Facebook's fake account problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/20190723/mark-zuckerbergs-ponzi-scheme/ <comment><USER2> _> Advertisers pay Facebook on the assumption that the people viewing and clicking their ads are real. But that's often not the case._

Actually, advertisers already _know_ there are lots of fake (Facebook/Twitter/Snapchat) accounts. Likewise, advertisers also know that newspaper & magazine circulation numbers are inflated (even though the circulation #s are "audited"). Ad buyers also know that tv audience sizes are inflated as well.

What matters in the end is if there's a positive ROI on the ad spending. The advertisers can measure the uptick on sales and if the ads worked, they renew their ad spend on Facebook. The majority of Facebook revenues come from _repeat business of advertisers_ who already know about fake users. In contrast, if the majority of Facebook revenue were to come from _1st time ad buyers_ that were easily fooled by fake accounts, that's when the false user count would drastically affect revenue.

I'm the last person to defend Facebook but just wanted to highlight how advertisers think. For the Facebook ponzi scheme to fall apart, the ads have to _stop working_. This has happened before. In the 1990s, advertisers were buying Yahoo banner ads. But after the initial novelty of naive web surfers clicking on them, advertisers quickly realized banner ads were worthless. As a result, Yahoo revenues plunged.

<comment><USER3> "What matters in the end is if there's a positive ROI on the ad spending."

This would make logical sense. BUT! it turns to not be the case. Larger accounts: Pepsi, Johnson&Johnson, Tmobile, etc tend to just take a massive budget and blow it on ads. They don't necessarily care about the ROI or click tracking. They just want to shove banners in front of people's faces before the quarter ends. What is nuts -- is that these large accounts (we used to call it dumb money) are almost all of the ad revenue. Accounts that care about click ROI tend to be low budget -- that is why facebook/google will push these people into self service ad portals.

<comment><USER4> That highlights something I noticed about advertising - it is ironically meta in that what is needed is to convince the buyer that it is the source of their success.

Many have "totemic" advertising where they think slapping their name everywhere will be what gives them success when they are already well known and widespread enough that people wouldn't forget about them if they stopped advertising tomorrow. Brand awareness is a thing but it seems overhyped - especially when it forgets the downsides of obnoxious advertising.

If as the old joke the moon was painted a cocacola logo that would give brand awareness in perpetuity but it would piss off a lot of people rightfully.

<comment><USER5> Pissed off people are still more likely to buy that brand because to do otherwise would require a thought override. These ads speak to the subconscious your anger is more conscious and will ebb and flow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This was an interesting piece. The author pretty clearly states upfront that he's been criticizing MZ for years, which I found to be strangely refreshing as opposed to trying to claim a neutral position.

As far as the account fraud is concerned, I've wondered about this throughout the tech industry for pretty much my whole career. Most companies I've worked for have done all kinds of things to pad usage and retention stats in order to appease investors, ranging from ethically innocuous to "holy shit I need to start looking for a new gig". Online advertising in particular has been the worst at this in my professional experience.

What's being communicated to the advertiser isn't the whole truth: it's a selectively, surgically crafted subset of the truth. The first time I saw "The Big Short", I couldn't help but think about how similar the ad company I worked for behaved like the credit rating agencies. We knew that if our reporting showed that we were ineffective, we'd lose customers, so we did all kinds of things to make the reporting look good.

The accusation that one of the largest companies in the world is doing pretty much the same thing doesn't surprise me at all.

<comment><USER7> Is there any independent audit of any advertising platform's data at all? Like Facebook tells me that 10,000 people saw my ads and I have no real way of verifying that. And I'm supposed to believe that Facebook is being honest even though Facebook has all the incentive to falsify numbers

<comment><USER8> Game companies that buy ads for mobile installs-- a huge advertising market-- pay per install. Of course fraudulent companies create fake installs from fake accounts. But when you get an app installed a thousand times it is possible to judge the quality of those installs. Where they are, if they are real people, etc. It is clear that the results vary wildly and from my subjective perspective ad fraud is at least as bad as it has ever been.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I always find it bizarre when people make these naive claims. Of course number of impressions are a proxy for reality, but when the rubber hits the road advertisers know what value they are getting. They are leveraging the microtargeting and the cookie tracking an God knows what else zuck has cooked up. Facebook, Google etc are fundamentally profitable places to advertise -when done intelligently. Smart, repeat advertisers pay Facebook a lot of money for this privilege.

