Computer Files Are Going Extinct - <AUTHOR> https://onezero.medium.com/the-death-of-the-computer-file-doc-43cb028c0506 <comment><USER4> To a computer science teacher, this feels like trying to walk up a down escalator.

First-year CS students (middle school or high school) with experience using Apple products don't have a concept of a filesystem. The shift to auto-saving documents also corrodes the intuition that files get stored on disk in some non-magical way. In the same way that it's now easier to teach networking and graph theory because youth experience identity and relationships this way, it's now a lot harder to teach lower-level abstractions. In my experience, this has changed over the last five years.

<comment><USER5> I have a very similar anecdote. I had a long conversation with a friend who is a high school science teacher. She told me that computer literacy has plummeted in the last ten years.

She has her students go into the field and collect data in the form of photos, spreadsheets, and typed reports. She wants students to bundle these files in zip files, and email them to her.

Students have no idea how to do this. Some of them struggle with emails. She has had to make her tutorials on this longer and longer. And she has also been forced to start accepting assignments as a pile of attachments, because so few students understand zip files.

<comment><USER6> I might imply that your highschool teacher friend is instead falling out of computer literacy, and that highshool students are moving away from _her_ form of a computer-based workflow.

I very rarely send emails at all outside of work. Maybe one or two support emails. I also fairly rarely create zip files either. Of course, I know _how_ to do these things, but I don't really do it anymore. I haven't needed to, for the same reason that I don't own a printer.

I haven't needed to "compress" anything since Google Drive and Dropbox meant that all I needed to do to get someone a file is type their email into a box.

Perhaps instead of email, you teacher friend could find out how her students send things to each other and meet them half way? Make up a google drive or dropbox or whatever microsoft or apple are doing instead of insisting on whatever's most comfortable for you.

In short, I don't think this is an example of students falling behind, but teachers getting left behind.

It's a little rudde to say it that way, but I really don't know how else to say it.

<comment><USER5> > I might imply that your highschool teacher friend is instead falling out of > computer literacy, and that highshool students are moving away from her form > of a computer-based workflow.

I suppose, in the same way that people using crayons are moving away from the printed word.

> Perhaps instead of email, you teacher friend could find out how her students > send things to each other and meet them half way? Make up a google drive or > dropbox or whatever microsoft or apple are doing instead of insisting on > whatever's most comfortable for you.

Isn't the whole point of school to learn new skills? If students have illegible handwriting and poor grammar, should the teacher really be meeting the students half way?

I actually told her that she should continue doing what she was doing, because it was a real boon to her students. They might not ever learn this stuff.

Her students objectively less able to share information with each other. I have certainly seen kids who have to go as far as taking screenshots of what an app contains and send a screenshot to someone, than actually be able to export text.

I could understand if what the students were doing was in some way comparable in flexibility, but it isn't. They basically only know how to click on the share button in an app, and text links for someone else to install the app. Or send them screenshots of them using an app scrolled to the relevant info.

But the biggest benefit is that having assignments in discrete organized bundles makes the most sense for everyone.

<comment><USER7> Email is actually pretty crappy for files. She should setup an https drop and get a way better experience.

<comment><USER8> How would that look for assignment submissions? Something like WebDAV?

<comment><USER9> Just a page with a form you can upload files through. You can setup something like that e.g. with Owncloud/Nextcloud. And dedicated education tools also often have it.

For normal document-sized files, email is fine though too IMHO, for university stuff I never really cared which way was used.

<comment><USER8> NextCloud is quite a dependency for a simple file upload.

<comment><USER9> Sure, if you just install it for that. But it's a reasonably common service (e.g. around here, many universities have it for their employees and students) with that feature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One of my greatest culture shocks in terms of technology was around 6 years ago when I received an iPad, having no experience with Apple products. After the initial setup, the first thing I wanted was to transfer some files - <USER2> episodes and PDFs - to the device. My first attempt was to SSH into it, only to discover that's not an option, and would require a third-party app store and jailbreak. Then I just connected the iPad to my PC by cable, expecting to see a mass storage device. No luck. Likewise, no luck finding a file explorer on the iPad.

The iPad is strongly tied to the workflow that Apple suggests, and that's a workflow that removes files as a concept, abstracting them away. It's quite possibly a genius approach in terms of how accessible it is to non-tech people, even though it doesn't sit right with me.

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure if this is _only_ an about accessibility to non-tech people.

Think about it: You can't get files on your device in a useable format anymore. This means piracy becomes exponentially harder to consume (i.e. you can't use your iPad [easily] as a reader for your pirated ebooks). Quite honestly, that's a stroke of genius and likely a secondary motivation for this workflow.

<comment><USER12> You can very easily use your iPad as a reader for arbitrarily downloaded ebooks. Go to Gutenberg or Archive.org or the pirate site of your choice. Select a book. Select the format. Epubs and PDFs have the option of being sent to iBooks. Mobi can be opened with a compatible reader app if you have one installed. And the file can be saved to Dropbox or whatever file service you have installed. With the latest version of iOS (IpadOS) you can save to your Downloads folder or even to a connected storage device, or to a file share on your local network. You can also load books via Dropbox, local network, or connected storage.

I do this all the time. For me, it's convenient to use Dropbox as the intermediary, but there's plenty of other ways too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > all culture, raging over us, for $12.99 a month (or $15.99 for HD) as long > as we keep up our payments like good economic entities. When we stop paying, > we're left with nothing. No files. The service is revoked.

This is the most frightening thing for me... by far: the concept that I no longer have control of the destiny of my own shit. Mine. Stuff I created.

I understand the concept of how cloud storage works: "hey, we'll look after it for you, back it up and stuff, and all you need to do it pay us a small monthly fee".

Makes sense.

But add to that fact that if you stop paying they'll keep you from your stuff. Also if they don't like you for practically any reason they'll keep you from your stuff. Or if they suffer a huge data loss they'll claim that the T's and C's protect them and they'll still keep you from your stuff.

What the hell are we sleep-walking into here?

Caveat: I'm a tech. I have a local copy, a local backup (that I rotate on an ad-hoc basis with the other HD at my mum and dads house) and an offsite cloud- backup (using Sync) so I'm covered but this stuff isn't aimed at me, it's aimed at my mum and my non-tech friends who just think "hey, it's <mega-corp>. They've got thousands of people and loads of equipment and they know what they're doing!"

They sure do!

<comment><USER14> Out of all my data, music and video is the thing I worry about least. I'm not going to lose my business or job because Apple Music stops working or I can't see the latest Netflix series. The last thing I want to spend my time doing is managing and worrying about terabytes of media.

<comment><USER15> Well clearly you don't have a library of Alexandria. Not to claim I do, but, well, i do curate my own library, both in books and in media and I do have some stuff that isn't easy to come by: mispressed Amorphous Androgynous CDs. Early Nate Tarrant music. The Screaming Abdabs bootleg - and to me they hold value just like a family album might hold to some. It's not about money or what i do, it's about intrinsic value of culture history, and if someone flips a switch and turns the while internet off, i will still be able to dig out the old hard drives stored in the basement and show my kid Tarkovskys' Stalker or Kubricks' 2001\. Hell, i'll watch them again for the 79th time...

But if you just consume it... well, that's good too. Just keep in mind not all do, and curating a media collection is gardening to some.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The article just felt...unjustifiably alarmist to me.

Most non-technical people I know _cannot manage files_ even after decades of computing experience. I understand why many services try to abstract or simplify the concept.

For example, Google or Apple is processing the crap out of your email attachment image because they know you don't understand the idea that trying to send five 10MB photos likely will not fit in an email. All you want to do is send your photos to Grandma. So instead your iDevice handles it for you and either compresses them or throws them in a temporary cloud storage location with a link. Grandma gets her photos - for most people the alternative is a confusing mail delivery bounce followed by frustration.

Apple added Stacks to the desktop because everyone's tired of seeing other people's computers with a mess of icons smashed together on the desktop, because that's the only place files could be conceivably stored in the mind of a non-technical user. The whole idea of a file hierarchy seems either too confusing or too labor intensive to that type of user.

Nerds like us always have and had options. We are aware and capable of coming up with a more friendly solution to us, like a home built NAS or Synology box; ask a non-technical user what those are and be met with a blank stare.

