Asian and African super apps are following the playbook WeChat originated - <AUTHOR> https://afridigest.substack.com/p/why-super-apps-are-proliferating <comment><USER4> In China:

\- There is no single Play Store equivalent, so the barrier to make people install a relatively unknown app is higher.

\- Phones do not come with Google Services Framework, so the barrier to develop a networked app is higher.

\- Just like everywhere else, people will use whatever is available because a suboptimal solution is still better than opting out completely from the benefits these solutions bring.

I don't think in China specifically it's about low-end devices or data cost at all. South East Asia - perhaps, but all in all the situation reflects the structure of the economies (the prevalence of monopolistic conglomerates with a finger in every pie).

Most of the time the most widespread solution is far from excellent because it only has to be better than the competition. Even more so when competition is limited by entry barriers to the point it hardly exists. So while the article is a good summary of the situation, it ends up being a bit like wondering why people use Windows.

Android is already one abstraction layer on top of another, there is no intrinsic technological benefit of adding yet another one OS-like super app on top of it, or at the very least any such benefits remain to be demonstrated.

<comment><USER5> > \- Phones do not come with Google Services Framework, so the barrier to > develop a networked app is higher.

Looking at f-droid: hobbyists seem to do just fine without google play services. I feel like this gives you a business advantage rather than a technical one.

<comment><USER6> f-droid is a horrible experience though IMO.

I go searching and I can't figure out what some of the apps even "DO", others are "Here is this app, you need to install these other things too to make it work, also it only works with X, so maybe it will work for you I duno....".

Now I get why it is the way it is, I don't expect much more from folks putting out software for me like that, but it's a terrible user experience.

<comment><USER7> Conversely I always look on FDroid first because for me the quality of apps is higher and the level of shady BS is minimal. I only resort to the Play store if there's no open source alternative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Super apps" are just bundlers.

This is the history of software, and other businesses as well.

From Jim Barksdale:

"Gentlemen, there's only two ways I know of to make money: bundling and unbundling." And said, "We've got an airplane to catch." And we left, and Peter Currie, walking out the door, said, "Those people are looking at you, Barksdale, like you're crazy. What did you just say?" And I said, "Well, best I can tell, most people spend half their time adding and other people spend half their time subtracting, so that's what works out."

[https://hbr.org/2014/06/how-to-succeed-in-business-by- bundli...](https://hbr.org/2014/06/how-to-succeed-in-business-by-bundling-and- unbundling)

Here is another presentation on "super apps" by Connie Chan of A16Z:

[https://a16z.com/2020/01/23/four-trends-in-consumer- tech/](https://a16z.com/2020/01/23/four-trends-in-consumer-tech/)

Of course the largest "super app" is the operating system as it constantly offers new APIs etc.. and devours more features by point solutions leading to terms like being Sherlocked:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_\(software\))

<comment><USER9> I feel like OS as a superapp is an underappreciated concept.

Like the idea that fish don't see water. On one side we have WeChat, but on the other side we have IOS, Android, and the browser.

And we're free... to install approved apps from approved sources. Free... to view stuff inside a browser window that works the way the platform owners want it to.

What if we could unbundle the operating system? I wonder what innovations we're missing out on?

For example, true peer to peer networking would be nice. I don't think we'll ever see it from Apple or Google. It's a hard problem sure, but it's also not in anyone's interest to allow people to communicate directly without platforms intermediating.

<comment><USER10> People don't WANT an unbundled OS. What does unbundled from the browser even mean? I can imagine my mom on day one with an unbundled OS ... "Well, first you need to download a browser, I recommended firefox but you have sooo many choices now that they are unbundled! What are those choices? Well, if you go www.browserchoicesexplaned.unbundled you'll ... oh, wait"

<comment><USER11> > What does unbundled from the browser even mean?

I'm guessing it would mean being able to install alternative browsers. Which is possible on most OS's, but not iOS.

<comment><USER10> That's a pretty useless definition of "bundling" though, since it only applies to ONE popular OS and, you CAN install alternative browsers (I use firefox), developers just have to use the iOS browser stack. You can share bookmarks, etc.etc. with their non iOS installations on other platforms.

<comment><USER11> It's a pretty important one. iOS's lack of support is the main thing that is preventing "PWA"'s from taking off. They're already pretty viable on Android. It's the iOS's browser stack that prevents them from being viable cross- platform, and locks everyone into the the 30% Apple tax.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is not a good road for anybody to go down. It's been done before. My primary example is the behemoth that is CA technologies: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CA_Technologies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CA_Technologies)

They started acquiring software in the 1980's. Software that would be reasonably good would go to CA to die an awful and slow death.

They're still around. They don't own a single piece of groundbreaking software, but they still make money.

<comment><USER13> Haha. History of technology is littered with anecdotes like this.

Almost all big tech companies have huge graveyards of acquired software companies, some for the products, some for tech, some for people.

The targets are acquired, in-digested and slowly die. What is left is a lot of millionaires / billionaires who move on to other big things, a lot of half- baked tech / feature stuff, a lot of wasted potential.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> While the trend is obvious, these types of super apps are neither desirable nor user centric.

They are hot-spots of monopolies, censorship and are front-line enemies for democracies. Especially if they include social / news / events / groups stuff.

I wish, there are more apps, bound together with integration mechanisms (loosely coupled, high cohesion) rather than one super app.

Unfortunately, the whole world is moving towards super apps. Google / Amazon / FB / Apple are all doing Commerce / Banking / Products / Entertainment / Internet Services / Cloud Computing / News & Information / Social at the same time. (There may be some exceptions, like Apple not doing commerce like Amazon)

I guess business moves in circles. There was consolidation in times of Standard Oil (or steel, I don't recall), where controlling everything in every vertical is the game, then business moved towards a more distributed services type structures, then we are witnessing another round of consolidation.

Across all sectors, this is more pronounced in US, a handful of companies directly / indirectly control huge aspects of an individuals life.

Unfortunate.

<comment><USER14> I'm in India now, and I don't see these super apps as monopolies , at least not yet. You can pay bills, recharge your mobiles and book tickets among other things using a bunch of super apps without any exclusive lock-in. The government did one good thing making a commoditized payment API enabling seamless transfer of money between services. Thus the apps compete on UX and fees and it really shows. Getting stuff done through my mobile in India is an order of magnitude less painful than anything I experienced in the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> In India, there isn't a super app just yet although there are multiple players trying to build it. Paytm: Alibaba has invested PhonePe: Acquired by Walmart (along with Flipkart)

Google Pay has opened its platform to select companies to offer their services: food ordering, investment products etc

Facebook invested in India's largest telecom network Jio (owned by Reliance which is India's largest listed company) and there are indications that they are building a super app with OTT, e-commerce, grocery etc as offerings.

</comment><comment><USER16> My understanding is that people want integration: being able to use their favorite platforms so that it's easy to share and connect data between them, and what the user already has on their device(s).

As I understand it, nowadays OS shells do provide something like that, by having a smart indexing and search tool available. A "super app" seems to be another way to provide that consolidation, but is there more to it than indexing?

A user is basically having a chat with their device. The UI is the language available for the user to form queries. The more flexible the language, the more the user may express complex queries. But users don't really want to learn a complex language, they want something either "intuitive" or matching their interests from the beginning (ie, opening up the search possibilities, or narrowing down to a usable set of targets). Because intuition is only made from analogies of accumulated knowledge, the former can only be constructed by having the app capable of understanding (possibly a subset of) the user language, which leads to Siri and the like. The later by reducing the scope of the super app to a template of interests, which could either fixed (mainstream topics), or determined from a set of existing models by having the user go through a questionnaire at app install to narrow down their interests to a manageable subset.

I think that for now the key factors are:

(1) consolidation of information, because the user doesn't want to jump through each of their accounts or data sources to find what their looking for.

(2) automatic connection of different services (banking, online markets, and perhaps many other use cases); this is only relevant for services which are not equipped with a protocol to deal with a given form of connectivity. Perhaps this is a generalization of (1).

(3) social interaction and controlled sharing of data

(4) security

Ultimately, the UI would have to become some sort of programming language to really be able to fulfill all of the users wishes, but natural languages are a poor fit for this task, and because of this the feature set of these apps will always be limited, unless somehow Siri and al learn to ask the user to be more precise when there are ambiguities (not unlike the dialogue that exists between a programmer and a compiler). Also, speaking to your app is not really a secure way of interacting with it, unless you're alone when doing it, and you never leave your device.

<comment><USER16> Perhaps a few precisions:

I don't claim to be capable of producing the software that is discussed, I'm merely stating my opinion on the topic. Most likely my view on this is skewed and not deep enough to be qualified as insightful. I feel that the work done on all these applications are already quite a feat, but I also remember seeing hard critics about Siri, Cortana and these solutions when they are quite difficult to get to the level they've reached. Yet, I also think that there is still a long way until they really become good assistants. The other way I discussed - which is these super apps - in my opinion require quite a bit of customizability to get out of the dashboard trench, but since I don't believe to have an accurate view of what they are capable of these days, you probably want to take all of that with a large grain of salt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> My Asian company have this kind of super apps as highlight product, the "hub" of everything imaginable. I hates it with the bottom of my heart.

I think super apps can be good, useful and fast if made well, but most of the time it's slow, bloat, messy, cluttered, etc. - seriously, no amount of negative adjectives can describe this kind of abomination of app. I feel bad for our users - our exe seems to like it though...I guess they never use it.

</comment><comment><USER18> It's simple.. You have automatic: authentication, payments, linked messages and everything. AND you don't have to download anything.

