Blindly submitting content to HN, good or bad? - <AUTHOR>

I've noticed an account that's submitting 80+ stories a day all from generally liked sites.
I think it's bad, at the least it automatically pushes everyone else a 1/2 a dozen spots further down when another batch is dumped making it that much more unlikely someone else has a fair chance.  It also reminds me of digg's 'power users' where a handful of people ended up dominating the site, this isn't happening right now but when you're submitting 10% of stories the front page will reflect that eventually.
But on the other hand some of the submissions would have been made regardless by other people.
Thoughts? <comment><USER2> 80+ stories a day is excessive. I would be in favor of PG rate-limiting submissions.

If each article takes five minutes to read, it would take the submitter 6 hours 40 minutes(!) to read all the articles he submitted. This implies the submitter is not reading the articles before submission.

This worries me because it is indicating submission by quantity, not by quality, and the thing I love about HN is the _quality_ of the submissions.

If _some_ of the submissions would have been done by other people, that's fine. IMHO...

a) Don't hog the karma.

b) As pointed out by benologist, the weaker submissions _would not_ have been submitted by others. The weaker submissions are therefore competing against other submissions that are more deserving of our attention, contributing to the dreaded "deterioration of HN quality."

<comment><USER3> Users should be rate limited based on the average score of their last x (say 100) submissions. If their last 100 submissions got an average of 1 (no points) then they should be rate limited to 3 a day. If their average score for the last 100 is above, say, 30, then it's obvious the user is providing real value to the community and their rate limit should disappear.

<comment><USER4> I don't like that. If anything here smells like Digg's "power users", this is it: the more you can post, the more karma you gain, and up goes your ceiling.

<comment><USER3> That's the point of the 100 most recent. If they are power users and they can submit 80 posts a day, each of which gets at least 20 points, then they are obviously making a contribution. If they just have high Karma though, they won't necessarily be able to have a high limit. If they keep submitting crap in the hopes that a few will be upvoted, their average will go down.

Also, you could try using median rather than mean and that might produce better results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One thing I've noticed happens quite a bit is that a thread on one story will have someone post a link to an external site. Someone takes this and then submits it as its own story. Take, for example, this comment on the "ACTA will force border searches" story:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3496269>

Two hours after this was posted someone posted the link within that comment as its own story:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3496475>

Normally it's not a bad thing to have a new discussion if the subject is too tangential to the main item being discussed. But this is close enough that the discussion probably ought to have happened directly within the thread.

Additionally, the person who submitted it as its own story received (as it now stands) 145 points for the effortless submission, far more than would be likely for even an incredibly well-written and researched reply within the original thread.

HN has gamified participation by rewarding people with karma. Even though it's only a bullshit number, it triggers a desire to maximize this number. As it stands, submissions are too highly rewarded relative to the value and behavior like 80+ submissions per day results.

<comment><USER6> _Normally it's not a bad thing to have a discussion if the subject is too tangential to the main item being discussed. But this is close enough that the discussion probably ought to have happened directly within the thread._

Similar to this is when the same event is reported by different sites, each of which gets submitted. We end up with essentially the same discussion happening in multiple places.

Ideally there would be some magical way to have all these posts direct to a canonical discussion, but in practice it seems this requires human intervention.

In the meantime perhaps the best action is to flag the late-comer posts and post a discussion link to an existing thread.

<comment><USER7> Not necessarily. Google's news aggregation has gotten pretty good at grouping numerous stories on the same subject together. It doesn't always get things right, but helps to reduce the clutter.

<comment><USER8> Right, while this is technically possible (and really, anything is technically possible when it comes to programming) I'm not sure if PG and whoever else maintains the site have the time, energy, and resources to set up such a system. I'm not sure what it would really take but I assume it'd be quite a bit of work to put it conservatively. The way things are run now are, in some ways, base on a compromise between the site maintainers and the users. It's as if to say "We'll manually intervene on occasion if everyone promises to play nice". Once you have to start implementing the kind of automatic quality controls we're talking about here programmatically instead of relying n good behavior, that's when you know the community just lost the quality it was known for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> When we notice people doing this we rate-limit them. I just did.

<comment><USER10> What are your thoughts on allowing people to downvote posts (akin to how comments can be downvoted)?

<comment><USER11> I believe that is what the flag button is for. Down vote button on a story could lead to people downvoting something they don't like because it is the opposite of upvoting. Flag is more of a "this is an inappropriate story" word.

<comment><USER12> There's less of a feedback loop there - people don't know if their submissions have been flagged or not.

<comment><USER13> On behalf of authors everywhere, please don't use the flag button as a downvote button. This, for several reasons:

1\. It's overpowered. Based on some experiments I conducted a year or so ago, it seems like 1-2 flags equal about 10-20 places dropped in the rankings. It's brutal. A single person in a bad mood can drop a story like a stone. I don't know the exact maths, but a single flag seems to have the effect of many downvotes.

2\. It's not what it was designed for! According to the guidelines, flagging is meant to be for "spam or offtopic", not for stuff you don't like or disagree with and want to downvote. If you disagree with it, write a comment to explain why, or find a comment that agrees with your disagreement and upvote that. Flagging is not a way to express disagreement!

3\. It's mean. I regularly get articles on the front page, and I don't care _that_ much what happens to them (though of course I like to see the discussion they generate!), but once upon a time I did, and I'm sure that's still the case for many. When you put your heart and soul into an article, and it miraculously got picked up by HN, and it's on the front page, and people are finally checking out your blog, and it's getting more visitors in one hour than it had in the last 6 months... and you see the story suddenly vanish to the second page because someone flagged it... wow, that feels like a punch to the stomach. So please don't flag "real" articles, only flag spam/trash.

If you think an article sucks, post a comment to explain why you think so. Maybe you misunderstood. In any case, the feedback will be clearer. Please don't use the flagging sledgehammer to express disagreement.

(note: I don't know if pg would agree with the above, but these are my feelings)

<comment><USER14> _> It's not what it was designed for! According to the guidelines, flagging is meant to be for "spam or offtopic", not for stuff you don't like or disagree with and want to downvote. If you disagree with it, write a comment to explain why, or find a comment that agrees with your disagreement and upvote that. Flagging is not a way to express disagreement!_

Disagreeing with something is not a reason to downvote either.

<comment><USER10> In your perspective, what are valid reasons for downvoting?

<comment><USER15> In the perspective of many people here, downvotes are to indicate that you don't think the comment contributes to the conversation in a positive way. For example, I upvote comments I disagree with as long as they make the point well and give me something to think about. Similarly, I downvote comments I agree with if they're snide or poorly constructed.

<comment><USER16> Yes, I think many people are under the mistaken impression that the upvote/downvote buttons are functionally symmetrical, which is understandable given that they are presented as visually symmetrical. But upvoting serves to avoid redundant 'I agree.' posts, while if users downvote to disagree, it robs the discussion of valuable content (i.e., _why_ they disagree). It would help if the UI were modified to signal this asymmetry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Check the source code for news.arc

<https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc>

to see what is already done about this. The account submitting so many stories may decide to be more selective after considering the implications of site algorithms.

<comment><USER18> If you're referring to the "oversubmitting" algorithm,

a) this appears to be turned off by default (line 1535)

b) if turned on it only applies to new users (lines 1539, 1540)

(Disclaimer: this is the first time I'm looking at the source, please correct me if I'm missing something.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Ha. This is a classic community phenomenon. You can also notice this in Foursquare, Twitter, and almost every other community based site. I think us as a community need to start encouraging progressive and meaningful arguments, rather than just the top news. I would like to come to HN to have a conversation/ discussion about something new rather than a link to NYT.

One idea would be to create separate sections for discussions, news, blog links, at all.

<comment><USER20> And how would that discourage the behavior of autosubmitting?

The speed in which new URLs are submitted by the same user should be limited according to their karma. (Assuming users with high points are trustworthy, which is the primary reason this metric is made for.)

<comment> mkr-hn New users could start with a 24 hour limit between submissions (86,400 seconds) and get 20 seconds removed for every karma point. Someone with 2000 karma would be able to submit every 12.8 hours. By 4000 you've probably learned that quality beats quantity.

<comment><USER21> That seems fair, though it might be better to use average story karma. The bots in question probably have a fair amount of karma just from the sheer number of stories submitted.

<comment> mkr-hn Multiply the value by their average. It boosts overall submission quality automatically by giving better commenters more chances for a front page article.

edit: Though the value would need to be much lower than 20 per karma with that modifier. My average of 2.73 with 2011 karma would let me post as much as I want.

karma * 3.7 * average would come to around 20,000 for me. That would let me submit an article every 18 hours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I can't see any obvious disadvantages to having a set limit of, for example, 10 article submissions a day.

<comment><USER23> Or even two a day.

As someone who almost never submits stuff, I find it really frustrating that the few times I do find something that I think would be great, I see it get knocked down on the "new" page within an hour because there are so many submissions coming in. The rate of new submissions seems like it makes it almost random what just happens to get picked up in the brief window of time and what doesn't.

<comment><USER24> as with all regulation, don't forget the unintentional side effects: spammers with many sockpuppet accounts will be more present in proportion to typical users that only have one account

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I definitely disagree with auto submitting but don't believe that Hacker News should be more locked down.

There is always a lot of complaints about content but there is an inherent system allowing posters to know what the mass wants rather than one commenter and making sure the best content rises.

