Game Over: Zynga Shuts Down PetVille And 10 Other Titles - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/30/zynga-shuts-down-petville-fishville-mafia-wars-2/ <comment><USER2> As an operations guy I find this really interesting. What I find interesting is the cost vs revenue of these games.

Obviously to me there is a bunch of up front costs, art assets, game play design, etc. But once you've got the basic HTML5 code going, and the art assets in place, what are your on-going costs?

Clearly there is going to be bandwidth at scale its like $2 - $3 per megabit per month, you've got power/cooling in a colo, so that's going to cost you maybe $3K/month for a 42U rack's worth of servers. And presumably you've got a couple of opsen types tending and feeding that rack. But they are split across say 100 racks so 1/100th of their salary/benefits per month, lets call it $160/month [1]. So lets give the game 500Mbits of bandwidth a month (that is 4.3TB of data transfer per day) We can put 20 beefy servers in our 42U rack with 20TB of disk space and 1/2TB of flash in each (we do this at Blekko)So 400TB of disk space and 10TB of flash, and if you wanted 3.8TB of RAM (192GB/server) and 480 threads of execution.

Now I'm making a huge assumption here, and so I'm calling it out, but my assumption is that the "game" is essentially a front end on a database, where player actions become database transactions, and those transactions show up as changes in the game 'world', further those transactions are both shared (everyone in the game can see them) and private (only you see the changes). So a system that is slightly less beefy than our setup (the Sun setup) gets 10M transactions/minute in the TPC-C benchmark [2]. At that level it suggest our stack-o-servers might support 1 - 2M players.

So our monthly cost is on the order of $6,500 and we're hosting say 1.5M players. That means we need to extract something like a half cent per month out of those players in order to pay for running the hardware. For a gross margin of 50% that is about .86 cents.

I may be completely off here somewhere, please point out my math or configuration errors! It seems like one could essentially run a game 'forever' until that average number got too low and then you would have to wind it down, but one wonders about how hard it is get get someone to pay a penny a month.

I did leave out the maintenance (warranty) cost of the servers, a recent quote from a server vendor had 'everything covered, onsite tech' for $175/server/month. So if you wanted to add that in then there would be another $3,500/month to cover.

It looks like a license to print money but clearly there is something here that sucks all that money away. Curious what it is.

[1] That is two ops people with a combined salary/benefit package costing $200K/year or 16K/month which divided by 100 (1/100th of their work) is $160.

[2] [http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_results.asp?result...](http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_results.asp?resulttype=cluster&version=5%&currencyID=0)

<comment><USER3> You are overlooking opportunity costs. All of your players could be playing a more profitable game instead.

<comment><USER2> Ok, so you're saying I need to measure this stack against another game that I could ship on this stack. So leaving it generating revenue $X is a loss of additional revenue $Y-$X if I deployed a game that had $Y revenue on the same hardware. Does that about cover it?

The assumption in that though is that game $Y cannibalizes $X. Which is to say if you also release a new game $Y your returns on $X go away.

And while I see that as true with similar/derivative games "CashVille 2" is just like "CashVille 1" but with unicorns or something, I am not sure I'm persuaded that we do accrue an opportunity cost against _different_ game. This is the root of the reasoning in my print money comment.

The reasoning is that if this config pays for the development cost and then generates marginal $ over time, you just add another stack to increase the marginal dollars you get. A writer releasing a second book doesn't 'cut into' sales of the first book, if nothing else they can sometimes _increase_ the revenue of the first book by getting wider visibility.

I'm interested though in how we might reason about the opportunity cost here.

<comment><USER4> Unlike books, I think the market for these games is inelastic. A player is going to devote four hours per day to some game, chosen from the available games. You want that to be your most profitable game. Allowing them to play other less profitable games is not optimal.

If you somehow knew I was going to buy exactly one book, you'd do your best to make it a hardcover and pull the paperback off the shelf.

