The company that I really hope doesn't sell out is Dropbox - <AUTHOR> http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/05/10/afternoonSelloutNotes.html

<comment><USER2> There's not a single good reason in this post why Dropbox shouldn't sell to anyone interested in paying, nor are there any reasons stated why Dropbox should open source.

Here's a good reason why Dropbox should never open source: Dropbox can never loose my files. Ever. If they do my trust in them is gone and I go elsewhere.

If Dropbox where to open source and then some dipshit provided a Dropbox based storage solution with a flakey backend, then Dropbox's brand trust is (almost) equally fucked.

<comment><USER3> "There's not a single good reason in this post why Dropbox shouldn't sell to anyone interested in paying, nor are there any reasons stated why Dropbox should open source."

Sure there is. "I hope they don't" and "I hope they do" respectively, for correct values of "I".

Well, I suppose you could argue about whether that's a "good" reason, but people are still allowed to _hope_ people do things without rigorous analysis of whether or not it is in those people's best interests to do so with cited references to economic theories and the disputes swirling around said theories, yes?

It's a blog post. It's not a bad one, though I'm not sure why it's the #1 link on HN right now since it is literally just one person's "hopes".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Warning: Content-free post.

<comment><USER5> Thanks. Interestingly, I cannot upmod you because I did not read it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Twitter doesnt make much sense to me-exactly what is the gain there? One company he didnt mention which I think would make sense is Amazon-I beleive Dropbox runs entirely on the AWS stack already, and the service drives decent consumer growth for S3.

</comment><comment><USER7> "If I were a Twitter board member I'd seriously consider merging with them."

can you explain this a little more?

</comment><comment><USER8> First sensible comment about Facebook. All the outcry now is somewhat mystifying because who didn't expect Facebook to start monetizing the private information? How did we all expect them to make billions of dollars otherwise?

The right way to treat Facebook is strictly as a public billboard. If you woulnd't tack it to the board in a public square, don't put it on Facebook.

It would have been better had they been completely public from the very first day.

</comment><comment><USER9> Does Dropbox depend on Amazon S3? How independent of that?

</comment><comment><USER10> Dropbox has saved my arse multiple times.

</comment><comment><USER11> And ESPECIALLY not to Microsoft. Please.

</comment><comment><USER12> > On the other hand, the technology that Dropbox has mastered is so important > that there should be an open source equivalent that we can all deploy, so we > can have Dropboxes for sensitive info we don't want to share with them.

FTP?

Yes, I understand that Dropbox is a lot more than just FTP, and I love it, but if you're asking for a non-Dropbox dropbox... then you should just put an ftp server on an old box and be done with it.</comment>


If Data You Have, Consume It They Will - <AUTHOR> http://phalt.co/if-you-have-data-they-will-consume-it/

<comment><USER2> Really great blog post with a great message and composition. As a testament to the theme I wrote an API over a weekend that returned ebola data and it has been very heavily used by people around the world. The astounding thing is that the World Health Organization, from whom I gathered the data, only offered it at the time in the form of PDF files. It's all open source if anyone's interested: [https://github.com/montanaflynn/ebola-outbreak- api](https://github.com/montanaflynn/ebola-outbreak-api)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is awesome, and another great example that "If you provide data, people will consume it"!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hey Paul! It's Dan from London API!

So glad to hear you're doing this. I wanna help out with SWAPI, if I get time :)

FYI everybody who maybe didn't read it in the blog post: Paul's API is now used by the UK Organisation Code Club when teaching schoolkids how to use python. They're given a task to create a Pokédex using this API and a python wrapper. I was extremely surprised when I saw my kids using it! Good job, dude!

</comment><comment><USER4> The definitive word on the Star Wars canon was given earlier this year: only the six films, Star Wars: The Clone Wars series, Star Wars: Rebels, and new content are considered canon.

Also, Wookiepedia is doing an excellent job differentiating Canon and Legends, so you can take your cues from there.

</comment><comment><USER5> Oh wow there is an easily querable pokemon API. Now I feel like a dick for manually scrapping that data from fan sites :\

</comment><comment><USER6> I noticed a typo you might want to correct: a cannon is quite different from a canon. One is a weapon, the other is not.

<comment><USER7> Another one I noticed: also have a "Here's a chat of the requests for each day". (chart).

<comment><AUTHOR> Bloody markdown and no spell checker. I rely on them far too much, thank you

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Awesome blog post! I am definitely inspired to create an open API for something. Still deciding on what. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER9> This makes me happy. :)

[http://i.imgur.com/d6OZWX7.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/d6OZWX7.jpg)</comment>


The Rise of the Thought Leader - <AUTHOR> https://newrepublic.com/article/143004/rise-thought-leader-how-superrich-funded-new-class-intellectual <comment><USER2> I was recently at a conference run by a progressive political think tank. I was surprised and confused by the way some of the speakers discussed AI, "innovation", entrepreneurship, and technology.

They basically all repeated a number of the same points.

1\. AI will be amazing, and will utterly decimate jobs in the future, though it was never clear whether they understood AI technologies or even the economics of automation.

2\. Everyone should be trying to become an entrepreneur. Disruption is a panacea.

3\. Technology is the future. But, they use about 1,000,000 different definitions of technology and give little heed to social ramifcations of some of the technologies.

4\. Everyone in the future will work on a contract basis and this is amazing. They gave little thought to many of the long term benefits usually associated with careers.

5\. "Nudging" will be THE tool of governments in the future, with little thought to the ramifications to democracy and liberal values.

There was such a small bandwidth of opinion and argument it was hilarious. They were basically all repeating boiler plate stuff you read in a lot of these "thought leader" books.

<comment><USER3> You're misunderstanding what a think tank is. It's a place that gets money from places and is a parking lot for displaced political people. They aren't there to have original thoughts -- they are there to support the perspective of whomever is signing the checks. What they say isn't very important, but what they don't say is critical.

