USER3> I'm sorry you were downvoted with no explanation, I'm sure that sucked after gaining positive karma.

As you may know, what you ran into there were two foundational ideas in HN culture, which are:

1\. Don't post "trivial" comments that are common on Reddit, like "+1", "thanks for that!", "interesting article!". HN tries to maintain a very high signal to "noise" ratio by discouraging these kinds of comments, and I actually appreciate it, since reading through lots of those types of comments makes it difficult to focus on comments meant to foster further discussion, or to inform.

2\. It's an official guideline not to complain about being downvoted. Your comment asking why you were downvoted may have been interpreted as complaining about being downvoted. If you were just asking why, I'm sorry you were downvoted and that no one bothered to explain.

Every online community has its quirks, and you just happened to run into two of them with your comments in that post. Personally, I've never worried too much about accumulating points on HN. I just try to post informative comments, or comments meant to provoke discussion, and things have gone well.

Again, sorry you were downvoted for asking a simple question. I'd not do that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I work for a gaming website that lets people vote on the games and comment. It's mostly a younger audience (under 18) but there's still a good amount of all ages.

Anyway, we released a game one day and some of the first comments were really negative, even though the game was objectively a pretty darn good game. Knowing the game was good I was awaiting the nice comments to show up, but they didn't. It was just a flurry of negativity.

I talked to some other employees and they agreed the game was good and something felt off. We all jumped into the comments, gave good reviews of the game and started discussions with all the negative reviewers. Then the positive reviews started showing up, and the games rating did a complete turn around to overwhelmingly positive.

I feel like if we hadn't intervened, the game would have continued to have negative reviews and end up with a bad rating. There's a kind of hive mind mentality going on, and the first public comments have some sort of psychological effect on the rest of the players.

<comment><USER7> As much as the other comments here might disagree, HN is subject to the same situation.

Early comments dictate the tone and focus of the conversation.

For example, its trivial to highjack any thread about security with a well written comment about the connection (however fleeting) to the NSA/snowden leaks.

<comment><USER8> I have frequently seen a thread begin with ill-informed, substanceless dismissal, and then turn around and produce a well-reasoned and informative discussion. That's one of the reasons I visit HN regularly, but not any other discussion site.

<comment><USER9> Whenever I comment here, I usually consider a bunch of different factors:

Is my comment necessary? Will it teach anybody anything? Did somebody else already make my point?

All in all, I try my hardest _not_ to comment. As a general rule, I won't participate in communities that value one-liners. A basic respect for thought is enough to make one community far better than another.

Just today I was over-listening a conversation about body hair that essentially amounted to "hair is there for protection," and all I could think was "what does that mean? What 'protection'? Do you even know what you're talking about?" It seems like the _entire_ point of that conversation was to find something to laugh about, and that the thoughts didn't even matter. They could have talked about anything. As soon as laughs were had, subjects changed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> From the article: "Cheng and co began by compiling a dataset of the comments associated with news articles on four online communities: CNN.com, a general news site; Breitbart.com, a political new site; IGN.com, a computer gaming news site; and Allkpop.com, a Korean entertainment site. The data includes 1.2 million threads with 42 million comments and 114 million votes from 1.8 million different users." I would respectfully suggest that the comments from news readers on news sites may not be a dataset that generalizes to discussion and news aggregation sites like Hacker News, especially because Hacker News starts us out with a set of user guidelines[1] particularly geared to encouraging sustained user participation in thoughtful discussion. There is also a welcome message for new users here[2] (I forget how it is implemented, as I am such an old user that I think I joined HN before it was implemented) that packages the rules in a slightly different format.

In other words, most of the time when I am downvoted here, what I ask myself is, "How could I have rewritten that comment to make it more clear or more persuasive," or sometimes, "Was that really a constructive addition to the discussion here?" I'm not generally spoiling for a fight or crushed in my self-esteem after being downvoted here. As far as I know, that happens to almost everyone here sooner or later. It sure has happened to me over the years

On my part, I downvote some comments, for reasons suggested in the welcome message, but I try to make sure that my upvotes predominate over my downvotes. And I don't keep an enemies list. If someone makes a thoughtful comment, they get an upvote, period, even if they disagreed strenuously with me just hours before. The idea here is to help good comments gain enough attention to promote thoughtful discussion in all good senses of the word "thoughtful." Maybe Hacker News is just plain different from most news discussion websites.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html)

<comment><USER11> _And I don 't keep an enemies list._

One thing that probably helps here is that HN doesn't use avatars and visually de-emphasises the username - if I don't specifically look for it I usually have no idea who I'm replying to.

<comment><USER12> I definitely notice that forums that have avatars have much higher rates of ego-driven commenting than forums that do not.