<comment><USER2> So far, for me, this is the most compelling reasoning. In theory to incur an opportunity cost you have to be constrained in some way, clearly Zynga isn't constrained in adding hardware or people (they are laying off in this case) but I can see how the customer's attention span is a constraint. If they have a fixed amount of game time then you're competing for your place in that time slot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I started playing farmville over a year ago to learn about what made Zynga so successful. Farmville is the lowest quality game I have ever seen. For a while, every time you loaded the game there was a php array of what looked like debug information echoed to the page just before the game loaded. There were numerous times where I would queue up a bunch of work in the game, only to get a message saying that "Farmville has been enhanced, please refresh to continue". Refreshing the page would mean I have to click on all those trees again. Every time you load the game you need to close about 5 promotional offers attempting to get you to buy farm cash, or invite your friends to play the game. The game employs emotionally manipulative tactics to get people to use farm cash (in game currency you pay for). Every once in a while you will get a pop up with a picture of a sad horse which needs shelter. It will run away if you don't feed him now! There are also a lot of annoying promotions that pop up and you are not given the option dismiss them. The only button provided is "Start now" or "Tell me more...". The game if full of bugs, and occasionally has pop up windows that have no text and empty buttons. I attempted to log in for the first time in 4 months today, and I could not play the game because it lags so bad despite my having a new computer. To be fair my map has all possible spaces filled with lime trees, so that is where the lag comes from.

<comment><USER6> I respect your efforts. It would be great to see a spectrum analysis of all their games in this way, if for nothing more than to show, holistically, how bad of a company Zynga is...

To be fair, I'd like to see the same for the KixEye games as well - as they are making money hand over fist (according to a good friend who works there).

<comment><USER7> See "What I Learned From FarmVille - So You Don't Have To Play It" <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1940778>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> With these kinds of games I really surprised Zynga didn't provide a more graceful wind down. As the article suggests, there must be HUGE numbers of people with real emotional attachment to their characters/pets, who almost by definition are Zynga's most loyal customers. SURELY a business decision which exclusively hurts those who are stakeholders in the games you produce is, from a long term perspective, just a horrible move for customer loyalty and reputation.

If I'd put 4 years into a pet on Petville, only to have the game basically deleted from under my nose, there is no way I'd _ever_ become involved in anything Zynga does again.

[Disclaimer, I've never actually played any Zynga games, so this is based on second hand conversions/observations]

<comment><USER9> It's possible that some of these games had paying user retention numbers such that maintaining customer loyalty among the holdouts was not a hard requirement. I don't have a convenient way to look up MAUs at the moment, but many apps languish at say 10k. That would imply a few hundred paying customers. The majority of them would be worth whole tens of dollars in LTV.

One of my rare compliments to Zynga: they aren't stupid and it is highly, highly unlikely that the live teams' business analysts made a worse decision based on the data than an outsider would make based on a press release.

<comment><USER10> I think it would be a straight numbers decision as you guess. A lot of companies would worry about how this would impact those high value and long term customers and how it could effect retention in other games and future projects. I think Zynga is passed that point now though (if that ever was a concern for them, they have never really been a games company a rational person would have a strong connection to).

Pretty much all the big name MMOs released in the past 10 years have gracefully downsized and maintained maintenance for the player base.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The article was amazingly sympathetic to Zynga's management. Almost as if... Hmmm... Almost as if... Someone sent them a press release and they reprinted it verbatim in exchange for an exclusive interview or an advertising buy.

<comment><USER2> Now now, are you saying coverage on Tech Crunch can be bought? I'm shocked I tell you, shocked!

<comment><USER12> "Your winnings, sir." (Transfers 1,000,000 Facebook credits to Tech Crunch's account.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> >But Zynga's share price got decimated over the past year.

Well no, not really. I mean, yes, I guess it technically did. Then it got decimated again. And then it got decimated 12 more times.

<comment><USER14> I feel like I'm fighting a losing battle with "decimate." Glad to see there's somebody else on HN still fighting the good fight though.

<comment><USER15> Now that your position has been decimated by history, you could focus your efforts on one of my pet peeves that's been appearing a lot on HN: "binary blob"

Type either "blob" or "binary lob." PLEASE!