Ditto for political people like cabinet members and CEO types. In public, their outward messaging needs to be tightly controlled. Behind the scenes for smart ones, their personal thoughts or agendas are often very different.

<comment><USER4> The RAND Corporation is a "think tank" but it's definitely not what you describe. They are quite valued for their objective and bi-partisan analysis domestically and even internationally. They actually shut down one of their international offices because the government in power basically asked them to spread propaganda on their behalf. RAND puts out great reports on all sorts of topics around policy and decision making. Education, marijuana reform, cybercrime, you name it. I bother saying this because I used to work there and think folks really misunderstand that there are some think tanks doing very valuable work. I'm a little salty even because when I moved to my current job at well known tech company, once there, I found my past experience gets massively discounted, even controlling for the differences between R&D/think tank vs tech company. It's annoying and it mostly seems to stem from ignorance and stereotypes based on a few of the bad apples that call themselves think tank but are actually partisan propaganda mills.

<comment><USER5> RAND is a pretty interesting place -- and as far as I know totally not connected to a certain author popular among libertarians. Research ANd Development, right?

A couple years ago I was considering a move to Santa Monica and while my obvious employment would have been some form of software development further from the beach, I thought it might be cool to find my way into RAND in some capacity.

Do they have part-time researchers there, or maybe researchers-in-residence for sabbatical-length periods?

<comment><USER4> They have part-timers who were once full timers but typically you can't start off part time. Closest thing is the summer associates program for visiting PhD students.

Ps. I had an office overlooking the Santa Monica mountains and got to spend time deeply immersing into interesting problems. Now at current tech co I'm packed into an open office plan elbows to elbows and don't immerse much past any problem that can't be solved in a week or too. I sometimes hear Gob saying in my head, "I've made a huge mistake..."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The entire pursuit of "thought leadership" is a joke. If someone purposefully seeks thought leadership then they are probably incapable of truly demonstrating it. Thought leaders don't try to become thought leaders, they become so by focusing on their areas of expertise

<comment><USER7> My favorite 'thought leader': [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Shing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Shing)

<comment><USER8> Valleywag was all over this guy:

Shingy's Book of Nonsense Prophecies

Shingy Just Spent 20 Minutes Yelling Insane Gibberish on a Stage

SXSW In One Photo: Shingy on a Wrecking Ball

[http://valleywag.gawker.com/tag/shingy](http://valleywag.gawker.com/tag/shingy)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This article desperately tries to pin the thought leader phenomenon on billionaires, but I don't buy it. Billionaires are certainly susceptible, but plenty of poor people believe this stuff too. The article even tries to cleanly separate academia from TED talks et. al., but I know plenty of people who came out of their masters / PhD spouting stuff like this.

<comment><USER10> What I took away is that while plenty of poor people might believe/agree with thought leaders, it's the rich who _enable_ them, by giving them a platform. I'd say the article is not so much academics vs. "thought leaders" as it is intellectuals (i.e. people who apply a critical lens to their chosen objects of study) vs. eloquent bullshitters (i.e. people who have one idea and dogmatically try to fit it to everything, and evangelically try to convince people that they're right. There are plenty of both inside and outside academia.

<comment><USER11> If the author wanted to pin something on the rich, I think he should've gone explicitly after think tanks instead. I don't think your run-of-the-mill celebrity intellectual living off book royalties, paid talks and columns has that much to do with large political donors. All a paid speaker needs is a paying audience, and preferably a large one. And if he's a bullshiter, that's all the better: bullshit sells. They just seem target anyone with some disposable income instead. But think tanks need _budgets_ (different order of magnitude here), and their output is used to supply media and lobbyists with stuff which might budge the decision of voters as well as politicians.

Also, I disagree that this is "The Rise" of anything in either case. Think tanks are recent, but they've been here for a while. But someone peddling some (seemingly?) shallow understanding of the world for money is probably old as the hills. Certainly older than the sophists, older than Mesmer and his animal magnetism, as well as older than any sort of quackery or intellectual sleight of hand in historical memory.

Talking about this as if it were something new, and with allusions to Gramsci to top it off, just strikes me as making it as unnecessarily ominous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Thew criticisms leveled at the Thought Leadership industry are valid, I think. I am much more skeptical that blogs, magazines, and small publications are the solution, or even _a_ solution to this problem.

Gone unmentioned is the massive technical change in communication, and its effect on the actual way in which humans absorb and communicate ideas. I would look to the process of "going viral" as a literal embodiment of the problem. Things which are easily transmissible can achieve that critical mass to self- sustain. The Thought Leadership industry recognizes and exploits it, while the countermanding vaccine of rationality, criticality, and analysis is much harder to pass on.

<comment><USER13> I shudder at reading the phrase "Thought Leadership industry". It is largely manufactured, consensus-oriented opinions by people that happened to get popular for one reason or another and most likely don't really know exactly what they're talking about aside from some popular slogans, terms, or arguments already having been made. It's really quite anti-intellectual, yet at the same time ivory-tower.

<comment><USER12> Infographics, Advertorials, and TEDx talks, brought to you by Thought Leadership of America Foundation for Progress, the Center for Media Excellence and the nam-shub of Enki. /s

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Thought Leader" and "Influencer" are terms that make me cringe. Anytime I see those labels on someones bio, resume, twitter profile, etc, I can't help but roll my eyes.

<comment><USER15> They are terms that one can't apply to oneself. It's fine for other people to call me a thought leader, but I can't say it myself. I suspect this may also apply to "entrepreneur".

<comment><USER16> I can't believe people downvoted you for talking about yourself in a manner that could be considered arrogant except they didn't realize you were actually just being hypothetical.

<comment><USER17> My understanding is that the standard usage is to employ the second person singular instead of the first when expressing this.

