EU copyright reform: the facts - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2018/09/07/eu-copyright-reform-the-facts/ <comment><USER2> In my mind, the most salient point is this one:

FACT: The proposed new copyright rules will lead to direct surveillance of users' activities online.

This and the recent 5 eyes document to require backdoors for all technology and services are the same. The surveillance state is coming. It is being bought. You are being sold.

But don't worry, they are doing this for our own security and safety. No one need watch the watchers.

<comment><USER3> How is that a "fact"? Pretty much every time you upload data to a website, there will be some sort of validation of the uploaded data that will happen. That's not "surveillance" it's a basic process that happens on the Internet. "Surveillance" requires going a step further to _track_ what users are doing. ( _E.g._ checking your ID at a club is not "surveillance"; having the bouncers file a report so someone can track what clubs each person goes to is surveillance.) Mozilla points to nothing in Article 13 to suggest such tracking would be required. They seem to be speculating that such tracking will happen. That may or may not be a good _conjecture_ , but that doesn't make it a "fact."

<comment><USER4> The european law requires services to have tools to not just validate content format, but process and categorize the content itself.

The australian 5 eyes memo says they think they can / should be able to require services to report all of this output directly to them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For EU people who want to take action: call or email your Member European Parliament (MEP) and let them know that don't supper the policy (or support it?!?). You can call them via:

[https://act.openmedia.org/savethelink- call](https://act.openmedia.org/savethelink-call)

Or email by finding your MEP details on:

[http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/search.html](http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/search.html)

More info on taking action can br found here (scroll a little):

[https://juliareda.eu/eu-copyright-reform/](https://juliareda.eu/eu-copyright- reform/)

<comment><USER6> You can use an automated (customisable) tool at saveyourinternet.eu to do this too.

<comment><USER7> Thank you, I've now used this to send an email to my representatives.

<comment><USER8> Having called a few of them and spoken to them on the phone about this they are mostly pissed off about the cookie-cutter emails spamming them about this but quite happy to talk about it on the phone.

<comment><USER9> On the other hand, some of us are much better at typing than talking. And some might have a fit of social phobia at the mere thought of a phone call.

The templates might be tedious, but they are there for people who would otherwise post some random flame or rant. Pages encouraging phone calls have scripted templates on them too.

<comment><USER8> Yeah and that's fine, personal emails were quite well received. Template emails were universally ignored, regardless of which side of the issue the representative stood.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Julia Reda's page on the EU Copyright reform is actually the best resource to get the facts right:

[https://juliareda.eu/eu-copyright-reform/](https://juliareda.eu/eu-copyright- reform/)

(edit: Not just the facts of course, also her opinion, shared by many organisations and individuals knowledgeable on how the Internet should work, eg. Vinton Cerf or Tim Berners-Lee, see [https://www.eff.org/files/2018/06/13/article13letter.pdf](https://www.eff.org/files/2018/06/13/article13letter.pdf)).

</comment><comment><USER11> Good on Mozilla for taking this on.

There's so many problems with this.

It sets up the infrastructure for control of media. Is an image being shared that is unflattering to the current powers that be? Well, now we have a mandated system in place that can immediately pull that image from the web.

I don't think getting totalitarian control is the goal here, but it is the end result of it.

</comment><comment><USER12> the IP Juggernauts are pushing so hard and strong that they will be their demise, hopefully.

they are trying too hard to have their claws on every jurisdiction and be the international police that can prosecute everyone based on content piracy. And they are very close to that.

They already have control on north America and southeast Asia (via US, ChinaN and TPP agreements). Now they are "fixing" what they wanted im GDPR but lawmakers were too clever to see the tricks then, so they are being more explicit.

But eventually, what people will start doing is what we see in china. everyone in country A will do whatever it takes to consume content/interact with other people via sites in country B, which is not under the same jurisdiction of country A.

Hopefully people will still be able to live as they live today, and only yhe advertising market will suffer as brands now can't reliably reach one market or another. Maybe that fixes advertising too and force brands to sponsor services regardless of demographic. or maybe I am too optimistic and the IP conglomerates will win and people will not have access to any content that is not made and authorized by them.

</comment><comment><USER13> From the viewpoint of regulations on business:

\- GDPR (Facebook/Google)

\- Article 11 (Reddit)

\- Article 13 (Github)

\- Mandated EU Content on streaming providers (Netflix)

\- EU Internet sales tax (Amazon)

The simple question begs: how many more regulations aimed at US companies are coming?

At this rate, the more regulations are created at fighting US companies. The number of internet startups and business located in the EU will one day cycle downward to zero.

What are they going to do next?

<comment><USER14> Art 13 isn't a EU vs US thing. It's a digital vs analog thing (or, more precisely, old-style copyright holders vs young content creators).

<comment><USER15> It's a carebear legislation aimed at protecting imbecile content creators who can't be bothered with at least trying to run it like a real business. Why not let people figure it out and deal with it on their own, ffs

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Europe is a no-go area for any startup. Instead of building your product, you will spend all your time complying with thousands of GDPR-like laws, difficult tax regulations, different languages etc. and every country has also a lot of additional national laws (Hackerparagraf in germany for example). It's just not worth it.

<comment><USER17> It's not that bad... In practice startups don't have worry about these things before they grow large.

I've yet to be fined for not having a cookie popup on my blog :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Anyone want to speculate on the chances of this getting approved by the European Parliament? Last July they blocked an earlier version and sent it back to the commission.

Edit:

And as someone living in the UK, I'm also wondering what the implications of this are for brexit[1]. Will the post-brexit interface between the EU and the UK w/r/t copyright be made even more complicated by this, with knock-on effects on digital service providers on each side?

[1] which I continue to oppose

<comment><USER19> > I'm also wondering what the implications of this are for brexit

We're well into "who knows?" territory, but what would _definitely_ happen is the UK would lose any say over the EU rules. The UK isn't really large enough to be its own market for startups (unlike the EU and US), so we'd mostly end up using companies hosted in one or the other and obliged to follow their rules.

(Safe Harbour is probably a more interesting one to consider!)

<comment><USER20> If the EU continues down the regulatory path, the UK could become the startup capital of Europe if they market correctly

<comment><USER21> the UK is already the startup capital of Europe

<comment><USER15> *still. As it is, not for much longer

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is there a simple, objective summary of the proposed rules? Everything I've seen is propaganda trying to convince me they're the end of the internet, which makes me quite wary of the authors' motivations.

<comment><USER19> You can read the directive itself: [https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal- content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal- content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:52016PC0593)

<comment><USER22> Yes, but with all the cross-references and legalese specifying which level of government is responsible for enforcing each piece of the directive, the actual regulations can be hard to extract for an untrained reader.

Hence my request for an objective summary.

<comment><USER19> > which level of government is responsible for enforcing each piece of the > directive

At least that's an easy question to answer: the member states.

A directive obliges member states to introduce local legislation to achieve a particular effect. Usually it's transcribed pretty closely, but some states may use their sovereignty to impose additional restrictions (if they're not precluded by the Directive, a different directive, or human rights law).

Generally if you want to speed up reading a Directive you can skip all the "Whereas" clauses, they're not binding but do specify the reasoning behind the directive.

<comment><USER22> And the real meaning of stuff like [1.11.3]? It's got to be there, or else the law is underspecified, but it doesn't make for effective lay communication. I still think a real summary would be useful for all the people that don't have your personal guidance about how to decode legislation.

[1.11.3] Articles 5 to 8 of Directive 2001/29/EC and Directive 2012/28/EU shall apply mutatis mutandis in respect of the rights referred to in paragraph 1.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Holy crap on a stick. These new laws are just stupid.

I don't generally see eye to eye with libertarians (or whoever advocates for minimal interference of state), but out of touch laws like this are just the worst.

</comment><comment><USER24> If we all ignore all copyright it will go away and with it all the nighmares conceived to prop up its rotting corpse.

But it won't happen sooner than before majority of creators learn that copyright does not benefit them in any way.

We can teach them that by never paying for copyrighted things.

<comment><USER25> There is one apocalyptic scenario here that everyone ignores: it is monetary compensation that keeps the social norm. Remove that, make it so only the rich or the obsessed write, make music, etc, and they will increasing do so for their own ends, because there is no reason not to. Social alone approval will motivate very few to commit to the amount of work necessary for most creative endeavors.