<comment><USER16> What? The b in blob does not stand for binary.

<comment><USER17> It does.

But I'm kinda curious what you thought it stood for?

<comment><USER16> It doesn't stand for anything in normal speech. <http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/blob?q=blob>

In the context of 'binary blob' I think it would be clear it just means an amorphous mass of bits and not some Jargon File definition (which in turn is clearly a play on the regular word in itself).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> You know what the right play on Zynga was? Cashing out and putting the money elsewhere. Instead, Zynga is the classic case of thinking that growth is basically infinite and there is unlimited demand. There are a limited number of gamers willing to buy virtual goods on Facebook games, and there is nothing special that Zynga does on mobile that other companies don't do as well or better.

Take the money and run. Now it might be too late.

<comment><USER19> Well, can't really know for sure, though from the outside it didn't really look like there was much innovation outside the addictive game model they first implemented. And then they got into defensive mode buying up competitors / talent, however individual developers can always do things cheaper and create breakaway games that will slowly take from the pie.

<comment><USER20> Were they in any way connected with kingdom of loathing? If not, then their only innovation was integrating kingdom of loathing with nicer graphics and facebook (i.e. not the game mechanics or business model).

<comment><USER21> No; Kingdom of Loathing is run by Asymmetric Publications (<http://asymmetric.net/>), which is only a few people: <http://asymmetric.net/people.html> .

And if Zynga didn't steal game mechanics or the business model from KoL, what did they take? While KoL was an early browser-based game, it certainly wasn't the first ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiplayer_browser_ga...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiplayer_browser_games)).

<comment><USER20> Browser is nothing to do with it. KoL's mechanics are exactly those of Mafia Wars and the like (including both the core concept of "energy" and the business model around it).

<comment><USER22> And those mechanics are exactly like dozens of BBS door games from the 80s and 90s, so...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Any thoughts as to why they didn't sell the titles rather than shuttering them? I'm thinking maybe they share code across games and don't want it in outside hands, or maybe they weren't revenue positive, or perhaps don't want to hand over any portion of their user database to a competitor. Any other ones I am missing?

<comment><USER24> Because it makes very little business sense to do so. The upside of selling is near zero because it would not make a dent in their bottom line or their future outlook, while there are many downsides to selling, some of which you have mentioned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> "Zynga's share price is down 3.52% to $2.33 from its $10 IPO price a year ago"

???

<comment><USER26> _slight_ oversight there. From the comments:

Should be 76.7%. 3.52% was the amount it was down on Friday, December 28th, 2012.

<comment><USER27> decimated...

<comment><USER28> If we're being nitpicky, then 'hammered' would be more descriptive than 'decimated'. Decimated would imply only a -10% drop if we stick to it's figurative definition

<comment><USER29> If we're being nitpicky, "hammered" means to work something out laboriously. Nothing was worked out. A stock's value moved in a negative direction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm a big gaming fan, and it seems like they could have explored and expanded the world of casual gaming; but they instead focused on a cash grab.

<comment><USER31> yeah... good ol' times where I associated casual games with companies such as Playfish instead of Zynga... You know, Zuma, Diner Dash, Sally's Salon.. Where the companies doesn't actually try to get you addicted to their games..

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> So, these are virtual pets and what-not, that people have kept "alive" and happy for years, right?

So, is it really that hard to port the player's data in to a stand alone desk top application that at least the character can sort of be preserved in, or more? Perhaps let the open source minded folk perhaps keep "feeding" the application? Or something like that. I would imagine that players would be happy enough to pay a reasonable amount for that. Or perhaps do a data dump for players so that some representation of the character exists.

I kinda think developers should have something like this in mind before they start, especially where kids and money are concerned.

<comment><USER33> That's nice from the human interest angle, but when it comes down to it Zynga is a publicly traded company now. I don't recall if they're profitable or not at the moment, but they are hemorrhaging shareholder trust.

They could either spend more time (and money) on letting people port their virtual corn to a local machine.. or they could cut the product and immediately start moving toward profitability.