Don't vote up anything you believe doesn't deserve to be on the front page or flag anything that deserves to be flagged. If there are very strict content guidelines some of the most interesting and obscure content won't be recommended for posting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Voting or not only addresses the person submitting a ton of content, it does nothing for all the stories prematurely bumped down to page 2 or 3 of the new section where they are effectively dead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> A slightly related previous discussion [1] on the aspect of blindly submitting stories.

Even not doing it blindly (say, you save up links that are good and post them all at peak times for better results) is not in good form either if it is more than say 5 at a time.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2386443>

</comment><comment><USER27> Agreed; surely there must be a limit on submissions per day?

</comment><comment><USER19> I am not sure if limiting the submissions per day should be our goal. It's obstruction of freedom of speech- which is do not stand for. Even if we limit the user, how are we making the site productive? The real problem is not that someone has 100K karma, rather, it's that because of this excessive submissions real stories are lost in the mix.

How do we help good stories/discussions come to light? Karma is a vanity metric, let's look beyond it ya'll</comment>


Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast - <AUTHOR> http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=samsung_chrome_a15&num=1 <comment><USER2> I got mine last week, and I've been using it as my main machine since then.

I put on a small Debian-based chroot and installed Guacamole[1]*, so I can use my favourite editor and X11 programs within a Chrome tab.

Compiling large C/C++ programs takes a while, but the Go compilers (what I mostly use) work really well. And I can always SSH into beefier machines (Linode/University) if I ever need to.

This replaced a Thinkpad which cost 5 times as much and broke in less than 13 months. So far I'm not missing the Thinkpad. (Well, maybe the 3 button TrackPoint)

[1] <http://guac-dev.org>

<comment><USER3> Ugh. I read this and cry inside. Perfectly brilliant idea that I didn't even think of.

Why? I just purchased a new ultra book burdened by Windows 8 pre-installed. If I switch to the legacy BIOS the machine won't boot up, period. The only way to get the machine to work is through Windows 8. No installing Linux, no changing firmware, no nothing. Wonderful little box that's magnificently useless for systems level programming...

<comment><USER4> Why would you switch to legacy BIOS mode? Linux support UEFI just fine afaik.

<comment><USER3> Which ones? I've tried Ubuntu and Mint but not Fedora. I tried googling it but all I ended up with was a several pages of articles talking about UEFI and the secure boot without a single link TO a Linux that did it. I'm dying to know 'cause I can't stand another minute on Windows 8.

<comment><USER4> I haven't actually tried Arch on UEFI, but their wiki page seems fairly extensive on the topic. Ubuntu documentation also shows UEFI support, but their documentation is bit vague.

[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Unified_Extensible_Firm...](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface)

<https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/UEFI_Bootloaders>

Of course I wouldn't be terribly surprised if your UEFI has some _bug_ that prevents Linux from booting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Teasing out some inferrences:

The comparison to the Intel D525 is really unfortunate, as that's a 2.5 year old, 45nm Pine Trail box with a 13W TDP. The low power 22nm Ivy Bridge cores are only 14W, so I'd really wanted to have seen a comparison to a more recent CPU.

The Exynos wipes the floor on the parallel NAS tests. I'm not sure why exactly.

The Atom core has known issues with floating point relative to desktop CPUs, and the A9 was never particularly good at it. So the FFTE results showing the A15 about 50% faster than Atom and 2x faster than A9 are a surprise. It's almost what I'd expect to see from a desktop box at that.

On the other hand, the 7-zip and x264 tests are integer dominated and largely cache-bound, and the A15 doesn't show itself off particularly well here, mostly matching the A9 and Atom per-clock. Yawn. (This is an area where all these CPUs get toasted by Ivy Bridge, btw -- remember that 14W TDP?)

The "Smallpt Global Illumination Renderer" and "C-Ray" tests (which I don't know anything about per se) shows everyone about the same (and for Smallpt 2x as fast as PandaBoard). So I'm going to guess this means the tests are DRAM- bound, and thus infer that the A15 has a similar memory bandwidth to Atom (probably 2x 32 bit vs. the Pine Trail 1x 64 bit channels). That's not great, honestly, as it's still about half of what you can get with a desktop part. But then DRAM refresh draws power, so may not have been an option for the Chromebook .

<comment><USER6> 7-zip and x264 make almost perfect use of additional cores, so it makes sense that a quadcore beats a dualcore. (aside: I rather wish that Phoronix actually mentioned how much a given test benefits from multiple threads, single- threaded tests are presented next to multithreaded tests when comparing chips with different architectures and core counts without _any_ comment or recognition.)

Additionally, x264 is heavily optimized for x86 and nowhere near as much for ARM. 7-zip is probably similar.

For floating point, A15 has double the execution resources as A9 (two symmetric floating point pipelines each capable of a FMA per cycle) so that's no surprise to me.

<comment><USER5> Exynos-5, OMAP and Atom D5xx are all dual-core CPUs. And they all get about the same performance per clock in those tests. I don't think parallelism is a determiner -- I went with "cache-bound" as my guess. And again, this is a spot where I'd really like to see a comparison with something other than Pine Trail. One assumes the L3 on Ivy Bridge would be a big help.

<comment><USER6> The Calexia Highbank Nodes are quad core. Relative to the OMAP4 tested, Exynos 5 has a 1.4x higher clock but 1.9x better 7-zip performance and 2.3x better x264 performance. For reference, A15 has double the vector execution resources as A9 in addition to adding out of order execution. Integer execution resources remain the same (two symmetric pipelines) but gains triple issue, wider out of order, and the potential of two load/store per cycle.

So simple integer heavy workloads aren't expected to be incredibly faster from A9, just the ~40% ARM quotes and these tests back up.

Atom D5xx has two hyperthreaded cores, and hyperthreading does help a lot for x264 at least. IIRC when I tested on a single-core Atom, the hyperthreading gave x264 a 1.6x boost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What's with the only 6.5 hour battery life? I would buy it if it had >=9.

Edit: it's a serious question :) I am really wondering why the Nexus 10 has 9 hours and this 6.5?

Please Google, add a 3rd 'chromebook without chrome os' which is a Nexus 10 (Android but hopefully soon Ubuntu hacked) with a click-on keyboard (with battery) for $350. Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> It only has a 4,000 mAh (15 Whr) battery, smaller even than Nexus 7's 4,300 mAh battery, and considering it also has a much larger 12" screen (more than twice screen area), the battery life would also be smaller than Nexus 7.

Nexus 10 has a 9,000 mAh battery, which is also used to compensate for the 2560x1600 resolution. iPad 3/4 has 11,500 mAh and it's pushing 1 million fewer pixels for comparison's sake.

But I agree, Google needs to rectify this in next year's ARM Chromebook. They need to use a battery large enough to hold for 10h (and hopefully maintain, or lower the price). If they use this big.Little chip from Samsung next year, it might be easier to achieve that:

[http://androidheadlines.com/2012/11/samsung-8-core-big- littl...](http://androidheadlines.com/2012/11/samsung-8-core-big-little- exynos-cortex-a15-cortex-a7.html)

<comment><USER8> Please don't try to compare battery capacity by looking at just the current*time. That's an irrelevant number if the voltages aren't the same. The Chromebook has a 30Wh battery, which is twice the size of Nexus 7's.

<comment><AUTHOR> It has a 2 cell battery. I doubt it's 30W.

<comment><USER8> So when I suggested that mAh wasn't the optimal unit for measuring capacity, the implication wasn't that you should measure by number of cells instead. It has a 30Wh battery as even minimal research would show:

[http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/mobile/Google/Chromebook...](http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/mobile/Google/ChromebookA15/DSC_0706.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Coming in even or slightly faster (in most benchmarks) than an Intel Atom D525 from over two years ago is "crazy fast"? I'm impressed with the Chromebook overall and I think it's a cool product but talk about a bait-and-switch title.

<comment><USER10> I think people are reporting this relative to expectations rather than absolutely: they assumed it woudl be slower due to the lower cost and lower power consumption but the results defied that expectaion.

<comment><USER9> $250 is not exceptionally low cost for a netbook. Furthermore the power dissipation of the chromebook under load is only slightly better than a comparable atom system [1]. The idle performance is better, I will give them that. Still, the death of x86 in the face of ARM for performance-sensitive environments (even when power consumption is a factor) has been greatly exaggerated.

[1] [http://www.anandtech.com/show/6422/samsung-chromebook- xe303-...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/6422/samsung-chromebook-xe303-review- testing-arms-cortex-a15/7)

<comment><AUTHOR> A15 is 40-65% faster than Atom and uses half the power consumption, according to your link. So yes, I'd say that's pretty impressive at its level.

Also, this specific Chromebook is higher quality than those netbooks. It's more like an ultrabook in terms of design. Not to mention that it has twice the battery life of those netbooks under normal usage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The A15 seems to be the same weight as the Macbook air. I always thought about buying an MBA, but I feared the hassle of installing Linux on it.

Is the A15 my future development machine? All my development happens in ssh and firefox. So performance is not an issue.

<comment><USER12> I am also starting to consider this for development, but I need more assurance that it is a viable option. Does everything mostly work out of the box, or would there be a lot of tinkering / troubleshooting required, e.g. because of the somewhat non-standard nature of running ubuntu on ARM architecture? What about drivers, e.g. for wifi and trackpad?