<comment><USER16> And then it's mistaken instead to be a direct insult because the same people who don't have a firm enough grasp on the English language to correctly comprehend hypothetical speech in the first-person case are also not going to understand the hypothetical second-person case either; instead, these people will also misconstrue that the speaker is directly referring to themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Makes me think of Kevin Kelly ([http://kk.org](http://kk.org)). His 1994 book Out of Control, read retrospectively, has held up better than any other prognostication I can think of concerning the nexus of business and technology. Neal Stephenson's 1999 Cryptonomicon is another staggering example. Asimov. Orwell. Machiavelli. Musashi. Tzu. There are the 'A' players of thought leadership, and there is everyone else.

<comment><USER17> What aspects of Asimov do you think are the most prescient?

(on a more pedantic note, his last name is Sun: Tzu is an honorific title)

<comment><USER19> My guess would be AI/automation.

An obvious thing today but not sixty years ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is there a proposal to distinguish between a "thought leader" and a "public intellectual" beyond feeling that one is superficial and vapid, while the other is deep and interesting?

The problem is that "superficial" and "deep" are just metaphors, and boring or interesting is subjective.

<comment><USER2> I think one distinction we should try to make is that a "public intellectual" is someone who actively seeks to relate academic/scholarly research and methods to the public in accessible, but not simplified, terms and is open to serious debate. A "thought leader" tends to be associated with little scholarly rigour, a tendency to skirt debate, and over-simplification of complex ideas.

I think the author did have a good distinction as well. A "public intellectual" questions and interrogates, while a "thought leader" seems to inordinately promote and prophesize. (I'm thinking of someone like Ray Kurzweil as a "thought leader" here) That's not perfect, but it seems to serve pretty well.

<comment><USER21> How are they getting paid a shit professors paycheck or a big fat sponsor check? That's how I would distinguish. Maybe not always right but pretty darn close.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This reminds me of a comment from the book "Postwar: a History of Europe between 1945 to 1989". Many oppressive governments that sprang up were initially supported by the learned classes. The quote is as follows:

"Totalitarianism can never truly succeed without the support of the intellectuals"

I'd like to point out that even religious totalitarianism usually displays this trait as well by co-opting the theological intellectuals, so this dynamic plays out again and again on both the liberal and conservative sides of history.

<comment><USER23> Does North Korea have intellectuals or is it not truly succeeding?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Thought leadership these days is almost always about pushing a corporate agenda. It's not true thinking, it's marketing.

That reminds me of the time when Mark Zuckerberg announced that his favorite book was "The end of power".

It's convenient for him to promote these kinds of ideas whilst his company acquires a global monopoly on consumer attention/awareness without being hampered by regulators.

<comment><USER25> I would go so far as to say that "thought leadership" is an oxymoron. It makes as much sense as "sex leadership" to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Thought Leader is just another way of saying "Some guy who wants to sell you something"

EDIT: In most cases

<comment><USER27> The official term is "bovine scatologist".

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> There exists a need for a niche un-Ted, one without music and tidy closing remarks.

</comment><comment><USER29> Quote: "The rich have, Drezner writes, empowered a new kind of thinker—the "thought leader"—at the expense of the much-fretted-over "public intellectual." Whereas public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky or Martha Nussbaum are skeptical and analytical, thought leaders like Thomas Friedman and Sheryl Sandberg "develop their own singular lens to explain the world, and then proselytize that worldview to anyone within earshot." While public intellectuals traffic in complexity and criticism, thought leaders burst with the evangelist's desire to "change the world." Many readers, Drezner observes, prefer the "big ideas" of the latter to the complexity of the former. In a marketplace of ideas awash in plutocrat cash, it has become "increasingly profitable for thought leaders to hawk their wares to both billionaires and a broader public," to become "superstars with their own brands, sharing a space previously reserved for moguls, celebrities, and athletes.""

Where does one start when trying to critique such muddle-headed dreck. You could start with 1) the article fails to address the fragmentation of the modern media landscape (any modern "big media" commentator's influence is minor next to that once yielded by Walter Lippmann of yore), or 2) quibble with the false dichotomies of a) "skeptical and analytical" versus "singluar lens" or b) "complexity and criticism" versus "change the world" 3) "marketplace of ideas awash in plutocrat cash" totally misses the point - it's an attention economy now, stupid. "Plutocracy" applies more to the old media oligarchy of the 20th century than it does today. 4) I don't even know what "increasingly profitable to hawk their wares to both billionaires and a broader public" even means. What's the mechanism here? That there's something new about the fact that commentators write books and give speeches?

A much better critique of public intellectuals comes from Philip Tetlock, who at least tries to hold them to account for their bad predictions. In that vein, I like Bryan Caplan's "bettors oath": "Blathering talk surrounds us, but I will take no part in it. My word is my bet; I will always put my money where my mouth is. When challenged, I will bet on my words, refine them, or recant. When no one is present to challenge me, I will weigh my words and thoughts as if my fellow oath-takers were listening... " [http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/05/the_bettors_oat....](http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/05/the_bettors_oat.html)

</comment><comment><USER30> I once read an article headlined something like "It's Clay Shirky's internet and we just live in it". I thought to myself, who the fuck is Clay Shirky and who decided it was _his_ internet? Is he besties with Vint Cerf or something?

I really have nothing against Mr. Shirky or his writing; some of his ideas sound interesting. But this is nothing new. People privilege some people's opinions over others not because they are the most qualified, but because they happened to be around to say something profound sounding while a _New York Times_ (or _New Yorker_ ) columnist was listening.

</comment><comment><USER31> No one to name. No examples to present. Just an agenda to suppose.

Seems a little hand-wavey, no?

<comment><USER32> More than a few names are mentioned, such as Thomas Friedman and Sheryl Sandberg, but it also seems a disingenuous at times. His theory looks more coherent than it actually is once you begin to break it down. People can be too quick to believe in vague ideas about "the elites" who are against us.

People the author likes, like Noam Chomsky, aren't considered "thought leaders" who "develop their own singular lens to explain the world, and then proselytize that worldview to anyone within earshot" in an attempt to "change the world." Even though Chomsky would definitely like to change the world, and is quite prolific.