For most people, they really should be paying someone else to maintain their data, iCloud, Google or whatever. Nobody's home back up scheme can match what these companies are doing in their data centers. And no, these services don't just delete your data immediately after your monthly payment method bounces - you are given time and nags to download your data or renew, often your data just becomes download-only.

Are we annoyed that most options are not for us, or have to be in a form of a workaround to a technology stack that's marketed to non-technical people? Maybe. It would be wonderful if there was a device as nice as an iPad that also gave us full access like a Linux PC.

But also, nobody's forcing us in 2019 to stop using our files as we did in 1999. We didn't _have_ all these services back then. File management was _the_ option. It is still an option.

And in 2019, Apple finally adds mass storage support to the iPad. Sometimes things come around.

<comment><USER17> 20 years ago, I thought that learning the basics of a filesystem would be a staple of education. I painstakingly taught this to my non-technical relatives. It wasn't that hard. I just assumed that this stuff would start getting taught in public schools.

Instead, we've been struggling (and often failing) to dumb computers down. The fact that people still struggle with the same tasks is a testament to that.

I have lost track of the number of people who have lost precious pictures or documents because they don't understand what device they are stored on, and threw away their old iPad. By focusing on the most common case "emailing photos to grandma" we end up introducing all sorts of new problems.

<comment><USER17> Just to go into a bit more detail: 1) An auntie thought that dragging 100GB of music into her Dropbox meant that she could just leave on a trip and access her music, without having to wait for it to sync. 2) An uncle didn't know how to access his late wife's photos from her iPad. Which cloud were they in? Were they only on her locked iPad? Who knows! 3) People making public YouTube videos to share private moments with family. (Pedos exploit this to find videos of children bathing)

Have we really improved things? I find these new file abstractions we have created to be much more confusing.

Old people understand the concept of physical media just fine. They know what a record or a roll of film is. And because of this phobia about educating users, we hide so much that they don't even know if their data has been synced, or if it is private.

<comment><USER18> > _Have we really improved things? I find these new file abstractions we have > created to be much more confusing._

We haven't, and here's why: a file system was _one_ abstraction. A simple one, that made sense, and wasn't very far detached from actual implementation details. Which meant that weird black magic almost never leaked from underneath.

What we have now, with the cloud and dumbed down software, is many mutually inconsistent and sometimes incompatible abstractions, all completely detached from the reality behind them, which means they have inconsistent corner cases that make no sense unless you know enough about software to be able to imagine what those abstractions are backed by.

In the best tradition of commerce, we've helped people avoid having to learn a simple concept by introducing them to lots of "simplifying" lies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> You can pry my files from my cold dead hands.

What amuses me about all of this is that it seems to just further cement software developers as magicians. Back in the day it was the Windows control panel.

Nowadays? I have direct experience with tons of people navigating cloud service settings or whatever else via endless GUIs. Just give me the filesystem. It's all a bunch of JSON configs or whatever anyway. find -name blah -execdir sed -i blah. Bosh.

Well, I'll never struggle for work at least. Perhaps this is our 'guild'...?

<comment><USER20> I'm often able to mystify people by fixing something by dropping to a shell and modifying files.. even some developers. I think the one thing that this article points out is how unaware some developers about what they're doing. The author had an example where he used NPM to download dependencies and said "websites were made of files; now they are made of dependencies." While that is not wrong, its too often how people think, and they forget that the dependencies are actually just a bunch of files.

I actually end up helping tons of random people in my company use conda, because they can't get the concept of virtual envs. They don't understand that the libraries are actually files on the disk, and your virtual environment is just a directory and some variables.

That's not to say all developers are like this, but I think the numbers that think like this are growing. Ultimately, I'm like you - they can pry the files from my cold dead hands, if I didn't know what/where/how files were used, I wouldn't fundamentally understand how a lot of different technologies even work.

<comment><USER21> I think the author's point of "made of dependencies, not files" is that they are not human files. They are autogenerated webs of dependent repositories, not to be touched by the user, unless something has gone seriously wrong. I wouldn't qualify personal files that are directly created and managed by a human user as being the same thing as a mass of folders curated and managed by a dependency manager utility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't understand how people can get work done in the post-file world. Any project I've got that's more complicated than a todo list has text files, images, code, links to websites, emails, and typeset documents. The only thing that holds all that stuff, organizes it into folders, lets me edit/run it, and makes the content searchable is a filesystem. Maybe my standards for usability are too high.

<comment><USER23> That's because the post file world is designed for consumers, not producers. YouTube creators and software programmers are still using standard computers.

<comment><USER24> It'd be nice if desktop computing went back to the nerds. Let the masses have their mobile, and let computer software not be so dumbed-down.

<comment><USER25> It seems to me that this is the clear trend. MacOS is increasingly "mobilizing" and Microsoft has already moved to a Windows-as-a-Service [0]. The only sane desktop/workstation choice is Linux and the rift grows wider every year. As the number of use cases for a workstation OS continue to diminish and the big players stop catering to that market segment, sooner or later we'll reach the fabled Year of the Linux Desktop!

[0] [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/deployment/update/w...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/deployment/update/waas-overview)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> arch-ninja There is value in knowing there are 2 demographics: most people use apps and don't care how the app handles it's data; indeed the app usually alters the user's behaviour.

Some people run the opposite: they instruct apps and the app had better use the data given in the format given or the user moves to another app (or writes their own).

Someday I hope the second demographic's lifestyle is taught in highschools, because it is socially healthier.

<comment><USER26> >socially healthier

That's a bold statement, can you elaborate?

People want to go for walks, meet up with friends, share memories, they don't care how it's done. Having the tools get out of the way and just do those things is a net benefit to society.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is why years ago I switched to a static site generator. Using something like Django was fragile. My provider would change some library and poof - <USER3> site is down. I don't use my site often (post on it once every so many months) - so I simply switched. Never gone down since then.

A few days ago I opened a Jupyter notebook I had authored in 2015 - and it failed to reproduce my results. I relied on pandas, and pandas has gone through API changes. Fortunately, it wasn't hard for me to search around for the newer versions of those APIs and fix things - but this is only 4 years after I authored it. Can I have any confidence that 20 years from now I could reproduce the results - or even find _documentation_ for the APIs I used to understand exactly what I was doing?

I mean sure - I could put the OS and all the libraries needed to reproduce the work in a container and be guaranteed[1] it'll run later, but the only people who will do that are those who need to for regulatory compliance[2].

[1] Not really. The software to run the container may no longer be supported, and the people with the knowledge may charge more than most can afford to get it to work.

[2] Something we're dealing with at work these days. Writing stuff for the automotive industry and they expect that any software + tools should work 15-20 years from now. Same level of expectation for availability as any other car part. Now that there is so much SW in modern cars, this is a good opportunity for being a consultant 15-20 years from now!

</comment><comment><USER28> Of course they are. That's just part of the pendulum swinging towards centralization. Files, _your_ files, are an obstacle to centralization so you should lose your ability to access them.

So no more books in your library, just _access_ to books through a device under the control of some large - usually American - entity. No more music collections, just _access_ to someone else's music collection. Ditto for movies, you don't have your own copies, there is just _access_ on a pay-per- view basis.

And of course only the 'proper' artists, movie production houses and writers will be available.

I refuse to play this game. I have my own collection of music, books and movies. Yes, it takes up space. But that's fine with me, at least no billionaire will be able to dictate what I can read, view or listen to.

Extending this to your personal files was an obvious move.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is what I'm gonna link to my friends the next time they make fun of me for being a green-texter.

This is exactly the story I went through a few years back as well. I had an iPhone 4? 9-ish years ago when I was in a music-kleptomania frenzy (back when what.cd was around too ;) ), and I remember just how frustrating it was dragging and dropping shit through iTunes all the time. Same for movies, photos, and documents! I couldn't see the appeal of using the iPhone at all - why would somebody use this when they could just plug an Android device into their PC and use their file explorer? (The update to iOS7 was the nail in the coffin - I found the neon design just repulsive.)

I guess my question is - has the Apple "ecosystem" gotten better for this? Can I actually edit metadata for .mp3s and .mp4s and just drop them into an iPhone or iPad now? And copy them out as well or download them offline, bit for bit? If so, are dongles still the norm?