<comment><USER10> Arguments like this always strike me the same way as the arguments about real- estate around 2007: "Smart bankers would never invest billions in bad loans".

Maybe advertisers know what they're getting. Or _maybe_ they think they know but are actually willfully ignorant of something important because it goes against "common knowledge".

Without some kind of third party auditing it's impossible to tell, and I haven't seen anything like that from Facebook.

<comment><USER11> The problem is you cannot audit as much as you would like. The important part is a real human sees the ad. (human with the desirable characteristic is a secondary factor). However you cannot measure the effects of an ad easily because there are too many confounding factors: people who buy because of a previous ad, people who would buy anyway, people who will buy in a few years.

We do know the companies that have cut advertising too much have lost market share. However when you have a lot of ads it is hard to figure out which ad made the difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't see the evidence here as being compelling at all.

Even if you could prove that Facebook is filling the gaps between new users and churned users by creating fake accounts, you also have to draw a line between those fake accounts and the company's bottom line.

Fake accounts don't buy products, so if advertisers are making decisions off of CAC, numbers potentially inflated by fake accounts (reach, clicks, engagement, etc.) are secondary.

Facebook's ad power comes from their egregious data collection and lack of privacy concerns. The more they know about you, the more relevant your ads will be and the more likely someone seeing your ad will be to buy. And if advertisers can draw a line that says "if I spend $50 on Facebook ads, I'll increase my bottom-line line $100", they'll spend money until it's no longer profitable to do so.

That said, it's not like all Facebook advertisers are acting rationally in that manner. I don't know what % of Facebook revenue to coming from unsophisticated advertisers, so it's possible that they could be making a lot of money from people focusing on fuzzy metrics like reach.

<comment><USER13> > The more they know about you, the more relevant your ads will be and the > more likely someone seeing your ad will be to buy

How much ACTUAL evidence is there for this?

Take Amazon for instance... they know everything I have bought from them ever and employ some mega-smart people but the number of times I buy something and they then recommend either absolute shite or the same damn thing is not an insignificant number.

Another thing is if I am an advertiser and FB says "your ad was seen by 20 million people", how can I dispute this? It's a closed system.

I am sorry... but from my comfy armchair position I'm calling shenanigans on mass-data collection in advertising being able to move the profitability needle in a measurable way.

Edit: Added a bit more stuff

<comment><USER14> I think you are missing the point here and thinking too much about pay per impression. Professional ad buyers don't measure their ad effectiveness in "people reached". That is for chumps who want to be ripped off, and large companies that have too much to burn on their marketing departments.

The people who use ads effectively are buying pay per click and measuring the real conversions to measure effectiveness. Bots don't buy the products after they click through, but the real clicks often do. (For some categories you can get as high as 10% conversion rate to a real sale from real clicks that you buy because ad targeting on platforms like Facebook and Amazon is really, really good. If your ad is good and your product is good then the ad targeting will get your ad in front of the right people a lot of the time.)

If you are smart you don't pay for impressions, you pay for clicks and conversions, and you measure how many of those clicks convert into sales to make sure you are coming out net positive. Sure there are always going to be some fake clicks but there are still enough real clicks that convert to make it worth it. A bit of click fraud is just the cost of doing business.

Lets say I'm selling a product that has a 20% profit margin. I might be willing to pay up to 10% of my profit margin on ads if the increased number of real conversions that result will more than double my sales, allowing me to make more money overall than I would have otherwise.

There are definitely a lot of people out there who are foolishly wasting money on buying impressions, but there are also tons of people making ludicrous amounts of money from well targeted ads that convert into increased sales of their product

<comment><USER15> You are over-simplifying. Almost all of the metrics Facebook will feed you when you setup an account are on a view-through attribution basis. Yes, there will be some clicks, but if you attribute revenue from Facebook by clicks only, it will look terrible. This is an old problem for anyone that has spent time with display ad platforms. So, you install a facebook pixel on your checkout, and if the person making a purchase saw your ad on Facebook, Facebook's reporting console will take credit for that. Thats view-through attribution and it highly overstates the credit Facebook should receive for making the sale, but there's not much you can do to measure it otherwise. So what do you do? The answer is, you setup a holdout test. Facebook has a black- box solution for helping with this, but it is a huge conflict of interest to let Facebook handle your test. The thing to do then is set up the test on your own platform. That is a massive undertaking, and any business that doesn't have a significantly sized engineering and analytic team doesn't stand a chance.