Parenthetically, I'd go even farther than HN has gone and make the reader navigate to another page to see the username.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm a math teacher and I saw a weird hivemind effect recently. A student was showing a proof, but I felt one of the steps seemed wrong (I wasn't sure). So I asked everyone else if it was right. They responded with a chorus of "yes" "of course" and a little laughing. Eventually the proof ended up showing something that was not true. So I went back to that step and again asked for confirmation. Again most of them agreed. I wrote the formula to be sure: log(A+B) = log(A) * log(B). Eventually one student with a different text book had looked it up and found it's wrong after all. How had most of the others been so confident that it was right? Surely they hadn't actually learnt it wrong. They must have been making their decision on some other factor, perhaps the fact that all their vocal classmates agreed.

At least they weren't giving negative feedback to the one who made the original mistake though. So I guess he won't continue to make worse mistakes as this article suggests.

<comment><USER14> The students were conforming. As this paper [1] explains, people -- especially young people -- will often answer incorrectly in order to gain social acceptance:

"...the group answered incorrectly on purpose; it appears that when we are unsure of how to perform a task or how to behave, we may take comfort in agreeing with a large number of other people."

[1] [http://www.personalityresearch.org/papers/lumbert.removed](http://www.personalityresearch.org/papers/lumbert.removed)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think the reason this behaviour disagrees with traditional ideas about negative reinforcement and punishment is because those theories were built on hierarchical relationships (someone's in charge and doles out conditioning action). If the person receiving the punishment accepts the right of the person doling it out to do so, even if they resent it, they will accept its validity more readily. Also, if they feel unjustly punished, they will focus their ire on the authority rather than the community as a whole. This kind of thing can easily be seen in forums where there is a hard line between moderators and moderated.

When people feel attacked by their whole community (which is what a slew of negative votes feels like), it seems like they'd be far more likely to lash out at that community as a whole, and that means throwing out increasingly antisocial posts and attacking people with downvotes themselves.

</comment><comment><USER16> I think the concept of being able to see your "points" at all is non- constructive for communication. Why should it matter to you if other people up or down vote your comments and submissions? So through a knee-jerk feedback mechanism you can best mold your future communication to fit with what will get you the most points?

If the purpose of commenting and submitting is not to amass the most "points" possible then they shouldn't be displayed.

<comment> aaron-lebo On that topic, I wonder how difficult it would be to make a bot which used machine learning to scan through comments to pick up phrases or words which were highly voted, then have it put together comments based on those.

I'm sure you could be very successful.

<comment><USER17> I can't find it right now, but there was a link a few months back that did some kind of text analysis for the most-"popular" HN users or so. Anybody else a clue what I'm thinking about?

<comment><USER18> Yes, the one that also rated their posts by emotion and other criteria? I can't find it either but you are not crazy, it did exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> _Not only do authors of negatively-evaluated content contribute more_

So empty vessels really do make the most noise.

 _That points to an obvious strategy for improving the quality of comments on any social network site. Clearly, providing negative feedback to "bad" users does not appear to be a good way of preventing undesired behaviour._

I'm not seeing such a strategy from the paper's findings. It suggests several ways to limit bad behavior, but since positive feedback doesn't seem to improve quality of comments or posting frequency, I'm getting the strong impression that the overall tone of an online community is set early on in its life, and while it can easily degrade over time there is not a whole lot you can do to improve it.

 _So how can unwanted behaviour be stopped? "Given that users who receive no feedback post less frequently, a potentially effective strategy could be to ignore undesired behaviour and provide no feedback at all," say Cheng and co._

This is pretty difficult to implement, though, since it only takes two people to start a flamewar. All I can think of is very proactive moderator pruning, which would a) become a full-time job and b) creates problems of its own as people start howling about censorship.

</comment><comment><USER20> This was posted last year.

Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7760857](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7760857)

</comment><comment><USER21> Although downvotes don't help provide feedback to the users, allowing them can provide an immense amount of feedback for the operators of the community.

You need a certain amount of positive feedback relative to negative feedback, and if you monitor that ratio, you can have a good pulse on the quality of your community. If you are not maintaining a high ratio of positive to negative feedback, you can take action to increase positive feedback in meaningful ways. You can also use provided negative feedback to tailor interactions. Someone downvotes a particular thread? Don't notify them of any future discussion on that thread if you otherwise would have, etc...

See: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_positivity_ratio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_positivity_ratio) In my opinion this ratio applies equally as well in social networks and online communities.

</comment><comment><USER22> I wonder if they looked at if you automatically hide replies to 0 or less score comments. Combine the downvote with the ignore.

</comment><comment><USER23> Online arguments tend to be long, degenerate, and quickly form opposing camps that will war in other threads too. I think that's (informally) very well known. And a down-vote is a potentially significant indicator that an argument is taking place.

But I think the authors are a little naive if they think the site-owners are not aware (and in some cases, counting on) this.

For many sites, it seems to be the arguments and battles that drive activity. As if to the site-owner, a (moderate) ding-dong battle is "increased engagement, even from the people who disliked the content" rather than something they necessarily want to stamp out.

</comment><comment><USER24> If only voting represented quality and usefulness. Unfortunately, it's most of the time emotional. Throw in conformity and political correctness, and you have a powerful tool serving both.