*An aside - I've definitely eased up on the file-ownership thing now. I just let YouTube Premium handle everything. It was definitely a waste of time retagging thousands of music files out of some strange ownership OCD. I see it as a net positive overall - now I just find it amazing that someone even uploaded some white-label vinyl-only run-of-100 Foul Play UK garage record (and similar records going for >$100 on discogs - maybe even ownership has its limits?) at 128kbps at all, even if it doesn't stay there forever :)

<comment><USER30> > [media file ownership] was definitely a waste of time retagging thousands of > music files out of some strange ownership OCD

Full disclosure: I used to work for Spotify. When people talk about services like Spotify and Apple Music, they usually miss how much value is added in the cataloging and search they do. These are a massive pain to do yourself, it doesn't scale past ~10,000 tracks, they've put more thought into it, and are better at handling the song/track/recording ambiguity in search results.

<comment><USER9> > _it doesn 't scale past ~10,000 tracks, they've put more thought into it,_

Spotify also says supporting more than 10000 tracks in "My Library" isn't necessary, so the people who hit that limit aren't helped by Spotify either

<comment><USER30> Except search and playlists still work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I haven't seen many non-tech people who manage their files in a systematic way. Most non-tech people don't have a naming convention for their files (seen many files named "letter.doc" or "shmith.doc" or "smith2.doc"), let alone a predefined folder structure for their files. What I have seen most of the time is this: A desktop full of files, hundreds, even thousands of files, some within folders, some flat. A chaos.

I am a tech person. I do organise my files in folders. And I don't want any other organizing principle for my documents. But I realize that this concept does not work for most other people.

</comment><comment><USER32> A HN comment from 2 years ago I bookmarked: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15235151](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15235151)

The war on general computing implies disempowering users, rather than empowering them. But that it's "not surprising" doesn't mean it's good, or that it can't be reversed.

I wonder what associations for craftsmanship in software, respect for users, and similar things there are? If there was a web ring about that, I would browse it.

<comment><USER33> Heh, that's a possibility, actually. Govs like how software and personal phones enable global surveillance, but they don't like the power that general computing devices give (all these encryption protocols, bitcoins and so on). So obviously some people in the govs are trying to convince the rest to keep the first and take back the general computing part. We may even see in our lifetimes how common people will only be allowed access to dumb software (the Apple model), and general unrestricted software and hardware will be threated like weapons, with licenses and prison time for software engineers. The alternative path for society is cheap and powerful general use phones with quantum coprocessors and a constitutional amendments that defend these rights. I'm pretty sure that the two alternatives are now being considered somewhere in DoD offices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Perhaps one day we can store stuff directly into a transactional database. I'd actually love to see an OS based on this principle.

<comment><USER35> MVS is pretty much that.

<comment><USER34> Ok perhaps a little more modern, where the database can be distributed, and where the transaction handle can be sent to different processes so you can have multiple microservices running in a single transaction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The reports of the death of the file(system) are grossly exaggerated.

And it's not been for lack of trying.

While I share many of the author's misgivings, files are actually making a bit of a comeback. After many years of trying to void the very idea of a file, Apple was essentially forced to introduce the _Files_ app for iOS and introduce mass-storage support for (some) iPads. This is a good sign.

The anti-file movement has also been very strong and vocal in the programming world, where many claim that many if not all of our programming problems would go away if only we put our code in databases, or (Smalltalk) images instead. Yet the files, they persist.

That doesn't mean that files, or hierarchical filesystems, are perfect. However, whatever the problems ("Unititled 54.txt", anyone?), the proposed cures for what ails files invariably appear to be worse than the symptoms. And almost inevitably, we have to bring back or reinvent the very same concepts that we gleefully got rid of. That's a resilient concept! One that is apparently useful and pertinent at a somewhat deeper level than we fully understand.

So how about we stop trying to "get rid of files", but instead see if we cannot improve the concept and the mechanism(s) to fix the problems.

</comment><comment><USER37> Files were an abstraction that appeared as well as disappeared in my lifetime, at least on home computers - before them, you were saving direct to the medium which was mostly audio magtape. And I've honestly never really liked them.

Files get lost in the clutter, get overwritten or corrupted, don't get saved when you crash, are on this computer and not that one, don't make it across when you transition to a newer box, have to be mailed around or put on (gasp) physical media and passed around like a crude lump of plastic. And then your media gets a virus, oops.

It was an improvement to autosave. It was an improvement to version. It was an improvement to distribute across redundant backups. It was an improvement, to be able to get at it from anywhere.

There's UI issues in the new way of doing things, but that seems likely to shake out with experience. Files were often clunky at first too.

<comment><USER37> Also it's worth mentioning, if I still had my files from my 486 PC (I don't), could I even access them? Mostly, not, or not without an emulator and fifty floppy disks of some ancient app I binned in the 1990s. And a floppy disk drive. And an adaptor cable.

Files rot, unless they are intentionally low rot by design. Most weren't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Files and directories are not a great abstraction. Never have been.

E.g. the insides of git are much better (although the abstractions layered on top are fucking gruesome.)

Something like IPFS is an obvious way forward. [https://ipfs.io/](https://ipfs.io/)

<comment><USER39> Problem is that we're not getting a better interoperable metadata-rich relational object storage system. We're getting closed silos in short-lived cloud surveillance services.

<comment><USER38> I agree, but then the issue is social/political rather than technical.

I'd love it if the WWW was e.g. Xanadu+Prolog.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Non-technical people will not hesitate to adopt online services to manage their data. I have a dropbox and other services of my own, but I'm talking about the mainstream apps mentioned in the article that also have a purpose.

People completely ignore the fact you would have no access to this data if you have no online connection (or access to the account). It's not that files are going away, it's that they're being increasingly managed by tech companies, and normal people don't know any better, as evident by the article's title... it shows the author doesn't what files are for and that they are invisibly managed by a third party.

</comment><comment><USER41> I wonder if this is a variation on a business anti-pattern we see in a lot of other places:

"It's better to acquire a new customer at any cost, versus retaining an existing one."

There are plenty of verticals where if you develop a piece of software that's blunt, direct, and full of power-user features, it won't take off because it gets panned as "too hard to use."

Tricks like abstracting where and how the data is stored tend to be appealing to non-skilled users. They see "look how easy, I don't have to figure out which files are in the cloud and which are on disc, and can't accidentally try to open a spreadsheet in the photo editor." New users buy into it, the developers get their hockey-stick growth chart and everyone declares victory. After a few months, a small percentage of users end up dropping the product with a migraine because they can't break out of the jails and abstractions that are clearly standing in the way of improved productivity.

No real point in satisfying those users anyway-- they've already paid, so there's no further value they can provide to your ecosystem.

</comment><comment><USER42> My major concern is that data backup is getting more and more difficult. I feel it's increasingly more difficult to figure out what to back up and how to restore it. I have heard several horror stories from people who messed up something and had all their cloud data disappear forever.

</comment><comment><USER8> If this resonates with you, I'd invite you to follow my work on MooseDrive [0]. I'm calling it a "data ownership" company. The product is focused on storage for developers.

[0] [https://moosedrive.io](https://moosedrive.io)

<comment><USER43> To me the whole idea of data ownership and everything this article is talking about is antithetical to some company somewhere or cloud storage. I personally collect mp3s. I could easily pay for a Spotify subscription or even have it included as part of a mobile phone contract at a discounted rate, but I prefer to have the actual files on my computer, I own them and no one can change that fact. I religiously catalogue and sort all my files and back them up to multiple external media constantly. I am currently working on a couple of projects that are all to do with organising files locally via their metadata (mp3s, JPEGs, et al). I avoid anything cloud. I am slowly but surely migrating away from the cloud.

<comment><USER8> The vision for the product is for you to be able to do everything you just described, and still have the files available for sharing and publishing through the cloud. Note, that doesn't mean _stored_ in the cloud, unless that's what the user wants.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Would read, but alas, behind the medium paywall...

Aren't all things in computers eventually a file (descriptor)?

And with the rate of data volume increasing, things going the opposite of the headline?

And with the cloud, they are being replicated multiple times there and locally?

<comment><USER45> > The file has been replaced with the platform, the service, the ecosystem. > ... When we stop paying, we're left with nothing. No files. The service is > revoked

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Years ago websites were made of files; now they are made of dependencies.