So yea, people look at things like reach, and view through conversions, and it would be very hard not too or they might not have the means to do something more sophisticated. Fake accounts undeniably puff of numbers for these people, and they should be taken to court for not giving a shit about that fact.

<comment><USER16> Facebook are 100% not going to lie to you through their experimentation platform. The whole point of it is to help people accurately measure the results of their ads.

In general, it will be extremely difficult to run accurate tests on FB (or indeed Google) ads without using some of their infrastructure, as these platforms can balance users appropriately in terms of likely response to your ads (for instance, ensuring that both ads are shown to people with approximately the same click probability).

Without this, you run the risk of making bad decisions because one ad got served to users who were far more likely to convert.

Of course you should definitely run your own tests, but I wouldn't completely discount the platform's tools as they do have advantages which are impossible for you to replicate (i.e. balancing users in terms of response rates in each condition).

<comment><USER15> Yea, but what are they using to analyze your results? You literally have no idea how robust (or not) their statistical methods are. It's been my experience that 3rd party solutions are notoriously shoddy in this department. They have no incentive to be robust.

<comment><USER16> AFAIK (it's been over a year), they use intent to treat approach, and only remove users from the experiment after they have already been matched to an ad. This allows them to ensure that the users are matched in terms of expected conversion rate, which allows for valid results.

I believe that there were rumours of using bayesian analysis in the future, but I believe it's a two-sided p-value based on the differences in your chosen outcome.

Reasonably simple, and mostly effective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's important to understand that Greenspan (who, incidentally, comments on hacker news a fair bit as [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=thinkcomp](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=thinkcomp) and submitted this link) is not an unbiased observer here. He's had an ongoing feud with Zuck/FB for years and years and years.

From reading his writings on this, and other topics, it's clear that he is extremely bitter about virtually all things related to Facebook.

See this from over a decade ago: [https://venturebeat.com/2007/09/02/who- founded-facebook-aaro...](https://venturebeat.com/2007/09/02/who-founded- facebook-aaron-greenspan/)

He also undertook a multi-year quixotic series of lawsuits against California and other entities over what he felt were unfair regulations on money services businesses.

[https://www.upcounsel.com/blog/aaron-greenspan-versus- silico...](https://www.upcounsel.com/blog/aaron-greenspan-versus-silicon- valley)

</comment><comment><USER18> Lying to advertisers would not make Facebook a ponzi scheme. A ponzi scheme is when early investors get paid with "profits" that are actually later investors' money.

No one is doubting that Facebook is making genuine revenue, although they may be misleading people to earn that revenue.

<comment><USER19> _early investors get paid with "profits" that are actually later investors' money_

But seriously, that's actually what happens in the real world in % of "successful" startups. I think context is important in pointing to something as a ponzi scheme

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> About a year ago we had to pretty much shut down FB advertising as we simply could not come close to rectifying the click numbers they were reporting to us. That trust broke down much further when you considered conversions and more human-like activity down our funnels.

That said, for another business, FB is absolutely killing it for us.

The difference is in target market size and niche.

<comment><USER21> > The difference is in target market size and niche.

Are the target market size and niche smaller or bigger for the one that works?

<comment><USER20> Smaller. And easier to identify.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Really enjoyed the article, but have to point out the obvious: Fraud =/= Ponzi scheme. Ponzi schemes are a payout model where money from later investors is used to pay off earlier investors.

<comment><USER23> Yes, I've noticed that "Ponzi scheme" seems to have entered common parlance as meaning any kind of fraud.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> There are so many ways in which I'd like to contradict this article, but I'll stick to just one.

> While they reveal a problem escalating at an alarming rate and are > constantly being revised upward .. in Q2 2017

In Q4 2017 the method for measuring the prevalence of fake accounts was changed to something more accurate. The number of fake accounts wasn't "escalating at an alarming rate", it was comparable to the number in the previous quarter.