On the surface, of course, this would seem ridiculous. But we only have to examine how much cultural capital is employed to keep writers writing toward the money and controlled by editors, and ratings boards, etc. And the common consumer expects what they, the consumer, to always be delivered unto with exactly that which they claim to desire. Under the monetary system reproductive advantage slates toward those who accrue capital. However remove that, and the 'shock value' of 'independent artistic work' becomes the most viable remaining path to mate attraction.

So, remove the money, and the only artists, writers, etc, who remain, are the ones that the mass of consumers despise as 'experimental' and 'weird', etc.

And given that humanity is pretty much by definition a story species, the resulting effects on society as a whole, with such a major hit to the mytho- poetic infrastructure that undergirds any society, might be very interesting. Most likely some government or wealth-backed cultural production engine will emerge in the vacuum, however, the question might be whether it will do so fast enough.

<comment><USER26> I think everyone ignores it because it's so far fetched (even if they go as far as assuming copyright == monetary compensation)

<comment><USER25> How does anyone otherwise do work that is distributed via mass mechanical reproduction?

Disney could operate private theatres that threw out and banned people with recording devices, but how could home distribution function.

For popular work, we are back at the pre-copyright world of patronage.

Popular appeal might lead certain rare individuals to monetary compensation in academia, but this, I would say, will be country and culturally dependent. In France, for example, I might see it, but not the United States. And it might lead to a certain amount of tribal-production to sustain the replication of certain cultural norms, but in order for that to e so the trend of production and consumption previously adhered to in these industries (from the consumer viewpoint) will have to be reverse: the consumer will be paying patronage _in advance_ of the creation of the work which will then be mechanically mass reproduced upon release. However, I think a smaller amount of people than currently consumptive model of media will be as likely to switch wholly to a 'pig-in-a-poke'-model. Even with things like netflix, the primary draw has always been that which pre-exists, that which the consumer already knows to be available, and its primary value is not weighted on what necessarily 'might' be produced in the future. People might be willing to fund such models through 'micro transaction', however, any individual funding themselves, thus, would necessarily require a proportionally larger base of funders; however this would have the function of keeping the cultural mytho-poetic framework in check, producing what commonly referred to as 'the lowest common denominator'. Also, however, even if someone were to make a living in this manner, they might not what to in that, no matter what survivable level of income they may derive, a Disney would then, through the sheer economy of their scale, be able to transform that, now mechanically reproduced work into something distributed through the private theatre system at no cost for the acquiring of the source material. This alone may be a sufficient psychological demotivator for many, and present a common source of burnout (thus requiring a change in employment), or even an obstacle to many taking up the profession at all.

The question remains, if the so-called creator is likely to get no monetary compensation, and little in the way of social capital anyway, what will induce them to create any works besides those they want to create. The problem is that 'artistry' in the mytho-poetics of most western countries attains a somewhat religious significance, but the most of its practitioners (or at least those who mange to make their primary living at it) would leave so- called creative fields for greener pastures; it's a job.

(I suppose I should add here that I am very much against to current copyright system as it stands now, though I realize my reply might indicate otherwise. I do, however, become aggravated when the attitudes of so-called consumers amounts to a type a slavery where they want what they want [produced but want it for free, resembles too much those companies that have baited artists and writer with 'exposure' for far too long. As it stands, what is said about the disruptive potential of the internet aside, most writers and artists make what they do (and paltry sums at that) by effectively signing over their copyrights in perpetuity to what amounts to intellectual property holding companies. So the law may say the author owns it, but to see anything from it (in the vast majority of cases) they have to give that right away, and then so-called consumers come along and claim (purely to pinch pennies) that authors should relinquish even (and presenting no alternative) that is, to me, as aggravating as the media conglomerates who do the same.)

<comment><USER27> A few notes (not dismissing your post):

\- The prepayment model was quite successful in the past; authors like Arthur Conan Doyle, Dickens and Dostoevsky made a living from producing novels in serialized form[1]. This model fits well also with TV shows, podcasts, and potentially video games.

\- Plenty of content is already funded by volunteer donations and ads (although, personally, I abhor the latter more than copyright).

\- You don't necessarily need copyright to have protection; contracts exist. It's doubtful the competing private theater networks would just copy each other's movies, rather than reach a legal agreement not to do so.

\- For certain types of works, live performances provide a funding model that doesn't rely on copyright. It's not copyright that keeps people going to concerts.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_(literature)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_\(literature\))

<comment><USER25> The problem is our respective post are sort of coming at the problem from opposite ends. Though, I agree with you, for the most part. Mine is attempting (lazily, I perhaps have to admit) to formulate how a post-copyright world functions. And, again, I agree, for the most part, with what you point out. Fundraising has been more and more a useful model employed by many writers and artists, no doubt. But all of that is still backed by copyright. Even in Dickens and Dostoevsky's day. (Though, in Tsarist Russia, it was the printer and not the author who obtained copyright.). Dickens, however, (in typical author fashion of often going from feast to famine) had almost all of his works circulated in the United States (where he was extremely popular) outside of the control of copyright, as, at the time, and as most developing nations do, the United States (much as China had done with technology in the nineties) neglected, for the most part, protecting foreigns works in favor of 'building themselves up' quickly. This was (to draw in your point about live performances) helpful to Dickens after a fashion, in that, at one point, his speaking tours ere his primary means of income. (However, part of that can be attributed not just to his popularity as a writer, but his phenomenal skill as an orator, so more than anything else, he may represent the exception that allows certain individuals to rise so much within the sphere of social influence.) But, to me, it still remains an unanswered question as to what would happen if, say, writing a 'Game of Thrones' under such a model, where a studio would have access to the material with no restrictions. The only thing that might hinder it is that multiple such entities would have the same rights, and they would most likely not want to step on each others toes (only for the reason they would likely see it as dividing their potential audience and thereby dividing the result money stream), and contractual and wink-wink- nudge-nudge agreements might become common place between them in such circumstances. And given the fact of the enormous amount of capital required for such undertakings (it's unlikely something on the order of Marvel film would be generated solely by crowd-funding) it would be unlikely, I would think, for many upstart companies to produce such, thereby locking in the defacto 'gentlemen agreements'. But there is also the question of just how much social impart such media would have, without the angel of home distribution, something that is fundamental to replicating the modern myths- poetic frameworks of western societies. And in any regard a truly post- copyright world, would seem to have the possibility of reshaping both culture and society in ways that are not apparent or predictable in extrapolating from system that are still in essence backed by it. After all, even Creative Commons and Free Software exists wholly on the back of copyright.

In regards to contracts, I think we only need to look at history: the case comes to mind wether agents of Thomas Edison saw a screening of the film 'Voyage to the Moon' and bribed a theatre operator to get a copy of the film made, so it was Edison, showcasing it in his private theatre chains (he owned an enormous amount of patents in motion picture technology, which is why Hollywood is movie capital of the United States, to get beyond the legal reach of Edison in New York), thereby having extracted the commercial value of the film prior to the director managing to bring it to the United States. Still, this leaves out the entire possibility of home distribution (outside of the most egregious contracts and locked-down hardware (so far as I can see), which, looking at the way things are going, may be the case under the current system as well).

I will completely agree as it regards to live performance. But that is a very small segment of so-called creative work. And even then we are still left with the perennial problem of the lion's share of the resultant capital going not to the actual performers, to the investor class. But, then again, copyright or no, maybe we'll always have that as the touchstone of commonality no matter what social, political, or artist upheaval does or doesn't come to fruition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "Only a handful of the largest tech companies have the technical and financial means to operate the sprawling filtering systems that this law demands."

The smaller platforms often use under the hood Amazon AWS, Google Cloud or equivalent.

Probably the copyright verification is going to be added at that level, and hopefully will be transparent to the platforms built on top of those cloud services.

So hopefully, this will not impact smaller SaaS companies as much as it might look.

<comment><USER29> > So hopefully, this will not impact smaller SaaS companies as much as it > might look.

... this _would_ not impact smaller SaaS companies ...

This isn't a law yet and I don't think most people want it to become one.

That said, I disagree that this isn't a terrible burden for the small guy. Even if it would be trivial to set up, all the other downsides remain and it leads to lock-in in the form of dependence on large companies who have implemented this.

More importantly, _why_ do we want this? What _benefits_ does this bring? I don't see many for the ordinary person.