Some of the criticism leveled at some of the people is valid but doesn't support his argument. Like when he mentions Fareed Zakaria's plagiarism, as far as I know it was limited in scope and not common throughout his writing. I'm ambivalent about Zakaria, but I'd rather talk about actual ideas than focus on that episode.

He constructs this "thought leader" strawman to attack, when he would better just directly addressing some of the core ideas presented by the thought leaders he doesn't like.

Maybe the article pulled it together by the end, but I couldn't keep reading when it was this sloppily presented. It's compelling, and there are even parts that appeal to my own biases, but it's too ambitious and falls apart.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Its comical how everyone in this thread shits on thought leaders, put then praise PG in his thread on insurance. He didn't intend to become one, but thousands of people read (literally) "Thoughts on Insurance". He is by definition a thought leader. Like anything in this world, some are bad and some are good.

<comment><USER34> Thoughts on Insurance

By Aaron Harris

<comment><USER33> That is fair, but my point still stands. I didn't see the byline, just the domain and the writing style.

<comment><USER35> >but my point still stands

Does it though? You're criticizing people praising PG but using an article not written by him as the example. If you have another example that's written by PG and relevant to your point then please edit your comment to use that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Dan Drezner also spoke on his book at the lawfare podcast, I found it quite a good listen:

[https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-ideas- industry](https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-ideas-industry)

</comment><comment><USER37> @ProfJeffJarviss on twitter is a great parody of the thought leaders. Would recommend following ([https://twitter.com/ProfJeffJarviss](https://twitter.com/ProfJeffJarviss))

<comment><USER17> You know it's a great parody when some light scrolling across the page is enough to induce slight nausea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I do not see any references to Thought Leader[1].

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZBKX-6Gz6A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZBKX-6Gz6A)

</comment><comment><USER39> It sounds like someone is trying to sell something.

</comment><comment><USER40> I'd like to offer an alternate theory:

A unionized elite dominates the economy. This bloc constitutes millions of unionized public sector workers who are in the top 10% of income earners, and the writers of major establishment media organisations like the New York Times and the New Republic.

I just googled David Sessions and NewsGuild, and it turns out he is/was a high-ranking member:

[http://www.nyguild.org/post/contract- approved](http://www.nyguild.org/post/contract-approved)

Like all elite groups with legally enshrined privileges, this group has created a set of myths to justify its existence, and a scapegoat to blame for society's ills.

This elite views the principle of a free market economy as the greatest threat to its privileges, and so it creates a conspiracy theory where any intellectual that promotes this principle is working for the interests of billionaires who are really calling the shots.

This elite is afraid of the freedom the internet provides. It is already looking to shut down free market interaction in digital media, by promoting digital media unionization:

[https://newrepublic.com/article/122667/how-digital-media- uni...](https://newrepublic.com/article/122667/how-digital-media-unionization- can-and-cant-strengthen-labor)

<comment><USER32> This sounds more like you have a chip on your shoulder for the people you defined as elites than a legitimate argument. It sounds like you're doing what you accuse them of: creating a set of myths to justify this imagined scapegoat; creating a conspiracy theory to attempt to neutralize a perceived threat by the defined group.

Do you have actual numbers to demonstrate this large group of people are heavily in the top 10% of income earners? Journalism isn't that lucrative. Public school teaching isn't that lucrative. Unions overall have shrunk and continue to do so.

It sounds like a veiled communist/socialist conspiracy by journalists and public sector workers, yet this is a group that you claim is in the top 10% and is therefore thriving even though they exist in a capitalist system. That's confused (unless you think we're knee-deep in socialism).

I'd argue this post doesn't belong here as it's so far outside any evidence- based perspective that it becomes pure partisan spin representing what sounds like an Ayn Randian inspired ideology.

To throw you a bone, I'm not a fan of all the power public sector unions wield, and there could be some reforms, but this isn't the way to persuade people.

<comment><USER40> Evidence that most federal employees are in the top 10% of income earners [1].

I haven't compiled comprehensive statistics on public servants as a whole, but in all of the jurisdictions I'm familiar with, a large percentage are in the top 10%.

For instance, across Canadian provinces, annual compensation for a teacher with 10 years experience is well over the $80,000 mark, which is approximately the threshold for being in the top 10 percent in Canada. [2] And these are very secure jobs with very low possibility of ever being fired. That has value that is not captured in compensation statistics.

The teachers in BC are so entitled now that they openly tell students they don't like a particular candidate, and every student I've talked to hates that candidate and their party. Yes I don't have statistics for this particular claim - it's just anecdotes, but for me personally, it's clear as rain that unionisation reduces accountability and creates an elitist mindset among the privileged few who work in the public sector.

There's evidence that unionisation has been very harmful to the education system [3].

Being a unionized journalist for a big media company comes with a lot of perks and job security. That is a material benefit owing from the accepted political ideology, that claims unionisation serves the public interest.

>It sounds like a veiled communist/socialist conspiracy by journalists and public sector workers

I would say it is in their economic interest to advocate for political ideologies that legitimize a major role of government in the economy, and I am conjecturing that this leads to bias by unionized journalists against free market ideology. I think it's a fair comment to make.

>I'd argue this post doesn't belong here as it's so far outside any evidence- based perspective that it becomes pure partisan spin representing what sounds like an Ayn Randian inspired ideology.

Please note the journalist in question is alleging a vast billionaire conspiracy, with nothing but anecdotes as evidence, and impugning upon the character of any 'thought leader' supporting market-based economic principles, with nothing but conjecture to support his outlandish accusations. If that's allowed here, then certainly my comment should be as well.

His position is not an evidence-based one, at all.

It's also note worthy that you're bristling at the possibility that I'm accusing journalists of being socialists/communists while you yourself don't hesitate to throw terms like "Ayn Randian inspired ideology" to denigrate me. Can I say pro-union position is "Lenin inspired ideology", or would you call for my comment to be expunged from here if I did?