<comment><USER18> Similar to the ongoing trend of turning every product into service, both on- line and off-line. It turns ownership into relationships, which is something I consider strongly negative. Ownership doesn't require as much maintenance and is much more forgiving, and I can own a lot of things, but there's only so many relationships I can be in before my mind is no longer able to keep track of them all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> File this next to "Mouse buttons are going extinct, because Apple."

</comment><comment><USER47> Can medium go extinct first?

</comment><comment><USER48> "Files are dead" is an oft-quoted meme, but they aren't going away anytime soon.

I wrote a piece offering a counterpoint to this view five years ago (in response to a similar article by Fred Wilson) and I think most of the points still hold true today:

[https://blog.zamzar.com/2015/01/02/why-fred-wilson-is- wrong-...](https://blog.zamzar.com/2015/01/02/why-fred-wilson-is-wrong-files- arent-dead/)

</comment><comment><USER49> I couldn't read this medium article, it said that I had read too many free articles this month, but hopefully this is relevant: files "are back" in iPadOS. Most iPad apps had interoperability with data in other apps, when it made sense but now with the new File app, I am increasingly doing more on my iPad Pro. I have a GPU rig for deep learning, and use a MacBook for Lisp and Haskell hacking, but now most of my time is spent on an iPad doing research, writing, and entertainment.

</comment><comment><USER50> I find myself very frustrated using newer versions of the Microsoft Office suite. When I want to save a file, I just want the tried-and-true Windows file dialog popped up, but instead I have to click around and avoid going into weird Onedrive dialogs.

I save everything to OneDrive anyway, but I'm a not-so-old fogey that is more comfortable using the filesystem myself, rather than crummy layers stuck on top of it.

</comment><comment><USER51> > Files are skeuomorphic. That's a fancy word that just means they're a > digital concept that mirrors a physical item.

So, the digital equivalent of [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomatopoeia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomatopoeia)

</comment><comment><USER52> [http://archive.is/2t5BK](http://archive.is/2t5BK)

<comment><USER53> For a better reading experience and for those using Cloudflare's DNS: [https://outline.com/yU64Cu](https://outline.com/yU64Cu)

<comment><USER54> I do use Cloudflare's DNS but I'll admit I don't know much/anything about how it really works... can you explain why the DNS server would matter here?

Somewhat related, I have made a deal with the devil and use Comcast and, until yesterday, I was using their combo modem/router. Comcast doesn't let you change the router's DNS settings (which are, of course, set to Comcast servers) but I was under the impression that the DNS settings closest to the client always prevailed. But fiddling around with WireShark yesterday I could clearly see my DNS requests going to 18.104.22.168 (Comcast) even though my laptop was set to use CloudFlare. Is that even possible? Could the router have been set by Comcast to somehow override my settings or to intercept & reroute DNS requests?

<comment><USER55> archive.is inaccessible via Cloudflare DNS:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Remember "Worse is Better" by Gabriel? Lisp was a correct, consistent and complete system, prioritizing these over simplicity. C, on the other hand, was a simple system but not nearly as much complete, consistent or correct as Lisp. Nevertheless, Lisp lost to C.

This is what happens when Capitalism meets Software. When it comes to winning markets, shipping simple stuff is always better than shipping a slightly more complex (in terms of code as well as UX) but correct stuff. That is why most companies prioritize feature development over bugfixes. That is why selecting multiple items from a list is still inconsistent across the web. That is why XMPP lost and Whatsapp and Messenger are winning.

There are efforts like Solid ([https://solid.inrupt.com](https://solid.inrupt.com)) by Tim Berners-Lee himself that's trying to bring back the concept of files and data-ownership to end-users, to enforce correctness and consistency. But I'm still skeptical if the efforts will ever win the market.

</comment><comment><USER57> Your database (in the context of things like blogs and so on) is a filesystem, it's just built on top of a higher level abstraction than traditional filesystems.

</comment><comment><USER58> It reminds me of Stallman's best quote: the computer industry is more fashionable than the women's fashion industry.

<comment><USER39> For much the same reasons.

[https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=information+th...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=information+theoretic+fads&restrict_sr=on)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Some of this is that the file/folder abstraction is inadequate for organizing large amounts of data.

</comment><comment><USER59> files are an abstraction and reference to objects in memory. The only problem I see is storage life cycle without cache in volatile plus redundant non- volatile memory. Same problem for blocks and segments, no?

</comment><comment><USER60> I can imagine corporations totally like the idea of users not being able to save their own precious data to a file. In the end they want to own and control your data as much as possible for profit and power. And they sell that idea by telling you it's more convenient. As if it were not possible to create great file management tools or maybe even your own files as a database that you can manage easily.

Same with the 'cloud'. What's the difference between running your own FTP server and a cloud server? Technically not that much IMAO, only the latter means the data is controlled by some corporation running that server. And why is there hardly any progress in the area of building a private turn-key 'cloud' server so you don't need gmail, dropbox, github, etc..? I'm sure it can be made, easy to setup, robust, with backup, you name it, just like a Mac pc that's made for non technical people. We know how to build it, but we don't do it, we build for corporations instead.

The further we go down this road the less control we will have, and the ramifications of that don't look pretty to me to say the least.

<comment><USER61> With the advent of database-managed, self-hosted personal clouds (i.e Nextcloud/Droppy,) the difference is even smaller. It's developing into a self-hosted "just works" personal cloud ecosystem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Files will never go "extinct". Files exist. They will continue to exist. You people are insane.

<comment><USER63> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS)

<comment><USER64> Does not exist in the wild, probably for a reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> The author says "everyone started to use Spotify" Everyone? Yeah everyone with their shiny $1000+ iFon toys in their hands doing touch gestures.

<comment><USER66> Spotify has 215m users. I'd assume that is more than the group that used to download MP3s and burn CDs (which would require some technical knowhow and a CD burner).

<comment><USER67> You're seriously exaggerating. In the past, almost everyone had a CD-burner. You could use just a couple of clear as day GUI programs, a dozen of clicks and one drag and drop to download an album and burn a CD. Eleven year olds were doing it no problem.</comment></comment></comment>


XIPH: Episode 1: A Digital Media Primer for Geeks - <AUTHOR> http://xiph.org/video/vid1.shtml

<comment><USER2> So this is how the 'codec wars' annoy me. I cannot watch this on my iPad or in Safari. I guess I'll be recoding it to MP4. Will post a URL when done.

<comment><USER3> I renabled Java in Safari and the Xiph site loaded some kind of applet based decoder that didn't work properly. Will appreciate your link.

<comment><USER2> Here [http://stefan.arentz.ca/stuff/A_Digital_Media_Primer_For_Gee...](http://stefan.arentz.ca/stuff/A_Digital_Media_Primer_For_Geeks- iPad.mp4)

Recoded the 720p version with Miro Converter. It is a 27MB file. Plays well on the iPad, iPhone or in Safari.

<comment><USER3> Thanking you

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Awesome video.</comment>


Has blogger vs PR gone too far? - <AUTHOR> http://theoutsidr.com/?p=61

<comment><USER2> Note: I use the first person in this comment but I'm not related to any of this tomfoolery.

The tone of this article is incredible. The quoted "stock answer" for how bloggers want to be approached is there for a reason -- people don't want to get bombarded with semi-spam about stuff they don't care about -- particularly if the sender is expecting the recipient to be a patsy to spam their readership with buzz about something they don't care about.

 _Newsflash: The internet is big. You, blogger, are not the center of it._

I'm close enough to the center of it you wanted _your_ billboard on _my_ property.

 _You might be a big shot in your circle; hell, you might even deserve to be a big shot as Pulver does but you're not the only game in town._

Uhh, cool. I was doing great before you sent me the email? I'm doing better now that my readers see that I don't suck up every piece of PR BS that is spoon fed to me?

 _PR is a business. Do you think every firm out there has the time and resources to go around building relationships with every blogger they might want to pitch down the road?_

That sounds like your problem, not mine. You don't have to buy me a plane ticket to invite me over to play XBox 360 with your kids one night a week. These "relationships" are pretty informal and inexpensive to maintain, and you'll learn a lot about the people you're asking to do your bidding by talking to them first. You might find out they're a prick and you don't want to send your stuff to them at all because it will end up like this.

 _And throwing the word "embargo" into an email pitch, while clearly ineffective with regards to Mr. Pulver, is an attempt to generate some excitement._

Cool. You should see some of the words that people put in emails to get me excited about replica watches or prescription drugs. They're a _lot_ more interesting than words like these that can be said on national TV.