<comment><USER9> After running debian on an ARM box for the past ~5 years, my experience has been pretty favorable. If there's a solid community following (which is a good bet with this product given the hype around it) the drivers should be a non- issue. Installation went very smoothly for me. Everything else, if it can get built from source, should be fine. On my box apt-get install "just works" for almost all of the software I use, and maybe 75% of make installs go smoothly with relatively little tinkering required.

For getting actually work done, I use an x86 laptop. I wouldn't ever go back to using a netbook or any non-mainstream notebook with iffy linux support. It's just not worth your time to deal with technical issues. Buy the best tools that you can find (best being what works for you).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One of the reasons the Android emulator is slow, it's because it has to emulate an arm chip to x86 instructions. So if I'm running an arm pc as my main dev pc... Would the emulator run magically fast? Like unicorns, rainbows and such?

<comment><USER14> Isn't the entire point of the JVM: "write once, deploy everywhere" ???

Emulating the architecture makes sense from the standpoint that you want your development and 'production' (ie, the devices/handsets) to be the same ... but the Android emulator is INCREDIBLY slow. The juice is not worth the squeeze.

<comment><USER15> Dalvik isn't the JVM, and Android is more than Dalvik.

Android applications can also rely on ARM binaries developed against the NDK, so full ARM emulation is required in order to realistically test these.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I should be able to figure this out for myself, but I will ask anyway: is 16GB SSD really enough to support Ubuntu and a development environment?

At a minimum, I would need Ruby+JRuby+Clojure+editors an an IDE. I could probably live with just 4 or 5 extra GBs for project files and whatever my current writing project is.

<comment><USER17> However, it looks like it has an SD card socket as well as a USB 3.0 slot. That means you could put a 32GB SD card in there and have plenty of room for projects. If that ounce is too important, you could probably get away with an Xubuntu distribution that's fairly stripped down.

<comment><USER16> That is true: I could just leave a 32GB card in permanently. No reason to remove it.

<comment><USER18> The only problem is the way the SD card sticks out so far, it's pretty frustrating

<comment><USER19> Yeah, this. I've been using the Chromebook as a mobile dev device since the week it came out (lucky enough to get in on the original Play orders) and the primary frustrating thing about this box is that an inserted SD card sticks almost halfway out of the case.

I was hoping the device would allow sdcards to be fully inserted as is the norm on most PC laptops, so I could just insert a hefty 32GB card and treat it as almost internal storage. But nope, Samsung can't not take a design idea from Apple, even when it is one of their occasionally bad ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Does anybody know how well the Mali drivers work on vanilla Linux (non- Android, non-Chrome Linux)?

As a longtime Linux guy, these ARM machines (and the similar tablets) are enticing. I'm finding conflicting reports on the drivers, though. It appears they were closed-source, that there is a project to reverse engineer them, and also I found a website (malideveloper.com) where they appear to have source code officially available...

<comment><USER21> I don't know much but it's a bit of a mess. You're right that there's a reverse engineering effort but it's against the 400 GPU, not the 704 in the Exynos. Samsung has been under quite a bit of pressure to open up the GPU code, and they've acquiesced to two binary blobs. See the Arndaleboard in ref below.

ARM have released code but it requires the full DDK which is not for general use. It's only available to partners.

BTW, in this link is a full linux Jelly Bean android repository. Except for the blobs, which are binary.

<http://www.arndaleboard.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page>

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> ARM processor running Ubuntu? What kind of applications can you run on that? (Genuine question)

<comment><USER23> Any kind of application you have the source code to, which is nearly everything in Ubuntu repositories.

<comment><USER24> With the caveats that the application must be written in a language whose compiler/interpreter seamlessly supports ARM, and whose dependencies all take ARM into account wherever architecture-specific code is necessary.

<comment><USER23> Again, nearly everything in the Ubuntu repository.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wish there will be lots of cheap 13-15" ARM ultrabooks on market one day...

</comment><comment><USER26> Say, for office users is open office the predominant office application suite used by these books, or to they virtual machine m$ office? I ask because i am currently a student

<comment><USER27> On Chrome OS, Google Docs is the go-to office application.

Once you install a different OS on it, you're probably going to be falling back on OpenOffice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I wonder how much more performance can we squeeze off from compiler. Since x86 had the advantage from years of tuning. But if a Ivy Bridge of upcoming Haswell was throw into the chart i guess ARM as a performance solution still has a long long way to go.

</comment><comment><USER29> I wish I could pay say, $300, and have it come with a higher resolution screen.

</comment><comment><USER30> i5 notebook (ex: MBA) is 3 times faster. (222ms vs 711ms)

[http://liliputing.com/2012/10/benchmarking- the-249-samsung-c...](http://liliputing.com/2012/10/benchmarking- the-249-samsung-chromebook.html)

</comment><comment><USER31> Is RAM upgradeable? does it take SATA HDs?

<comment><USER32> Dunno about RAM, I believe it takes mSATA drives. Waiting for someone to open it up to see how viable it is to upgrade.

<comment><USER33> Here is a tear down: [http://www.anandtech.com/show/6422/samsung-chromebook- xe303-...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/6422/samsung-chromebook-xe303-review- testing-arms-cortex-a15/3)

The ram and nand is soldered to the board. It does have SD card expansion though.

<comment><USER32> Ah, that sucks then. Having done stuff with a BeagleBoard with everything on an SD card (even a class 10 one!) it's horrifically slow. Though perhaps with the OS on the built-in NAND and /home on an SD card would give not-horrific performance...

<comment><USER34> It has 16GB of on-board flash behind a flash/SATA interface chip, basically a 16GB SSD as parts on the board (more compact and cheaper than a replaceable 2.5" drive). That is plenty big for the OS, lots of programs, and your home directory as long as you don't go overboard with pictures and videos. Those should go "in the cloud" or on a SD card.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm

<comment><USER36> yes, you are.</comment></comment>


The Area Under an ROC Curve (2001) - <AUTHOR> http://gim.unmc.edu/dxtests/roc3.htm <comment><USER2> The AUC for ROC does not work well in comparisons involving imbalanced datasets, and Precision Recall curves can be a better option.

[https://classeval.wordpress.com/simulation-analysis/roc- and-...](https://classeval.wordpress.com/simulation-analysis/roc-and- precision-recall-with-imbalanced-datasets/)

<comment><USER3> I disagree with the analysis of this article. In a typical machine learning process, the response variable stays the same (at a distributional level) but you cycle through candidate models. So regardless of whatever the class distributions are, a higher AUC score indicates a better model.

It might be true that the classifier performance is worse on an imbalanced data set (with the same AUC score) than a balanced one but that just reflects the fact that classifiers are harder to build for imbalanced data.

<comment><USER4> Having a better AUC score does not guarantee a better AUPR score. So a model with better AUC is not universally "better"

See [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.98....](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.98.4362&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> i would dearly love for this to be a more commonly used measure of performance. it's much harder to hide your sins if you give a ROC.

it's not naively useful for multi-category classifiers, but it's great otherwise.

<comment><USER6> I came to the conclusion that area under ROC is pretty much garbage. What you really want is two separate steps: estimate the probability that instance A belongs in classification X, and then a decision step where you decide how to classify A based on a loss function (this varies depending on how harmful a false positive is).

Area under ROC forces you to conflate these two.

Why not evaluate the probability estimation directly, using Brier score [1] or something similar?

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

<comment><USER7> >I came to the conclusion that area under ROC is pretty much garbage.

I cannot disagree more. IMO AUC is a rare great metric: it's principled, useful, universally applicable (e.g. invariant to class imbalances), and easy to explain adequately to non-statistician ("probability of choosing a positive sample over a negative one").

>What you really want is two separate steps: estimate the probability that instance A belongs in classification X, and then a decision step where you decide how to classify A based on a loss function (this varies depending on how harmful a false positive is).

Yes, but those are two inherently separate steps and should be measured separately. AUC is a metric of the first step (the "model"). The second step is a business decision and will often be made separately from the modeling process, by different people, with a different cadence, and with a different goal in mind.

For example if I am designing a model to find a disease, I just want to make the best prediction I can, which is cleanly measured by AUC. Then, when it comes to actual diagnosis, someone else will choose cutoffs based on various factors like false positive costs (treatment cost, human toll), false negative cost (disease damage, death toll), supply of treatment, etc. I can picture scenarios where the same model is used for decades, but the cutoffs change seasonally.

<comment><USER6> > invariant to class imbalances

I think this is a red herring that comes from not thinking probabilistically. If the distribution of your training data does not resemble the distribution of your real-world data (or cannot be made to resemble it), you're just guessing anyway. If it does resemble the real distribution, then you _want_ those class imbalances. In fact, I tend to think that the fact that ROC is "invariant to class imbalances" is a significant downside: it means in some sense your score is just as sensitive to things that rarely happen as it is to things that happen all the time.

> "probability of choosing a positive sample over a negative one"

I find the practical implications of this pretty opaque, and it's never been clear to me whether this is measuring anything I actually care about. As far as I know there aren't theoretical guarantees that a better AUC score means anything real. I haven't thought deeply about it, but I am reasonably sure I could find some simple examples illustrating how to "cheat" AUC by getting a higher score with predictions that are worse in any practical sense.

I still like the Brier score: just give me a number indicating how well my estimated probability predictions do on a test/validation set. There are even theoretical guarantees about it, because it's a proper score function.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This page actually help me a lot in the past. Thank you for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER9> I really wish people could make it a habit to define acronyms.

<comment><USER10> I really wish people could make it a habit to read articles.