When your stock price is $2.33... it really isn't much of a choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is really sketch, in my opinion; There are people with hundreds of dollars invested into their facebook game microtransactions. "Take the money and run" to a whole new level...

</comment><comment><USER35> Of course what Zynga created cannot really be respected as or compared with proper games, but it's still sad that it's gone. How will the Moma put games like Farmville (which are an important piece of history of computers and FaceBook and stock markets) in an exhibition once the servers have been turned off?

Makes one really want to buy Sim City 5 (which will do calcuations in the cloud and not be playable without internet connection). Today EA shut down games like Fifa 2011!

</comment><comment><USER36> They need to figure out a way to persist these games. Either sell them off, or open source them or something. It makes me rage when companies lock in users to a game and shutdown the servers.

<comment><USER37> Their games pretty much amount to marginally interactive spam. I don't think that too many people who are smart enough to code would be willing to put in the effort to continue developing them, because the games don't have enough depth to capture an intelligent person's attention.

Also, it's doubtful that the company would be interested in open sourcing them, because they don't really care about gaming or gamers, they just saw a quick way to make money.

There's nothing wrong with having money be your top priority (to each their own) but in Zynga's case it's obvious that it's their only priority.

<comment><USER38> Zynga has actually open sourced a bunch of stuff. Nothing earth shattering, but there's good stuff there. See <https://github.com/zynga> and their tech blog <http://code.zynga.com/>

<comment><USER37> Thanks. I guess I stand corrected on this count.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> If you're a dev with Flash experience from the PetVille team looking for an opportunity with a much smaller (but profitable) company, please get in touch with me. Remote work ok.

</comment><comment><USER40> They may be doing this to switch customers to their other titles before a new competitors game comes out

</comment><comment><USER41> Good.

</comment><comment><USER42> Time to issue stock buyback to return money to shareholders and shut the company down.

</comment><comment><USER43> Yeah, predictable three ... now four years ago. Zynga and the rest. Can you say bubble burst when FB finally goes down?</comment>


IPhone Game Developer Reports $1M in Sales Per Month  - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/12/iphone-game-developer-reports-1m-in-sales-per-month/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> It is good to read about a success story.

OTH it is strange that the article starts by saying "Plenty of iPhone programmers whine about their failure to strike it rich in the App Store, but Tap Tap Revenge developer Tapulous can't complain."

It is true that many developers have said that most app store developers don't make much money. For example, a fairly successful developer (in <http://www.newsweek.com/id/216788/page/2>) said "We made enough to live, but not nearly as much as if we kept our jobs at a regular game company,". However, I'm guessing that very few people (if any) have "whined" about not becoming "rich"

<comment><USER3> There was a period of several months where seemingly every article about the app store included comments that the gold rush was over, piracy was rampant, it was impossible to rise above the noise, etc.

Why would they all point out the difficulty in getting attention, unless there was a real phenomenon wherein people expected that it would be easy?

And how else _can_ we interpret implicit assumptions that it would be easy (or at least _easier_ than in other markets) or that the rewards would be great (or at least _greater_ than in other markets)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Jeez! A big congratulations to the Tapulous team. On a fairly related note: Here is a presentation by Jessica Kahn given to Stanford's iPhone development class. It's about the first year at Tapulous as an iPhone software shop.

The link is a video podcast of that class/lecture from iTunes U. [http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/itunes.s...](http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/itunes.stanford.edu.2024353965.02024353968.2134836854?i=1846742253)

</comment><comment><USER5> _"[Games] give fans a way to engage the music more interactively, turning them from listeners into participants, riding the social-networking wave better known as Web 2.0"_

This has got to be the most strained definition of web 2.0 I have ever seen.

Generally a good story though, it just made me chuckle.</comment>


Sourcegraph raised a $23M Series B - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/craft-ventures/why-we-invested-in-sourcegraph-5ace28317e3d <comment><USER2> Sourcegraph CEO here. Thank you for posting this. We are on a mission to bring Universal Code Search to every company to help you explore, navigate, and better understand all your code. Check out [https://about.sourcegraph.com/](https://about.sourcegraph.com/) for some very well-known companies already using Sourcegraph heavily.