Source: I worked on that change.

<comment><USER25> does facebook refund advertisers all the money spent advertising to fake accounts?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> While this raises some good points, it's worth mentioning the history between Aaron Greenspan and Facebook:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/01/technology/01facebook.htm...](https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/01/technology/01facebook.html)

<comment><USER27> _"I actually did think about integrating it into houseSYSTEM before you even suggested it, but I decided that it's probably best to keep them separated at least for now."_

Oooh, there's a blast from the past. Why do so many Harvard undergrads talk like this? (I was as guilty as anyone.)

<comment><USER28> I'm curious, what's particular about that quote? Nothing jumps to me, but I'm a non-native speaker.

<comment><USER27> First, the superfluous "actually". In the late 1990s, every Yard conversation was peppered with "actually". I was on the phone with an HR person for my first job out of school, I dropped an "actually" on her, and she (rightfully) read me the riot act. (So, _actually_ , the idiom could have changed by now... it apparently hadn't changed much at the time Zuck attended.)

Second, the implicit comparison between the great stupendous thing that "I" did with the minimal barely-worth-mentioning thing that "you" did. As if "thinking" and "deciding" were somehow so much more important than "suggesting". We can be certain that if the conversation roles were reversed then the implied relative importance of the different actions would also have been reversed. This was just a particular flavor of a more general rhetorical activity we called "flexing", back then. Lots of intimidated kids, attempting to intimidate in turn.

<comment><USER28> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Similar post from a few hours earlier, with 43 comments currently: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20505885](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20505885)

<comment><USER30> Also, back in 2010 Joseph Perla wrote a similarly titled article, but less targeted around fake accounts and more around the supply of advertisers trying ads when fb was growing (was a couple years before its IPO): [http://www.jperla.com/blog/post/facebook-is-a-ponzi- scheme](http://www.jperla.com/blog/post/facebook-is-a-ponzi-scheme) (discussions: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1293119](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1293119), [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2116062](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2116062) )

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=facebook%20ponzi&sort=byPopula...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=facebook%20ponzi&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm the author (Aaron Greenspan). Funnily enough, Joseph Perla used to be my roommate in Palo Alto. But I had nothing to do with him writing that piece, and I think he later ended up working for Facebook. So maybe his convictions weren't quite so strong.

<comment><USER31> It's true I wrote that independently. Hi Aaron!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm no FB apologist, but I take issue with this:

> _fake account problem … Google Trends shows worldwide "Facebook" queries > down 80% from their November 2012 peak._

Except that much of this downturn in people googling "Facebook" is explainable by the shift to mobile. Surely no one needs to Google "Facebook" to open the Facebook app on their phone's home screen. (For that matter, one doesn't even need the app icon when one is receiving push notifications from FB. No legit notifs? No problem, FB will synthesize fake ones.)

</comment><comment><USER33> Misleading title, weak arguments, no evidence. Just click bait . Facebook saw huge growth since 2012 by acquiring Instagram and monetizing mobile, and also from increased advertising. Facebook does not need more accounts to grow, but rather by making more money from existing users.Terrible article.

</comment><comment><USER34> As much as I dislike Facebook these days as far as I can tell this does not even have a surface similarity to a ponzi scheme.

</comment><comment><USER35> At the risk of sounding like a devil's advocate (that isn't my intention), if there really were this much fraud, wouldn't it shake out in the economics? i.e. if you aren't getting your money's worth from the Facebook ads you're buying, wouldn't you notice?

<comment><AUTHOR> If Facebook tells you that you got 1000 impressions, 100 clicks and 50 likes, how are you going to prove them wrong?

<comment><USER36> If the business' value of success is driven by impressions clicks and likes, they aren't doing it right.

It would be like a development team measuring success by lines of code written - it bears no relationship with the underlying success of the business.

The identification of success/failure should be attributable to revenue or profit. They can have an internal conversion factor from clicks->$$, but it should be there.

<comment><USER37> It's actually very hard and expensive to do end-to-end reporting, so it's not as simple as you either prove profitability or not. Think of how many SMB's there are out there that have to choose between hiring a new service provider to provide better coverage or spending money on an obscure-to-them tool like a CRM. I feel for them.