So all the usual crap is available, and you can simply use the application part of an app.

luckily apple will also provide app-snippets.. Unfortunately, authentication is still not fixed

</comment><comment><USER19> This immediately made me think of the Unix philosophy (Do one thing well and provide the right way for other tools to connect to the output or pipe in input) vs the Emacs way (Operating System within an Operating System).

If we frame it this way, I think it helps us understand better the pros and cons of each, and importantly that they appeal to different type of folks depending on their use cases.

For e.g., one of the main appeals of Emacs is that it's easier to combine functionalities across mini-tools within Emacs than in Vim. However, it also means that when building one of these mini-tools, you have to have awareness of all other mini-tools in the system, and integrate with them properly, which makes the cost of building much higher vs Vim.

</comment><comment><USER20> One crucial difference between China and other western countries is that, China government won't try to break WeChat up in the name of antitrust or anti monopoly.

<comment><USER21> Is that because China's government has direct access to the data in WeChat?

I mean the US government has that as well with Google and FB and co (see Snowden revelations), but apparently not as much as they'd like.

<comment><USER22> What part of the Snowden revelations showed that the US government has "direct access" to Facebook and Google data?

<comment><USER23> >The NSA's top-secret black budget, obtained from Snowden by The Washington Post, exposed the successes and failures of the 16 spy agencies comprising the U.S. intelligence community, and revealed that the NSA was paying U.S. private tech companies for clandestine access to their communications networks.

>The NSA was shown to be secretly accessing Yahoo and Google data centers to collect information from hundreds of millions of account holders worldwide by tapping undersea cables using the MUSCULAR surveillance program.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Revelations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Revelations)

<comment><USER22> These two quotes refer to different things. The first refers to PRISM, which gives the US a privileged position as it involves companies bound by US law, however, all participating companies denied it involved direct access to their data. See the quotes in the wiki article [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#I...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_\(surveillance_program\)#Initial_public_statements)

From the slides; it appears it works by the agencies (via the FBI DITU) sending the cooperating company a selector (e.g. email address), and then those companies sending back the actual material (e.g. emails);

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_\(surveillance_program\)#/media/File:Prism- slide-7.jpg)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_\(surveillance_program\)#/media/File:Prism- slide-6.jpg)

From transparency reports it is clear that the receiving company can see how many selectors are coming in and how much data is being "exfiltrated" under this scheme (and it is roughly 10,000 targets).

\---

The second quote refers to a program of passive surveillance which - <USER2> probably the most underhand thing revealed by Snowden - did not rely on any privileged position of the US government, and could have been pulled off by an adversarial nation as well. It didn't rely on the cooperation of those companies, and in fact they were outraged by it and implemented encryption in an attempt to thwart it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It just goes to show you that phone makers are unlikely to be the best OS makers.

Take this trend forward, a phone only has one app that a user clicks on to 'open' a new and better 'operating system' that better suits their needs.

Each of these app-'OSs' will be unavailable to other developers, so it becomes an arms race.

The convenient thing for China is that the CCP picks which companies will be winners and will therefore have the capital backing to compete and make the best app-OSs to get a majority of users to buy in to. They can also build in the required back doors to keep their population from getting any funny ideas.

</comment><comment><USER25> The description of "shake" is something that I would expect to have "in the West" as well, by now, but still... nothing. Connecting to someone's online identity when meeting or soon afterward is still somewhat awkward - <USER3> rely on old-school phone numbers, which are long and error-prone, or on names and usernames you can misspell.

I get that it's hard to do this while respecting the more privacy-oriented sensibilities "we" have, but surely it's not impossible. Is there anything I'm missing, like some cool app that teenagers use...? LinkedIn, for example, should absolutely add it.

<comment><USER10> "Shake"? You mean "bump" don't you? This has been tried numerous times before ...

[https://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/01/23/5-mobile-apps-that- co...](https://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/01/23/5-mobile-apps-that-could-kill- business-cards/)

<comment><USER25> Bump had bootstrapping problems (if I have it but you don't, it's useless), and it was also not particularly reliable at the time because of hardware quality.

To be clear: I don't think this sort of thing alone is enough to bootstrap on its own in a market with established social networks, but I don't understand why such social networks don't offer it as a feature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I live in Mexico and recently discovered Rappi. It has delivery from the pharmacy, AND restaurant delivery, AND grocery delivery. And live events (which I don't know how that works). And some other stuff that is not available in this area.

I think I tried to get Instacart to work before and I don't think they have it here. So when I found out that the app which I already entered my credit card into for ordering take-out has grocery delivery also, I was pretty happy.

But not having to enter my credit card or do a verification again is pretty convenient. And like I said a lot of US apps aren't available here. So I think Rappi is great. When it works.

I mean, just to clarify Rappi runs like a piece of shit on my phone, sometimes completely freezes, sometimes does not deliver important chat messages, does not seem to have tracking for users, has few restaurants compared to Uber Eats, and the grocery inventory seems to be totally out of date.

However, it's the only one I know of for grocery delivery. And I know that Uber Eats is screwing over restaurants so I would love to order through Rappi. If they can make it slightly less shitty then I would be happy to use it more. It's sort of like an Amazon for delivery.

</comment><comment><USER27> It's interesting that they say there's "nothing like it in the rest of the world" while KakaoTalk has incredible usage numbers in Korea, with a similar number of capabilities. You can do banking, ride hailing, messaging, and even more... plus the characters from stickers/emoji are cultural icons in and of themselves.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, author here.

I'm a fan of KakaoTalk and I specifically include them in the visual: [https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q...](https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F41c6ff46-c8bb-467b-9f6d-446ffb6a9ba6_1012x506.png)

I think you're referring to where I quoted Ben Thompson, but he was speaking in a specific sense: that there it nothing like WeChat in the sense of being an OS for an entire nation (not simply being a super app). More context around the quote is here: [https://stratechery.com/2017/apples-china- problem/](https://stratechery.com/2017/apples-china-problem/)

The quote is indeed a bit dated though, I'll grant that -- is KakaoTalk that dominant in SK now?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> super apps == late 80's, early 90's walled gardens (AOL, compuserve, GEnie, et al). It will be interesting to see if the same forces that led to the downfall of walled gardens also effect super apps. I think two key variables are the 1) diversity of user tasks / needs 2) amount of interop needed between services.

If it's a large number of tasks with low interop needed, I think these will give way to unbundled open web / app marketplace style platforms. If users in these markets have concentrated needs with high degree of interoperability between them, then I think they will persist.

</comment><comment><USER29> I created [https://stockevents.app](https://stockevents.app) a few months ago and it's currently undergoing a similar development.

It started of as an app for one use case (events around stocks), but due to customer requests I'm expanding the use cases to many more areas around finance. So I guess in some time it will be a super app for finance.

With each use case I added so far, the conversion rate, in app time and downloads increased.

The key to it all it to keep it simple I guess and help users configure the app so that they only see what they want.

<comment><USER30> Congratulation for your new venture.

<comment><USER29> Thank you. It's a lot of fun developing this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Great write-up of WeChat's history here.

So Tencent (now as big as Facebook market-cap wise) owes a large part of its success to an acquihire? Impressive.

</comment><comment><USER32> WeChat feels like an odd thing to try to copy, because you can't copy the Chinese government. They directly keep out foreign competition like Facebook, and it's difficult for any small company to deal with the censorship issue.

You're much more likely to have some small scrappy startup steal all your users elsewhere.

<comment><USER33> Good god in every other thread there is the standard propaganda about the "CCP".

> They directly keep out foreign competition like Facebook

As opposed to huwaei that's welcomed with open arms in the US? Lots of countries keep out foreign competition to protect their own industries. It's the smart thing to do. We actually pioneered it in the 1800s.

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

So you can copy the chinese government. Not only that, the chinese government copied the US, germany, japan, korea, etc. Protectionism is how every major economic power became a major economic power. Airbus wouldn't exist if it weren't for EU copying "the chinese government".

<comment><USER32> I never stated an opinion on the policies, and you don't seem to be saying I'm wrong. I have to wonder how anyone can say anything positive about China, if even accurate descriptions are "propaganda".

If you actually want to help China's reputation I'd also advise skipping the whataboutism.

<comment><USER33> > I never stated an opinion on the policies, and you don't seem to be saying > I'm wrong.

I'm clearly saying you are wrong with examples and sources.

> I have to wonder how anyone can say anything positive about China, if even > accurate descriptions are "propaganda".

You can say positive and negative things about every country. China isn't an exception regardless of your agenda. It's bizarre that anyone would even write "wonder how anyone can say anything positive about China".

Well how about this? Their economic growth? Their impressive poverty reduction? Their infrastructure build-up?

> If you actually want to help China's reputation I'd also advise skipping the > whataboutism.

It's not "whataboutism" to directly refute your claim : "because you can't copy the Chinese government." \+ "They directly keep out foreign competition like Facebook".

You certainly see the difference between whataboutism and a refutation with examples right?

And I'm not here to help China's reputation because I don't have an agenda like you. I'm here to refute nonsense and bullshit propaganda.

<comment><USER32> What is my agenda? I'm genuinely curious. Tell me, based on my original post, what I'm in favor of, or against.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Hey it worked for AOL ... for a while

<comment><USER35> Any theory on why it works for a while?

<comment><USER36> It's a pendulum. It swings.