And use our `docker run` 1-liner to run Sourcegraph self-hosted: [https://docs.sourcegraph.com/](https://docs.sourcegraph.com/). You can get great code search on your own code (on your own infra, without sending any code off-network) very quickly.

We will be using the $23M Series B funding to make our code search even more universal: more integrations into the code hosts, editors, and other dev tools you use; deeper language coverage; and many more things to search and fix (including code review comments, dependencies, etc.). Our vision is that you have one search box to find and fix anything in your code, and you use this 20x/day or more. Join our quickly growing all-remote team ([https://about.sourcegraph.com/jobs/](https://about.sourcegraph.com/jobs/)) if this excites you! We work in the open, so check out [https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph](https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph) and [https://about.sourcegraph.com/handbook](https://about.sourcegraph.com/handbook) to see what it's like being a Sourcegrapher.

<comment><USER3> Congrats on these major accomplishments.

Do you think your series B is just in time for the recession?

Any new innovative layers to augment the coding experience that you could reveal?

Autocomplete with super ML powers?

<comment><USER2> Thank you! Stay tuned for the things you mentioned. :) And yes, we are very happy to have raised this Series B now so that we can be a bastion of stability for our team and customers given the uncertainty out there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Congrats! Sourcegraph has great code navigation and search.

We're also excited that they are open core: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18117755](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18117755)

BTW There is a spelling mistake in the title Sourcepgrah => Sourcegraph

<comment><USER2> Sourcegraph CEO here. Thanks for the kind words, GitLab CEO Sid! :)

We are very happy to have Sourcegraph deeply integrated with GitLab so you can get native code intelligence right in GitLab files and merge requests ([https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2019/11/12/sourcegraph-code- in...](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2019/11/12/sourcegraph-code-intelligence- integration-for-gitlab/)).

(edit: Also, just emailed the HN mods to fix the typo in the title. Someone else posted it.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does Sourcegraph makes sense for smaller companies/companies with relatively fairly small codebase? As I'm working with 'not that big' projects that are primarily Java/Javascript/Typescript based it seems to me that the level of insight, easiness of navigation etc. is much greater when I just load a project into IntelliJ IDEA.

(Edit) I may see some pros with working side-by-side with our core review tool (Gerrit). E.g. you are reviewing some patchset, you want to check a usage of a particular method or class so you can switch to Sourcegraph to explore the codebase in a more sophisticated way that a 'dummy' repo browser would allow. If you don't have the project opened at that time in IDEA then maybe it could be something useful. But then Sourcegraph would need to understand/index/whatever 'magic' review branches in Gerrit.

</comment><comment><USER6> Congrats on SourceGraph. Hoping to see more innovations you brought to code search area. For users wanting an integrated experience of code search, self- hosted git repositories, issues, and CI, here is another alternative:

[https://github.com/theonedev/onedev](https://github.com/theonedev/onedev).

Checkout the demo here:

[https://code.onedev.io/projects/linux](https://code.onedev.io/projects/linux)

Press 't' for quick symbol search, and 'v' for advanced search with regex support.

You may also hover mouse over a symbol to find its declarations and usages.

</comment><comment><USER7> Congrats! I have told a lot of people about Sourcegraph and they all seem to see it as a viable alternative to their current code search and navigator. I wonder what the future of the product looks like. It is also one of my favorite open source projects to just browse through and understand the code base.

<comment><USER2> Thank you for spreading awareness of Sourcegraph!

For anyone else interested, our code is browsable and searchable at [https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph](https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph) (on Sourcegraph itself, naturally) and hosted at [https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph](https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph).

If you want to hear about the future product roadmap, check out [https://about.sourcegraph.com/handbook](https://about.sourcegraph.com/handbook) and/or join our open office hours Zoom call on Tue ([https://info.sourcegraph.com/office-hours- march-17](https://info.sourcegraph.com/office-hours-march-17)).