[1] [https://www.cato.org/blog/federal-government-pay-exceeds- mos...](https://www.cato.org/blog/federal-government-pay-exceeds-most- industries)

[2] [http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/nhs-enm/2011/as- sa/99-014-x/99-01...](http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/nhs-enm/2011/as- sa/99-014-x/99-014-x2011003_2-eng.cfm)

[3] [https://academic.oup.com/qje/article- abstract/111/3/671/1839...](https://academic.oup.com/qje/article- abstract/111/3/671/1839935/How-Teachers-Unions-Affect-Education-Production)

<comment><USER41> Gonna jump in here for better or worse...

> I would say it is in their economic interest to advocate for political > ideologies that legitimize a major role of government in the economy

While this may certainly be true for federal workers, I'm not at all convinced that this is the case for union workers. But even if it were true, I don't think federal workers and journalists have nearly the same power as large corporations and special interests who have don't just have "bias", but explicit stated goals to change the status quo in their favor.

<comment><USER40> Even if someone doesn't work in the public sector, they depend on the widespread acceptance of major tenets of 'big government' ideology for their union perks.

Unions only have power because the law forces employers to negotiate exclusively with them once a bargaining unit votes to unionize. Without this type of legislation, which thoroughly violates property rights, employers would boot all unions, including the NewsGuild, to the curb.

>But even if it were true, I don't think federal workers and journalists have nearly the same power as large corporations

Are you sure that's true? Have you added up all of the compensation of unionized workers to see what it adds up to? And what about numbers? Money is very important, but having numbers helps too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> thinkfluencing.

<comment><USER11> Terrible. I love it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I stopped reading after " _... organic intellectuals helped the bourgeoisie establish its ideas ..._ " because I believe that an extremely convincing case for the superiority of GMO intellectuals has already been made many times.

<comment><USER44> The term 'organic intellectuals' (Antonio Gramsci, ~1926-37) actually predates 'organic farming' (Walter James Northbourne, 1940).

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> While some may shun Ayn Rand for her raw view of capitalism, if you read Atlas Shrugged, she does do a good job of calling out this "arcane unintelligibility"

<comment><USER21> title says it all:

[http://knowledgenuts.com/2013/09/20/ayn-rand-was-a-secret- we...](http://knowledgenuts.com/2013/09/20/ayn-rand-was-a-secret-welfare- queen/)

<comment><USER46> You mean she used a system she had paid into?

How is this not merely a personal attack?

<comment><USER47> A personal attack, or _ad hominem_ , attacks the character, motive, or other attribute of the person.

One can be a welfare recipient and be of excellent character and the article doesn't question her character. The article also doesn't say that Rand's being on welfare was any sort of motive for any sort of act.

No one is questioning her right to receive welfare having paid into the system.

The criticism the article brings is her evident hypocrisy for taking welfare after criticizing it for others. That she clearly didn't need it, that she and her followers kept this a secret only adds to that hypocrisy. That hypocrisy has bearing on her _thought leadership_. Yeah, it really does.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Twitter Passes 500M Users - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/30/analyst-twitter-passed-500m-users-in-june-2012-140m-of-them-in-us-jakarta-biggest-tweeting-city/?grcc=3c6fd5c6aa55fb82a48202192ddb92fdZ8ZwdgtZ0Z386Z200Z99Z3&grcc2=5dffc6504aa0b4adab5cd0fe821a9fe7~1343683715812~fca4fa8af1286d8a77f26033fdeed202~a394bf78855e6ef2368f0425f4bdff66~1343683060137~8~3~0~0~0~386~200~99~7~3~

<comment><USER2> Like nobody has more than one twitter account.

Does seem a rather low number, but I feel its more accurate than anything facebook have bounced of us. Still a impressive number, even with dupe/poop reduction factors.</comment>


Maltego – open-source intelligence and graphical link analysis tool - <AUTHOR> https://www.maltego.com/ <comment><USER2> Here is a list of osint tools I compiled after a fairly recent review for those who don't like maltego:

      https://www.spiderfoot.net/
      https://github.com/jivoi/awesome-osint
      https://github.com/laramies/theHarvester
      https://github.com/aancw/Belati
      https://github.com/intrigueio/intrigue-core
      https://osintframework.com/
      https://github.com/s0md3v/Photon
      https://github.com/lanmaster53/recon-ng
      https://github.com/kpcyrd/sn0int

<comment><USER3> Shameless plug for Synapse, our Intelligence (OSINT or otherwise) Analysis Platform:

[https://github.com/vertexproject/synapse](https://github.com/vertexproject/synapse)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It says it is open source but I have a hard time finding the code. [https://github.com/paterva/maltego-trx](https://github.com/paterva/maltego- trx) looks like something much more basic.

<comment><USER5> They may mean "Open Source Intelligence" as in OSINT.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open- source_intelligence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_intelligence)

<comment><USER6> This is correct. It's not open source as the HN crowd would know it. OSINT as you say is the correct "Open Source" moniker. Source: I use Maltego for work daily.

>[...]the term "open" refers to overt, publicly available sources (as opposed to covert or clandestine sources). It is not related to open-source software or collective intelligence.

<comment><USER7> Interesting, is there a alternative that is open source for OSNIT?

<comment><USER8> There are bits and pieces, but not a complete tool that gathers all the same functionality (that I'm aware of, there could alays be something new that's not well known yet).

The main selling point of Maltego is the large amount of plugins and data sources that you can integrate with it.

<comment><USER9> It is of continuous disappointment to me that there really isn't not only a good FOSS link-analysis tool, but doesn't appear to be _any_ of any quality. I've used yED in a pinch a couple of times but it's not FOSS.

<comment><USER10> But why would there be? It's a niche application and the target market doesn't care about open source.