A single super-platform has the benefit of integrating several functions in a nice package. But while accumulating more functionality at some point it becomes too bloated, innovation slows down, it's a big ball of mud able to do everything, but also bad at everything, at which point it is outpaced left and right by small speedboats specialized on single functions, highly innovative, but with less tight coupling between them. This leaves more burden on the user to integrate them, but at some point the qualitative difference between the big ball of mud and the individual tools is so big that users will gladly do this integrative work if they can then enjoy better solutions...until the individually-constructed "big ball of muds" made out of haphazard integrations of many individual solutions become convoluted enough again for someone to "professionally" integrate some of these functions at the current level of quality into a new "super platform", and the cycle starts anew.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Isn't a large part of the success of duplicate apps in china due to the great firewall preventing outside tech from suceeding in chinese markets? Baidu is just a worse google, alibaba is a worse amazon, list goes on, I'm sure I could find ten more.

<comment><USER37> To the people anonymously downvoting, that was a question. Is it or is it not? Are we going to discuss or are we just going to downvote anyone behind the security of our screens just because I'm saying something you don't like? The great firewall exists. China has a track record of duping products, not upholding copyrights, and manipulating their markets. They are trying to passive aggressively win an economic and cyber war, and if you want to pretend it's not the case then and pretend we are all playing by fair rules and continue to preach fairness when there is clearly a bad actor and continue to let the bad actor get away with it then we will all be worse off for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is the normal business model in much of Asia. Large, tightly knit, near monopolistic, corporations operate over many sectors. Classic example are Zaibatsu of old and Keiretsu of today. Is it any surprise that the same business approach is used in software?

</comment><comment><USER39> I find it fascinating how we can sort of up-scale things but never without adding something weird that no one wants. Often there are competing formulas that have us compare the drawbacks rather than the qualities. (The funniest to me are monasteries running some kind of business. They have a management level above the suits (so to speak) made up out of monks who care only about quality.)

Something that increasingly puzzles me are the implications of having links in a chain that either do not care if things work or not or are able to pressure the rest into obedience though lack of skin in the game. They may seem the least significant but have the most leverage.

</comment><comment><USER40> I still believe it's because of an original intuition everybody has : more is better. It actually takes a lot of time and (collective) experience to accept that 'less' is actually more. "emerging" markets will probably get there too, with a bit of time.

<comment><USER41> More is evidently better. Which new iPhone or XLaptop gives you less? Or focuses?

"Less is more" is just talk of company that want to not grow into monopolies and I support that view. But users do not.

Outside of software each global conglomerate is the exact opposite of "less is more".

<comment><USER42> Chromebooks are less than comparable laptops that came before it. iPads are less than laptops that came before it. The iPhone SE 2 is less than the iPhone 11 which came before it. The MacBook was less than the MacBook Air which came before it which is less than the MacBook Pro that came before it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> This also makes me feel like there is not much innovation happening, but rather just copycat playbooks in different marketplaces or niches. It's a missed opportunity because different markets can inspire different solutions or focus on different problems, but not if the cheapest and lowest risk path is to do the same thing everyone else has.

</comment><comment><USER44> So, a tangential query: have we already lost Africa to the Asian sphere of influence?</comment>


Show HN: Digest.AI – AI-automated digest for your team's Slack - <AUTHOR> https://digest.ai/?ref=hackernews <comment><AUTHOR> In the past year since Slack Digest has launched, we've helped many teams and communities getting more productive and saving lots of time through having important messages picked out for them every day.

In the last few months, we have learnt new machine learning techniques, applied new algorithms, redesigned the system architecture, and restructured all of the software components to make the overall system more robust, more accurate, and easier to use.

Rebuilt from ground up and changed name to Digest.AI :D

</comment><comment><USER2> Any other platf integration in the future?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thinking about Workplace by Facebook, Hipchat, Salesforce. Let's see which is easier and more interesting!</comment></comment>


Speedy Neural Networks for Smart Auto-Cropping of Images - <AUTHOR> https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastructure/2018/Smart-Auto-Cropping-of-Images.html <comment><USER2> It won't be long and you'll be stringing together a bunch of Neural Networks with some glue in the middle where each of the nets performs some task.

One net to crop the image, one net to recognize it, another to synthesize the words to describe it and presto: a new application.

<comment><USER3> This is just a data pipeline . Multiple tools support what you describe . Or you could do this as a batch job / use spark to perform the task as a stream.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cool! For any javascript devs this looks like a capable library that attempts the same functionality and looks like it has pretty impressive results: [https://github.com/jwagner/smartcrop.js/](https://github.com/jwagner/smartcrop.js/)

<comment><USER5> Thank you for that share, this is something I want after having read the article for a project I'm just starting on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Cool tech, but seems like over-engineering. As far as I can tell, Facebook just crops to the center and top of images which works pretty well. Meanwhile Twitter has spent years cropping images awkwardly based on trying to find the relevant regions, and now is doubling down on trying to find relevant regions...

</comment><comment><USER7> This is really cool! The SmartyCrop service does a really good job of intelligently croppping images as well. [https://smartycrop.com/](https://smartycrop.com/)

</comment><comment><USER8> I have seem good results in automatic cropping by just giving a higher value to areas of high entropy and to faces. I wonder how this compares.

<comment><USER9> They specifically mention that their previous face detection-based algorithm didn't work as well as they'd like. E.g. for animal faces.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> so is there some open source library or something that I can try, or just a paper announcing this new feature at twitter?

</comment><comment><USER11> Is that why all my pasted images show up as blank?</comment>


A Raspberry Pi (VAX) Cluster - <AUTHOR> http://www.designspark.com/content/raspberry-pi-vax-cluster

<comment><USER2> OT, but I'm getting desperate to find a home for the VAX described below before my dad scraps it. He purchased it several years ago from a man in north Georgia who said it spend the 1990s answering the phone at a utility company. My dad kept it in his classroom while he was a high school technology teacher, but now that he's no longer teaching it's gathering dust on his carport.

There's a Vaxstation 3, DECvoice unit, two hard drives, and a tape drive in an enclosure on wheels. There's also a VT420 terminal. Pictures are at [http://www.flickr.com/photos/puerexmachina/sets/721576229810...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/puerexmachina/sets/72157622981044137/)

If anyone is interested, or could put me in touch with VAX collectors, please email me. My contact info is in my profile.

<comment><USER3> Reblogging to a place that might help find a good home for your VAX.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ahh the memories.

At my first proper job, we had a 8 node VAXCluster running Oracle 7, VB3 clients on Windows 3.1 on Compaq and DEC machines, Motif clients on Solaris 2.4 on SparcStations :)

The VAXCluster had 100% uptime for 4 years when they killed it and replaced it with Alpha machines.

<comment> excuse-me I remember DEC sending out a fix for the "day 10000 bug".

Some system counter would wrap around if it was up for 10000days (27years)! Compare it with the Windows95 49day bug that nobody ever reached.

<comment><USER5> Some DEC code for OpenVMS had been converting variables containing times using the Unix epoch date to and from the OpenVMS-format dates* using the LIB$ LIBRTL calls, and the LIBRTL calls had a documented format limit of 9,999 days.

When 19-May-1997 rolled around, you needed to use a different conversion sequence for your Unix epoch dates, or to have applied the then-available LIBRTL 10K Delta Time patch that extended the permitted day field.

More to the OP's point, the longest continuous OpenVMS server uptime I'm aware of was around seventeen years.

The downside of that being seventeen years of unapplied patches.

*VMS uses 17-Nov-1958 as its base date; that date was chosen to match the date commonly used by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory

<comment> excuse-me Actually "1858" - the base for Modified Julian Days.

Although ironically MJD was invented in around 1958 to cope with a computer limitation.

vms is also famous for having one of the system time settings specified in "micro-fortnights"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Heh, if you'd like a real MicroVAX 3900 to play with I can hook you up :-) (or 3100, or 3200, or 3300, or 3400, or 4000/200 or 4000/400 or you get the picture)

</comment><comment><USER7> Totally sour grapes, but I sure get tweaked when I see people doing cool things with toys that are ostensibly available but that I can't buy yet because...

<comment><USER8> Its not just you. I haven't gotten mine yet either. Should be coming along now from Newark any day now...

Its funny. My jaw dropped initially, not because of the cool software hack, but because here was a fellow that had managed to get _two_ raspis!

<comment><USER9> You too. Mine's been back-ordered since I ordered it. Which was within the first 24 hours after the launch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "I love it when a (geeky) plan comes together!"

<comment> excuse-me And the sheer unadulterated wonderful pointlessness of it !</comment></comment>


Calepin is shutting its doors in 90 days - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/#!/calepinapp/status/192335906479415296

<comment><USER2> I haven't heard of this service, and I'm not sure if there's any wonder why:

They state "Because Calepin Does All the Hard Work for You," but:

* Calepin currently has no plans for custom themes.

* Every post must have "Date" and "Title" in the metadata, formatted correctly.

* Calepin also skips ANYTHING that is not UTF-8 encoded.

* In the future, expect Calepin to become a paid service with a free trial or limited account.

One of the biggest things I've ever learned from my colleagues is that you need to know who you're serving. It seems like Calepin is targeting people who:

1\. Know enough about markup to use markdown.

2\. Care enough about their content to want full control over it.

3\. Know what the heck UTF-8 is.

4\. Understand what 'metadata' is.

There are a lot of people out there like that. Unfortunately, they're all smart enough to whip up something like Calepin within a half an hour or so, or longer if they want customization (which Calepin doesn't provide).

In short, there's absolutely no market for this tool.

</comment><comment><USER3> An interesting concept and a nice design. But, I don't see a business here.</comment>


Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance? - <AUTHOR> As a software engineer, I want to learn more about business administration and finance. I want to able to level with CEOs, CFos or other managerial positions. <comment><USER2> The onramp for finance is accounting. There is no other right answer. This is also essential for general business administration.

Accounting is a huge topic; being able to read financial statements is a good, first tangible exercise.

Best book I have found for this is Thomas Ittelson, Financial Statements.