<comment><USER30> > More importantly, why do we want this? What benefits does this bring? I > don't see many for the ordinary person.

Maybe it could shift liability? So if someone posts the lyrics to a song and Sony sues them for 50,000 euro could they argue that it is the fault of the ISP for not filtering their post properly?

This is a longshot, but I was trying very hard to think of some way in which this law doesn't screw over individuals for the benefit of large corporations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Whether or not you agree with the copyright reforms, it is not helpful to present these opinions (e.g. 'will negatively affect...') as fact. You may as well stand outside the legislative building with a placard.

To my mind, it's impossible to take part in the debate until you've realised that your position is a point of view; that other have a different point of view; and that compromise is going to be necessary.

<comment><USER32> It's quite hard to talk about a compromise when there's zero benefit in accepting the new law to begin with. Remember how effective the SOPA/ACTA protests were, the only reason these succeded was because no one was interested in a compromise.

<comment><USER33> They weren't effective. The same has already been implemented through a loophole with Canada (CETA) so US companies can already force their lower standards on us through their Canadian subsidiaries.

Simple distraction and switch and playing into the mindset that Canada has somehow ties with Europe and is therefore 'good'.

It's amazing how they get away with these things.</comment></comment></comment>


IndexTank / 80legs Crawlathon (developer contest) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.indextank.com/759/new-contest-indextank-80legs-crawlathon-2/

<comment><USER2> IndexTank as opposed to WebSolr has a proprietary api. I don't think you can easily move the data to your own servers like you can with WebSolr

<comment><USER3> Another problem is 80legs will only crawl pages <100kb with the free/contest plan. This means it is useless for all but the smallest pages.

<comment><USER4> Er.. not true, the contest plan (which is different from the free plan) allows up to 10 MB download. Registered contestants should have access to their plans within an hour of registering.

And if you don't have it, just contact us: <http://www.80legs.com/contact.html>.

<comment><USER3> Ah, awesome, thank you for the correction, this allows me to continue with my plan. I said that within an hour of registering, but had asked on their support page as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If I'm building a search engine, say focused on telescopes, can I use 80legs to crawl youtube videos (or results from google video search)? I mean can I add this url to my list of urls to crawl? - <http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=telescope>

<comment><USER4> Our default crawler obeys robots.txt and it looks like the /results URLs are not allowed. However.. I think you could start from a URL like <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAzhOSbxMiI> and then crawl to the linked videos from there...

<comment><USER5> Oh I didn't know about the robots.txt rule for /results. Thanks for pointing it out or I would have built my own crawler and got banned. I think I'll go with playlists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What's the goal of the contest? "Build the most awesome app on our platform"?

It's not clear to me reading the post.

<comment><AUTHOR> Create a small web search engine. Crawl stuff with 80 legs, index it with IndexTank. Example:

\- Crawl everything you can find about bitcoin and do a bitcoin search engine (just popped up in my mind, may not be the most interesting idea).

<comment><USER3> Then post the bitcoin-related whatever to HN. Instant winner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is there any documentation on how to get started using these two products together?

<comment><AUTHOR> It should be pretty straightforward:

\- run a crawl at 80legs \- download the results as a csv or xml \- feed them to IndexTank using your client of choice

Over the weekend I'll put on my (rusty) hacker hat, do an example and blog about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is there a good reason that reddit has banned 80legs crawling?

<comment><USER4> True story: We crawled them a while back (before they expanded their engineering team) and because of our distributed system, "alarms" were going off. Rather then take time to tell their system we were not a DDOS attack, they put us in robots.txt. I imagine their small team had other stuff to work on.

<comment><USER9> So, 80legs caused more traffic volume to reddit than Google crawler? That seems interesting; why would it be the case?

<comment><USER4> Not necessarily more traffic, though that's possible. More likely it was the fact that it was coming from multiple IP addresses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> can't sign up yet. Seems to be down

80legs is currently down for maintanence.

We're working on upgrades, new releases, and other fun stuff! Be back soon!

<comment><USER4> Hm.. can you try again? Seems to be working from our end!</comment></comment>


How IBM quietly pushed out 20,000 older workers [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e681QNbHloE <comment><USER2> IBM has stopped innovating a long time ago, I would guess sometime in the late 1980s

IBM is also the biggest Patent Troll on the planet[1]. I met a Patent and IP Lawyer at a Code Camp in San Luis Obispo. He said he did Legal Patent and Licensing work for IBM for many years and claimed that they generated over 1 Billion $ / year just from their Licensing deals and patent enforcement alone, and that it was their biggest source of income. I tried to see if those # in his claim were true, and it looks like they are, even to this day.

> Between 2008 and 2012 IBM's patent portfolio generated between $1.1 and $1.2 > billion per year.

Source: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2016/01/19/if- patent...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2016/01/19/if-patents-are- so-valuable-why-does-ibms-intellectual-property-revenue-continue-to-decline/)

[1] Source: [https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs...](https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs- images.forbes.com%2Fchuckjones%2Ffiles%2F2016%2F01%2F2015-Patents-IBM-vs- Competitors.jpg)

<comment><USER3> And yet I'd bet a lot of money that innovating again was a large part of the reason IBM management justified to itself and shareholders these layoffs.

Turns out, again, that management had zero plans for innovation. Instead, they only had the standard MBA plans : we're going to get a cheaper, MUCH worse, workforce. No more decisions to make for management, so they don't have to take the risk of being wrong anymore.

Innovation ... died. Bill Gates became the richest man in the world taking one of their more obvious opportunities. But managers looked good to other managers, you know, in ways they were taught in their MBA education, and only in those ways. IBM ... withered and died, in the opinion of a lot of people. IBM watson, their poster child for innovation, is not even a bad joke in the AI research community. It's actually unknown. It's an empty shell.

Today, even the financial community is saying stuff like IBM is like McDonalds ... it's a real estate play (you're essentially betting on their ability to sell-and-lease-back their real-estate portfolio and pay out the short term profits from that to their shareholders). There is much justification for that in their financial reports.

It's a bit wider than that: they own some things, and they're rent-seekers, who are to deep in debt and are finding they have to sell ever more income- generating assets. Every product they have, even the ones with deep market lock-in is declining fast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For anyone who doesn't want to watch a youtube video, here's the article the video is based on:

[https://features.propublica.org/ibm/ibm-age- discrimination-a...](https://features.propublica.org/ibm/ibm-age- discrimination-american-workers/)

<comment><USER5> & the discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16648000](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16648000) which has 348 comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My uncle used to work for IBM, and he told stories for years before also getting let go. They definitely made a push for a younger workforce.

</comment><comment><USER7> On my first day at my new job out of college, IBM told me the location I requested for in my offer letter could only be temporary as I was on "loan" in a budgetary sense. Now 6 months in, I must transition to a new role (which will not be in my current location). I have other offers in this area, but the agreement I had to sign to repay my bonus (which has been used to pay off student loans) if I voluntarily leave before a year of service is likely not something myself or a startup can make happen at this point. I feel trapped and it's not great.

<comment><USER8> Anecdotally, I've had 2 friends leave companies where they owed a bonus to the company (50k) - one paid it back and one didn't. The one who didn't, never heard from them and it's been over 2 years now.

Not advocating this, but don't be miserable over a small sum of money. They'll probably work with you on a repayment plan if necessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Did IBM use to have "great wages" as the article says? Because it certainly doesn't anymore. A friend had an offer from IBM Research. It was practically a grad student stipend and a drop in the bucket compared to GoogFace wages. It was even worse than Amazon wages, which is already a painfully low bar. (Though AFAIK at least they let you pee in the bathrooms).

<comment><USER10> Anecdotally, yes. My grandfather worked at IBM, retired comfortably, had many hobbies, and notoriously packed the christmas tree every year. I was shocked to find, only this year, that despite a basement full of oscilloscopes and tape equipment, his role had been... customer support? Maybe this was less "call center" and more "embedded engineer". I'll never know.

How much of this effect was IBM, how much was the economics of America at the time, and how much was specific to this one man is debatable. But he definitely appeared to live well, whatever it was.

<comment><USER11> Customer support engineers can be a really skilled job - you have to get highly skilled engineers who know the product well and can explain it and answer technical questions, but that also have really good social skills and are good at sales. A pretty rare combo in my experience.