Sorry your job is getting harder but don't come looking to us to fix it for you. The whole reason people look to bloggers for reliable information is because the individual blogger puts their reputation on the line with every post or comment. Pulver just upped his reputation by proving that he receives crap like this and he's not swayed by it.

I feel bad for the medium and big name people because of the amount of this garbage they must get on a daily basis, and I can't say I wouldn't do the exact same thing (or worse) in the same circumstances.</comment>


Judge rejects $324.5M settlement over Apple, Google hiring - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/08/us-apple-google-ruling-idUSKBN0G822T20140808 <comment><USER3> The otherwise amazing book by Ben Horowitz (of Andreessen-Horowitz fame) called _The Hard Thing About Hard Things_ has a chapter that basically lays out and encourages this type of illegal behavior (called "Is It Okay to Hire People from Your Friend's Company?").

It literally recommends that companies maintain a "do not hire" (aka "do not poach") list of other organizations from which HR is forbidden from recruiting. It also recommends calling the CEO of the other company on the down-low to ask permission before extending an offer.

It really disgusted me when I read it. Such smart people doing such dumb things, and encouraging would-be CEOs to do the same.

<comment><USER4> Seems taken out of context.

Do not hire is different than do not poach.

The wisdom I subscribe to is, if you have common investors, it's bad form to actively poach from portfolio companies.

For companies that are later stage, it's bad form to poach _key_ employee's from portfolio companies.

Do Not Hire agreements between companies, however, seem unreasonable, except when there is clear cause for conflict of interest.

<comment><USER5> _Seems taken out of context._

In a [post] on his blog Horowitz describes a scenario in which a person currently employed at a company that is "important" to you comes in for an interview. The recommended course of action is to 1: block the hire, 2: inform said company about it. There are two things i just can't agree with at all:

* The part about informing the current employer: about 50% of the time it will end with ruining the next few weeks or months of his/her life. I.e. getting them fired, with ruined prospects of getting the job they took the risk for. Note that at e.g. apple the standard procedure when they find out that an employee is looking for a job is to escort them out of the building right then and there.

* Note it's not about "poaching", he explains thoroughly that it applies to people who ask for an interview on their own accord too.

If you don't want to read the whole thing, at least read this gem:

 _It is important to note that just about all of these kinds of policies violate the Right to Work laws in California. Specifically, if you block a hire based on this kind of policy and the employee loses their job and cannot find work, your company is liable for his wages. As a result, the business relationship with the other company must be extremely important for you to employ any kind of "hands off" policy._

said blog [post]: [http://www.bhorowitz.com/is_it_ok_to_hire_people_from_your_f...](http://www.bhorowitz.com/is_it_ok_to_hire_people_from_your_friend_s_company)

<comment><USER6> You are taking it out of context, though. BH is basically talking about an issue that could kill your startup. Whether or not you like that reality, there is a real risk that the other company will retaliate for something they see as an adverse breech of trust.

Note that logic: the problem is not with the company ben is advising. The issue is at the third part company. If that company decides to "go nuclear" and sever all ties because you poached/goaded or otherwise got involved in their "interal politics" (note: this is not a _per-se_ issue of math/economics/money), bad things might happen to your firm.

CEOs of startups have a fiduciary duty to avoid "bad things", and even that choice is a catch-22 (ie, two bad things...) you pick the worst-bad one. And that is what he is saying.

In other words, he's talking about something that is a real-world problem. If you want to vent out about the issue, it really sits with the third part company. They are typically the one with all the power in the situation.

Example:

Startup A had 80% of its business tied to a single company, BigCo B. Like it or not, the CEO of startup A needs to avoid a situation where the CEO of BigCo B comes to the conclusion that he won't do business with A becaus of Politics (note: not economics).

Whether or not poaching is politically sensitive (or offensive) and/or warrants this type of "nuclear" response, is a function of many thing. But none of that is BH's responsibility in the larger world.

This dynamics is something that has played out for millenia from kings and queens and royal courts to how the predisent and Y combinator select their staff and senior leadership.

At a certain level of the game, its all about trust. And polticial power is essentially a combination of trust and goodwill. And its easy to disolve and can reak havok on any company of any size when systemically undermined. So you need to pay attention to it.

In other words, this is a much bigger issue. The tack of trying to shoot or lynch the messenger is sort of misplaced. Because the startup is the employer and may have a power asymmetry with a potential hire; but that startup is in itself subject to potential power assymetries at much higher levels.

(This goes for pissing off BOD members, VCs, and Key clients alike...maybe it suck/isn't fair...etc... but the reality is you need to pick your battes as a small company. And picking fights with the consituents you need to help you build your biz is ~dysfunctional and needs to be understood as such.)

<comment><USER5> The thing that irks me the most is not the practice itself. My problem is with everything else in that post.

Note that he has not described it as a morally ambiguous but sometimes unavoidable choice (like you did) but as the most righteous and noble option. That he's openly admitting he knows that it's illegal. Pay attention the sugar-sweet language of his parable and how its tone gets more colorful whenever the story takes a darker turn (from pov of the employee).

I mean, this entire thing is something out of a dilbert strip. I'm serious. This is something you'd expect Dilbert's CEO to write. The self deceit, the contrast between the language of "hurt feelings" vs the unstated reality of a person getting fired as a consequence and the stupidity of it all are mocked in hundred different Dilbert strips. Remember when this wage fixing story surfaced and the surprised comments that they were stupid enough to put it in email? If Mr Horowitz ever gets in similar trouble the paragraph i quoted above will make these troubles a lot worse.

<comment><USER6> There's plenty of scope to fairly critique the BH piece. He's not perfect or beyond taking a few shot across the bow on a controversial subject.

But the situation of apple and google colluding (ie, this linked article) IMHO is a ~different situation here than the subject of the BH piece.

1> Google and AAPL as of the time of the lawsuit were not small players (fighting for their lives). They were 'fat cats' essentially at the top of the food chain.

2> Their motivations seem inherently economic/greedy, and fundamentally anti- competitive. They were not even vaguely 'customer centric' or otherwise constructive (except at the most tenditious levels).

3> The defendents were self aware their actions were unethica/illegal, and in the context of (1) and (2), were actively taking steps to hide/bury/conspire/collude regarding the illegal activity.

So this type of context is not the same. Calling out the BH essay seems to add a layer of useful sophistication to the discussion here. Half the utility, tho, is understanding the difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it." -Santayana

This is yet another iteration of American labor politics. That it involves workers with greater skills than in previous iterations is not germane. The reason that labor unions arose in the first place was that capitalists actively exploited workers. And, guess what? Capitalists still exploit workers, even when the workers tools are laptops and VMs rather than steam engines and Bessemer converters.

How easily we forget that our grandfathers fought and died for the forty-hour work week. How easily we give that up, because we're working for "disruptive startups".

If you want to know what previous iterations of no-hire agreements looked like; see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklist_(employment)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklist_\(employment\))

<comment><USER8> This _is_ the market reacting to malicious behaviour by large organizations. As far as I can tell, in this situation it seems to be working. The court system nor the market isn't putting up with their shit.

I'd much prefer courts handle this than solving the problem by creating a second problem. Which in your example, the unions themselves eventually become too powerful or negatively effecting the job market and upward mobility of smaller players. We would see benefits in the early days then eventually reach by a stasis where everything starts moving extremely slowly and consumed by bureaucratic process.

Then only those embedded within the union system benefit, while competing global markets without constraints operate more efficiently. While smaller players in the job market start hiring less due to the high bar needed to hire union workers.

I've witnessed this first hand as an electrician in my family ran a successful business, until the workers organized into a union and he had to shut it down because their demands made it completely unprofitable (they demanded expensive benefits programs and high wages, keep in mind we live in Canada with public healthcare). The workers lost their jobs and most ended up working for another much larger company. Unions create bigger companies and bigger unions.

<comment><USER9> The court system isn't putting up with it? You must have a liberal definition of punishment, if you expect $300mm to change behavior. If you add a zero it may have an actual impact, but at $300mm it's possible the companies net saved money.

edit: for a (very rough) estimate of how much money google saved, remember that in late 10 they gave their entire staff a 10% raise, effective 1 Jan 11. So if you look at their 2011 10k [2], a _very_ rough underestimate of their comp expenses -- looking at R&D alone -- is $5,162 (numbers in millions). So if 1.1x = 5162, then x = 4692 and that 10% raise cost google $470m. A fine less than the savings of one year of your illicit behavior -- and for just one company! -- discourages behavior exactly how?