Using double-entry accounting methods for your own financials with a tool like Beancount is super helpful from a practice perspective, and appealing to an engineering mind:

[http://furius.ca/beancount/](http://furius.ca/beancount/)

"Being able to level with CEOs and CFOs" is less about administering a business and more about being able to communicate with executives. This is essential for all technical people, whether or not they have management or executive ambitions themselves.

This also is a huge topic, I would suggest starting with concise definitions of what managing is, and what being an executive is about. When you understand the concerns of the people you are communicating with, you can do so more efficiently and effectively.

From a mindset perspective I would start with Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive, and since everyone is their own CEO, his book Managing Oneself is very valuable.

These are all classic texts, still valuable and relevant, as these topics are as old as the hills.

Good luck.

<comment><USER3> I would like to strongly second your recommendations regarding accounting. Double entry accounting is the root of all finance. If you understand it well enough to keep accurate accounts of your personal finances (credit cards, 401k, salary, pre/post-tax expenses, etc), you understand it well enough to fumble through a financial statement. I'd plug GNU Ledger, but really any double entry accounting software is good to get started.

<comment><USER4> What's the opinion about gnucash?

<comment><USER3> Big caveat that I've never seriously tried using it, but my perspective is that GNUCash and GNU Ledger have different target audiences. The way I think of it is (Cash is to LibreOffice) as (Ledger is to some combination of Vim and SQLite).

Cash aims to replace non-free accounting software, Ledger is both a file format and a general purpose tool for parsing and transforming that file format, that is designed for accounting but can be used to drive a wide variety of applications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I just finished an MBA in June. A few thoughts outside of what's been mentioned here already:

If your company is publicly traded, learn about the variety of SEC filings that most C-level executives are responsible for. In particular, learn how to parse the footnotes of 10K/S1 filings — an income statement might be 1-2 pages but the footnotes are often 30+ pages. The interesting choices a company makes are often in the footnotes. For example, the related party transaction for WeWork's "We" trademark that everyone was up in arms about appears on page 199 of the filing.

Finance is about cashflows. GAAP accounting is about subjectively spreading costs across periods. The two are often at odds. Learning to navigate both and knowing which your audience cares about is critical. You often need years of context about a business to be able to make contributions on this front.

<comment><USER6> Just don't call them footnotes if anyone finance-y is around ;)

<comment><USER7> Why do you say that?

<comment><USER6> Nobody calls them that in practice so I'd avoid it if trying to sound knowledgable. They're just called notes.

Its also quite common for FS to have actual footnotes (ie in bottom margin of page) in addition to notes.

<comment><USER7> In my experience, I hear and see "notes" and "footnotes" used interchangeably when referring to financial statement notes. I've also not heard anyone react negatively to someone using footnotes instead of notes. Have you run into many people who insist on using only "notes"?

For reference, I've worked in finance for several years (investment banking and as a professional public markets investor [hedge fund]), and I also have a PhD with a focus on capital markets disclosure.

A quick search finds many examples where "footnotes" is used by the SEC [1], the FASB [2, 3, 4], the CFA Institute [5, 6], KPMG [7], and Investopedia [8], to name a few. I also saw several papers in both The Journal of Finance and The Accounting Review that use the term "footnotes".

[1] [https://www.sec.gov/reportspubs/investor- publications/invest...](https://www.sec.gov/reportspubs/investor- publications/investorpubsbegfinstmtguidehtm.html) [2] [https://www.fasb.org/jsp/FASB/Page/SectionPage&cid=117616858...](https://www.fasb.org/jsp/FASB/Page/SectionPage&cid=1176168589034) [3] [https://www.fasb.org/jsp/FASB/Page/SectionPage&cid=117616372...](https://www.fasb.org/jsp/FASB/Page/SectionPage&cid=1176163728733) [4] [https://www.fasb.org/resources/ccurl/599/128/ASU%202014-15.p...](https://www.fasb.org/resources/ccurl/599/128/ASU%202014-15.pdf) [5] [https://www.cfainstitute.org/en/membership/professional- deve...](https://www.cfainstitute.org/en/membership/professional- development/refresher-readings/2020/introduction-financial-statement-analysis) [6] [https://www.cfainstitute.org/-/media/documents/support/progr...](https://www.cfainstitute.org/-/media/documents/support/programs/cfa/2019-L1V3R26-footnotes.pdf) [7] [https://www.scribd.com/document/335028195/Disclosure- Overloa...](https://www.scribd.com/document/335028195/Disclosure-Overload- Complexity) [8] [https://www.investopedia.com/articles/02/050102.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/articles/02/050102.asp)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Software engineer with an MBA here.

I didn't have a bachelor's degree, got into coding as a hobby and turned it into a career. I needed a degree to put on my CV. All the hard problems I'd encountered weren't in the technology (99.9% of business coding is simple), so learning more CS wasn't actually going to help that much. So I took an MBA (they accepted my board experience as good enough to not require a bachelor's, with some hoop-jumping).

The MBA itself wasn't that instructive. The Leadership unit was the highlight. Knowing how to read a balance sheet and understand Corporate Finance was interesting. The Entrepreneurship unit was farcical - the first step was always to create a 40-page business plan and then consult a lawyer about IP. At the time I was getting heavily involved in the startup scene, and the differences between what I was learning at Uni and learning from actual entrepreneurs were huge. The rest of it was OK, not great, not bad. Certainly not difficult.

Having an MBA is useful. It has landed me interesting jobs. It does act to dismiss any "but he's just a code monkey" arguments. It looks great on my bio when part of a startup team. The leadership training has been great when managing people.

But it doesn't stop the bias against people who build things. I still get regularly sidelined in meetings in preference to sales and marketing people. I still find it hard to argue my case even with the correct finance terminology. It's annoying, and it was one of the things I hoped the MBA would fix. Apparently not.

<comment><USER9> Where did you get your MBA?

<comment><USER8> Curtin Uni in Perth, Australia. It was (briefly) one of the top 100 MBA courses in the world, though apparently they gamed the system to get that, and there was some controversy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can't recommend How Finance Works by Mihir Desai enough.

There are a few cool things about it:

1\. You get the feeling that the author has developed a deep sense of how learning works, and is using the same teaching methods in the book that have been honed over a lot of in-person classes. For example, having you puzzle out which balance sheet belongs to which company early on in the book, and it being surprisingly doable.

2\. There are different levels of abstraction discussed in close proximity - the math, then the account from a cfo.

3\. It's concise. That lets it cover a pretty wide range without feeling like a textbook, and I think that helps a lot for developing an early understanding.

</comment><comment><USER11> I consider finance to be a subset of "business administration" (which I assume you mean in the sense that the MBA uses it i.e. as a catch all) and what a CFO does is an important subset of what a CEO is responsible for.

Finance is an important component but other MBA topics would be strategy, marketing, organizational dynamics, operations and so on.

In a business school you would learn many of these through case studies (to the extent the school is influenced by HBS which every school is to some extent).

These topics also have recognizable curricula. Operations courses will delve into queue theory (exercise: one oven bakes a cookie in 5 min but your constraint is the strainer which can only ... blah blah, or something to tell throughout from latency), a course in marketing might describe the 4 ps (price, placement, product, promotion). A course in strategy night talk about a swot analysis (strength weakness opportunity threat) or Porter points out that the pricing power in an industry is set by workers, customers, competitors, new entrants, substitutes and so on.

Most MBA courses have their class requirements online. You can even click through the classes and add the curriculum and the books required. The materials, quite frankly, are not technically difficult but you have to practice them in order to remember to use them when you need them.

Other important components of the actual experience inckude working in teams and presenting to the class.

</comment><comment><USER12> The expert on teaching Corporate Finance and Valuation is Aswath Damodaran at NYU. And he also happens to offer all his lectures, class notes, and exams for FREE at his website: [http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/](http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/)

</comment><comment><USER13> A few people are saying that a grasp of basic accounting is important, and I just realised I've written something relevant on this front.

A while ago I developed a library for double entry accounting in Django. To do this I had to learn how double entry accounting worked from scratch. I was therefore briefly in a position to remember not knowing how it worked, while also grasping at least the basics.

I therefore add a page in the docs titled "Double Entry Accounting for Developers":

[https://django-hordak.readthedocs.io/en/latest/accounting- fo...](https://django-hordak.readthedocs.io/en/latest/accounting-for- developers.html)

I kind of cringe posting this here, because 1) I wrote it a long time ago, 2) it may not actually be entirely accurate, and 3) it may be overly simplistic.

That being said, I think a fair few companies are running their finances from Hordak, and I haven't had any angry issues opened yet. So I can only assume I wasn't too far off the mark.

</comment><comment><USER14> I would say that the skills really break down into 2 areas:

\- Fundamentals that can be learned and quickly applied. This means taking an Accounting 101 and 102 course. Then applying those accounting principles to your own personal finances. They're not that different from a small business. I would also encourage you to take a couple of intro to law courses, they have been very helpful to me.

\- Contextual understanding. This is the ability to take what you have learned in the fundamentals, and understand how it applies to a current set of data. This is significantly harder, and there isn't a general solution here. For example, cash flow seems like a fairly simple concept. But once you take into account enough variables, it gets very complex. Those variables are specific to one organization.

Finally, while not directly tied to your skills, I can tell you that as a founder, having an excellent accountant who I can trust to understand the minutia of all of this is super helpful. I focus on the high level and making sure that it's driving in the direction I need, he focuses on the guts. My understanding of the fundamentals means I can understand what is going on when he explains why something happened that I may not have understood initially. All of what I wrote here applies to our lawyer as well.