Maybe that's not what he did but I wouldn't write of "customer support" so easily - it could mean a wide range of things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Would a penalty/fee/tax help prevent companies from laying off then immediately hiring for the same role? I'm sure they'd just find a loophole but there's got to be a way to at least reduce the benefit to the companies.

<comment><USER13> Then they might just not be hired back. Which would be even worse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> IBM is one of the few remaining employers who will pay for your outrageous graduate School tuition, provided you work for them another five years following your completion.

</comment><comment><USER15> Ageism was just a side effect, I don't think IBM committed it intentionally. IBM's business changed and some of their employees failed to change with it. That the employees who failed to change were generally older is just a coincidence.

I know that I might face that same reckoning when I get older - out of date skills pushing me out of the market - so I'm actively taking steps now to set up habits that keep me on top.

<comment><USER16> So, as others mentioned, you should read the article. For example, here is something that addresses your exact comment:

> Told some older employees being laid off that their skills were out of date, > but then brought them back as contract workers, often for the same work at > lower pay and fewer benefits.

<comment><USER17> That doesn't prove ageism, it proves that IBM (and apparently the market) thought those specific individuals were overpaid for their skill sets.

Sounds like kind of a crappy move, but it doesn't prove ageism.

<comment><USER18> Is there a difference between losing your job because of ageism and losing your job because the company thinks they can get the job done for less money?

Is it still a difference when the functional effect is that workers over 45 are the primary target?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A new Google brand designed using only black, white and Roboto - <AUTHOR> http://jackwmorgan.com/google-brand-black-belt/ <comment><USER2> From the page:

 _" an elite training program for their most senior advertising executives and the people responsible for Google's financial succes [...] For Google employees, the Black Belt should be a literal badge of honor to wear with pride [...] the result of this thinking is a brand identity built to represent the elite in every Google team"_

From [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_belt_(martial_arts)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_belt_\(martial_arts\)):

 _" In contrast to the "black belt as master" stereotype, a black belt commonly indicates the wearer is competent in a style's basic technique and principles [...] the shodan black belt is not the end of training but rather as a beginning to advanced learning: the individual now "knows how to walk" and may thus begin the "journey"."_

Nice cultural appropriation :)</comment>


Google Reportedly to Launch 'Google Me' in May - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/google/2011/03/11/google-reportedly-to-launch-google-me-in-may/

<comment><USER2> I hope for Google's sake that the name they're contemplating for this isn't "Google Me." Have they thought about how people write and speak about media and products that become media for communication?

"Did you see that tweet?" "Did you read what that guy said on Twitter?" "I posted that picture to Facebook." "I posted that picture to _my_ Facebook." (I hate that one.) "I read it on the internet." "We were chatting on AIM."

"Google Me" doesn't really work many of these usages, and the name seems born of adherence to a myopic strategy that tries to jump-start a product's popularity by leaning on people's awareness of the Google brand.

Imagine if PayPal were created by eBay and not acquired. It would be called "eBay Payments" or something similarly stupid. (eBay had a failed billing product before they bought PayPal, and it was called Billpoint, if I recall correctly, but that too was an acquisition.)

Oh, and Skype would've been eBay Talk, maybe eBay Voice. (Wait, aren't there both Google Talk and Google Voice products?)

And given Google's history of sunsetting products after proclaiming them the second coming of sliced bread (Google Wave), adding the Google name to a product might even tamp down interest.

I tried so hard not to mention Apple here, but Apple used to have this same habit: AppleTalk, AppleScript, AppleCare, etc. And the same with "Power" (PowerBook, PowerTalk) and "Mac" (MacBook, MacInTalk, and—of course—PowerMac). Sure, they're attached to the "i" prefix, but they also stray from the obvious quite a bit: FaceTime, Garageband, Bonjour (née Rendezvous), MobileMe (previously Mac.com), Genius, AirPlay (previously AirTunes), and probably some others. (On a random note, I was a bit surprised by "AppleTV" when that came out.)

Even Microsoft seems to have put down the crack pipe and started to re-assess their brain damaged, strategy-driven naming conventions.

It's frustrating to watch Google sometimes.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it is coming from a branding halo concept. I highly doubt there is going to be a Facebook clone called Google Me. It is more of a way to convey idea of applying Google search to people. The ideal conversation Google wants is "Want to know more info about me? Google me." From there, they will just use their existing infrastructure and branding. Want to chat with your friends? Gtalk. Email? Gmail. Text? Google Voice. Status update? Buzz (Okay, that one is a problem, but maybe they can turn that around). Know where your friends are? Latitude. Share a funny video? Youtube. Photos? Picasa. And so on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A few relevant links:

[http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/update-to-google- soci...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/update-to-google-social- search.html)

[http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2011/03/decide-what- worl...](http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2011/03/decide-what-world-sees- when-it-searches.html)

[http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2011/03/more-picturesque- go...](http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2011/03/more-picturesque-google- profile.html)

[http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2011/03/check-in-gain- sta...](http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2011/03/check-in-gain-status-and- unlock-offers.html)</comment>


Google Maps: Bird Mode - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/btaylor/status/1099370126678253569 <comment><USER2> Fun story. There's something to be said about the importance of naming. Google Maps likely set UX precedents for a lot of other map software to come, for better and worse. Had Google went with "Bird Mode" (and not trademarked the phrase) we would have probably seen it propagate throughout other map apps and the Internet at large.

To this day, I still see the floppy disk used to represent "save" even though we haven't used floppy disks for decades now. It's not uncommon to see it used in mobile apps, especially the less UX-obsessed ones you might find on the Android Play Store.

The next time you assign a name or symbol to something, give it some thought. You never know how others will use it.

<comment><USER3> The floppy disk icon is scheduled for deletion the same year that we stop dialing our phones.

<comment><USER4> Right after we stop using "dashboard", eh. I doubt anyone here (me included) has ever seen a real dashboard.

<comment><USER5> The instrument panel in front of the driver in a car is still a 'real' dashboard.

<comment><USER6> Not in the 'original' sense of the word, which was the point: status webpages are _twice_ removed from the original meaning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Steve Jobs on how Apple got its name:

"And we were about three months late in filing a fictitious business name so I threatened to call the company Apple Computer unless someone suggested a more interesting name by five o'clock that day. Hoping to stimulate creativity. And it stuck. And that's why we're called Apple."

<comment><USER8> The added benefit is that at the time you end up appearing very early in the phone books if you company name starts with A. Example: Atari, Amiga... Amiga was also chosen, if I remember correctly, also because it made it appear before Atari (eternal rivals...).

<comment><USER9> ASUS has a similar origin. They were supposed to be called Pegasus, but they cut off the first 3 letters to be the first on alphabetical lists (I guess they didn't notice Acer's existence).

<comment><USER10> ASUS was founded by Acer employees, so they probably were aware of Acer :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > We spend the next few days freaking out. We knew the feature was going to be > huge, and now it had this name that everyone on both sides of the Satellite- > vs-Aerial-Photography war agreed was silly and horrible. But it was > _decided_.

Or maybe Sergey did that on purpose to force the teams to make a decision, "don't make me pull this car over" like.

<comment><USER12> That's what I think happened, pick what you want or you're getting bird mode.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interestingly, Bing Maps uses the technically accurate "Aerial" term: [https://www.bing.com/maps](https://www.bing.com/maps)

<comment><USER14> This reminds me,

Is anyone else remembering when Bing Maps was REALLY good? It had a 45 degree view of cities that looked insanely good, like Sim City. When you zoomed in too close, it switched to aerial imagery.

And it was all buttery smooth. What happened to that product?

<comment> black-tea Yeah, that was great.

Bing also allowed OpenStreetMap to use its aerial imagery for tracing. This helped OSM a lot!

Google, on the other hand, asks users to help them with their proprietary data with no compensation.

<comment><USER15> Before Bing, Yahoo allowed OSM to trace.

<comment><USER6> And others followed suit later, e.g. DigitalGlobe

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> _Now, these exec reviews were Larry and Sergey's favorite place to experiment with crazy meeting ideas (kind of fun, actually). I had attended one review where one founder spent the entire meeting on an elliptical machine. Their new experiment was a huge countdown clock._

If your manager brings fun gadgets into your meetings to keep him/herself entertained, your work might not be important to the company.