<comment><USER9> Governments and police in particular are customers for these tools and they _do_ care about open source. If there was a good competitive FOSS tool out there, not a weekend project by any means, but a serious effort. It would be adopted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There is an alternative if interested:

[https://secapps.com/market/recon](https://secapps.com/market/recon) \- mostly free with subscription if you want to save the maps and work in teams

[https://github.com/pownjs/pown-recon](https://github.com/pownjs/pown-recon) \- the open source engine that powers the above

Full-disclosure, I am the author and I am planning to split this tool into a separate entity it greater focus on the tool itself.

</comment><comment><USER12> What is the main value of link analysis? As far as cause and effect and the larger picture (especially WRT the time domain), a lot of it seems like reading signs in chicken gizzards. The more you put in, the less sense they make.

There's only so much useful information to be gleaned from this kind of geometry. Fingering out and tracing cause and effect is just about impossible.

I wish someone would come up with a half decent top-down timeline creation and analysis tool.

<comment><USER13> The way I've seen Maltego-like tools being used is in one of two modes: Documentation-mode and exploratory mode.

Documentation mode is "just" recording relationships between assets so they are readily understood and visually obvious. This can be used to break new analysts into cases and to publish reports. These also serve as good starting points to pick an investigation back up. This is arguably the "easier" mode to implement since it just requires a visual graph with different entity types.

Exploratory mode means populating the graph through "transforms" (in Maltego- lingo). Going from one node to more nodes and relationships by attempting to "pivot" from a node using a certain datasource. As an example from infrastructure analysis you'd say "here's an IP, now do a transform which creates vertices for all hostnames that point to that IP". This mode is harder to get right since there's always explosion of edges and also since it's just mind-numbing work to implement transforms for all the data-sources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I remember using this in 2008!</comment>


Bountify – Crowdsource small coding tasks - <AUTHOR> https://bountify.co/

<comment><USER2> I love specialized task-oriented marketplaces like this and hope several of these take off.

The only other that I'm aware of at the moment is Tweaky.com.

Tweaky appears to focus on front-end development while I see a back-end task or two at Bountify.co.

Another difference is the minimum price. Tweaky is at $39 and Bountify is at $1.

Are there other big differences between the two?

I would hesitate to jump into a marketplace with low minimum prices because I have been groomed to 'get what I pay for' with development. It's hard to imagine that $39 is sufficient for a lot of tasks let alone $1.

As a person currently in the market for developers:

Finding a front-end rock star went well although it was slow going. We filled that position within a couple months and have asked that developer to source to Tweaky (and to check out Bountify) for spillover until/if/when we need to hire another person in-house. Our in-house developer would audit/implement changes coming from Tweaky/Bountify.

Finding a back-end/systems engineer rock star is turning out to be a bigger challenge for us and at this moment I would find a lot of value in a verified systems engineering marketplace to source work to. I find Bountify appealing in that sense although I would wait for a high quality validation procedure before sourcing systems work to a 3rd party. Even then, I would only allow access to a test environment with a requirement for instructions on rolling the changes live so I could bring in somebody who has worked closely with me to audit and implement that solution.

The bottom line for me: I am very much in favor of this type of specialized marketplace and am glad to see Bountify.co enter the arena.

<comment><USER3> @jameszol, please add <http://freedomsponsors.org> to your list ;-)

<comment><USER2> Noted, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some of the tasks are at least an hours worth of work and they are offering a bounty of 1$?

You need to prune these types of job listings, they're just spam and completely unrealistic.

Example: <https://bountify.co/1c>

Solid days worth of work. Tweaking, designing, etc.

50 bucks! That's terrible. Any thoughts on how to mitigate this problem?

<comment><USER5> Most users, including myself, provide solutions for fun. Look on StackOverflow; a lot of answers are very involved, and it's a free service. Bountify is like a Stack Overflow for code tasks, with a bonus of beer money if your solution is selected. Bottom line is that it's mostly for fun, as the bounty amounts are trivial wherever you live.

<comment><USER6> I would rather do something for free than have to worry about the extra accounting declaring lots of $1 amounts to the tax department entails.

<comment><USER7> In the US you don't have to declare income under (i believe) $500 from a single source in a given year. So if you earned 5,000 $1 payments, each from a different source you would have to declare NONE of them. If you earned 1,000 $100 payments from different sources you wouldn't have to declare those either.

Personally I'd rather do something for free that benefits the general public than for someone who just seems to be a cheap bastard. Now, if it were coding for an open source project and getting payed trivial wages because the project has no money and devs just need help getting something done... maybe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great idea.

As someone who wants a small project to try out a new framework, this seems like a great site to find projects.

It might be helpful to have users flag tasks that they are working on, so that others can get a sense of how many people are currently working on an answer.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the feedback! That's an interesting idea. Right now, registered users can click "I'm working on it" on a given bounty to privately signal to the bounty creator that they have started work. I was hesitant to make the list of current workers public because it might dissuade other would-be solution providers from answering, since they might assume that the other user is almost done with the problem (when they might not have done anything at all). I might add in some kind of "I'm working on it" track record for each user, so people can see how often they actually solved problems they said they'd be working on. Thanks for bringing that up.

<comment><USER8> Hmmm... I guess I am worried about the opposite. The fact that lots of people might be working on it and I might be wasting my time.

Perhaps allow partial answers?

I have seen this happen often with StackOverflow. Were a person gives a one line answer to start things off, and then within 30 minutes elaborates the answer to a very detailed one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks pretty cool, I can definitely imagine outsourcing some easy-but-long tasks. I think that you should not aim at becomming "stack overflow with bounties" but a real marketplace, so the "do it for fun and a few beer bucks" tasks should be pruned.

<comment><USER10> I'm pretty sure I'd use this sometimes as well, especially when struggling to find bugs and needing another eye on the code.

I think the few-bucks posts will probably fall away over time as more serious requests get posted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Recently, I've been thinking about how it might be possible to improve the current model of how commercial software development is done today.