<comment><USER15> Yep, I'd say it's all about learning some accounting. Get a beginner accounting course, not sure where to go. Lots of terms to understand, assets, cash, capital, depreciation, revenues, taxes, cost of goods, expenses.

In layman terms, it's all sorts of revenues and expenses, short term or in the future, interacting together. Ask yourself, how much do you pay for salary? for office? for equipment? for materials? when? and a hundred more questions...

A good chunk of it is rather straightforward really, yet it takes a course or a discussion with an accountant to learn the proper terms and the broader concepts formally. Seen all of that in university long ago, to be able to make our own companies when we graduate.

That being said, I am not sure this would help to talk to the CEO. I'm not sure CEO generally care or understand about this sort of this. Just outsource accounting.

</comment></comment><comment> barry-cotter Josh Kaufman's book "The Personal MBA" is a good, short introduction to what's covered in a typical MBA with a recommendation for further reading for each topic[1]. MIT's MicroMaster's in Finance is a great place to start if you want to learn finance[2].

[1] [https://personalmba.com/](https://personalmba.com/) [2] [https://micromasters.mit.edu/fin/](https://micromasters.mit.edu/fin/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Finance Theory I by Prof. Andrew Lo: [https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan- school-of-management/15-40...](https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of- management/15-401-finance-theory-i-fall-2008/). You can view the first lecture here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdHlfiOAJyE&list=PLUl4u3cNGP...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdHlfiOAJyE&list=PLUl4u3cNGP63B2lDhyKOsImI7FjCf6eDW).

Prof. Lo taught this course at MIT in the Fall of 2008, which you can imagine would be a very interesting time to teach finance. The course is excellent. I think you'll really enjoy it.

</comment><comment><USER17> As a CFO myself, I notice there are a few concepts it is important for successful managers to understand to help discussions regarding performance and investment.

1) Time value of money - internal rate of return (IRR) and net present value (NPV). Both are easily learned on the web in 30 minutes.

2) Broad accounting concepts. Others have recommended learning double entry accounting on this thread. I do not think that necessary - too much in the weeds. You need to understand what is revenue, when it is created (different industries and companies have different rules), what are operating expenses, what is EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization) and why it is a good approximation of cash flow, and why capitalizing some expenses matters. In my experience, the FP&A (financial planning & analysis) team is often the best people to discuss this with as they are responsible for reporting these metrics to management in a manner consistent with how the executive team runs the company.

3) Option theory - more decisions are being discussed as options. Developing a new product idea is an option to ultimately produce and sell the product. The initial investment to blueprint the product, get regulatory approvals, etc can all be thought as the cost of the option. Importantly, you can always walk away from the option if you determine the payoff is too risky (unlikely to be realized) or too low.

While there are more finance concepts to know, they tend to build off the ones above (e.g. reading financial statements builds off the accounting ideas).

A final note, if you are looking for formal online courses on these topics, the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School has a great series of their fundamental courses for MBA students online that were free last time I looked.

</comment><comment><USER18> If you don't want to go through thousand page textbooks on financial accounting, managerial accounting, and corporate finance, I recommend the following two short books to everyone:

1\. Financial Statements, Thomas Ittelson - [https://www.amazon.com/Financial- Statements-Rev-Thomas-Ittel...](https://www.amazon.com/Financial-Statements- Rev-Thomas-Ittelson/dp/1601630239)

2\. Financial Intelligence, Karen Berman - [https://www.amazon.com/Financial- Intelligence-Revised-Manage...](https://www.amazon.com/Financial-Intelligence- Revised-Managers-Knowing/dp/1422144119)

I've also found this website useful: [https://www.accountingcoach.com/](https://www.accountingcoach.com/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Think of it as Accounting is how you keep score, Finance is how you justify strategy. For better or worse you have to learn financial accounting first. I've been unable to learn it on my own - I needed to take courses. If you don't want to be a full time accountant, where you take the courses doesn't matter. The material is the same. Finance my require coursework or book learning, but you can advance a lot on your own if you have the basics. Just apply NPV and ROInto everything you see. You didn't mention Econ, but most senior execs think in terms of Micro. Supply and Demand.

</comment><comment><USER20> I am taking MBA course at UoPeople. Because I do not have much of career plans and wanted to "check it out" more than anything, I ignored lack of prestige. What I find so far - a lot of stuff is very superficial to anyone who did at least some business on their own, and invested in stock market (not speculated/traded/yoloed).

But at the same time, some material kinda helps to put disjointed pieces together.

Based on my experience there (I did not finish it yet, btw), I think the best approach would be to actually get your hands dirty with running a business AND investing first for quite some time, and after that take an MBA class to organize all the knowledge you gained. Without getting hands-on experience, I am not sure much of MBA program will make sense or help beyond learning the vocabulary and getting connections (connections if you go to a prestigious school of course, that what most pay for I think). It is much easier to understand the importance of financial statements after you actually traded or run books for a business, filed taxes.

</comment><comment><USER21> If you want a really well rounded finance background, you could pursue the level 1 CFA exam, or the curriculum of it. If you are not looking to pass the current exam, you can get older books for almost nothing used.

If you want to actually pass the exam, you need to register and get the current curriculum. You should be prepared to put in to 200 to 300 hours of study for this, though. Its a lot of material.

If you are not looking to pass the exam, I would recommend going through the accounting section and the economics section. The corporate finance section would probably also be useful.

If you were to pursue all 3 exams and pass, you would have a knowledge base that exceeds an MBA in finance. The MBA has other things the CFA can't give you though like project and presentation experience.

</comment><comment><USER22> William Ackman: Everything You Need to Know About Finance and Investing in Under an Hour [https://youtu.be/WEDIj9JBTC8](https://youtu.be/WEDIj9JBTC8) — An excellent crash course for the most critical concepts.

</comment><comment><USER23> I recommend taking a formal college accounting course online, via any online learning platform. I took accounting in undergrad and found it to be one of the single most valuable and generally applicable courses that I took. Accounting is the language of business – knowing accounting for business is like knowing object-oriented programming or something similarly basic for coding.

A great unrelated line that I heard from an MBA who works in Marketing: Everyone thinks that Marketing is a creative field and Finance is a methodical quantitative vocation. But in reality, the best marketers are methodical and quantitative, and the best Finance folks are highly creative.

</comment><comment><USER24> I know this is off-beat, but I found Warren Buffett's annual letters invaluable as a resource to learn about corporate finance. They don't substitute a good textbook, but they give a great insight into real world application.

They're available for free on www.berkshirehathaway.com ("Annual Reports" -> "Chairman's Letter"), for those who prefer a book Lawrence Cunningham wrote a great compendium with annotations and context called "The Essays of Warren Buffett".

I re-read these every once in a while over the years and found endless useful insights as my real-world business and finance experience grew.

</comment><comment><USER25> [https://openstax.org/subjects/business](https://openstax.org/subjects/business)

Look up the curriculum/reading lists of MBA programs.

</comment><comment><USER26> 8 years after starting my own company I discovered Kay and Jim Stice. I wish I had discovered them years ago.

They are world renowned accounting professors from BYU and their courses are easy to understand and surprisingly entertaining. They have several excellent courses on LinkedIn learning.

Here's a good one to start with: [https://www.linkedin.com/learning/accounting- foundations-2](https://www.linkedin.com/learning/accounting-foundations-2)

I highly recommend them.

</comment><comment><USER27> I've done MBA and been involved in small family business my whole life. I think more relevant than finance or accounting practice are the business fundamentals which I think are different but related. If you want to learn the former there might be good resources in this thread.

To level with the CEOs, I think many CEOs value few things above else: either have a great understanding in relevant specific industry niche like residental construction or copper mining or in specific technology like web applications or weather measurement hardware. Another few things CEOs have to constantly think about are investments, in what and how much to invest to balance optimal risk reward ratio. Third thing is maybe the strategy/business/industry language like SWOT, business model canvas, balace scorecard, revenue, roi, roe, equity, debt, corporate taxes, ebitda, earnings, customer life time value, product lifecycle, growth drivers, organic/nonorganic, acqusitions, divestments...

</comment><comment><USER28> Accountancy was my second career. I currently do a mixed accountancy/technology management role at an SME.

I learnt to code from books and the internet. I'm not bad at using high level languages to get things done. I couldn't pass a Google whiteboard test, I couldn't write a compiler, an os, a db or anything. I know _about_ coding, but I am not a software engineer.

Becoming an accountant actually does not have a prequsite much beyond basic maths, ratios, percentages etc. Then it requires 2-3 years of intensive on the job work and study to get to the basic level. In the UK that would also mean passing 10 intensive exams in that time. To get to CFO would probably mean another 7 years experience.

But it sounds like you want to know _about_ finance. I would learn to read financial statements. Get some financial statements for some smaller companies from whatever your local corporate register is (uk companies house has them free online). Start with the balance sheet (sometimes called statement of financial position) and profit & loss (sometimes called an income statement). Go through it line by line and read the acounting policy and Google the terms. You can also look them up in your local accounting standards.

Next take a look at a cash flow statement. Notice how different looking at cash is to looking at profit. Work it why and why it is much more important to have cash than profit.

Learn some accounting ratios like Return on Capital Employed, see if you can calculate them from those statements.

A bit of knowledge about Mudigliani & Miller, and NPV (not the maths, Excel can do that. The assumptions) would be good. Learn the Sunk Cost hypothesis, and relevent costs.

I think this will get you where you need to be without long coursed of material that you may not use. You don't need to be able to prepare financial statements.

</comment><comment><USER29> One of the most effective ways I know to do that is to read books written by people who have run technology companies, or about technology companies by insiders, or by venture capitalists, or biographies of important figures, or about the history of technology world, or books recommended or mentioned by any of the above. You get examples on a canvas you're familiar with.