The article defines the acronym and even mentions where it comes from.

<comment><USER11> True, but the definition is in the very last line of the whole page. For people unfamiliar with an ROC curve, which seems to be the target audience, it should be defined the first time it's used.

Edit: on navigating the site a little more, the previous section does define the acronym on its first use.</comment></comment></comment>


How to buy a Microsoft volume license on the cheap (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoworld.com/article/2613773/office-software/how-to-buy-a-microsoft-volume-license-on-the-cheap.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Notice that if you want to buy Windows and Office at the same time, just buying three of both qualify. I wonder if anyone tried to get Win10 enterprise with software assurance this way. Even the software assurance renewal isn't that expensive I think.</comment>


Why Software Should Be Free (2002) - <AUTHOR> https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.en.html <comment><USER2> While I resonate fully with the ideals encompassed by free software, I find that the "logistics" of supporting them "in real life" are a completely different story, that has little to do with the ethos behind them.

This comes as a singular, personal data point, or course. There's wider context behind my trials and tribulations, but, succinctly put, starting a for profit company around my 5 year-ish old OSS project was the only way I managed to find to safeguard its continued existence and development. This road involves a lot of uneasy compromises that don't fit in the original discourse around free software.

Perhaps, what I'm lacking, is a "how to get there" guide - the ideals are clear, the way to achieve them is not so much so.

<comment><USER3> I agree with supporting the ideals, but hitting a barrier in features and usability. For my wife and I, our Apple Watches, AirPods, iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks are a net (I use this word purposely) that holds our digital life together and make working (she is my editor, and even in retirement I write every day for a few hours) and our digital lives easy and pleasant.

On the other hand, I love Linux, have a zillion GitHub repos with open source projects I do, etc.

I dream of a world in which I could use open hardware and free software, but how would something like an Apple Watch ever be open hardware and software?

<comment><USER4> If people stopped buying the proprietary version, manufacturers would make open products. They don't really care either way, they just make a bit more money with proprietary licenses.

So, the answer is: it's on you.

<comment><USER5> _I agree with supporting the ideals, but hitting a barrier in features and usability_

You could reverse this and say that if open-source advocates would make usable products with features on par with commercial products, people would adopt them. There's a chicken-egg problem here.

People interested in these issues should read _Working in Public_ by Eghbal, which is about open source culture and sociology. I just finished it.

<comment><USER6> The trouble is that the commercial products have marketing departments that aim to convince people that _their_ feature set is the most important. So although open products have unique features of their own - including openness - people are likely to overlook them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This fails because we only have one formal kind of payment - money - and in a monetised economy, nothing compares with it.

Money solves one problem - how to get people to do things that may be useful to others which they wouldn't otherwise do - but causes much worse problems in return.

The most obvious is money is such a riotously inefficient way to decide what is and isn't genuinely useful, especially collectively.

OSS doesn't really solve the usefulness problem. It's good at producing software that's appealing to people who like using and tinkering with OSS software - but no one else really cares unless it's handed to them inside a product which has been assembled to be useful. And even then it's about the product, not about a largely imaginary "freedom" which is inaccessible to most users because it specialised skills, advanced knowledge, and plenty of free time.

This doesn't make it useless, it just gives it a different domain to operate in. There's some overlap, but there are many potentially useful projects that don't happen because they don't appear inside either the commercial or the OSS circles.

<comment><USER8> Free software in this essay means software that respects your freedom. Not "Gratis".

So every company has the right to charge you for their software but once you acquire it you can use it however you wish.

<comment><USER9> Don't most FOSS licenses explicitly allow for redistribution though? So once one person gets itm they can then redistribute it for free or a cost with the original developer not benefiting (directly).

<comment><USER10> Sure but the end user of this product doesn't know or care about the parts. This matters to those of us in the plumbing business and those businesses that would hire us to do their plumbing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Eventually the users will learn to support developers without coercion, just > as they have learned to support public radio and television stations.

The crowd funding culture is evolving. In recent years I follow and donate to a couple of public initiatives in my country from free media, environment, and other public services. People are excited to donate and be members in projects that solve real problem, conduct transparency and communicate with the members.

Its all about trust.

<comment><USER12> From the perspective of user, it's not as simple, at least for some.

a) At a personal level, it forces the user to make choices. Making choices is exhausting. Should I donate $1, $10, or $100? Should I donate based on my perception of how much each project lacks funds, based on how much value I extract out of the software -which is not easy to quantify anyway- or just send an amount that I wouldn't miss? Should I donate one-time and forget about it or set a recurring donation? If recurring, shouldn't I monitor the project's development to decide if a recurring donation should continue? Then would it not be fair to hunt down every single free software project I'm using and evaluate its needs and value in order to donate to that as well?

Personally I admit that I rarely donate to free projects as an individual, unless they explicitly ask for a fixed amount that I find reasonable, because I dread the process of such decisions.

2) At a business level, usually there is a complete detachment between the value drawn out of a piece of a free software and the process of donations. The company is there to maximize its profits and minimize its costs, donations exist at a separate sphere that has more to do with financial/tax or PR incentives than the intrinsic value of the free software project, so all donations tend to get send to recognized charity organizations.

Very often the people who understand the value that a piece of free software brings to the business, have the right mindset and want to donate, but there is no process to make it easy for them to do so (it would be awkward to put a purchase order to the finance department for a donation).

For that reason, I would encourage every free software project that cares about funding to sell something at a fixed price, that can pass for a standard purchase in the eyes of a non-technical person -i.e. call it support/maintenance plan, or premium forum access. Even if in reality it adds nothing to the value of the software, it makes it easy for IT departments to support projects they are using that they would otherwise not be able to. Speaking from experience, it's very frustrating to see how much a company spends for bullshit and not be able to donate even a small amount to projects that bring much higher value to the company.

<comment><USER13> >At a personal level, it forces the user to make choices. Making choices is exhausting. Should I donate $1, $10, or $100? Should I donate based on my perception of how much each project lacks funds, based on how much value I extract out of the software -which is not easy to quantify anyway- or just send an amount that I wouldn't miss?

I can't speak for what society should do, but I adopt a "value for value" mindset.

If software saves me time, I drop a donation that is in proportion to the value it has to me. This is sometimes hard to quantify, but as a rough estimate, if it's in a professional capacity, I start my hourly rate multiplied by the time it saved me, and if it's in a personal capacity (think used with hobby work), I start with half my hourly rate multiplied by the time it saved me. You should never feel like you should give more than you can comfortably give.

> Should I donate one-time and forget about it or set a recurring donation? If > recurring, shouldn't I monitor the project's development to decide if a > recurring donation should continue?

It depends on the project - often I'll ask the author. Some software is backed with recurring donators, so a one-time donation to help pay for some hardware or software the project needs is the most helpful, but some software is not backed by recurring donations, so a smaller, recurring donation will help sustain the project for longer (especially with hosting bills or other recurring expenses). My number one suggestion to free software authors that accept donations would be to specify whether one-time or recurring donations would be more helpful, and if one-time, if there are specific expenses/amounts that are needed that could have a high impact on the project.

> Then would it not be fair to hunt down every single free software project > I'm using and evaluate its needs and value in order to donate to that as > well?

Disabuse yourself of the notion that life is fair. For me, there is certain free software that I use almost constantly (Debian and Emacs, say), and some free software that I use one-off that saves me a large amount of time. Both are examples of projects that I would consider donate to. Something that I use once or twice a month for a short amount of time and has many alternatives I may not donate to.

<comment><USER14> > If software saves me time, I drop a donation that is in proportion to the > value it has to me.

Love this idea. Can you give some example amounts? How much have you donated to OpenSSL? NTP? Postfix?

The bulk of OSS is invisible "plumbing" that provides the critical infrastructure for the software we actually use on a day to day basis (proprietary and OSS). I'm happy to hear that you contribute to some projects and that's great, but you haven't exactly solved the tragedy of the commons.

<comment><USER13> >Love this idea. Can you give some example amounts? How much have you donated to OpenSSL? NTP? Postfix?

Sure!

For regular one-time donations:

      - Debian => $500 once a year (typically in the summer)

      - Free Software Foundation => $500 once a year (typically around the new year)

      - MetaARPA membership on the SDF => $36 once a year (in August)

For regular ongoing donations:

      - $60/half year to the OpenBSD Foundation for OpenBSD (once for each release - I used to buy each CD set but they don't sell them anymore)

      - $20/month to the OpenBSD Foundation to support OpenSSH, LibreSSL, and OpenNTPd

      - $5/month to a niche forum that I post to on occasion

      - $5/month to a podcast that I listen to

      - $6/month to a BandCamp artist that I listen to

For other projects, I'll keep an eye on their calls for donation for specific things and support them one-off as I can. GnuCash says I've donated about $5000 over the last ten years or so doing that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > The feeling of attachment is one that programmers can cultivate when it > suits them; it is not inevitable. Consider, for example, how willingly the > same programmers usually sign over all rights to a large corporation for a > salary; the emotional attachment mysteriously vanishes.

It is because they are getting paid they willingly hand over the rights. Also a lot of full time employees do take personal ownership of their code maybe not in a legal sense but they feel it is their responsibility.

This is why I cannot stand Stallman. There are plenty of good arguments for open source software. However completely ignoring the fact that when you are a full time employee you are promised pay and some benefits by the employer is as far as I am concerned completely disingenuous. His whole premise is faulty.