I was thinking along these lines:

A company has a Github repository with several tasks. Independent developers choose tasks, fork the repository and upon completion of the task send a merge request. The company would then review the committed code and upon approval pay the developer.

While this at the first glimpse seems like a pretty simple and feasible model there are obviously quite a few gotchas:

1.) How can companies make sure developers don't use their source code for their own purposes? 2.) How can a company make sure it's not wasting time on a developer? There would have to be some sort of rating system. 3.) How could you break down more complex tasks so developers don't have to spend weeks just to understand the software they're working on. 4.) Is it possible at all to accomplish non-trivial tasks on a complex software system one doesn't have at least some sort of training on? 5.) How would you make sure a company actually pays the developer upon task completion?

Quite a few problems, indeed. Nevertheless, do you think such a concept might have legs?

<comment><USER12> >do you think such a concept might have legs?

I do! I have been thinking about this much like you BjoernKW.. my dream is individual bid able pivotal tasks, that are part of a coherent whole agile project. When organized the right way, the fastest person to complete them on a distributed team wins, and there would be no limit of team size.

I actually ran a request on Bountify, and it was cool. There was some pushback for programmers who thought it was too much of a project for low $, while others enjoyed completing it for the challenge (and actually got paid).

Plenty of challenges (in making this really work for companies), but I believe Bountify has a good start here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm trying it out at the mo.. It seems to be fairly full of Google searchers.. The fact that there are so many $1 means I thought by going in at $10 I would get a good response.. I've had quite a few, but there's no incentive for the responder to test their solution that it has met the test.. It's like Stack Overflow in that the first to respond often wins.

</comment><comment><USER14> Interesting idea! I only had a quick look around the website but still have a couple questions:

1.How does the poster verify a solution?

2.If verification involves looking at the code, what's stopping the poster from just copying the code?

<comment><USER5> If the bounty poster requests code, they would verify it by running that code on their own. Most bounty creators are programmers themselves, so that is not a big issue for most users. Non-technical users have posted bounties as well, but they generally request deliverables that are easy to verify, such as complete html pages or website widgets they can drop into an existing page.

An unscrupulous bounty creator could indeed steal a working solution and post it as their own. However, any attempt would be quite obvious, as there is a "Timeline" for each Bounty that shows every revision of every solution in the order it was created. In practice, there have been no disputes or stolen solutions on the site thus far.

Hope that answered your questions!

</comment></comment><comment> UK-AL Personally, I would remove the bounty price restriction, and find a way to allow the market to let the all good listings rise the top, and bad ones towards the bottom.

Lots of $1 spam.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the feedback. I'm considering revising the bounty amount options and will most likely remove the $1 category.

<comment><USER15> Another solution would be to allow people to stack up bounties. Like the upvote system in SO in fact.

I like the idea of the solution being presented. This way you do not work only for money, but money do come as a bonus

<comment><USER3> <http://freedomsponsors.org> (disclaimer - I'm the founder) has a bounty system like that.

One difference is that users are encouraged to place bounties for existing issues on open source projects issues - the main goal on FS is to kickstart Free Software projects - but you can place a bounty for an "unlinked" task much like Bountify, like this one --> [http://www.freedomsponsors.org/core/issue/13/a-complete- jee-...](http://www.freedomsponsors.org/core/issue/13/a-complete-jee-sample- application-using-maven-hibernate-jpa-and-google-guice)

Another big difference is that there's no money escrow. You pay after the task is done, if you're happy with the result.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looks great, but why do you need to have the ability to update my GitHub profile when signing up?

<comment><USER5> Hi @olegp, I'm the founder of Bountify. Thanks for the kudos! Unfortunately, the only way to get the user's email and github url is to request the "user" scope, which has write access. Bountify will never edit your Github account, but I understand that's besides the point, it's a terrible thing to ask for. I plan to work around this ASAP, as I imagine it's dissuading quite a few would- be users. Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hi everyone, I'm the creator of Bountify. I'm very grateful for all your comments! A great deal of the site's current features were built based on feedback from HN, so if you have any other suggestions for making the site better I'd greatly appreciate it.

</comment><comment><USER17> Great concept and implementation.</comment>


Ask HN: Review site for watching current news as TV - <AUTHOR>

Tiltview.com streams current news video as TV. The service monitors news websites in and brings you current and breaking news from all around the world.
It started as a personal project. I was watching the news on web more often, but visiting different websites to watch news from different sources seems hard work. Created Tiltview so that it gathers important and current news and play it on single page.
Created mostly using jQuery talking to the server to get a list of videos to play.
Site:
http://tiltview.com <comment><USER2> This is great. As a Canadian that is thinking about using Boxee as a replacement for cable, this fixes the void of news stations.

Do you plan on bringing this to boxee? How about localization?

Good job.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very cool. Unfortunately I just dont like to watch the news. It takes too much time, I could blow through several text articles faster.

Consider blowing this out from just "news" to an array of sortable niche topics and you might have something more interesting to a more diverse audience.

</comment><comment><USER4> Thank you. Your app may the reason I finally quit my cable tv in the near future. I only subscribe for news and filler.. and since i'm addicted to breaking news, your site is perfect!

In regard to the source sites.. is there a list anywhere? is the plan to make it customizable?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://tiltview.com></comment>


Extreme dogfooding - <AUTHOR> http://blog.rainforestqa.com/2013-11-04-extreme-dogfooding/

<comment><USER2> I've been grammar sniped! [0]

> Confident that our product is fast and accurate enough to solve real-world > QA needs, this has been a long journey and many things helped us get to this > point.

This sentence has a very common grammatical error called a dangling modifier. In this case, notice that the adjective (i.e. noun-modifier) "Confident" is intended to modify the pronoun "us." But, if we look at the sentence, the subject of the sentence is the pronoun "this"! Because introductory phrases (from Confident... to the first comma) are naturally attached to the subject of the sentence, it sounds like the target of "this", namely "the long journey", is the target of the modifier.