[1] [http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405274870352360...](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748703523604575605273596157634)

[2] [http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/0001193125120...](http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312512025336/d260164d10k.htm)

<comment><USER8> Considering it is not a criminal offense and instead a civil one, the only option for the courts is to fine them.

But I actually agree with you, as an alternative to unions the reaction I'd like to see is strengthening the courts ability to punish malicious acts by corporations and have more individual responsibility. As we've seen where banks destroy thousands of peoples lives by purposely gambling their savings away. Or pharma companies mislabeling products every year: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Largest_Pharmaceutical...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Largest_Pharmaceutical_Settlements)

While these cases are much worse than conspiracy to not hire people, I agree settlements aren't always the best solution because it seems to keep happening. There needs to be stricter and real punishment for businesses. One reason is we need to stop protecting those executives directly involved with the conspiracy from being shielded by corporate legal entities, who can easily pay out the fines.

Which is why I agree with the judge the current settlement is insufficient. Unfortunately a greater fine is the courts only option, that is the real problem IMO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had two concerns when this was made public:

that this was a laughably low amount considering the scope of the collusion and the time-scale over which it happened.

that it looks like a good deal to all the companies concerned on two fronts - 325 Million is a pittance compared to what Apple, Google or Adobe make in a month. and the perception of the non-tech folks that this is about the rich whining about not getting caviar rather than a real issue.

At least the first one is being addressed (somewhat). I hope the final settlement really makes them hurt financially so that it becomes one more item in the HR manual - "thou shalt not enter into illegal no-hire agreements even when pressured by an asshole" .

For the second issue there needs to be some effort put in towards communicating with the non-programmer public and educating them about why shit like this is a VERY bad idea no matter who does it or who is impacted.

<comment><USER11> The fact that this settlement was rejected by the judge should be an embarrassment for the plaintiffs' lawyers, and IMO is a great example of the problems with the incentives in class action settlements. Basically, the judge is saying there is substantial evidence that the plaintiffs would win considerably more if the case went to trial. From the lawyers' perspective though, if they settle they get a sure thing, and, importantly, they don't have to do any more work.

So in other words, if this settlement had been approved, the employees would have gotten a raw deal, while their attorneys would have gotten tens of millions for poor work on a pretty clear cut case.

<comment><USER12> IANAL, but this makes a lot of sense. Lawyer's motivations are really really important.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Good. the decimal point needs to move (right) before this settlement can even remotely be considered fair.

<comment><USER14> As an employer, I'd like to see it move right by two places. I'm not optimistic though.

<comment><USER15> It would be interesting to see an analysis of what the economic impact of these depressed wages has been. $3 Billion is probably not too far off the mark. Probably not $3 Billion directly to the programmers impacted, but definitely to the broader economy.

<comment><USER16> Across the industry, the number of employees affected is easily in the high hundreds of thousands, at a direct cost to them of tens of thousands of dollars per year. So billions to maybe low tens of billions is not an unreasonable range. And would that get trebled under California employment law?

<comment><USER17> As of April, Apple had cash reserves of about $160 billion. Just saying.

<comment><USER18> Just saying what? If you fine Apple $160B, then you have to fine Google a similar amount, since they are co-conspirators.

<comment><USER17> What I'm saying is that the amounts of cash held by - and available to - <USER2> companies is so eye-poppingly astronomic that even an twelve digit settlement - which the law may allow - is nowhere near enough to bankrupt them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is there any recourse for the engineers who weren't directly affected by the collusion but were affected by the indirect effect on the market as a whole?

<comment><USER20> don't hold your breath

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's strange that even the NYT got this wrong -- the bulk of the agreement was not in fact about poaching engineers, but rather sales and product people[0].

[0] [http://www.businessinsider.com/emails-eric-schmidt-sergey- br...](http://www.businessinsider.com/emails-eric-schmidt-sergey-brin-hiring- apple-2014-3)

<comment><USER22> _the bulk of the agreement was not in fact about poaching engineers, but rather sales and product people_

Do you have a better citation for this claim? The linked Business Insider article does not claim such a thing, and the court filings the article cites do not support the claim.

The article cites Google's Special Agreement Hiring Policy that divides companies into three categories: Restricted Hiring, Do Not Call, and Sensitive. Only the protocol with respect to Restricted Hiring companies is constrained to Sales, Product, and G&A. Google's protocol for the Do Not Call companies seems to prohibit actively recruiting any employee at those companies. The article does not address whether other companies limited the scope of collusion to, "sales and product people."

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Does anyone know how many people are likely to actually be paid out as part of the class?

<comment><USER24> There are 64,000 plaintiffs.

Source: [http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/08/judge-rejects-comically- low...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/08/judge-rejects-comically- low-324-5m-settlement-to-tech-workers-who-were-cheated-out-of-fair-wages/)

<comment><USER25> By the way, Judge Lucy Koh estimated that fees would be $82885000, so each of the 64466 class members would have received $3750, not quite the "essentially zero" that Alex at TechCrunch claims in the article you link.

Source: Judge Koh's order [http://www.scribd.com/doc/236255928/Apple-Google- Intel-Adobe...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/236255928/Apple-Google-Intel-Adobe- Wage-Fixing-Settlement-Denied)

<comment><USER26> $3750 is about a week's pay for a tech worker, so essentially zero.

Salaries jumped by about $30K/year when the pact collapsed, so the commenters above who are calling for the decimal point to shift a place to the right aren't all that unreasonable.

<comment><USER27> Assuming that is the true effect, it should probably 2-3x that in punitive damages otherwise the collusion was still a good idea, and next time it will be more adequately paranoid corporate types covering their asses instead of the self-assured Jobs forwarding evidence around with smileys.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> From [https://plus.google.com/103157122834258782502/posts/dvxSd4wn...](https://plus.google.com/103157122834258782502/posts/dvxSd4wnkG6)

"I'll settle for a personal letter of apology, written by and signed by Eric, Larry and Sergey."

AFAIK the SEC is already beginning to push for admission of wrongdoing.

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm curious if this will have any impact on the practice other than companies getting better at not leaving a paper trail.

If it doesn't, the only people this settlement will help is those at the named companies and not the trickle down effect it's had on the rest of the industry.

<comment><USER30> A case like this leaves institutional scar tissue. There will be new sections in HR policy manuals and training programs. Executives will be gun-shy about any conversations that even come close to those at the heart of this lawsuit. There will definitely be an effect.

For a while. As time passes and this case fades from memory I expect such collusion to eventually happen again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is still worrying.

>In her ruling, Koh repeatedly referred to a related settlement last year involving Disney and Intuit. Apple and Google workers got proportionally less in the latest deal compared to the one involving Disney, Koh wrote, even though plaintiff lawyers have "much more leverage" now than they did a year ago.

>To match the earlier settlement, the latest deal "would need to total at least $380 million," Koh wrote.

$380 million??!!?!?! That's not really any better when they're suing for $3B, and having it come from a judge's mouth is NOT helping. I'm glad she turned down $324m, but the new number is still insulting.

<comment><USER32> Leverage = $380 million.

Now the judge tells them "you have much more leverage". So tey have to work out how much more leverage they have. 5 times the leverage would be $1.9 billion.

That's at least how I understand the text, and I find it very honest of the judge. I guess she can't give them the exact sum she thinks is appropriate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> > After the plaintiffs' lawyers took their 25 percent cut, the settlement > would have given about $4,000 to every member of the class.

> Judge Koh said that she believed the case was stronger than that, and that > the plaintiffs' lawyers were taking the easy way out by settling. The > evidence against the defendants was compelling, she said.

Can anyone explain this from the perspective of the economic/sociological motivations of the lawyers? People often complain about a huge chunk of the money going to the class-action lawyers who are too eager to settle, but the traditional argument is that a fixed percentage structure (rather than an hourly or flat rate) gives the lawyers the proper incentive to pursue the interests of the class by tying their compensation directly to the legal award.