<comment><USER16> Well, compare/contrast the emotional attachment a programmer has for code with the emotional attachment a parent has for their child.

No amount of money would make the emotional attachment of a parent to their child go away; I think this is his point.

<comment><USER15> Yes let's compare looking after your a new life in the world with source code like they are they in anyway equivalent.

This is exactly my problem with characters like Stallman and why people should actually read the more robust arguments against GNU/Free software movements sad the more robust arguments gives you a reality check against a lot of Stallman's nonsense.

<comment><USER17> It's not equivalent, that was the point. Any responsibility one might feel towards their employer's code goes away immediately when they find a new job somewhere else for better pay. If you follow that, this whole line of reasoning really doesn't have anything to do with FOSS versus proprietary. You can observe the same effects happening at tons of Linux companies too, i.e. employees who don't care one way or another about the OS or the license and are just there to put in their time and collect a paycheck.

<comment><USER15> You are using the his language.

The language is that many developers take ownership of a project while they are working for an employer. The fact that people make these comparisons between children and source is the problem and what you are doing is framing it the way Stallman wants to frame it. This leads you to his conclusions. If you actually take some time to look as some of his assertions you can see they are far more nuanced that he would like you to think. It is disingenuous of him to frame it like that in the first place, he isn't stupid and therefore I cannot accept it is an oversight.

I would rather Software development was more seen akin to be a plumber or a carpenter and that is exactly how I try to work. People have to get over the fact that programming is a profession, it has a market and things need to be paid for.

The whole activism for free software is completely missing the point as it focuses on source code and not specifications. If there is an open spec then anyone can make a opensource or proprietary implementation of that spec. The "freedom" of that software is irrelevant because it adheres to the specification.

The current model for monetising free and open software software has lead to making money via support contracts, which leads to things like SaaS where you are perpetually renting something rather than actually owning a license. When you are perpetually renting from a large company you are then tied into what they want to do and you are probably in a worse situation than using a proprietary product especially if your data is held up in that service (that why Microsoft and Amazon want you to use their proprietary NoSQL infrastructure and price it so cheaply compared to something like Postgres of SQL Server).

This is such a difficult thing to get across I end up rambling on tangents because there any many many things wrong as the presuppositions are just incorrect or aren't as concrete as many assert.

<comment><USER17> >The language is that many developers take ownership of a project while they are working for an employer.

For most employees this seems to be factually untrue unless they have significant stock ownership in the company. And even with that, it's still common for projects to be regularly scrapped, postponed, sold off, redesigned from scratch, transferred to different departments, you get the picture. It's just business.

I have no comment on the rest of your post, I request that you please not make assumptions about what conclusions I've drawn. My only point is that that emotional argument makes no sense, it makes even less sense now in 2020 than it did when the article was written.

<comment><USER15> > For most employees this seems to be factually untrue unless they have > significant stock ownership in the company. And even with that, it's still > common for projects to be regularly scrapped, postponed, sold off, > redesigned from scratch, transferred to different departments, you get the > picture. It's just business.

I know many developers that are quite happy working and improving particular systems for years on end and consider it their project. Richard Stallman over simplified the relationship between employer and employee and the project they work on. I believe that is disingenous.

> have no comment on the rest of your post, I request that you please not make > assumptions about what conclusions I've drawn. My only point is that that > emotional argument makes no sense, it makes even less sense now in 2020 than > it did when the article was written.

When did I state anything about what your motivations maybe? I didn't.

Well that is a shame you don't have any comment on the rest of my post because it is quite important when it comes to discussion about this. You cannot ignore that Richard Stallman in some ways has shown companies that engineers will create stuff for free and they don't have to pay. OpenSSL debacle proved this, they were quite happy to let the engineer who was maintaining the project basically live poorly until HeartBleed vulnerabilities. This is never discussed but this is direct consequence of Richard Stallman and his activism.

As for it being an emotional argument, it really isn't. All I am simply saying is that Richard Stallman ignores nuance when it suits him and invents it when it doesn't exist and by using his language that he invented (he redefined the word free).

IIRC he said on a mailing list that he specifically tied the plugin system to GCC to the main part of the program itself so plugins would be forced to use the GPL license. Forcing other people to be tied to your license is anti- freedom. But it is okay when he is a hypocrite about it, people will make all sorts of excuses for the hypocrisy because of the "GPL Freedoms" but the GPL is less free than many other licenses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why did rms choose to remain poor when he could have earned a lot of money. That must've been a difficult choice. Programmers who are a lot less talented than he is earn a lot more money. I also noticed that other open source programmers also were poor. There was an article on hn about the programmer who maintains ssl.

<comment><USER19> Why does everything have to be about money? This view is really prevalent on HN and it's actually really tiring to read week after week.

It boils down to this: some people prioritise other endeavours. And if your response to that is 'but they could be doing the same thing AND getting paid £££' then I guess they just don't care as much as you might do.

<comment><USER20> It doesn't, but a lot of doors open with sufficient amount of money at your disposal. And it is very easy to get lost in the pursuit, because there is never really enough and someone always has more. I am not excusing it, but I understand the strong pull.

For the record, I agree with you. There are things that I effectively add money with no hope of money return. From a purely monetary perspective, those should have been ended a while ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > I am not saying that a toll road is worse than no road at all. That would be > true if the toll were so great that hardly anyone used the road—but this is > an unlikely policy for a toll collector.

With "toll road" as a metaphor for "proprietary software," it seems like the current situation requires an even more radical stance than Stallman could have envisioned back then, because software companies today aren't content with merely operating in a socially suboptimal way. Instead, many now have a net negative impact on society: through spying, engineered addiction, echo chambers, etc. For instance, I think society would be better off if Facebook simply ceased to exist, even if it wasn't replaced by some type of privacy- protecting alternative and everyone just had to go back to email and personal home pages.

<comment><USER22> You are confusing social media with software companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The systems I work on tend to be comprised of free software but "business logic" is private. I don't know if this would please the GNU founders but a lot certainly runs on open source and I can't imagine this changing anytime soon. It helps everyone to see the foundation and plumbing but then there's diminishing returns as you move into particulars of opinionated design.

For my part, one of the biggest wins has been freely available and HIGH quality development tools and languages. I still have PTSD from C++ compilers licensing. I'm still hoping that Office tools will get there.

And as for the possibility of "less software developers" ... unlikely! Again, there will be (and are) fewer low-level power-programmers but many many more high-level business coders. You don't want your guru working on that stubborn input field validation but you DO need SOMEONE to do it

</comment><comment><USER24> I think most software should be at least semi-free. You can read the source code and distribute changes but you can't redistribute the software (code and binaries) without approval from the author (i.e. paying them).

Basically I want people to be free and able to fix and improve what they paid for.

<comment><USER25> Of course. Long gone are the days you could tinker with your machines and appliances, fix your problems, replace oartd, hack together improvements, or simply take it apart to show your kid how it works. Okay maybe not long gone but certainly on the way out. Appliances and computers and even cars are getting ever more encumbered in terms of being able to fiddle with them, both physically but above all in terms of software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Maybe forward to PG who seems to be veering into Peter Thiel territory lately. Might remind him why startups are even a thing he can brag about to AOC.

</comment><comment><USER27> Edit: I rewrote this to add a lot of substance.

This was written in 1991. The world was very very different then. The Internet was small. Hardware was commodity. Most of the power in the industry belonged to proprietary software vendors like Microsoft and there was a danger they would totally monopolize the future.

Things have changed quite radically. Today hardware has been effectively de- commoditized, on one hand by the escalating difficulty of building a high quality machine and on the other hand by vertically integrated cloud vendors whose hardware becomes "special" by virtue of its location at a highly connected secure data center. The Internet is also huge, and it has made network effects powerful and has created a new form of closed called "SaaS."

Today software is commoditized, hardware is proprietary, and SaaS is where the power is centered. Everything depends on the cloud. Much of the software that powers the cloud is open source, but that doesn't matter. Having source or being able to run your own copy is irrelevant if the value is in the centralized network location of the runtime and the fact that the cloud has all the data.

RMS's strategy for freedom is obsolete. If software is totally free and un- owned, all the power belongs to the owners of physical capital and SaaS systems that leverage that capital to create network effects around centralized _instances_ of software.

SaaS is more closed than commercial software ever was. I can still run a 1980s proprietary application in a VM on my own system, but I cannot run 2008's Facebook or Google. SaaS operators have total visibility into everything we do and the power to rescind capabilities at any time. It's a pure panopticon. Today we need open and liberated _runtimes_ more than we need open and liberate _source_.

Those of us who care about privacy and freedom need to change strategies to cope with a changing world, but the problem is that RMS's views and the views of others in the 1990s FOSS movement have been dogmatized and transformed into a religion.

It's not a religion. It's a strategy, and one that _was_ largely successful at checking the power of Microsoft and other commercial software vendors. The trouble is that it's a strategy that also undermines the economic sustainability of software, thus handing all the economic power and muscle to those who control other aspects of the stack. Those other aspects of the stack now rule us by virtue of the golden rule: "he who has the gold rules."

The FOSS movement is fighting the last war.

What we need is a new model that hopefully can retain the openness of free software but that recapitalizes the software layer and allows the center of gravity to shift more toward the physical and economic edge of the network. I was hoping for a while that cryptocurrency would furnish this, but it was taken over and destroyed by scammers. Some are exploring "source available" licenses like the BSL, but that feels like a stopgap to me. There has to be something that preserves the freedom of open source at the individual level while restoring revenue streams to software and limiting the ability of the for-profit cloud to exploit FOSS to create its silos.