<comment><USER17> Or it could be that you work at a startup where the founders are playful, willing to experiment and don't take themselves too seriously. Google did a lot of things differently than other companies.

Larry and Sergey were extremely invested in Google. I don't think that at this point there was a single employee at Google whose work was not important for them. Larry personally signed off on every single hire. And as you can see in this story they got involved in details like what the text on a button is.

<comment><USER18> Yep. Meetings are hard to get right. Experimentation with meeting formats can be very valuable.

We tend to try a new meeting format for retrospectives every few times, because different formats raise different sorts of issues, some go deep, some go wide, variety ensures that the meetings don't get boring over time and that we cover as much as possible.

We do similar with brainstorming for new projects too. Some brainstorming methods are very design focused or tech focused or user focused, etc. Different types have different results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think I saw it in an Dilbert or something, but that reminds me of the Dinosaur Strategy. It involves just ignoring any stupid directives that management puts out, hoping that by the time anybody notices that you haven't actually done it, they will have forgotten about it or left.

<comment><USER20> That seems to go well with the general Dilbert philosophy of "everyone but me is stupid".

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The title reminds me of an arguably-even-closer-to-bird mode I rigged up for a fun conference exhibit at UCL years ago, using the Google Earth browser plug- in and a Kinect (linked via Processing and Websockets). We called it Pigeon Sim.

Video: [https://vimeo.com/41552761](https://vimeo.com/41552761)

Code: [https://github.com/jawj/pigeonsim](https://github.com/jawj/pigeonsim)

<comment><USER22> Ahh those were the days, gmac. We rolled that thing out for years afterwards, this was truly "Bird Mode" \- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5ye9dfeu7c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5ye9dfeu7c)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> As a hardcore GIS person it drives me a little wild watching people of other domains misname things like aerial vs. satellite, photography vs. imagery, etc. Even moreso is when people of other domains re-write the wheel rather than learn some GIS (like stuff I see often in Mobile robot perception/mapping).

The best way I can describe it is that feeling when kids on the playground are speaking like experts about a videogame you knew about years before anyone. You should be excited they're into stuff you're into, but you just wished they'd give a little credit. :)

<comment><USER24> I also work with GIS data. Robot perception/mapping is still useful because it accounts for changes in the environment, like a moved furniture piece. Even for GIS, you need fresh aerial photos to do feature detection, don't you? The UN has GIS analysts working around the clck to supply fresh mapping data for military missions.

<comment><USER23> Those are pretty unrelated.

I'm talking about things like not properly maintaining a singular Cartesian projection across a mapped space, so it becomes impossible to reproject related data. So people end up having to manually adjust all the related data after a remapping session.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> For more stories like this, I highly recommend "Never Lost Again" by Bill Kilday: [https://www.powells.com/book/never-lost-again-the-google- map...](https://www.powells.com/book/never-lost-again-the-google-mapping- revolution-that-sparked-new-industries-augmented-our- reality-9780062673046/1-0)

Kilday was a PM and marketing manager at Keyhole, the startup whose product was renamed Google Earth after being acquired.

His book includes stories and details on Google Earth, Google Maps, the huge amounts of $$$$$, and some of the personalities and politics involved (including Bret Taylor, author of the OP tweet thread).

</comment><comment><USER17> I feel like they were taking themselves too seriously. The company is named after a spelling mistake. I don't think "Bird Mode" would have been too silly.

</comment><comment><USER26> >> It turns out, when you write the code, you have a fair amount of power.

Best quote, and the same thing what I think all day long.

<comment><USER27> I had to laugh. All these execs taking the name so serious during the meeting, yet afterwards none raised a fuss because you used a different name.

What that tells me, the name was never that important to them, it was just an meeting to show how important they were to each other - yet in real life their poses meant NOTHING.

<comment><USER28> It could also mean exactly the opposite of that: that they didn't take it seriously and just had fun naming it, but didn't really care.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I would've just gone with "Photograph", given that the other two types shown are "Default" and "Terrain".

(As the old saying goes, naming things is hard, and I've personally experienced a lot of bikeshed over it...)

</comment><comment><USER30> Kinda wish they'd gone with "bird mode". In addition to being cool, it looks like it would have been more accurate as well :)

<comment><USER31> true, because the photos were taken by birds

<comment><USER32> ever heard of the phrase bird's-eye view?

<comment><USER33> Yea but if you can make a bird analogy why not a satellite analogy?

<comment><USER34> Bird is a slangy term for satellite, so it actually fits pretty well with the Keyhole acquisition

<comment><USER33> Oh I've never heard of that!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> As always, here's the thread for people that dislike the twitter format: [https://threader.app/thread/1099370126678253569](https://threader.app/thread/1099370126678253569)

</comment><comment><USER36> It should have been called Bird Mode, because all the images are obviously taken with birds: [https://birdsarentreal.com/pages/the- history](https://birdsarentreal.com/pages/the-history)

<comment><USER37> The internet is truly an amazing place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Perfect example of "its easier to ask for forgiveness than permission" if the execs remembered the meeting and did't like the naming, and also meshes extremely well with "It turns out, when you write the code, you have a fair amount of power"

</comment><comment><USER39> Why not "Aerial" mode?

Edit: Looks like another reply correctly pointed that Bing uses this.

</comment><comment><USER40> Apple Maps, OpenMapTiles, and Mapbox calls it Satellite. Bing Maps calls it Aerial.

Maybe heavily influenced by Google Maps.

</comment><comment><USER41> > _[Larry and Sergey 's] new experiment was a huge countdown clock. The rule > was: the review had to end on time. ... And literally no exec noticed or > remembered our review._

I suppose when you're Larry and Sergey, toying with bikeshed product managers can be fun _and_ not actually waste a crap ton of time.

</comment><comment><USER42> Side note: on Twitter, you need to place each paragraph of your essay in a separate post, paying attention to the number of signs.

And people are complaining that the new editor in WordPress (Gutenberg) is bad :)

</comment><comment><USER43> Or the other paranoid conspiracy theory interpretation is that the CIA wanted to call it Bird mode to avoid freaking out people. See [https://pando.com/2015/07/01/cia-foia-google- keyhole/](https://pando.com/2015/07/01/cia-foia-google-keyhole/)

<comment><USER44> Your comment makes little sense.

The article you linked is from a FOIA request. CIA's In-Q-Tel was an investor in the Keyhole product, and that Google has continued to receive excluive contracts for Google Maps.

The tweets note that Sergy proposed the name Bird mode, not the CIA, although the article suggests he (and Google) was closely working with CIA and US intelligence agencies. CIA also denied providing details on why/how they solid the In-Q-Tel funded product to Google.

Which is all to say, you should question what Google's doing with Maps and the massive amount of data its mining every moment its on, rather than passing off baseless statements as conspiracy theories.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> What does `We pocket vetoed the decision ` mean ?

<comment><USER46> A pocket veto is when the President vetos a bill by not signing it and letting it expire.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> A few years later, perhaps it would have been Drone mode?

When I saw the title, I thought a flying UI, like Google Earth VR has[1], had come to Google Maps.

[1] A random flight to street view transition: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nulHk7Z3mI&t=96](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nulHk7Z3mI&t=96)

</comment><comment><USER48> Speaking of the founders' involvement, I seem to remember that, almost ten years ago, picking up to ten "best ever" places among your Google Hotpot ratings was Sergey's idea. I don't think that lasted more than a year. Hotpot itself was folded back into Maps reviews.

</comment><comment><USER49> Funny enough, Bird Mode would probably be the most accurate name for the service as both satellites and planes are referred to as "birds"

</comment><comment><USER50> It would have been more fun to name it after a three letter agency, the ones with Hubble Space Telescopes that point down instead of up.

<comment><USER51> In fact, the Keyhole satellites those agencies used were state-of-the-art at one time. And "Google" is a much less scary name than "NSA Surveillance Tool," though there's little practical difference between the two in terms of the amount of data they scoop up on each of us. Of course, only one requires a court order (at least theoretically) to use it against you.

<comment><USER52> Says a lot I had to wonder which required the court order and then remembered since I'm not a US citizen it's a moot point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> L&S come off as the biggest jokers ever who lucked into a multi-billion dollar empire. Sigh.

</comment><comment><USER54> This would have opened them up to all sorts of litigation nightmares generally classified under Bird Law, a sector in which Google is notoriously weak.

Why didn't they just call it Photo, or Image, or Detail?