Generally you can catch these by reading your work aloud. Once you read, "Confident that [...], this was a long journey...", hopefully it will throw some red flags that this sentence "doesn't make sense." Another technique (of error location) is shortening the sentence to make the error more pronounced: _Confident that we 're awesome, this journey has taken us far._

Potential rewordings (of many):

 _It has been a long journey and many things helped us get to a point where we are confident that our product is fast and accurate enough to solve real-world QA needs._

 _Confident that our product is fast and accurate enough to solve real-world QA needs, we 're reaching a milestone in our long journey._

If we also try to introduce some brevity:

 _After a long journey, we 're confident that our product is fast and accurate enough for real-world QA._

[0]: [http://xkcd.com/356/](http://xkcd.com/356/)

Edited to add: this is meant to be helpful to the poster, who also wrote the post (I assume). It's not a commentary on their product, since as I said, I never did get past the first paragraph.

<comment><USER3> Your comment was thoroughly written and informative, thanks. Not sure why you've been down-voted. Is discussing meta aspects of submissions frowned upon?

I would think blog writers would like to see tips on how to write well.

I'd be interested to see if the author of the original post revises his entry.

<comment><USER4> Meta aspects? Ha.

No, being the grammar police is frowned upon.

<comment><USER5> That's not being the grammar police, that's being a grammar teacher. I see nothing wrong with that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like the product, but I think this blog post would've been much more interesting if it wasn't written in a "omg we're so aweome we're using our own product and we wrote a script that makes it difficult not to! disruptive!"-way.

Instead, maybe, what trouble did you have when dogfooding? Did you ever run in the situation that you couldn't proceed because of a bug in the then-being- dogfooded software? How did you get by it? Did engineers like it? How about non-engineer team members? Did the dogfooding influence the way you prioritized?

Sure, I like that the second part of the blog post says "we found some new requirements because of this", but for me, as a programmer of another piece of software, it would've been much more interesting to find out how you got to those requirements and how you dealt with them, rather than what the new requirements were. I mean, every software team finds new requirements all the time.

I mean to be constructive here: I strongly doubt blog posts about how awesome your own tool is and how using it yourself made it awesomer is the best approach. By turning it less into promo and more into general experience- sharing, the post may be more generally useful and thus spread further.

<comment><USER7> Great feedback dude! Thanks. We will try and take this approach in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> So hold on, I don't understand why you're calling it extreme, seems just like what everyone else would do to get their product working.

<comment><USER7> The difference is that because we're using Rainforest in our build process we cannot deploy if Rainforest itself doesn't work... so it's a bit more 'extreme' than regular dogfooding.

<comment><USER9> That sounds exactly like dogfooding to me.

What is regular dogfooding?

<comment><USER7> It's probably instructive to think about the type of product that you'd be dogfooding.

For most startups, dogfooding is a process of heavily using your own product to figure out what works and what doesn't and better understand the painpoints in the product from your customer's perspective.

That process changes quite significantly - what we're calling 'extreme' dogfooding - when the product you are dogfooding is a crucial part of your build process, because you cannot deploy if the product isn't working properly, whereas with most products that aren't developer tools a problem found through dogfooding isn't going to do something as drastic as preventing your deploy :)

<comment><USER10> The nature of your product means that you are able to use the product as part of creating the product. Much like how a trucking company uses its own trucks to deliver the parts needed to build/repair those same trucks. Or how gcc is used to build gcc. What you call "extreme dogfooding" is more like half plain old dogfooding and half bootstrapping.

<comment><USER7> It's got nothing to do with bootstrapping.

<comment><USER10> It's quite similar: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(compilers)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_\(compilers\))

The process of getting a compiler to compile itself is not unlike your process of using Rainforest as part of the build process for Rainforest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This seems pretty interesting, but even after reading through your docs, I'm left with a few questions.

How long am I going to wait to get a tester? Does this change over the course of a day? Do you use more than one tester to consider something a 'fail'?

<comment><USER7> Hey Adrian, Fred, co-founder here. Yeah, our docs need some love :)

It's totally seamless, so as soon as you run a test we allocate (multiple) human testers automatically and your results come back within 30 mins on average. The median time to being allocated a first tester for a test is (in the last 30 days) is 2min 29s.

We have a massive crowd of testers available, so in general response time is fairly consistent.

The majority of our tech is on the backend for scoring and sorting results and testers. There's a bunch of sorting that happens in the background between a tester submitting a 'result' and Rainforest verifying that result and returning it to the customer.

Does that answer your questions?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Note to Rainforest team: When I signed up for the free trial I was sent 3 identical confirmation emails. Something going on there.

Overall your product looks good, definitely going to keep it in mind.

<comment><USER13> Thanks! I'd love to look in to that for you. Could you reply to them and I'll check it out?

<comment><USER12> Done.

<comment><USER13> I've fixed an am deploying now, was a race condition with two requests happening at the same time. The code to create the user via segment.io on intercom was being fired inside a transaction, which was rolled back. I've moved to an after_commit block instead :)

<comment><USER14> Did you write a regression test for it? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What blog theme did you use for this? I like it.

<comment><USER7> Thanks Sasha! It's actually custom, based on a bunch of technologies though. I'm going to do a blog post this week about it, and we've open-sourced the template at [https://github.com/rainforestapp/middleman- boilerplate](https://github.com/rainforestapp/middleman-boilerplate). The stack is:

\- Scss

\- Susy

\- Compass

\- Haml

\- Middleman

\- S3</comment></comment>


How to keep up to date on Front-End Technologies – The Recipe - <AUTHOR> http://uptodate.frontendrescue.org/ <comment><USER2> Cool page. Makes totally sense. I'm doing it the same way. And in addition I use VersionEye to get notified about new versions of open source libraries I'm using in my projects. That saves me a lot of time. By the way I'm the dude who started VersionEye.</comment>