<comment><USER28> This has been the elephant in the room for more than over a decade, but hardly anyone mentions it apart from occasional posts on HN.

Stallman has largely ignored the web developments. Pushing for the GPL works (almost) as well for companies these days as pushing for the BSD license.

I think most new OSS developers are distracted by the thousands of social issues that are made up by corporations to give them the illusion that they are doing meaningful, socially relevant work.

So they no longer care about software freedom and overlook that elephant in the room.

<comment><USER29> > Stallman has largely ignored the web developments.

See [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server- really-s...](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really- serve.en.html) for Stallman's take on Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS). He seems to broadly agree with parent's points wrt. this industry; he's certainly not "ignoring" them.

<comment><USER15> It is irrelevant though whether he is paying attention. The most successful work under the GPL (the Linux Kernel) development is steered by the companies that he attempted to wrestle control back from.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > Eventually the users will learn to support developers without coercion, just > as they have learned to support public radio and television stations.

It's funny because users freely buy software from developers without coercion and they're coerced by the government to pay for public radio and television under threat of imprisonment.

</comment><comment><USER31> It works when everybody is singing love songs in rainbow coloured clothing, but at the end of the day there are bills to pay and only a few lucky ones get to live from donations and they surely aren't arriving at the bank with donation extracts for a credit renewal.

</comment><comment><USER32> Well...

(1) If you believe prices trend towards marginal cost, and,

(2) the cost of acquiring a new user trends lower for more useful products, then it follows that...

(3) capping the price of software would generally improve its overall quality.

(Don't worry, I'm mostly joking. Still...)

<comment><USER33> It's a GNU/FSF article about software freedom, it's not about pricing.

<comment><USER32> The libre/gratis distinction is important, sure. But when rms argued against "programs as property" here, there were certain implications about pricing models that came along for the ride, whether that was his primary intention or not.

My argument is really a (somewhat tongue in cheek) rebuttal to people who think libre software, which incidentally tends to be gratis, can never be high quality or sustainable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Richard Stallman is a genius, he didn't deserve to be cancelled from his position at the FSF.

<comment><USER35> Could you expand on cancellation part a bit. Why was it done?

<comment><USER34> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman#Resignation_f...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman#Resignation_from_MIT_and_FSF)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> When was this written?

<comment><USER37> Copyright at the bottom suggest originally 1991:

> Copyright © 1991, 1992, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2006, 2007, 2010, 2017, 2018, 2020 > Free Software Foundation, Inc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> RMS is a brilliant mind and someone I have had the luxury of meeting. Every now and then I like to look at his rider list and have a little chuckle: [https://github.com/ddol/rre- rms/blob/master/rider.txt](https://github.com/ddol/rre- rms/blob/master/rider.txt)

I came across a site that just rotated pictures of him, using his laptop in some strange places: [https://rms.sexy](https://rms.sexy)

<comment><USER39> As much as I respect his ideas, god he is cringeworthy.

<comment><USER40> He's like Cassandra, except a tad insufferable instead of cursed.

Social skills are boring to work on, but he's a political activist; those should be a priority for him. He's usually right, but that doesn't mean he has to say things _all the time_! (Or, rather, he could probably pick more opportune moments, while retaining most of the frequency, and be listened to more.)

Plus, the kinds of jokes you make with your friends are _not_ necessarily the kinds of jokes you should be making on stage, during a talk about free software, in front of a wide audience of strangers. Though I hear he's got a lot better at this in the last half-decade, so perhaps this criticism is no longer warranted.

<comment><USER41> His social skills are fine, and he has been immensely successful and changed the entire face of computing. I find it strange that people condescend about his appearance and manner because he has as of yet failed to transform the entire technological world to his vision.

The reason FOSS exists is because of how charming and convincing RMS was and is.

<comment><USER40> I condescend about his _manner_ because when he slipped up, he slipped up _big-time_. Not just a single-word blunder, but entire paragraphs. (He does this less nowadays, from what I can tell.)

He was charming and convincing within the environments in which he needed to charm and convince people. I reckon those were largely informal settings, in what I've heard referred to as "tech-bro" cultures. Those skills don't generalise.

The easiest way for eccentric people to gain social acceptance is to fit in. That was never an option for Richard Stallman, so he _must 've_ been charming and convincing. I couldn't have done what he's done. That doesn't automatically mean he's good at _every_ kind of social interaction – and he most certainly _wasn 't_, in the early 2000s. He made enough public slip-ups that I might need two hands to count them!

He's a political activist. One slip-up is enough for your enemies to discredit you. He can't afford as many as he's made, and certainly not any more. That's why I say he needs to focus on social skills; there's still work to do, and he's still one of the few people doing it, and he _needs_ social credibility to be able to do so.

(I suppose his biggest mistake was spreading himself across so many causes, and hence making himself a lot of enemies… But I'm not going to criticise him for that; it's better than I've ever done.)

<comment><USER42> > I condescend about his manner because when he slipped up, he slipped up big- > time

In his failure he seems to have achieved success greater than pretty much anyone else in the tech industry. The GPL and the laughably successful strategy behind it is one of the main planks underpinning the modern tech industry, and Stallman was one of the key characters to set in motion that agglomerative process that is the modern OSS stack.

Stallman has arguably had a more transformative impact on the software industry than any CEO in recent history. It is a weak argument, because any one man can only do so much, but it is there. More than can be said about most people.

If that is his contribution with slip-ups you must have high expectations for him.

<comment><USER40> I do. He's Richard Stallman.

The slip-ups I'm referring to were largely spur-of-the-moment social blunders; there's only one general principle I know he has that I think is wrong. If he hadn't made those, there'd be less fodder against him, so he could do more. I'm glad he's not making them as much, but he's still doing it enough that he had to resign from the FSF to prevent it from being dragged down by association with him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Speech or beer?

<comment><USER44> Free as in 4 freedoms.

<comment><USER45> Freedom zero should be only for people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> What's disturbing to me is that this idea is under attack by people who believe we are morally responsible for the users of our software. Meaning, software should not be free for everyone, only free for people that won't use it immorally.</comment>


Ask HN: Why my question about Ian death was removed from Ask HN? - <AUTHOR> I asked this question[1] which i think is something fairly interesting for the community to see, but after few hours, it was removed from top of ASK HN, even though it stayed on my account, I guess it has something to do with not being able to give black bar to Ian death ?<p>[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10815695 <comment><USER2> I suppose because it is a meta question where any discussion doesn't have any value.

We already know that many HNers are in favor of a black bar. It doesn't matter if there are hundreds or thousands.

Just ask firstname.lastname@example.com. They are the only ones to decide on this, and they already know about that request.

What could a Ask HN thread possibly do?

</comment><comment><USER3> Almost certainly community members flagging the question caused it to sink faster than it would with ordinary gravity.

</comment><comment><USER4> [http://pastebin.com/yk8bgru5](http://pastebin.com/yk8bgru5)

<comment><AUTHOR> I am talking about HN black bar and the HN mods , his last tweets are publicly known now.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Stop Solving Cloudflare CAPTCHAs over Tor - <AUTHOR> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/onionflare/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, author here! This is a little thing I've made a while ago to scratch a personal itch and based on some positive feedback I thought I'd share it. Its use case is incredibly niche but for the people that need it, it has a high utility.

TL;DR

> Who is this for?

> People browsing the web over Tor but not with the Tor Browser

> What does this do?

> Cloudflare lets users of the Tor Browser pass CAPTCHA-free while requiring a > CAPTCHA for all other Tor connections. This extension emulates some of the > Tor Browser's behavior (which you won't notice) to trick Cloudflare into > thinking you use the Tor Browser.

If you're having issues, here's a nice debugging guide: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/onionflare/re...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/onionflare/reviews/1549107/)

</comment><comment><USER2> > Access your data for all websites

Bummer

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately I don't have a choice for that. Cloudflare could be behind any domain so the extension has to patch all HTTP requests (and permissions aren't finer grained than that). It doesn't do anything invasive though, it just patches a handful of headers to look like the Tor Browser. You can read up on it here: [https://github.com/T0astBread/onionflare/blob/master/backgro...](https://github.com/T0astBread/onionflare/blob/master/background.js)

If you have an "unbranded" Firefox build (which means not built by Mozilla) or (iirc) the Developer Edition you can disable mandatory signing, zip the contents of the onionflare repo, call it onionflare.xpi and install it locally instead of using my AMO distribution.</comment></comment>


Universe May Contain "Tardis" Regions Bigger On The Inside Than The Outside - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/f9a65d6fe175

<comment><USER2> [Edit: Never mind -- I completely misread the quote, as JumpCrisscross points out.]

I stopped reading here:

"But just over a decade ago, astronomers noticed that the most distant galaxies were accelerating away from us much faster than the ones nearby. In fact, the further they looked, the greater the acceleration seemed to be."

This was, in fact, noticed in 1917 by Vesto Slipher, derived from General Relativity by Georges Lemaitre in 1927, and further confirmed by Edwin Hubble in 1929, when it became known as Hubble's Law.