<comment><USER55> Those are horrible options, worse than all three alternatives discussed (bird, aerial, satellite).

Detail: That's not specific enough. It could refer to everything and anything.

Image and Photo: People do not really use these words to refer to aerial and satellite photography. People might think it's some kind of photo-mode (referring to actual photos that are somehow placed on the map).

Obviously you would have to test this to be really sure that someone has a problem with these – but to me their problematic nature seems quite obvious.

Realistically it would, however, not really be realistic to test (all) changes like these … so you have to trust me that your intuition in this case is horrible.

I mean, even if you test it the effect of anything you suggested would probably be small – but to me choices like those are what make software really and truly awful.

<comment><USER54> [https://youtu.be/3bImBBTaPDY](https://youtu.be/3bImBBTaPDY)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> \+ Raster: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raster_graphics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raster_graphics)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raster_graphics#Geographic_inf...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raster_graphics#Geographic_information_systems)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthophoto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthophoto)</comment>


A Tiny Startup's Plot to Beat Google at Big Data - <AUTHOR> http://wrd.cm/1k2ZiLj

<comment><USER2> The thing that's missing from this article (which is relevant to this crowd) is the incredible focus on simplicity of Keen's API. Keen's API for reporting metrics is the right one. Any Keen SDK has essentially one API call for reporting metrics:

        keen.add_event("collection_name", {
            "arbitrary": "dictionary properties",
            "with_any_type": -11.23
        })

For developers accustomed to instrumenting their applications with various metrics libraries, this is akin to finding the holy grail. Most APIs for metrics collection require you to decide up front what metrics you want, whether it is a time series or a count or a gauge or a ratio. And even after you've figured _that_ out, there is a combinatorial explosion of different metric collections you have to create for every combination of filters that interest you.

For the developer, Keen's API is so powerful because it lets you defer almost all of your "question-asking" until later (which is when you want to think about it anyways because you can never predict up front all of the questions you want to ask about your data).

When I began to evaluate options for monitoring ngrok's usage and performance, Keen struck me both for getting the abstraction right, and because I have watched company after company dump countless amounts of money and developer time into homegrown analytics systems that materialize either too late or far over budget.

Disclaimers:

\- I am Keen customer for ngrok.com ([https://ngrok.com/status](https://ngrok.com/status))

\- Compelled by the power of their product, and the competence of their team, I now work for Keen.

<comment><USER3> I see that they price in terms of events/month.

Is there a limit as to how big an "event" can be? Is there a limit to how long they hold onto it?

<comment><USER4> Hi! I'm on the Keen IO team. We have a limit around 1000 properties per event.

For small accounts, we don't currently enforce data archiving, so your data sticks around as long as you want it to.

For large volume customers, where storage & querying large data sets becomes a significant cost, we discuss retention requirements when doing the pricing negotiation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As inaccurate titles go, this is a exemplary one. Other than that, a nice if fluffy overview of Keen. The "data" space is getting incredibly complicated and it will be interesting to see who finds a profitable niche.

<comment><USER4> The title was definitely a surprise! We don't see ourselves as David to Google's Goliath, though that title & dramatic shadowy photo might have you believe otherwise. :)

<comment><USER6> You should revisit the David to Goliath story :)

[http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_the_unheard_story_...](http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_the_unheard_story_of_david_and_goliath.html)

It is worth watching, if not for the accurateness of the facts, but by the amazing point of view.

<comment><USER4> I'm a big fan of MG and this was so great! It really does paint the story in a new way. Thanks for sharing.

Still, David was intent on destroying Goliath. I want our company to be the best at what we do, but that's not the same as wanting to beat and/or destroy Google. I'd like for Google to stick around for a long time, inventing new cars and better internet and whatnot :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why not a more automatic approach like [http://heapanalytics.com](http://heapanalytics.com)? Their js snippet starts automatically collecting all click events, then I group and analyze events on their website.

How is this "big data" when I have to make backend code changes to manually add each event using keen's api library? There's no way I can get as many events adding them one-by-one.

<comment><USER8> We emphasize "event data" which goes beyond blanket monitoring. This is "big data" because what you're tracking could still happen at high volume and velocity. We leave the third V, variety, up to you - ultimately you will know your business best and can create and extend the data model you need. Making a backend code change to add a single event collection could immediately lead to millions of very rich data points!

My colleague wrote an excellent blog post on about the event data approach and I think you might enjoy the read! [https://keen.io/blog/53958349217/analytics- for-hackers-how-t...](https://keen.io/blog/53958349217/analytics-for-hackers- how-to-think-about-event-data)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Keen is one of those companies like GitHub, Heroku, or Mailchimp that makes it easier to focus on what I'm actually trying to do. Best of luck to them.

</comment><comment><USER10> Keen has a great team, and some great ideas + technology. They were on it back at the Techstars Cloud program, and glad to see them getting some press these days. Kyle and Ryan are both wonderful to talk to about big data problems. Keep up the good work guys!

</comment><comment><USER11> Beat Google at Big Data? OK, great sneaky way to put "Beat Google at X" in a headline.. too bad Google's business isn't primarily about providing tools in X (and if it is, it's probably < 0.01% of their focus/revenue).

<comment><USER12> You don't understand: whoever gets Big Data, beats Google. Period. Google's main business is web text search -- but the best text search doesn't stand a chance against good data search. All those pages will happily become data as soon as someone makes that breakthrough to make it feasible and compelling.

Text search is "horse-and-carriage" and Google is certainly its king. But data is the coming "automobile", and all bets in that space are off.

<comment><USER11> But who has that data? Google. And who else??? Big data is not just the tools to analyze that data. It's also HAVING Big Data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Keen seems awesome, except I have a high volume startup with no funding and no revenue right now. We'd blow past the 50k event/month within the first few days for sure.

I really wish there was a more affordable way to do this. Though, I guess you get what you pay for.

It actually reminds me of Mixpanel. Both are too expensive for my liking :(

<comment><USER4> We offer discounts for startups! Email me! firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> .. tomorrow around 9am .. Google buys KeenIO for $900 million.

</comment><comment><USER15> The thing I like most about Keen IO is their team. They are very open and would help anyone who finds their way to their Hipchat room.

<comment><USER16> You are not the first to note this about the team. Uniquely nice ppl.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The Next Big Thing You Missed: A Tiny Startup's Plot to Be Purchased by Google</comment>


More Than Core Competence...What it Takes for Your Career to Survive - <AUTHOR> http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/94307-are-you-invisible/fulltext

<comment><USER2> Great advice in this article. I've added a recurring reminder to my iPhone to connect with key players and receive mentorship from company leaders.

</comment><comment><USER3> This article seems to assume that you can't be considered a success unless you're a manager.

<comment><USER4> No, it talks mostly about raises rather than promotions. Even if you focus on promotions, many companies will let you get more senior developer/engineer titles with the responsibility and money that comes with it without moving into the management track.

Now, the article does assume you care about moving up at least in salary and likely in position as well, but that is true for a wide swath of the population.

<comment><USER3> ...yeah, I suppose you're right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Read this instead: [http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais- principle-o...](http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or- the-office-according-to-the-office) (on HN a few months ago)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is one of the best arguments for joining a small startup. There is no need to work on getting your name out there for top execs at a startups.

<comment><USER7> "There is no need to work on getting your name out there for top execs at a startups."

But you will if they start to get any kind of investors.</comment></comment>


The Theory of Interstellar Trade (1978) - <AUTHOR> http://fermatslibrary.com/s/the-theory-of-interstellar-trade <comment><USER2> Any discussion of interstellar trade deserves a mention of the fantastic Charles Stross book "Neptune's Brood". I went into it expecting more or less a sequel to "Saturn's Children" but what I got was a treatise on monetary policy for economies that span multiple star systems. The concept of slow and fast money and its implications is utterly fascinating and the book is worth reading just for its explorations of the topic (the plot isn't too bad either).

A quick Google search brought me to this post by Krugman[0]:

      I'm reading an advance copy of Charlie Stross's Neptune's Brood. (Hey, I have connections!)
      And it is the best thing by far written on the subject to date, partly because it is, as far
      as I know, the only thing written on the subject to date.