<comment><USER7> Looking forward to what future holds for you! The codebase is still pretty tough for me to understand given I am still a newbie, but I don't plan on stopping till I contribute to it.

<comment><USER2> Awesome. As you read our code, feel free to post a GitHub issue or tweet with any questions about why we did things in certain ways, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Congratulations! Sourcegraph's search is very nice, though I feel its UI/UX limits it's true power.

Filters are organised horizontally, hard to scroll, hard to combine. The UI feels a little outdated as well. I'd love to see the usability improve.

<comment><USER2> Thank you for the feedback. I agree with you - we are working on it (and just hired a designer, among other things). We need to do much more to make it so every developer is using code search 20x/day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Congrats :)</comment>


Practice Fusion pushed doctors to prescribe opioids in kickback scheme - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/27/practice-fusion-backed-by-top-vcs-before-selling-in-2018-pushed-doctors-to-prescribe-opioids-in-kickback-scheme/ <comment><USER2> Also discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22165946](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22165946)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's no secret that a lot of companies value money more than the lives of middle and low-class people, but to actually see the prices they accept for this hits hard. You don't know who to trust anymore even when you're ill or dying.

</comment><comment><USER4> > Practice Fusion solicited a nearly $1 million payment from the opioid > company, promising that in exchange it would create alerts in its software > that would cause physicians to write more prescriptions for extended release > opioids than were medically needed.

wondering whether whoever actually coded up the change in software knew what he/she was doing. i truly hope not.

<comment><USER5> The most charitable option is that PF had some sort of tooling to allow folks other than engineers to create new CDS alerts, and that system already had all the info it needed to render these new alerts. If they had such a system, and if they were just using pain related diagnoses or something, it's possible no engineering effort was required (such a system would certainly already be able to consider the pt's diagnoses).

In my experience (working with similar systems at a different EHR), these things are complicated, and you pretty much never get away with zero engineering effort. That effort might have been limited to "Expose the patients last three reported pain levels to the CDS system", or it could have been much more involved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Practice Fusion has agreed to pay $145 million to resolve the DOJ's criminal > and civil investigations, including a $26 million criminal fine and a $118.6 > million civil settlement that "also resolves allegations of kickbacks > relating to thirteen other CDS arrangements where Practice Fusion agreed > with pharmaceutical companies to implement CDS alerts intended to increase > sales of their products."

So, nothing was taken from the personal bank accounts of the people who made these decisions, and nobody went to jail. That is to say, nothing was done about this.

The takeaway here is that you can murder people for money and as long as you do it behind the paperwork of a large corporation, you can get away with it.

</comment><comment><USER7> $140 Million dollar settlement on a $1M dollar kickback...finally a monetary penalty against a tech company that may actually deter future bad behavior rather than reward it.

<comment><USER6> Okay, it's a step in the right direction, but how did this actually affect the people who made the decision? As far as I can tell, none of them were personally fined, and none of them went to jail.

Keep in mind that if some nut with a gun murdered the same number of people, he'd be in jail for the rest of his life, which might end with a lethal injection, and people would be calling for gun regulation to keep guns from getting into the hands of nuts. But because this was done with a pen instead of a gun, we're incentivizing shareholders to not invest in execs like this and hoping shareholders can figure out how to identify sociopaths in advance in the future?

<comment><USER8> No one murdered anyone. Opioidal medications are entirely legal. Doctors did and do prescribe them all the time. Your accusations seem a bit excessive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> We should bring back exile as punishment for some crimes. Namely, this one.

<comment><USER10> Exile from a global economy means exile from our globe. Sounds good to me, call spaceX. Kind of expensive though. The Chinese dealt with the their opioid epidemic by charging the family for the bullet used. In this case I'd be fine wih that as well.