Here's my best guess: Lawyers, like most people, are risk adverse for sufficiently large amounts of money. (They would rather have $10 million for sure than a 50% chance at $50 million.) On the other hand, the legal award will be distributed over many more plaintiffs. Since it will be much smaller per person, the plaintiffs are significantly less risk adverse. So the lawyers settle even thought it's not in the best interests of the plaintiffs.

This suggests the following speculative solution for correctly aligning the incentives of the lawyers and the class action plaintiffs: either (a) spread the legal work over many lawyers such that the potential compensation for them is small enough that their utility function is at least as linear as the plaintiffs or (b) turn the class-action lawsuits legal team into a corporation which must answer to many shareholders.

Proposal (a) has problems because it might require the number of lawyers to be comparable to the number of plaintiffs, which could be thousands or millions. Proposal (b) strikes many people as weird, and introduces other principal- agent problems, but it does have precedence:

[http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/04/30/looking-to-make-a- pro...](http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/04/30/looking-to-make-a-profit-on- lawsuits-firms-invest-in-them/)

Would love to hear an expert opinion on this.

</comment><comment><USER34> I know this is illegal but I wonder whether any, most, or even all of the plaintiffs will be blackballed from most large companies in the future? Yes it's wrong, but in practice it's both easy to do and get away with it.

</comment><comment><USER35> 'To match the earlier settlement, the latest deal "would need to total at least $380 million," Koh wrote.'

</comment><comment><USER36> $324.5 is just a wild number or is there a math behind it?

</comment><comment><USER37> The plaintiffs have those companies "dead to rights."

</comment><comment><USER38> This collusion depressed the price of engineering talent but so does H1B Visas. Need to work on the current battle as well...

<comment><USER39> National collusion against talented individuals born by chance within the boundaries of another administrative area seems more like an entrenched privilege than a worthy "battle", especially given how much of US companies' revenue comes from outside the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> There's nothing wrong with "collusion." Collusion is nothing more than free association. Same with "poaching" for that matter. There's nothing wrong with two people agreeing to work for each other. People should be free to negotiate their own agreements.

The arguments for criminalizing such free association are based in sentiment not reason.

<comment><USER41> Collusion leads to artificially suppressed wages, which makes the labor market inefficient, to the detriment of the employees.

In general, completely unregulated free markets lead to monopolies and price manipulation, among other problems.

So no, collusion is wrong.

<comment><USER40> What's artificial about wages or prices determined through agreement (the market)? What constitutes an agreement's artificiality?

<comment><USER41> Consider the extreme scenario where all companies collude, sending wages to near zero. Would you still call this "agreement"?

<comment><USER40> Sure, let's consider it.

Let's say all companies form an agreement to not hire from any other company. They're now in a situation where either they must terminate the agreement in order to hire, or bid against other companies for labor that is not currently working for any of the firms. Companies bidding over labor drives wages upwards... not downwards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> "The ruling by U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California, said the proposed settlement amount "falls below the range of reasonableness," before dashing back to her new two million dollar home to pack for her European vacation.

<comment><USER43> In NorCal that's like, what, 2BR/2BA a mile away from any public transit?

<comment><USER42> Very true. I 48 years old and can remember reasonable home prices, so I kind of just did a Dr. Evil on that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Their collusion depressed the price of engineers generally. I spent a lot of the years in question ignoring recruiting emails from those companies, and this affected the amount my employer needed to pay me to do that. We should dig up the corpse of Steve Jobs and tar and feather it.

<comment><USER45> That last sentence right there is one of the few times I really wish I was able to down vote. I valued your opinion until you felt the need to include that.

<comment><USER46> You'll get it at around 600 karma, if you didn't already know.

<comment><USER45> I wasn't aware so thanks for the heads up!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Having a Garden Linked to Better Health and Well-Being - <AUTHOR> https://sparkonit.com/2020/05/10/having-a-garden-linked-to-better-health-and-well-being/ <comment><USER2> Correlation.

People who are healthier and wealthier find it easier to have a garden.

It is possible that gardening is good for your health, but teasing apart how much of which causes which would not be easy.

<comment><USER3> It's difficult or impossible for dual parent households working 2-3 minimum wage jobs each to have time to plant a garden or do anything else but drop dead asleep every 18 hours only to do it all over again the following day.

<comment><USER4> Idk about 2-3 minimum wage job. Are people in the US really doing that? But I grew up in a place where having a garden is pretty natural. It's something you take care of between putting the trash out and walking the dogs. It does not have to be amazing magazine-ready. But having a staple of stuff that grew easily and are forgetful. ( Courges, Carots, potatoes, aromatic plants .. )

<comment><USER2> Yes, they absolutely are doing that. Life in the US is a worsening hellscape for the increasingly permanent underclass, commonly one small medical crisis away from homelessness. A "managed population", most reliably vote to make it worse for themselves, year after year.

Just controlling ground for a garden is a privilege.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _People who are healthier and wealthier find it easier to have a garden._

You wouldn't happen to have a source supporting that would you?</comment>


Google Web Light: Faster and lighter mobile pages from search - <AUTHOR> https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6211428?hl=en <comment><AUTHOR> Whilst playing about with useragents, Google started proxying sites through googleweblight.com when I had the useragent set as 'Windows CE'. I had no idea this feature existed.</comment>


AI Can Detect Alzheimer's Disease Six Years Before a Diagnosis - <AUTHOR> https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2018/12/412946/artificial-intelligence-can-detect-alzheimers-disease-brain-scans-six-years <comment><USER2> Presenting the true positive rate without mentioning false positives seems problematic. I couldn't find any information about that in the article, and they don't link the paper / publication.

<comment><USER3> This is a key point. If the false positive rate is 18% (as noted in other comments), and the rate of Alzheimer's is 36/100k[1], then for every patient the test correctly identifies, there are 500 patients that tested positive but did not have Alzheimers. There needs to be significant improvement before such a test becomes useful.

[1] that's mortality rate which I am using as a proxy for incidence rate, though the actual incidence rate is presumably higher (mortality rate from the CDC)

<comment><USER4> That depends. I suspect that this test would only be used on those with a family history of Alzheimer's or similar.

That alters the Bayesian priors quite a bit.

In addition, you can monitor the progress of someone who "tests positive" over time and see if that is really true.

Part of the issue with Alzheimer's treatments is that we may be intervening far too late. These kinds of tests may help that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Typically Alzheimer's diagnoses are given with extreme reluctance, it changes how every person that interacts with that patient will view their condition, prognosis and treatment options.

I think that has more to do with the extended time frame than the actual ability of family and medical providers to see changes in a patient cognition and abilities.

<comment><USER6> It also triggers a lot of legal implications. In Norway your divorce is automatically approved if your spouse is diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

<comment><USER7> Seriously? It seems really inhuman to me.

<comment><USER8> I feel the opposite. If I was unhappy in my marriage and found out my spouse now also has Alzheimer's, granting a quick exit from a situation that can only get worse seems humane to me. Why force somebody who is suffering to suffer even more?

<comment><USER9> Making it easier to divorce your spouse if they get Alzheimer's is more humane for spouses of Alzheimer's victims (who get to escape that unpleasant situation more easily) and more inhumane for Alzheimer's victims themselves (who are more likely to find themselves abandoned at a time when they are increasingly unable to cope on their own).

<comment> barrow-rider > who are more likely to find themselves abandoned at a time when they are > increasingly unable to cope on their own

That often happens rapidly, and in many cases putting the Alzheimer's patient in full-time care is the only option -- even with a caring, involved spouse.

I watched my grandfather go from a slightly forgetful goof to confused, violent, and impossible to manage in <3 years. My grandmother, not doing so well herself, struggled to keep up but after a couple years putting grandpa in a facility was the only real tenable option.

<comment><USER10> Yes, Alzheimer's patients will eventually need to be placed in a facility.

<comment><USER11> Not necessarily. They might die of other causes first.

There are several things in this discussion that make not much sense to me (a non-Norwegian):

* How would a divorce court refer to a (confidential) medical diagnosis? In some countries, at least, even a criminal court cannot easily access such things.

* Why would the law refer to a _diagnosis_ of a particular disease (when the patient might still be healthy) rather than refer to actual cognitive impairment?

* What's the hurry? Can't you get a divorce fairly quickly just by moving out and filling in some forms?