I'll read books mentioned in interviews of people who have a track record. Even watching a video like this [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aW5gdRRn_U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aW5gdRRn_U) (check out the first comment and replies). It only lasted a few seconds, but we got the books in the background figured out. We recognized some by the spine.

There are a _lot_ of things that are the way they are because someone did something at some point, and it's only reading a book where the author mentions an anecdote that you piece things together. There are entire deals that didn't happen because someone was a jerk to another years before that. These books also expose a situation, and the decisions made in a certain context, the tradeoffs, etc. How people went about the product, which strategies they used to find a market, how conflicts arose and were handled with.

But, back to your ask:

Wharton has a "Business Foundations"[0] series on Coursera which includes entire courses on marketing, accounting, finance.

Microeconomics (two or three books you find in every course: the ones by Pindyck, Perloff, and Mankiw. Either named "Microeconomics" and "Principles of Microeconomics").

You can checkout the MIT OCW courses on these.

[0]: [https://www.coursera.org/specializations/wharton-business- fo...](https://www.coursera.org/specializations/wharton-business-foundations)

<comment><USER30> Reading books written by people who have run tech companies definitely helped me. I recommend books by Basecamp.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The second part of your need is interesting. I'm being a bit generic but to speak with CEOs, it would greatly help to know about strategy and competition. It's a loaded term and here's what I would recommend:

1\. Michael Porter's Competitive Advantage [0] or Understanding Michael Porter [1]

2\. One of the things that really applies well to tech businesses has been Platform Business Model. This book [2] is a good starting point

3\. The Lean startup [3] and Hacking Growth [4] round up the tech books that I have benefited from.

3b. Warren Buffet's letters are a classic to learn about businesses and help when you are dealing with CXOs.

4\. With these basics in place, I would recommend Stratecherry - the blog and Economist for keeping up with the current developments in the field.

Good luck!

[0] [https://www.amazon.com.au/Competitive-Advantage-Creating- Sus...](https://www.amazon.com.au/Competitive-Advantage-Creating-Sustaining- Performance/dp/0743260872/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=michael+porter&qid=1595738730&sr=8-2)

[1] [https://www.amazon.com.au/Understanding-Michael-Porter- Essen...](https://www.amazon.com.au/Understanding-Michael-Porter-Essential- Competition/dp/1422160599/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=michael+porter&qid=1595738730&sr=8-1)

[2] [https://www.amazon.com.au/Platform-Revolution-Networked- Tran...](https://www.amazon.com.au/Platform-Revolution-Networked-Transforming- Economy/dp/0393249131/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=platforms&qid=1595738819&rnid=5367991051&s=books&sr=1-1)

[3] [https://www.amazon.com.au/Lean-Startup-Innovation- Successful...](https://www.amazon.com.au/Lean-Startup-Innovation-Successful- Businesses/dp/0670921602/ref=sr_1_1?crid=181L2D9T18GCR&dchild=1&keywords=lean+startup&qid=1595738874&s=books&sprefix=lean+star%2Cstripbooks%2C314&sr=1-1)

[4] [https://www.amazon.com.au/Hacking-Growth-Fastest-Growing- Com...](https://www.amazon.com.au/Hacking-Growth-Fastest-Growing-Companies- Breakout/dp/B06Y15ZS35/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=growth+hacking&qid=1595738900&s=books&sr=1-1)

FYI, I come from a similar background. Was a techie for 9+ years before switching to an MBA and can personally attest to the materials given above :)

</comment><comment><USER32> I have worked in non finance areas of large corporations and can highly recommend this [https://www.causal.app/blog/whats-a-financial- statement](https://www.causal.app/blog/whats-a-financial-statement)

</comment><comment><USER33> UPenn just announced an online FinTech Boot Camp. Looks really current. Master python, portfolio optimization and crypto in one semester ;)

[https://bootcamp.sas.upenn.edu/fintech/](https://bootcamp.sas.upenn.edu/fintech/)

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm not sure whether product management is something which you're interested in.

But my friend Adam Bader has been creating a video course on How to become a good Product Manager and it is almost done!

It's gonna be a video tutorial. I've see the content which is almost done and really loved how it's presented!

He will walk you through what he does in his day-to-day job, the fundamentals of product management, development, design, stakeholder management, user and market research, how to find and get your first PM job, as well as everything else you need to know.

I highly recommend buying this course: [https://gumroad.com/a/84636787](https://gumroad.com/a/84636787)

</comment><comment><USER35> As a developer turned co-CEO, developing an understanding of the differences between cashflow, revenue, profit, and overhead was critical.

My recommendations are a little different from most other folks here, in that they relate to understanding the business as a whole and how finance figures into it:

Norm Brodsky's "The Knack" [http://theknack.info/](http://theknack.info/)

Jack Stack's "A Stake in the Outcome" [https://www.amazon.com/Stake-Outcome- Building-Ownership-Long...](https://www.amazon.com/Stake-Outcome-Building- Ownership-Long-Term/dp/0385505094)

If you're in a startup environment, Brad Feld's "Venture Deals" [https://www.amazon.com/Venture-Deals-Smarter-Lawyer- Capitali...](https://www.amazon.com/Venture-Deals-Smarter-Lawyer- Capitalist/dp/1119259754)

</comment><comment><USER36> [https://www.coursera.org/learn/uva-darden-financial- accounti...](https://www.coursera.org/learn/uva-darden-financial- accounting/home/welcome)

University of Virginia Financial Accounting Fundamentals! This is the only one that you need to get started. Luann J. Lynch is a fantastic teacher. She guides you through all accounting fundamentals with lots of example problems (including a breakdown of the Coca Cola's Balance Sheet).

</comment><comment><USER37> The title is regrettable but I've learned a lot from the CFO Thought Leader Podcast [https://cfothoughtleader.com/](https://cfothoughtleader.com/)

I am not a finance person but what, to me, this series gets right is that (a) the technicals are just a tiny part of what makes someone "good" at finance and (b) what seems to make CFOs "good" is very strong discipline around measurement, a deep understanding of the product/market and ability to lead people.

</comment><comment><USER38> I work as a software test engineer in crypto, so I thought it'd make sense to learn more about finance the other week. It might be overkill for many but I started studying for the CFA Level 1 and it's been really interesting so far. Depending on your goals, it might be worth the 300 hours.

</comment><comment><USER39> Second to the suggestion about accounting. For the general business side, try picking up some business framework books such as Traction/Get A Grip(EOS) or Good to Great or Scaling Up. They lay out challenges almost all businesses have and proposed frameworks to manage them.

</comment><comment><USER40> Inb4 "Subscribe to Matt Levine's Money Stuff"[1]

Particularly in terms of generating what another thoughtful user dubbed "contextual understanding," this is a gold mine. Also occasionally gives very lucid, refreshing descriptions of how lots of things that other finance people take for granted work.

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthe...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew- s-levine)

<comment><USER41> Came here to say this. It's entertaining and enjoyable reading that happens to be about financial topics. It is to financial literacy what "take a long vacation in France" is to learning French.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is extremely useful [https://www.causal.app/blog/whats-a-financial- statement](https://www.causal.app/blog/whats-a-financial-statement)

<comment><USER42> This was posted on HN few days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23825606](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23825606)

The thread has some interesting comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> [http://www.youexec.com](http://www.youexec.com) — we have business frameworks and spreadsheet models to help you pick up the skills you list

</comment><comment><USER44> Related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23552667](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23552667)

<comment><USER4> That resolves into a blank page for me. Am I missing something?

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> UIUC iMBA has all classes on Coursera. I think Coursera+ is <$400/year so you can take them all without paying individual subscriptions.

</comment><comment><USER46> Take a semester of Basic Accounting then a semester of Financial Accounting at a local Community College.

</comment><comment><USER42> Any good sources for understanding behavioral finance?

</comment><comment><USER47> Enrol in a good MBA college</comment>


HTML5: The Facts And The Myths - <AUTHOR> http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/09/23/html5-the-facts-and-the-myths/ <comment><USER2> This is a great article, it washes away most of the misunderstood hype around HTML5 and the associated technologies.

I can't help but feel the mainstream media are dumb enough to accept any jargon that gets thrown in their general direction and put it as their factual message to their readers.

</comment><comment><USER3> Myth: regular old html 4 isn't good enough for you.</comment>


Apache Flink: Juggling with Bits and Bytes - <AUTHOR> https://flink.apache.org/news/2015/05/11/Juggling-with-Bits-and-Bytes.html <comment><USER2> If you're interested in these topics, I strongly suggest you to take a look at Facebook Presto's source code. Unfortunately, they don't have any documentation about the internals of Presto but they extensively tested and implemented these techniques in order to archive C/C++ like performance in Java. The slice library (the underlying memory management library of Presto) might be a good start for that: [https://github.com/airlift/slice](https://github.com/airlift/slice)

</comment><comment><USER3> Whenever I read something like this I have a bad feeling about it. They are trying to get "C/C++" performance in Java by bypassing all the JVM's management and garbage collection. They even basically reimplemented malloc() for memory heap management. Why not just ditch Java itself?

</comment><comment><USER4> Looks great especially Gelly, but does this have to run on top of YARN?

<comment><USER5> Nope, you can run Flink stand-alone as well. Mesos support is work in progress.</comment></comment>


Albert Woodfox's Forty Years in Solitary Confinement - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/albert-woodfoxs-forty-years-in-solitary-confinement <comment><USER2> "The vindictiveness of the state is perhaps best illustrated in its treatment of Woodfox's co-defendant, Herman Wallace. When Wallace's conviction was also overturned on discrimination grounds in 2013, the judge in his case ordered his release, in view of the fact that Wallace was dying of liver cancer and had only days to live. Wallace was released on a Monday, and died on a Friday. He'd had three and a half days of freedom. Two days before he died, the prosecution reindicted him."