<comment><USER10> The Chinese solution executed those who used drugs as well as those who sold. Emotionally it is a lot easier to blame the seller, but eliminating consumers is probably even more effective if you "have a certain moral flexibility."</comment></comment></comment>


Anything You Search For Can and Will Be Used Against You in a Court of Law - <AUTHOR> http://singularityhub.com/2011/02/15/anything-you-search-for-can-and-will-be-used-against-you-in-a-court-of-law/#more-27347

<comment><USER2> Jared Loughner isn't going to be put to death for his search history, he's going to be put to death (or more realistically, lifetime psych containment) for killing six people and wounding more than a dozen others, including a prominent public figure.

Library records have been used in this manner for decades, if not longer. The records are obtained via due process of law. What's the issue here?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, I really think Jared Loughner is going to be put to death for his search history.

Loughner is obviously insane, but these searches establish _legal_ sanity, which means knowing the difference between right or wrong, or understanding the consequences for your crimes. Jared Loughner commmited this crime strongly expecting that he would be put to death for his actions.

Does the USA even have lifetime psych confinement? Insanity defenses are almost never successful.

<comment><USER3> I've heard a proposal, which I generally tend to think is a good idea: eliminate the insanity defense, but give judges the option to send criminals to the insane asylum rather than prison.

Does anyone with greater knowledge see flaws with this idea?

<comment><USER4> _Does anyone with greater knowledge see flaws with this idea?_

Yes. There are cases where the insanity defense is clearly correct, and extended incarceration makes no sense. One example is a man who had become very abusive to his wife and newborn. Medical tests demonstrated the existence of a brain tumor. Removal of the tumor removed his uncontrollable rages and restored his normal state of being. (Along with great remorse over what he had done.) After that, what purpose would incarceration have served other than to derive his wife and young child of much needed income?

In practice, though, I've heard that those who are found to be insane will, on average, wind up incarcerated longer than those who are not. True, it is a mental hospital rather than a jail. But the effect is similar to what you indicate. With the twist that discharge happens only after medical professionals judge that the person has improved, rather than having the discharge happen according to a guess by the judge.

<comment><USER3> I hate to add noise to the conversation, but I would like to thank you for changing my opinion on this matter. I was wrong and now I understand why.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe the problem is expectation of privacy when we act in a public sphere (The Internet). Imagine a situation without a computer where a murder suspect with an insanity plea was seen weeks in advance browsing a gun store and asking really specific questions of the clerk. He was acting in public space and has no expectations of privacy.

Should we amuse that any unsecured, unencrypted activity is equivalent to doing it in public and if we want privacy than we should encrypt our communications? Maybe there should be an easy to use mode in browsers which encrypt your traffic. Any information stored on your computer would be treated as private in the same way as mail correspondence is.

Also, the judges should really be careful and demand that any search history evidence presented before them should really be relevant to the case. Just because I was curious at one point how much a handgun would cost, does not necessarily mean I am guilty of the murder that I am accused of. The evidence should be persistent and without doubt linked to the crime.

</comment><comment><USER6> We are entering what I call the "Orwellian Era" of computing. Google, Apple, and your data carriers (wired & wireless) are battling it out right now to become the one all-powerful big brother.

Encryption will absolutely be outlawed in the future.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, the cypherpunks have already won.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This site looks like TC.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes.</comment></comment>


Starbucks Devs Leave API Key in GitHub Public Repo (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/starbucks-devs-leave-api-key-in-github-public-repo/ <comment><USER2> This seems to be a common trend and if I was GitHub, I'd at least have a daily cron job to scan recent updates for API keys and send email alert to the owners at the very least.

Heck, they could do such a service and offer it as part of a premium package for a few dollars a month - mistakes are an opportunity and they are a business after all.

<comment><USER3> Not sure how it works behind the scene but one day we received an email from Github a few minutes after a commit informing us an AWS key was likely detected in our latest commit. This was a free open source repo and we took the necessary precaution fast thanks to this warning. This was 3 years ago.</comment></comment>


Responsive prototyping tool Weld.io launches, trends on Product Hunt - <AUTHOR> http://www.producthunt.com/posts/weld-2

<comment><USER2> Product aside, the onboarding process is great. Within a couple of minutes they had my email address, I had a sharable URL of an interactive responsive design and a really clear idea of what the software could do.</comment>