<comment><USER25> Slashdot's metamoderation system is a pretty good approach to preventing users from mis-using their upvotes and downvotes. (Unfortunately, Slashdot's comment moderation system is flawed in other ways, so the benefits of metamod are hard to evaluate objectively. Also, metamod probably won't help for any site where trolling is the dominant culture, which describes most "comment sections" you'll find on the Internet.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> > "We find that negative feedback leads to significant behavioural changes > that are detrimental to the community,"

I really hope the sites that have downvotes don't take this to heart. There are massive benefits that the authors completely overlooked.

It allows the community to rapidly bury garbage content, and because of this, the pool of potentially good content (with few upvotes) is much smaller and less daunting for the users to sift through, which allows _more_ good content to rise to the top.

</comment><comment><USER27> I've seen this in the "social network" of code reviews where I work. A "downvote", i.e. a negative comment, often has the opposite effect of the one intended by the reviewer. The code author will dig in their heels and over time contribute lower quality code. Alas, I don't have the luxury of simply ignoring lurking bugs.

</comment><comment><USER28> This was fascinating. One of the interesting challenges with feedback that I have observed is that often separating feedback on the comment/post/idea vs feedback on the author is hard to distinguish.

I have this thought that instead of 'up' or 'down' a less directed 'agree or disagree' might be less painful on the poster.

</comment><comment><USER29> I don't buy it. They just found a correlation that users with a downvoted comment happened to also make other bad comments (what a surprise.) They didn't actually downvote or upvote comments on randomly picked users and see what effect it had, which would have been way easier than the machine learning approach they used.

</comment><comment><USER30> Zuckerberg seems to know something, dislike is most requested and ignored feature on Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER31> It is as strange to read Burrhus Skinner as it would be to read John Tolkien. B.F. Skinner has always been so stylized.

</comment><comment><USER32> Just remove voting altogether and let the strength of the argument/statement prevail rather than allow a mechanism that rewards groupthink.

<comment><USER15> Unfortunately, that just leads to 5 pages of "FIRST!!!" before you get real content.

<comment><USER33> Forums with good moderation solve those problems. A nice example is rpg.net.

Traditional linear forums are still the best format for in-depth discussion, IMO. Threads actually stick around for more than a day or two. Just compare gamedev.net to /r/gamedev.

<comment><USER34> It felt like there was an inflection point around '96 or '97 when Usenet really dried up and web-based forums became the most common way to discuss things on the Internet. I blamed it on Slashdot at the time but I think it was inevitable as more and more people got on the Internet.

I really feel like we lost something though. Newsreaders provided a much better way to engage in the kinds of conversations that people have on place like HN or even Reddit. To this day I don't know of any web forums that offer the conveniences of newsreaders like tin or slrn. I miss killfiles (and plonking!) and really, really, really well-maintained FAQs on just about anything.

I'm not sure how much of my Usenet nostalgia is just remembering the good stuff. It may not have been as great as I remember, but it sure seemed like it at the time. I learned so much from it, from so many people in so many different newsgroups. Maybe that's what places like HN are to larval hackers today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Voting is basically used as a form of censorship in almost every community on the Internet, including HN. If you go against the grain, you will be removed and ignored.

I guess it's a mirror of real life: people generally only want to be around people that think like they do.</comment>


[video] China's Got Talent Winner: Feet Pianist - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7CeoUZbW3Y http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-11106935
This boy won China's Got Talent Finally about 30 minutes ago.
2 quotes stood out to me, loosely translated from my memory:
"Nobody told me I have to play piano with hands" "Die quickly or live spectacularly"
Props to him. <comment><AUTHOR> <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-11106935>

This boy won China's Got Talent Finally about 30 minutes ago.

2 quotes stood out to me, loosely translated from my memory:

"Nobody told me I have to play piano with hands" "Die quickly or live spectacularly"

Props to him.</comment>


Ask HN: What is your personal Murphy Law tech quote? - <AUTHOR> It is simple to make something complex, and complex to make it simple. <comment><USER2> If a given component is poka-yoke and can only be installed one way, some manager will find a way to force it in upside down during a customer demo while swearing point-blank that they did it right and the line-operator was wrong to scrap off the now-ruined part.</comment>


Andreessen Horowitz's Benedict Evans on privacy and encryption - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/BenedictEvans/status/665965554142806016 <comment><USER2> Gut reaction: arggh

Slightly-less gut-based reaction: everyone has a different comfort zone on the privacy/security spectrum. I respect that. However, Twitter is not the medium to discuss where society's zone should be, nor will a debate be productive when the starting premise is "you have to prove to me you're right" on a contentious issue. Especially if the initial justification is relatively raw and emotionally-charged.

There may be an argument that encryption could have prevented the attacks (unsubstantiated), but it was definitely not the only means. For example, what about cameras or armed soldiers everywhere?

Encryption also did not cause the attacks, as far as I know. Nor did it play a deadly part in the actual attack. It seems a strange place to start dissecting the problem.</comment>