* One of the major legal implications of divorce is that you don't automatically inherit or get insurance pay-outs. Not the most obvious thing to want when your spouse has a terminal illness, though in some cases you know there's no money involved. Even if you're named in the will there may be bad tax implications if you're not married to the person you're inheriting from.

* Someone mentioned children, but divorce doesn't have to relate directly to children: courts have to deal with the children of unmarried couples, and they have to deal with the children of couples that are separated but still married, so I'd expect a court to worry about the relationships and the welfare of the children and not to care very much whether the parents/guardians are officially married or not.

I would guess that these are all areas of law in which there are a _lot_ of differences between jurisdictions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm a co-author of this paper and happy to answer any questions.

<comment><USER13> No questions here, but you guys might be interested to see the implementation I took with this, where I also used machine learning for Alzheimer's / dementia diagnosis.

[https://github.com/jddunn/dementia-progression- analysis](https://github.com/jddunn/dementia-progression-analysis)

I was using OASIS's public dataset so I only had ~150 images to work with, instead of ~2000. I used transfer learning from ImageNet's dataset to try and get usable results. I also had super limited testing (15-20 patients), but got ~60% accuracy with ~13% false positive rate.

It could be useful to apply those same transfer learning techniques in your team's model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > No cure exists for Alzheimer's disease, but promising drugs have emerged in > recent years that can help stem the condition's progression.

What are the downsides of these treatments on a healthy brain? Why are we not administering them preventively to anyone with a family history of AD?

<comment><USER6> We are, sort of. We've added lithium to drinking water which has been linked to decrease in dementia.

People that suffer from bipolar disorder and are being treated with lithium seems rarely if ever to develop dementia, but the dosages are much much (1000 times, or so) higher than what we add to drinking water.

According to my doctor the primary issue with adding higher concentration of lithium (still, way below therapeutic levels for mental disorders) to drinking water is quacks that make a lot of noise when the topic comes up. They see it as adding mind altering chemicals to water, which couldn't be further from truth.

<comment><USER15> According to [https://www.webmd.com/vitamins/ai/ingredientmono-1065/lithiu...](https://www.webmd.com/vitamins/ai/ingredientmono-1065/lithium) (presumably about as mainstream a source as one can hope to find online):

"Lithium can cause nausea, diarrhea, dizziness, muscle weakness, fatigue, and a dazed feeling. These unwanted side effects often improve with continued use. Fine tremor, frequent urination, and thirst can occur and may persist with continued use. Weight gain and swelling from excess fluid can also occur. Lithium can also cause or make skin disorders such as acne, psoriasis, and rashes worse. The amount of lithium in the body must be carefully controlled and is checked by blood tests."

"Lithium can poison a developing baby (fetus) and can increase the risk of birth defects, including heart problems.

Lithium treatment is UNSAFE in women who are breast-feeding. Lithium can enter breast milk and cause unwanted side effects in a nursing infant.

Heart disease: Lithium may cause irregular heart rhythms. This may be a problem, especially for people who have heart disease.

Kidney disease: Lithium is removed from the body by the kidneys. In people with kidney disease, the amount of lithium that is given might need to be reduced.

Surgery: Lithium might change levels of serotonin, a chemical that affects the central nervous system. There is some concern that lithium might interfere with surgical procedures that often involve anesthesia and other drugs that affect the central nervous system. Lithium use should be stopped, with the approval of a healthcare provider, at least two weeks before a scheduled surgery.

Thyroid disease: Lithium might make thyroid problems worse."

Clearly Lithium isn't side-effect free, so it would be pretty reckless to add something like that to drinking water.

<comment><USER16> Not at all. The poison is in the dose.

<comment><USER17> As my pathologist father quipped, 'Everything is poisonous at some bodyweight- relative dosage.'

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I found the publication that the article discusses.

[https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/pdf/10.1148/radiol.2018180958](https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/pdf/10.1148/radiol.2018180958)

<comment><USER19> And the full publication can be found by entering [https://doi.org/10.1148/radiol.2018180958](https://doi.org/10.1148/radiol.2018180958) into sci-hub.

I often see [https://outline.com/](https://outline.com/) links on HN, does HN allow sci-hub links?

<comment><USER20> Thanks for the cool tool, didn't knew about it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> My grandmother died from this, and it is a horrible death. I really fear becoming a victim to this disease. Anything that can help, even a little, is so encouraging.

</comment><comment><USER22> Some people with a unique gift in sense of smell can do it even better than 6 years.

<comment><USER23> Sorry, what do you mean? Are there examples?

<comment><USER24> There was a specific case of a woman who realized, after her husband acquired a peculiar smell and was 6 years later diagnosed with Parkinson's, then everyone at a Parkinson's support group had that smell, that she could smell Parkinson's in people well before any clinical tests.

She went to researchers who tested her with sweat from 6 diagnosed patients and 6 controls - she identified the 6 diagnosed patients correctly, and one of the controls who was later diagnosed with it but had not been yet.

[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/12/18/woman-can- sme...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/12/18/woman-can-smell- parkinsons-disease-helps-scientists-develop/)

(Also, as a fascinating aside which probably isn't what the GP comment meant, _loss_ of sense of smell is one of the earliest symptoms of Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. Why? Good question.)

<comment><USER25> If a human can smell Parkinson, I wonder what a dog could smell.

<comment><USER24> There's all sorts of anecdotes of pets reacting to people being ill well before the people put 2 and 2 together.

The primary problem, I think, is that you'd have difficulty convincing someone to fund this research without a priori knowledge - e.g. if you don't already know that there are (relatively) readily externally visible biochemistry changes from a degenerative brain problem, why would you see if you can train an animal to smell it?

It's similar to the question people posed after the PS3 signing key leak came out - while it is the case that Sony was signing all PS3 (and PSP, if memory serves) binaries with the same (all-zeroes?) random input, so they leaked information sufficient to eventually retrieve the private key from enough samples, why would you think to check if they did that without already knowing?

(Or, more generally, the large domain of problems that is relatively-trivial to verify a correct solution but infeasible to test all possible solutions in order to find one.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> "People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election"

\-- Otto von Bismarck

This quote need to be updated for modern times regarding performance of AI/ML models.

</comment><comment><USER27> Interesting that glucose levels are used, since they are significantly affected by diet: [https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/55853/what-is- th...](https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/55853/what-is-the-brains- preferred-energy-source-glucose-or-ketones)

</comment><comment><USER28> *Machine Learning

<comment><USER16> *Computational Statistics (a better name for both, given current methods, since it avoids anthropomorphism and sci-fi implications in uninformed readership).

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> How do they compare the AI performance to that of radiologists? The abstract says that radiologists aren't as good at spotting subtle, diffuse changes but what metric did they use to compare?

<comment><USER30> You get historical PET scans from years ago and label them with whether they turned out to have Alzheimer's later in their life or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is a great thing, but i wonder if it's actionable. What are the insurance impacts?

</comment><comment><USER32> 23–26 mSv of radiation. If the Alzheimer's doesn't kill you the PET scan will from a secondary cancer.

<comment><USER33> [https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact- sheets/b...](https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/bio- effects-radiation.html)

> The data show high doses of radiation may cause cancers. But there are no > data to establish a firm link between cancer and doses below about 10,000 > mrem (100 mSv – 100 times the NRC limit).</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Advice on finding growth / marketing contractor? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
I have a few side-project DTC brands.  I've been fortunately been able to handle all of the tech side, setting up e-commerce stores, some cool custom pages for user feedback and instructions etc.
That said, I am woefully clueless when it comes to marketing.  I've spent a lot of time reading up on copy-writing and online marketing strategies without much luck.  I largely intend to keep my side hustles well - as side hustles and at this point I'd be willing to pay someone for their expertise.  ($1-2k to start per campaign)
However, outside of some instagram traction (lots of money wasted on ads that fell flat) and a relatively promising "promo code" strategies I'm stalling out on growth and would like to hire a relatively affordable "part time" marketing person to help drive growth and maybe develop some ad strategies.
I've talked to a few people, but many are either looking for a full-time gig or don't have much "ecomm" experience.
My products are both physical and target specific "plant" niches.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> $1-2k per campaign isn't enough to get someone good. You'll end up with someone who is learning the ropes a bit, which may be fine!

Try to find someone on Upwork, but fully vet their portfolio. You should also withhold some of the money as a performance bonus.</comment>