0: [http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/the-theory-of- in...](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/the-theory-of-interstellar- finance/)

<comment><USER3> I loved that book. For the curious, the way interstellar trade works is through a simplified bitcoin network transmitted over light beams (because the only assets worth trading are digital). The biggest difference is each node in the network is actually a planet and a transaction between planet A and B is only confirmed when planet C validates the transaction. Planet C is usually decided on a nearest neighbor basis (If I recall correctly).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Krugman is huge scifi nerd. He chose to study economics because it was the closest thing to psycohistory in real life.

[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/03/01/the- deflationis...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/03/01/the-deflationist)

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd be interested to know what possible commodity would be worth trading among star systems -- even if some star system has a planet made entirely of diamonds, surely it would take far less energy to made them here than to ship them between stars? Likewise, it seems that endless amounts of gold (platinum, rhodium, whatever) could be harvested from our own solar system before it's worth shipping here.

Even if there's some alien truffle delicacy that only grows in the shade of a tree bathed in UV light from an alien star, surely that could be cultivated here in an artificial habitat far easier than shipping it light years across the galaxy?

<comment><USER6> Information.

Personally I imagine we're better off when we share information for free, but I haven't tested the hypothesis.

<comment><USER7> Aww dang it, I didn't see you wrote information first.

And here I am thinking I was being insightful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Link to the original PDF that does not endlessly nag you to subscribe to the newsletter:

[https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf](https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER9> Fun article but, has figure II been lost to history?

If so then an better scanned version of the pdf should be the first thing we buy from a distant civilization.

<comment><USER10> "Readers who find figure II puzzling should recall that a diagram of an imaginary axis must, of course, itself be imaginary"

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."

-Paul Krugman

Paul does not have the best track record.

<comment><USER4> exact quote:

>"The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."

Krugmans response to criticism:

> First, look at the whole piece. It was a thing for the Times magazine's > 100th anniversary, written as if by someone looking back from 2098, so the > point was to be fun and provocative, not to engage in careful forecasting; I > mean, there are lines in there about St. Petersburg having more skyscrapers > than New York, which was not a prediction, just a thought-provoker.

>But the main point is that I don't claim any special expertise in technology -- I almost never make technological forecasts, and the only reason there was stuff like that in the 98 piece was because the assignment required that I do that sort of thing.

<comment><USER12> He was partly right that most people have nothing to say to each other. But that doesn't seem to stop them from talking anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> On a related note; this is one of my favorite podcasts

[http://contrakrugman.com/](http://contrakrugman.com/)

Also related; Krugman is probably my least favorite modern day "economist".

</comment><comment><USER14> I understand that this paper is sort of a joke (hence references to "the force"), but I don't understand the point of some of these research papers.

> "How should interest charges on goods in transit be computed when the goods > travel at close to the speed of light?"

Perhaps we should do more research on getting the goods to travel close to the speed of light before we start worrying about how to calculate interest charges on them.

<comment><USER15> According to Krugman, the paper is "a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics."

I think this paper is a great example of the playfulness inherent to an effective "hacker" mindset -- do something fun and interesting, and perhaps useful conclusions will follow. Perhaps they won't, but hey, you still had fun.

<comment><USER16> >> According to Krugman, the paper is "a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics."

So, if I understand correctly (as non-native English speaker), the usual in economics is: "ridiculous analysis of serious subject" ??

<comment><USER17> Yes that is the implication exactly.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Nintendo, EA, and Sony no longer support SOPA - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/the-largest-game-companies-in-the-world-have-dropped-their-support-for-a-bill-the-internet-hates-2011-12 <comment><USER2> As a Reddit user points out, this is more of a PR move, since ESA is still in support of SOPA. [http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/nwoa9/nintendo_sony_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/nwoa9/nintendo_sony_and_ea_drop_sopa_support/c3cjkip) [http://www.destructoid.com/ea-nintendo-sony-reduce-sopa- supp...](http://www.destructoid.com/ea-nintendo-sony-reduce-sopa-support-by-50 --218742.phtml)

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there an official list of companies in opposition to SOPA?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Progress!</comment>


Apparently Techcrunch Staff doesn't read Hacker News - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/21/13-year-old-designs-efficient-solar-array-inspired-by-oak-trees/

<comment><USER2> Either way, I don't understand the physics behind it :(

<comment><USER3> No, your confusion shows that - unlike the boy and half the media - you do understand the physics behind it just fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> can you explain this title for me?

<comment><USER5> This same story was posted on HN a few days ago. Since then there have been some articles crop up that claim that "solar-panel" trees are inferior.

13 year old makes cool stuff: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2902329>

13 year old's stuff isn't so cool: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2906538>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> sigh, yes, unfortunately we are going to have to hear this on the main stream news tomorrow, and they will also have it wrong.</comment>


Equidate Launches A Secondary Market For Early Startup Employees To Sell Shares - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/30/equidate/

<comment><USER2> > with or without the startup's consent

I'm not convinced this is possible in the long run.

The idea seems to be that employees can't sell the shares themselves, but can sell the kind of derivative around which Equidate is based. That may be true at the moment, in that the employees may not be contractually forbidden from writing such a derivative. But if companies currently forbid sales of the shares themselves, won't they eventually get wise and start to forbid sales of derivatives as well?

<comment><USER3> I don't understand why companies would _want_ to prevent employees from selling stocks. Most startup equity is worth very little. Giving employees more options to sell said equity makes it worth more which also makes it a more effective means of recruiting employees.

<comment><USER4> There are a number of reasons for it, one they can constrain what employees do, but they can't constrain what 3rd parties do. Investors are bound by their term sheets, employees by their employment agreements, and these people who hold stock and are 'unbound' might cause trouble. (not that they will its just that if they do the company has a limited number of ways to respond)

<comment><USER5> They can't cause any trouble until the employee shares have been delivered, which would be at the same point that the employee could unload the stock via other means; until that point, all they have is a contract with the employee.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps we have different ideas of what "trouble" is :-). My experience is that 'qualified investor' can often be substituted for 'troublemaker' but it may just be coincidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can see two practical problems with this, and am curious about how they deal with them:

\- The investors will not be entitled to the same information as stockholders, which will limit their ability to properly value the shares. This, in turn, should increase their risk perception and lower the price they offer.

\- Even if the contract between the investor and the employee is sound, the employee could fail to deliver the stock for a number of reasons, including violating something in their employment agreement, or due to onerous provisions among the vesting terms. (Companies have been known to pull back securities which were _already vested_ at the time the employee left.)

<comment><USER5> Regarding the second point, failure to deliver is an insurable risk, and would probably spawn a related market in derivatives. Anyone trading the contract on the shares that the employee wishes to sell will probably go over the employment agreement and the corporate bylaws very carefully in order to assess this risk.

Under what conditions have employers been able to pull back shares that are already vested without being sued into oblivion?

<comment><USER6> _Regarding the second point, failure to deliver is an insurable risk...assess this risk._

Yes, but whoever insures the risk would face the same difficulty in getting enough information to properly assess the risk. I'm not saying it's not doable. However, it might not be doable well enough, and cheaply enough, that there's enough margin of safety for the investor, above the lowest price at which the employee would be willing to 'sell'.

 _Under what conditions have employers been able to pull back shares that are already vested without being sued into oblivion?_

Skype pulled back _options_ that were already vested: [http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/06/24/skype- vesting_cont...](http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/06/24/skype- vesting_controversy/)

I'm not aware of any similar instance for vested _shares_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Walk me through the mathematics of why an Employee at a startup they believe in and have vested equity in would sell that pre-IPO to an investor?

Can you provide a few scenarios? I imagine other HN readers are curious too, especially given our(collective) lack of experience with IPO's....well at least mine.

<comment><USER6> Imagine your net worth consists of 100k cash, and a lottery ticket which, by your reckoning, has 15% chance of being worth 1m, and an 85% chance of being worth zero. Imagine further that you won't know the outcome until 3-5 years from now.

Let's forget the time value of money for a moment. The expected value (mean value under all possible future scenarios) is 15% x 1m, i.e. 150k. This is more than half your net worth.

Wouldn't you give an investor a discount if he agrees to buy half of the lottery ticket? It would get rid of the 85% chance that you lose over half your net worth through an outcome over which you have only limited influence.

Also, you can buy stuff with cash. Today.

<comment><USER7> I see. That makes sense. Well put. Are you on the team?

<comment><USER6> Thanks.