<comment><USER3> Discovered in 1998, and explained in 2008 using generally accepted equations, at [http://finbot.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/dark-energy- obviated/](http://finbot.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/dark-energy-obviated/)

In short, if you launch a unpowered projectile upward at close to the speed of light, Einstein's prediction of gravitational time dilation (experimentally confirmed) in turn predicts that the projectile accelerates away from you, for as long as its velocity relative to you is close to the speed of light.

(The ivory tower no longer considers ideas that source outside the tower, which explains why this idea is in a blog.)

<comment><USER4> I can't pretend to understand relativity well enough to verify that blog post's maths, but one of the notes caught my eye:

<quote> 2\. Herein, as in most relativity texts, we ignore the travel time of light that prevents a remote event from being seen until after it has occurred. In principle a network of observers can be set up in locally inertial frames that momentarily co-move with the rocket, so that events can be detected by equipment right next to them, and the records subsequently compiled and analyzed. </quote>

I could be reading that wrong, but the author seems to be suggesting that time's inherent inconsistency at relativistic speeds and distances can be mitigated with a "network of observers". I don't know if that's true, but "momentarily co-move with the rocket" sounds like it's ignoring an awful lot of relativistic acceleration of the measuring devices.

<comment><USER3> The network of observers are moving inertially (i.e. unpowered, freely falling), moving with the rocket for only a moment, so they're not accelerating like the rocket is. That's how those observers can make good measurements, in that moment. For more info search for "momentarily comoving inertial frame" at [http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/clock.ht...](http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/clock.html). Each inertial clock can measure the passage of time accurately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> But of course. We reside in one of them.

Space ("bigger") and time are interrelated concepts (same damn thing/Minkowski vector) - if you have less time in an area (i.e. due to a gravity well, like Earth's) you can equally view it as more space.

Ergo, the "volume" of "space" measured from within Earth's gravity well out to a fixed distance (say EML-1, for the sake of argument), differs to the same volume as measured from outside of the gravity well.

There's also another way of looking at their hypothesis. If cosmic voids have _less_ space in them (i.e. more time) (if you don't have any matter-energy in a volume, then what "keeps" time?), this would explain redshift pretty neatly in terms of the refractive index of space-time. Beats the hell out of dark matter and dark energy, both of which are fudge-factors for a fundamental facet of the nature of the universe which we Do Not Understand yet.

It's all relative.

<comment><USER6> _Space ( "bigger") and time are interrelated concepts (same damn thing/Minkowski vector) - if you have less time in an area (i.e. due to a gravity well, like Earth's) you can equally view it as more space._

The metric in a gravity well like Earth's is not the Minkowski metric, so you can't interpret gravitational time dilation (which is what you are referring to by "less time" in a gravity well) the same way you would interpret time dilation in special relativity. The simplest way to see this is to observe that gravitational time dilation is present even when everything is at rest relative to each other, whereas time dilation in special relativity requires relative motion.

 _the "volume" of "space" measured from within Earth's gravity well out to a fixed distance (say EML-1, for the sake of argument), differs to the same volume as measured from outside of the gravity well._

This is not correct as you state it. What is correct is that the volume you measure depends on your state of motion: the volume of space you will measure out to a certain radius from the Earth will be larger if you are at rest relative to the Earth than if you are free-falling inward towards the Earth. But two observers both in the same state of motion will measure the same volume of space out to a fixed radius from the Earth, regardless of their location relative to Earth's gravity well.

 _If cosmic voids have less space in them_

This isn't consistent with their hypothesis; their hypothesis is that the voids have more space in them, not less. So you can't combine this with anything in their model to get a valid answer; you're starting with inconsistent premises.

 _(i.e. more time)_

Less space does not mean more time; see above.

 _(if you don 't have any matter-energy in a volume, then what "keeps" time?)_

The voids don't have zero matter-energy; they just have a lot less than other parts of the universe (at least, according to our best current observations.) That said, spacetime itself can "keep time" even if there is no matter-energy present in a particular location.

<comment><USER7> Since you seem to have some insights on the topic -- the article points out that

> Lavinto and co say that when light enters a Tardis region, it is deflected > sharply by the greater curvature there. That's not what astronomers observe > at all

Given that "light" is, I believe, our only way to observe the universe, how can one tell that it is not deflected?

I mean if for instance the heliosphere had some unknown refractive properties, how could we discover it since we only have light to determine the position of objects outside of the solar system?

<comment><USER8> We measure spectra. So there would be no way to measure the redshift of a single wavelength, e.g. a laser, but since we have the full spectra, we can measure the relative position of spectral features and the wavelength of these features to compare them with laboratory measurements.

<comment><USER6> _we can measure the relative position of spectral features_

That will only tell us about redshift/blueshift; it won't tell us anything about what path the light took to get to us.

<comment><USER8> Yes, but that is a rather general problem. Best you can do is to look at the so called Lyman-alpha forest, which gives you essentially the mass distribution along the path. And this gives you a good estimate for the deflection.

<comment><USER6> The mass distribution isn't necessarily a good proxy for the deflection. Lyman alpha lines are from absorption by hydrogen gas clouds; the average effect of those on the path of light is likely to be close to zero, because the clouds are diffuse and more or less homogeneous (i.e., their average density on large length scales is pretty much the same everywhere). The "Tardis region" model requires large deflections of light at the boundaries between the "Tardis" regions and regions of normal density, which will not average out since there aren't enough such boundaries between us and the distant supernovas that are our main line of evidence for the accelerating expansion of the universe.

<comment><USER8> I did not read the tardis paper, but the mass distribution gives you at least a upper limit, in the sense that if there is not much mass in one direction, then there is also not much deflection. At least in more or less normal models.

<comment><USER6> In more or less normal models, yes; but as I read the Tardis paper, the whole point is that it is _not_ a more or less normal model.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to Beat Amazon - <AUTHOR> http://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/how-to-beat-amazon/ <comment><USER2> I think people are starting to also notice cracks emerge in Amazon's e-commerce quality as it scales, whether/when it becomes enough of a problem to change shopper behavior is another question, but here are some examples I've seen:

\- Blatant fake thumbdrives - this entire section is thumb drive scammers using the hack that makes a drive appear larger in system info [https://www.amazon.com/s/s/ref=sr_nr_p_n_size_browse- bin_8?f...](https://www.amazon.com/s/s/ref=sr_nr_p_n_size_browse- bin_8?fst=as%3Aoff&rh=n%3A172282%2Cn%3A541966%2Cn%3A1292110011%2Cn%3A3151491%2Ck%3Athumb+drive%2Cp_n_size_browse- bin%3A10285020011&keywords=thumb+drive&ie=UTF8&qid=1513525301&rnid=1259751011)

\- $23 knock-off magsafes rife with fake reviews, that break/fry in days - [https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_7?url=search- alias...](https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_7?url=search- alias%3Dcomputers&field- keywords=magsafe+charger&sprefix=magsafe%2Caps%2C185&crid=J0KJGT8BMTT6&rh=n%3A541966%2Ck%3Amagsafe+charger)

\- The level of chaos in shopping categories effectively prevents you from doing things like sorting by price or reviews.

In my experience, Amazon is always happy to refund on these things and chalk it up as cost of scaling, but when does it start to become too much, similar to what happened to ebay?

<comment><USER3> Product quality issues of the above types leave me deeply skeptical that they are ready to be a health care provider.

<comment><USER4> Eh. Different Amazon verticals are ran very differently and have their own set of problems.

I've used Amazon Fresh a few times and I've never received "fake salmon".

<comment><USER5> Funny you should mention that...

[http://abcnews.go.com/US/fake-fish-experts-mislabeling- seafo...](http://abcnews.go.com/US/fake-fish-experts-mislabeling-seafood-real- problem/story?id=13706266)

> A new report released this week says recent studies have found that seafood > may be mislabeled as often as 25 percent to 70 percent of the time. > According to Food and Drug Administration port inspections, a third of > seafood sold in the U.S. is mislabeled as one type when it's actually > something else, even something cheaper.

<comment><USER4> Here's hoping this fish problem doesnt exist overseas in the UK!

<comment><USER6> Yikes!

www.google.com/search?q=mislabeled+fish+uk

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Complicating beating Amazon is the fact that it is lead by the arguably the best CEO in all of tech (and maybe in any company).

Whatever else may be said about Bezos, he has the ability to think long-term, create new markets, and execute on his vision. He also has the trust of investors who still buy Amazon stock even though he pretty much reinvests all the profits. The combination of existing market dominance, excellent leadership, and ready access to vast amounts of capital is a very hard combination to beat.

<comment><USER8> >investors who still buy Amazon stock even though he pretty much reinvests all the profits.

But you see, that's the way the game is played. Why siphon down cash and get it double taxed to pay it out as dividends when investors can sell shares as the price rises.

This avoids corporate tax and income tax on dividends. You are effectively saving 40% or more by doing it this way.

Investors aren't holding out for the day there are finally profits. They are riding their tax preferred profits all the way to the sky as we speak.

<comment><USER9> Yes but... any other company could do that instead of paying dividends? What makes AMZN so special?

<comment><USER10> Amazon actually has uses for the money. Managers in most firms are so scared of failure that their best idea is to buy back their own shares because it makes the next quarter EPS easier to beat. Few companies are investing in plant/equipment like Amazon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is it just me or is Amazon doing all of these things already?

Create an aspirational brand -> they have tons of in-house brands in many categories, from premium to budget. They're just not usually advertised as being owned by Amazon.