I don't understand why people would do this.

<comment><USER3> I'm more and more convinced that this is a cultural problem in the US. The idea of "serving out justice" seems to override any compassion for people.

People always talk about throwing bankers in jail for the crisis, but why would you wish all this suffering on anyone? Denying freedom for someone for years. Especially considering the multitude of studies showing that extended incarceration _does not work as a deterrent_.

We should be ashamed, a country with this sort of penal system cannot declare itself to be a bastion of civil rights.

<comment><USER4> The bankers are the ones I think it would work for. They understand risk analysis and it's all slow, reasoned, crime. Not like crimes of passion.

<comment><USER5> Is locking people in cages really necessary to stop bank misbehavior though? I would prefer first trying things like: 1) closer oversight; 2) fines restructured as a percentage of wealth so that they actually deter even very wealthy people; 3) kicking people out of the sector (e.g. bans from working in finance). Cages seem like a really blunt and rather barbaric instrument to use for improving society.

<comment><USER6> Some punishments are designed to send a message [1], maybe bankers would change their behaviour too.

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

<comment><USER7> Making an example out of someone to send a message to others is completely unjust for the person who is made an example.

<comment><USER4> Did they intend the crime? And their only defense is "The other guy was doing it too"? Oh well.

As long as we prosecute as many people in their position as possible it doesn't seem to be a problem if we miss some. It's only selective when we choose who to ignore.

Something like Aaron Schwartz where it wasn't a crime until someone who made the DA look like an idiot does it... Then it's clearly crossed the line.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> <off-topic> Can we have a HN rule stopping people from posting paywalled content? This is getting really annoying apparently I ran out of my quota for visiting newyorker.com pages this month. I know how to overcome it, but that's a website I normally wouldn't visit from some other website than HN and this feels annoying. This is like the new DRM.

<comment><USER9> Most paywalls are trivially easy to bypass.

You've run out of your free quote, but other people have not (or they have paid for the content) so why should they be denied content?

Good content needs to be paid for somehow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This report is characteristic especially when considered in contrast to the (overly?) thoughtful justification of the sentence given by a German court in the recent case around the killing of a Turkish girl named _Tugce_.

This report is also characteristic when considered in context of the killing spree in Charleston.

USA is a country of institutionalized hatred. Hatred seems to have become a central aspect of the national identity and culture.

<comment><USER11> > USA is a country of institutionalized hatred.

Maybe, but which countries are not?

<comment><USER12> Most of europe?

Don't get me wrong there still is institutionalized hatred here but at a scale 2-3 order of magnitude under the US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Reminds me of this: [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/06/before-the- law](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/06/before-the-law)

What a stupid loophole in the law

</comment><comment><USER14> Instead of focussing on the abstract "state", why not recognize that almost every eligible voter in America decided what the state should do by voting either democrat, republican or nothing.

</comment><comment><USER15> Fuck that state.

<comment><USER16> I feel like this comment is gonna get crushed, but this is the attitude people need to have. This sort of thing should not be tolerated at all by those paying for it to happen, and the only way it's going to change is if people get mad enough to do something.

<comment><USER17> Amen, it's not as if this is the only wrong (or even right) conviction leading to torture at the hands of the state that has occurred recently in the US, either. What is interesting about this one is that it is a frame-up by prison authorities rather than the police, which is far more commonly reported. _Regular people walking down the street or sitting in their homes with absolutely no connection to an alleged crime_ have been _frequently_ improperly given life sentences. In the probably small subset that _has_ been eventually discovered and overturned, no apology or compensation is usually ever received from the state.

Just last month there was an exhibition in Paris at the excellent Jeau de Paume gallery featuring a video exploring this phenomenon in the US by artist Taryn Simon, who actually tracked down numerous people who had been falsely imprisoned for her 2003 project _The Innocents_. More info at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taryn_Simon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taryn_Simon) and [https://books.google.com/books?id=RRoiDl9rJtoC&printsec=fron...](https://books.google.com/books?id=RRoiDl9rJtoC&printsec=fron..).

I don't know how people can just passively stay in the US these days, wouldn't it be better to leave?

        First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
        Because I was not a Socialist.

        Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
        Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

        Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
        Because I was not a Jew.

        Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

<comment><USER18> That poem by Martin Niemöller always strikes me as such a powerful wakeup call.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Cannes Will Ban Streaming-Only Movies from Competition - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2017/05/10/going_after_netflix_cannes_bans_streaming_only_movies_from_competition_slots.html <comment><USER3> \- Any film that wishes to compete in Competition at Cannes will have to commit itself to being distributed in French movie theaters. This new measure will apply from the 2018 edition of the Festival International du Film de Cannes onwards.

Makes sense. I guess they want potential winners to be viewable by the people and not appear to be promoting netflix as the only option.

<comment><USER4> How is it better to promote a theater chain than Netflix?

<comment><USER5> Promoting local business and movie culture instead of a soulless American global firm? France doesn't value capitalism and "freedom" (to destroy all other values) as in the US.

<comment><USER4> It just strikes me as, well, self-defeating to have an _international_ celebration of film confined to your nation's take on it and promoting your local businesses while ignoring major contributors to the medium.

It seems strange to say, "Well, a film must be in a cinema" when that's not how most people watch them. (At least not the vast majority of films they watch in any of the countries I've been in.)

It's not that they banned all soulless corporations producing faux art, they just banned a change in watching habits to prop up an industry with poor value proposition.

Film as a medium is a valuable part of culture; theatres aren't necessarily.

Theatres must offer something over sitting on the couch -- and in the US they have, introducing things like bars and food services.

<comment><USER6> > _It seems strange to say, "Well, a film must be in a cinema" when that's not > how most people watch them. (At least not the vast majority of films they > watch in any of the countries I've been in.)_

David Sedaris goes on at length about moving to France and falling in love with the film culture there, where movies are shown in small theatres very cheaply. This was back in 2000, so things may have changed, but he was very clear on the differences between the American and French theater-going experience.

> _Film as a medium is a valuable part of culture; theatres aren 't > necessarily._

You should probably stop calling it 'film', then. Most theatres can still show actual films; few homes can.

<comment><USER7> "Film" is the UK English word for the US word "movie" (which has a red squiggly because of my English (UK) spell-check). That's all it means.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I guess it kind of makes sense because the Streaming-Only movies are not available to the general public in cinemas and require a paid subscription. "Normal" movies have a one-time fee too and these competitions are free advertising for every winner, but in the case of Streaming they are essentially free advertising for a movie subscription.

<comment><USER9> You can always pay 9.99 or whatever the price and cancel after one month. Still cheaper than movies.

<comment><USER10> With the added costs of owning a PC good enough to stream and being on a paid for network good enough to stream, which might not be available in a lot of the French countryside where a bicycle ride or a short trip on public transport is more affordable. The cost is far greater than 9.99. Not to mention that French cinema sees itself as 'art' and a laptop screen can't do the director justice.

<comment><USER11> Netflix, in some countries has an option to download movies. And most PC's are good enough for 1080p.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Streaming services are the future of media. If Cannes wants to be irrelevant then so be it.

The hype surrounding Cannes was overrated anyways. France isn't even a major market to be making that kinds of demands.

I foresee a major festival/competition for Streaming only media attended by A-list celebrities in the future.

<comment><USER13> >I foresee a major festival/competition for Streaming only media attended by A-list celebrities in the future.

Sounds awful, why would you restrain a festival to only one method of distribution? Cannes is certainly overrated but they focus on authors first and foremost, and that's what led them to their current position.

<comment><USER12> Because the alternatives exist in plenty. There isn't a single respectable "Streaming only" festival/competition.

Content produced for streaming services can be radically different from traditional studio content. Rather than think of it as a restraint it would be a celebration of the difference compared to traditional content.

The "restriction" would allow for streaming only content to be on the forefront than be eclipsed by traditional media which still dominates the charts.

<comment><USER14> Interesting perspective. I can't help but think of what happened with E3 and PAX.

E3 decided that they wanted to be an industry only event and banned the general public and all but a handful of elite media companies. In reaction Penny-Arcade launched PAX as an E3 replacement for the general public, one that also focused more specifically on gaming than E3 had been. PAX was almost immediately a roaring success and E3 continued to slide into obscurity.

It will be interesting if we see a similar dynamic play out here, with say Netflix launching a Streaming Media Festival or something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wow, that's short sighted.

Force streaming services to release in French theaters, force customers to pay someone else to watch the movie, and subject the streaming services to draconian french regulations on when they can stream that movie.

So as Netflix, Amazon, and other streaming services take off, cannes will become less and less relevant as more and more movies are funded and produced by streaming services until cannes is that old french indy festival that was replaced with a more modern and movie viewer friendly festival.

<comment><USER16> AFAIK the Academy Awards have a similar rule - a movie must have a cinema release before it can be considered for nomination. (More specifically, a run for at least seven days in a Los Angeles County theater!)

Made-for-TV movies have their own competition and awards, like the Emmy awards.

I don't see how this will make Cannes less relevant. It doesn't make Cannes less relevant that it doesn't award daytime soaps or commercials or whatever. Focus on a specific niche - cinematic movies - arguably will help it stay relevant, as long as cinemas exists.

(Whether cinemas will continue to exist is a different question. I suspect Netflix is a much larger threat to traditional flow TV than to cinemas.)