No, I'm not on the team.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Something very common in the poker tournament world is equity swapping. In any given tournament a player might swap 5-10% of their action with one or more other players. This is a way to reduce variance while maintaining similar equity (assuming roughly equal skill levels).

Why isn't there a service for allowing employees at different startups to swap their equity to reduce their variance?

<comment><USER9> Because private companies don't want to lose control of their shares. When too many outsiders hold your shares, bad things happen (i.e. the SEC starts treating you like a public company).

For this reason, most equity plans have a right of first refusal. Your ability to trade restricted shares to outsiders is limited.

<comment><USER10> IOW, regulation creates an significant limitation for individuals (being able to sell their shares), for the supposed benefit of individuals (forcing companies to publicly report), even if the selling individual and buying individual are both perfectly fine with the private transaction and situation. This limiting of individuals is of course for their own good, and such limitations are greatly reduced for the wealthy, who can simply bypass the individual and buy direct from the company.

As someone who once had significantly valuable equity in a company that eventually failed, and who asked and was denied the sale of some of that equity, I would have welcomed an opportunity to trade some of that upside to secure against the downside.

<comment><USER9> Of course you would have welcomed it. But you're missing the point: companies don't want you to sell their private shares, either. If nothing else, it's a logistical headache that they don't need.

This isn't a story of "big government" \-- it's better for everyone (except perhaps you) if it's difficult for you to sell your private shares on a secondary market. The company maintains better control of share pricing and internal information, you have a (sometimes strong) incentive to stay an employee if you can't liquidate your shares on a moment's notice, and it helps to keep scammers out of the equities market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One of the biggest reasons people sell private stock on the secondary market is because the want (or need, in the case they leave) to exercise options and pay the associated taxes. Early Twitter, Facebook etc... employees who left had the standard 90 days to exercise options. The good news is that an option exercise might only be $30k, the better news is the stock was worth $15 million the bad news is the tax bill was $6+ million - probably more than Mom or Uncle Willy could lend! Hence a stock sale. The other big reason people sell is life happens, i.e. after 5+ years earning $150k in the Bay Area doesn't buy a new house after you get married and have kids. I've done hundreds of deals and the reasons for selling are very consistent. But there are definitely issues with the proposed structure of Equidate. Happy to discuss with anyone email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER12> _It's similar to a collateralized loan. No shares are trading hands._

It actually sounds kind of like a convertible bond that you might have in an early stage VC round, except that instead of the company issuing shares when the conversion happens, it's the founder/employee "converting" from their already issued shares. The convertible bonds can trade just like well, like other bonds trade.

Given that they haven't even managed to acquire "equidate.com" (currently goes to an all comic sans site for "Equine Event Dates & Places") we have to assume this is a pretty early stage / MVP type of company.

Ultimately this comments thread could really use some input from a knowledgable VC or lawyer...

</comment><comment><USER13>
       Regarding the SEC's 500
      shareholders' threshold
      for public disclosure of
      financial statements, any
      shareholder has the right
      to examine a corporation's
      books and records.</comment>


Show HN: Acme Blogs - gerges-beshay https://acme.center/blogs <comment> gerges-beshay Acme Blogs, the first service of Acme Center. Very minimal MVP for what is planned to be a feature-rich blogs platform service.

Developed using Firebase (Auth, Functions, Hosting), React, GraphQL, and MongoDB.

Give it a try, and let me know what you think, and what you would like the service to provide.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> There's no content and no sign-up mechanism.

<comment> gerges-beshay If you click on the avatar icon on the top right, you get the option to sign in using Facebook. Then you can add blogs and articles.

Good point though that I need to make that more clear in the UI somehow.

<comment><AUTHOR>
      sign in using Facebook

... which I consider a fatal flaw.

<comment> gerges-beshay You mean to use wording like "Sign in/up" instead of just "Sign in"?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, I mean to give Facebook any more page hits or demographic data.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Hang out this weekend in SF? - <AUTHOR>

I'm going to be in San Francisco for a job interview, wondering if there is anything cool and / or startup related going on that I could go to, or if anyone just wants to chill. <comment><USER2> Not sure about the compnay, but there are many meetups happen every single day. You might wanna check that out and register yourself..you will get to meet lot of awesome people and FREE FOOD!!!

</comment><comment><USER3> Sosh.com does a good job of recommending activities. There's also a decent list here: <http://sf.funcheap.com/>

</comment><comment><USER4> Is there any aggregator which lists the meetups that are happening in the Bay Area?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not familiar with any, other than stuff like Meetup.com (which I'm checking as well)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A/S/L?</comment>


Mueller Used Bitcoin to Catch Russia - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/19/tech/bitcoin-mueller-russia/index.html <comment><USER2> So Bitcoin was used to finance and control the election of the most powerful country in history?

If you believe that HRC lost because a foreign power "hacked" the election, then yes.

If you believe that releasing actual, and somewhat unflattering, information about candidates to the public shows that political party leaders chose the wrong candidate, then no.

At the very least, this is an example of how Bitcoin is _not_ completely anonymous, depending on how one uses it.</comment>


Harvard's CompSci intro course boasts record-breaking enrollment - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/article/2682600/education/harvards-compsci-intro-course-boasts-record-breaking-enrollment.html

<comment><USER2> _" Malan also said that 'it is possible' that the decision to exempt CS50 from the new restrictions on enrollment in courses occurring at the same time helped bolster its enrollment numbers. Last month, Dean of Undergraduate Education Jay M. Harris sent an email to course instructors notifying them of tighter controls on simultaneous enrollment for all courses except CS50."_

Besides, David Malan is a rockstar himself. His classes are fun, witty, engaging, great for non-techies. Not a surprise that his class is one of the most sought-after.

[1] [http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2014/9/11/cs50-breaks- enro...](http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2014/9/11/cs50-breaks-enrollment- records/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if this means more Harvard students are seeking careers as devs or that Harvard students in other disciplines are looking to add programming to their repertoire?

<comment><USER4> I also wonder what the percentage of graduates they have after the four years. I'm sure a lot of people see the draw of a fun career and money, but don't know how difficult the degree is.

<comment><USER5> A computer science degree can be easier than a physics, math, or biology degree. At least for some of us.</comment></comment></comment>


Skype and other Video calling services are "illegal" in India - <AUTHOR> http://www.nextbigwhat.com/skype-illegal-in-india-bsnl-chief-297/

<comment><USER2> I imagine old ministers discussing over skype illegality of skype.</comment>


Utah K-9 sniffs out porn – or the devices that carry it, anyway - <AUTHOR> http://www.sltrib.com/news/4031044-155/utah-k-9-sniffs-out-porn- <comment><USER2> This is more-or-less complete rubbish. Does a "porn" image file have a different odor than a non-porn image file? Only a credulous loon would believe a headline like that.

I'm not even sure that "the devices that carry it" actually makes sense either, even though the article says: "Because the chemical URL can smell is distinct for storage devices, he isn't confused by remote controls or garage door openers." I'm going to have to call BS on this - the article lumps DVDs, USB storage, and memory cards as "storage devices".

Yeah, this article is bunk. It's a pure police PR plant. If this kind of information is just floating around, part of common knowledge, then police can use "porn dogs" to find "evidence" at will.

<comment><USER3> The idea is to find any storage devices you hid when they serve a warrant, not to do spot checks for porn. It doesn't matter if the dog finds your car keys or the TV remote you lost in the couch, if it eventually finds your stash of illegal music or that video tape you forgot to take back to Blockbuster that they're trying to bust you for.

<comment><USER2> Really, you don't need to apologize for the Utah police being dumb enough to repeat that "special scent only storage devices give off" rubbish. It's OK, the US Supreme Court almost always says we citizens have to give police a pass based on their verified Good Intentions.

But it's still stupid to believe that yourself. "Storage devices" (except maybe DVDs or CD ROMs) are made of the same components with the same processes as Tee vee remotes, cell phones, laptops, you name it. They're not going to smell special, even to a dog, and they're really not going to smell special if there's porn on them. Bits are bits, dude.

Either URL is a fake (likely) or he just alerts on subconscious clues from the policeman (highly likely). He's going to be like those drug-sniffing dogs that mainly detect cheese and sausage: the police will end up finding and returning a lot of lost remotes, and using fishy evidence in court, contributing to disrespect of law enforcement, and the US legal system in general.</comment></comment></comment>