Build a community -> Lists, Vine, Reviews, their forums, probably a bunch of other things

Personalize your products -> Amazon Merch

Deploy an omnichannel strategy -> Retail stores, Treasure Truck, Amazon Go, Whole Foods, Prime Now, Flex, drones...

Go niche over mass -> Marketplace

Commit to values -> I think the last 20 years have shown that Amazon is pretty committed to investing in growth...

<comment><USER12> Great post, but I take exception on this part:

 _Commit to values - > I think the last 20 years have shown that Amazon is pretty committed to investing in growth..._

In the article, "values" was alluding to something more altruistic or socially aspirational than growth, capitalism, etc. Amazon's image is pretty weak in this area. Especially around employee culture and truly putting the consumer first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I beat Amazon all the time on their own platform. That is, I sell the same items they sell, but for cheaper. But this is merely a tactical localized advantage.

If you want to build something that beats Amazon, you need to identify what Amazon either won't or preferably can't do. Some plausible candidates:

1\. Consistent prices

2\. Customizable prices (ala jet)

3\. Products or categories Amazon can't source (surprisingly many, there are a ton of popular items Amazon doesn't sell and a bit of sleuthing can find some of them). One subcategory of this is exclusives of existing brands and licenses, or patented products. Another, quite lucrative category is MLM stuff - it's tough to get them in bulk but the popular ones sell quite well by third parties on Amazon.

4\. Trends. A small business can typically react quicker to trends. Lots of small sellers made money on fidget spinner well before big retailers did.

5\. Sell to b&m, still 90% of retail. The vast majority of Amazon PL is not in stores.

Another thing would be to identify Amazon's profit centers and compete there. They make a ton of money on some items, they lose a ton of money on others. You can profitably compete with the high margin items.

</comment><comment><USER14> One problem with Amazon is that it's terrible for discoverability. You can't really effectively browse Amazon, because there are too many items, and their categorisation is somewhat lacking due to the range of items they sell.

This is where niche websites really come into their element. JetPens comes to mind as a very good example. They sell high end pens (fountain pens etc). Their categorisation is spot on, since all they sell is pens, so I can browse their range of pens and accessories easily. They also have a really good blog and guides to help drive sales. Their price point is ideal for a blog-driven marketing/sales model. After reading a blog article or a guide, I'd happily shell out $25 to try something new, which is conveniently linked to from the blog post.

<comment><USER15> There are all these startups popping up that curate the best products on Amazon, Aliexpress, etc.

[https://canopy.co/explore/popular](https://canopy.co/explore/popular) [https://thieve.co/](https://thieve.co/)

Actually really interesting potential from a biz perspective - nice lifestyle biz if you do it right. Depending on how many purchases you drive you can earn between 4-8.5% of the purchase price.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, camelcamelcamel is the one that comes to mind for me.

Also, for Amazon Video, instantwatcher.com, but not sure how they monetize. Way easier on a PC to navigate Amazon Video Prime and Netflix than on their native sites. Amazon still leaves a lot to be desired though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm still kind of amazed by Dollar Shave Club ($1bil exit to Unilever) - absolutely no product innovation (private label S. Korean razor you could've bought on Amazon for cheaper) but brilliant branding/marketing.

Objectively Amazon has never had much of a personality brand-wise, and anything you can do to exploit that weakness will help you win customers.

<comment><USER17> It amazes me too. But we have to remember that although there was no product innovation, there was business model innovation for that niche market. Online subscriptions for razors were not a thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> They left out one. If you have a quality brand and you're not trying to compete on price and you have an upscale market, advertise on podcasts. I find most podcast ads to be interesting, maybe not applicable to me directly at the time but a product that would be on the top of my list if I were in the market for that category of item, and a lot of my recommendations come from hearing about products on podcasts.

Podcasters seem to be a lot more discerning about which products they will advertise.

On the other side of the coin,since most ads for podcast include some type of offer code, you can measure which podcasts are affective at driving sales.

</comment><comment><USER19> they forgot: out-execute under promise and over deliver be more agile be willing to break things etc.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think the best way to beat amazon is just start a shipping company.

Creating an online shop is dead simple. Search is solved.

If only Prime existed as a SaaS service. Shyp seems to be attempting to do it.

<comment><USER8> Prime IS a saas service. It's called fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) and they will warehouse and ship your products whether you sold them on your own site, eBay, or Amazon marketplace.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If you don't know how to beat Amazon, read the Innovator's Dilemma.

Just don't buy it on Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER22> I thought, being on HN, this would be about offering a better PaaS product than AWS, but I could have been equally wrong if I'd guessed any of 10+ other industries too (How to beat Amazon at food delivery? Ticket sales? Music distribution? ...)

</comment><comment><USER23> tldr: the only chance you've got to beat Amazon when building a consumer brand is selling a premium product to a specific niche

</comment><comment><USER24> > it's certainly not known for its values.

Oh, this I disagree with. (Bias note, I work for Amazon but state only my own opinions).

Amazon has the Leadership Principles. Google them to see what they are. You may not agree with them, but these values are religion inside the company. It's becoming less so lately (to the detriment of the company, in my view) but they're still values that Amazon is and should be known for their obsession with.

<comment><USER25> I would wager you've been downvoted because no one believes these purported values to be Amazons true values.I had a brief prescreening call with someone at Amazon when i flirted with the idea of applying to work there. They ended the call by pointing me to these values. My first thought while reading them was that they are terribly dishonest. Really turned me off applying there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> These are good suggestions for anyone starting an online retailer.

But when it comes to overall innovation I'd argue that Amazon is significantly out-innovating Facebook, Apple, and Google, each of which seem afraid to take any big risks or make any obvious long-term bets.

I think markets will catch up with this reality at some point. I reorganized my tech stock portfolio to reflect this view yesterday.

</comment><comment><USER27> This article is talking at the wrong level about Amazon. They're not an ecommerce company anymore. They're an infrastructure provider that cannibalises its ecosystem _just_ slowly enough that nobody panics.

Start a business, run it on AWS, do well, they have all your systems metadata and using that can replicate your business. Rinse, repeat. Then there's Lambda and Greengrass... ha

We're the Eloi, AWS are the Morlocks.

You can't beat the Morlocks with a 'community' play, and the only way 'going niche' will help you is that you'll be too small to pay attention to.

[Edit]

To make my comment less negative...

To beat Amazon you need to get ahead of them on a game they don't already own (or have the capacity to catch up on) and establish yourself as the dominant market in that space. E.g. there's an interesting company in London calle Synthace for example who are building a compiler for pharmacueticals. You write code that defines a manufacturing process and it makes the drugs for you. If they can provide commoditised pharma-as-a-service and evolve a healthy enough ecosystem to build up some value, Amazon will find it hard to replicate and either try to acquire or hunt elsewhere.

Yeah it's a bleak view. It's not going to change either because China's ascendance will mean Amazon is the US's strongest buffer against Alibaba, so unlikely to get broken up even it achieves monopoly position.

<comment><USER28> > they have all your systems metadata

My first thought is this is a very big claim. It sounds like they are "stealing". They ask what customers want and then build new services based on customers' reqursts and what could win more customers. Sure they know what their customers do when the customers interact with an account mamager, but we can say the same about every business out there then.

Also, AWS is only part of what makes Amazon profitable. Amazon is interested in making itself indispensable, by connecting dots, from online shopping to healthcare to home automation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> It's hard to beat Amazon on diversification, specialization would be the only way. Until they acquire you

</comment><comment><USER30> At some point, doesn't antitrust intervention trigger? Especially once a firm bootstraps across multiple markets? Or is Amazon's market power too small?

</comment><comment><USER31> I wonder if Amazon would be open to reselling access to their distribution centers, a la cellular networks. I feel like the upside to them would be enormous.

</comment><comment><USER32> "How to not compete with Amazon"

</comment><comment><USER33> This is a dumb article

</comment><comment><USER34> Amazon succeeds by being data driven.

[http://ShopIn.com](http://ShopIn.com) is working to move buyer personas out of data silos by decentralize purchasing history onto a federated blockchain.

Decentralizing purchasing data should let individual brands compete more equally.

It's an ambitious project but should it take off it will provide real world data to make smaller brands more competitive.

<comment><USER28> I am not really sure how this is decentralized. Users still depend on your service to be operational in order, no? Then that is not decentralized. Is it the data really decentralizrd then? The infrastructure piece doesn't seem to be, which makes decentralization existence questionable since, unless the data can be used else where, the data itself is useless.

Also when you say data is completely owned by thr user, how are you able to recommend? How do you help your engine to improved? In the end you do need the data. Spotify trains their customer dataset annoymously, which most companies do when they are doing training. So I don't how this project is any more putting user in control. It's very vague to me - are you suggesting privacy is honored? That's what "user is in control" means - I can either share or not share, but what value do you get then?</comment></comment>


Design in the open at work - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@poyichen/design-in-the-open-at-work-4fd1397b9915

<comment><USER2> I work as a UX designer for almost 2 years. And I think design in a transparent environment is really important.

Sometimes I think all the people in the team should know why the product is designed like this. Actually, the fact is just like that. Programers would like to tell you their thoughts about design even though their suggestions may be not appropriate at all. But if you don't explain the reasons, some parts of the product may be totally different from what you thought they would be. Because you can't explain all the things with the docs. There are always some points we miss.

So like the OP said, it's a good solution to build an open work environment where anyone can see what other members of the team are working on, including programers. You will get the feedback at the first time, and you will find it becomes simpler to explain the design to others in the team.</comment>