In any case, Cannes is not "forcing" anybody to do anything. They are just clarifying what kind of movies can be considered for the festival.

<comment><USER17> But your assertion there is that made-for-TV (or made-for-Netflix, or whatever follows) movies intrinsically have less value. You're saying a movie can only really be "cinematic" if it comes out in a cinema.

That's exactly the nonsense we're talking about here.

Distribution channel doesn't mean anything. There are strong correlations between being able to put on a show and production values, but it's not causative.

Define a movie by its actual qualities. Runtime, dialogue(?), even picture format... But forget about distribution. Lots of people have cinemas in their houses now. Where they don't have to pay £30 to be surrounded by sweaty strangers and sit on uncomfortable and dirty seats. Plus snacks and transport.

<comment><USER16> Where do you get "less value"? They are just delimiting what kinds of movies the will considered for their festival. The Academy Awards also have certain restrictions on the picture format in place to prevent straight-to-video movies from consideration.

If you don't like going to the cinema, why do you care about Cannes at all? It is a film festival which celebrate cinema and the associated mystique and glamour. Nobody is preventing you from watching whatever you want in your home cinema.

<comment><USER17> You're saying only movies shown in a cinema can be cinematic. That's the value you're discounting.

Again, I think you need to separate the building from the art.

<comment><USER16> Never mind the word "cinematic", the point is the festival and similar movie awards have a certain definition for what kind of moving picture entertainment they consider eligible for their awards. The definition includes that the general public should be able to go to a cinema and buy a ticket to see the movie on a big screen.

That's not saying other forms of entertainment cannot have value, just that Cannes is about a certain form.

<comment><USER17> I don't disagree that that's their definition. I wish you'd stop repeating it. It's that definition that's so stupid.

Conflating "form" with distribution as if the latter affects the first.

No, I'll give you a chance... But how do you think they review these things? It used to be DVD screeners but (ironically, here) Cannes set up an online VOD service for screeners. How do you assess something that _has_ to be available via cinemas, on computer via a wonky streaming service?

This rule is simple (and classic French) protectionism of a distribution channel that is failing to compete.

<comment><USER16> It is a film festival for cineastes - film lovers or film snobs if you will. Its whole culture. For them there is a big difference between the big-screen cinema experience and watching home video. It is certainly a bigger difference than just the means of distribution.

I think it was David Lynch who said "If you haven't see my movies in a cinema, then you haven't seen my movies".

You may not care for this difference, but why does it anger you so that others do?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As a Frenchman, it makes sense to me.

Imho, watching a movie at home or in a theater are totally different experiences.

At home you can get interrupted by anything (phone call, email, notification), whereas in a theater the risk of getting interrupted by something external are lower. (I agree though, that I could airplane-mode my devices at home.)

Also, the ambience in a theater is much more different than at home, especially for comedy and horror genre.

<comment><USER19> Complete opposite for me. Theaters are full of people who react audibly at the wrong things, chatter, phones... I loathe all that and won't see movies on theaters on that principle.

I don't have any urges to check phone, imdb or anything like that during a movie. I usually have a break in the middle of a movie for more tea or bathroom.

Besides that, a mere $1500 audio setup is enough to beat theater in terms of sound. Screen is the only thing that the theaters have going on, but I've been satisfied with my 42".

<comment><USER20> I am not defending the position that banning netflix from Canne is right, because they have several high quality shows, so it's a pity, but note that in France the movie theaters audience is very respectful of the experience, and there is barely any inconvenience for the viewers (no chatters, no phones, no buzzing, it's pretty strict -- except in movies targeting children, because well, children are children and it's hard for them not to talk sometimes)

<comment><USER19> You are right. The culture matters a lot. Maybe I'd tolerate French theaters better than I tolerate American or Finnish theaters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> That will just force Netflix, Apple, Amazon and others to start producing their own movies.

It will have the opposite effect.

<comment><USER22> You mean, I think, that it will force them to start distributing them in movie theaters (well, French theaters, but possibly more if other awards follow suit.) Which is possible.

Alternatively, as those platforms become more important movie distribution venues, it will reduce the relevance of Cannes and other festivals/awards that exclude films distributed by streaming alone (or "not in theaters", which isn't exactly the same thing.)

<comment><USER23> I think your second point is much more on. Think about MTV movie awards. I don't think it existed 20 years ago (just checked and it started 24 years ago but I never heard about it that long ago) and came about because of the unhappiness with the academy awards.

If all the award ceremonies start excluding streaming movies and the same quality movies are being released I can assure you we will see a Netflix Movie Awards or Streaming Movies Awards come to fruition.

<comment><USER24> Indeed, Cannes' policy will only serve to degrade its relevance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Netflix will in a few years be completely "incontournable". Give it a few more years and Cannes will have no other choice then to allow their movies.

</comment><comment><USER26> Just from reading the headline, my initial thought was "But Netflix also does DVDs, so they'll probably be fine?" But it turns out that the headline isn't a fully accurate representation of the article's message.

> _From now on, if you want to compete at Cannes, your movie had better be > released in French movie theaters_

That's quite a bit more specific.

</comment><comment><USER27> I don't think it's a bad thing to release movies outside streaming services. I think it's a bad thing to release in different periods in the world.

Ps. Yes, I'm protecting theatres ( also small ones) on that. Yes, I have Netflix. No, it shouldn't last 4 months or more after being shown in theatres to stream them, perhaps 2 months at maximum

<comment><USER28> But why should theatres be protected ? .. They are just the distribution medium , not the art itself

<comment><USER27> Even while they cost more, they give a lot of people jobs. Not everything needs to be as sufficient as possible. ( eg. Robots are taking over jobs in China at a high rate, while they already were very cheap considering globally)

<comment><USER29> I imagine a late 1800's version of you would also require car owners to use their horse and buggy exclusively at least once a week because it will "give a lot of people jobs". That's some sloppy reasoning.

<comment><USER27> Buy car or buy a horse is the same and vastly different of the point I was making. Not everything needs to go to the international companies.

I'm also not against car sharing, buy a car to share or to have is also a bought car.

Prereleasing a movie in theatres is not that bad for everyone, giving the exclusive streaming rights to one streaming party is much worse.

Ps. Already a lot of movie renters are out of business, but I wouldn't protect them as I do with cinemas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> First they ignore you, then ... bla bla bla ... then you win! — Some cool person that might not have even said it

[http://www.snopes.com/first-they-ignore-you](http://www.snopes.com/first- they-ignore-you)

</comment><comment><USER31> its their competition. their rules. they get paid by the cinemas probably so it makes sense to ban competition which is killing cinemas.

</comment><comment><USER32> I imagine the next logical step would be for Netflix to start having their own (inclusive) movie competitions, and in the process more than likely become far more relevant than the exclusive competitions.

</comment><comment><USER33> In other news, the music industry decides not to acknowledge any songs with a digital only release. Good luck stuffing the genie back in the bottle. [sigh]

Filing this under 'terrible ideas'.

</comment><comment><USER34> They should buy a cheap French theater and show each film there.

</comment><comment><USER35> Sounds like Netflix should open their own competition up then.

</comment><comment><USER36> «we like art, but only art painted with oil colours on canvas»

</comment><comment><USER37> I wonder how hard it is to produce a "digital cinema" cut of a movie. Probably not too expensive in the grand scheme of things

It is mostly a non-issue

<comment><USER38> The technical ability to show the films in movie theaters isn't the issue. The problem is that Netflix hasn't arranged for the movies to be actually shown in French movie theaters:

> _The two movies included in Cannes' lineup this year are slated for > theatrical bows stateside, but according to the festival's official > statement, "no agreement has been reached" to get the moves into French > cinemas_

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> And in the process kill creativity.

</comment><comment><USER40> Looks like Multiplex lobby is pretty powerful in France.

</comment><comment><USER41> France has strong communist influences, that's why it is how it is

<comment><USER42> That's not Communism. Communism is when there's one single political party that rules with total authority and owns and finances everything. A bit of theatre protectionism does not a communism make.

<comment><USER41> It is the influence of communism and protectionism. Not sure which one is worst. France is full of both and had always close ties to Russia - <USER2> sympathies with them since 1920 (the early days of the worst disease of XXth century - communism). Communism killed more people, and enslaved even more, then any other disease.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where have all the comments gone? - <AUTHOR>

In my periodic checking of HN today, I've noticed an extreme dearth of comments on today's posts. Why? <comment><USER2> I noticed the exact same thing but didn't think it was worth a post. Glad you did !

I even checked wikipedia to see if I had not missed some US Holiday.

November 13 is the World Kindness Day, but I guess it's not related. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Mostly people only comment on stuff that relates to them, pertains to things they care about or gets a good enough psychological reaction to comment. My opinion on the matter.</comment>


Confessions from the Scammy, Underground World of Kindle EBooks - <AUTHOR> http://thehustle.co/part-2-confessions-from-the-scammy-underground-world-of-kindle-ebooks

<comment><USER2> Seemed like it was going to be interesting, but as you read it turns out that the point was that if you post a decently written free ebook in an extremely niche section of Amazon, and then get all your friends to download and rate it, you can hit #1 in that extremely niche section before anyone catches it.

Which isn't really surprising. Or that interesting. I dunno, maybe it's just a let down because from the intro I thought the article was going to be about someone scamming their way into _selling_ enough ebooks to #1 in the main romance category, which would be amazingly impressive. Giving away enough ebooks to be #1 in "African-American Historical Romance" isn't quite the same. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting story, but even she admits she only made a handful of sales. While she may be #1 in a super-niche category that doesn't actually seem to be worth much, so I have to wonder if that's part of why she wasn't caught by amazon.</comment>