In addition, time is always an issue and is the ultimate variable. What worked two months ago didn't work last month, what do you do? Every company runs into this and there are factors that make it crazy complicated: payback period, LTV, AOV, Days to Close.

Ad platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Ads talk more about "reaching your target customer" with fluffy metrics since that's what they can easily measure and, IMO, it obscures the real end-to-end results you mention. When success is obscured, it allows them to absolve themselves of educating their customers.

The ad platforms build case studies of success and then simplify it down to impressions and reach so that companies feel like they have to do it. It's a profit machine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I was getting a half dozen obviously fake friend requests on IG every day until I set my account to private. These were invariably users like "TatianaXXX6969" or "SexySvetlana1727288". Seems like the easiest kind of fake account to block (so much for AI and ML). I deleted my FB two years ago and I think IG is next.

<comment><USER39> The easiest fake accounts to block have already been blocked, these ones would've been created with more nuance.

<comment><USER40> I get them all the time, and there's not much nuance to them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Interesting to discover the author is a classmate of Zuckerbro and claims to have invented Facebook. Which seems to have led to a career of writing articles like these.

<comment><USER17> I'm fairly certain that his "career" is mostly based on living off the money he got from this:

[https://www.adweek.com/digital/facebook-announces- settlement...](https://www.adweek.com/digital/facebook-announces-settlement- of-legal-dispute-with-another-former-zuckerberg-classmate/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Excluding the personal attacks, which dilute what would have been a good alternative look at Facebook, I suggest everyone interested in this topic to look at the other parts that make up the click-fraud industry:

\- Clickfarms in China that have shady people using some automation and thousands of smartphones to perform fake clicks for the Chinese ad market

\- Pied Piper style farms with people in poor countries sitting all day creating accounts (it was exaggerated in the series)

\- The ad giants constant "battle" with click-fraud

\- Shady tactics used by smaller app/websites to get people to accidentally click on ads

I wouldn't personally denounce all online advertising though. It has its place the same way print media advertising does. It's market-value is questionable though (which is derived from questionable "effectiveness" sales pitches we're told about online advertising)

</comment><comment><USER43> > Aaron Greenspan is short Facebook stock.

The author seems to be talking up his portfolio. Although there may be truth to this article, it seems the author is attempting to move the stock price with negitive press.

<comment><USER28> He's just putting his money where his mouth is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> He keeps referencing total number of user accounts. This is a bad number to track, precisely because of fraud, duplicate, and unused accounts. A better number is something like monthly or daily active users. Then you can randomly sample a subset of these users and manually determine the number of fake accounts to give you a confidence interval on the total number of real daily active users, which for investor/shareholder purposes, is much better to use than total accounts anyway.

<comment><AUTHOR> I go into more detail in the report I wrote in January, which also points out that the perfectly constant DAU/MAU relationship Facebook reports cannot possibly be true as growth continues to slow/reverse. See [https://www.plainsite.org/realitycheck/facebook.html](https://www.plainsite.org/realitycheck/facebook.html).

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Time will tell whether the author, Aaron Greenspan, who knew and interacted with Zuckerberg at Harvard, is right or wrong. Given the lack of good, transparent data, it's hard for me to judge the prevalence of ad fraud. I suspect it's hard for many ad buyers too.

In the meantime, the OP and comments here remind me of the reaction of a media executive, Mel Karmazin, upon realizing, back in 2003, that Google could measure the effectiveness of advertising:

> Karmazin and the networks continued to charge steep rates because, Karmazin > says, "advertisers don't know what works and what doesn't. That's a great > model." But it's a model, the Google executives told him, that is horribly > inefficient. Karmazin, before departing, trained his eyes on his Google > hosts and blurted, only half in jest, _" You're fucking with the magic!"_[a]

Perhaps new media companies like Facebook have come to the realization that they too should not be "fucking with the magic," to use Karmazin's colorful language.

\--

[a] [https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120389...](https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120389927)

</comment><comment><USER46> While I do believe that Facebook is indeed lying (about virtually any question you mask it, including user numbers), I think it is meaningful to ask:

"Are advertisers getting enough performance out of Facebook ads to justify the expense?"

The answer could be Yes. It's also possible that many of the companies aren't managing their expenses well, and that they don't know (but still have enough cash, whether from stock market "play money" or VC (SV play money)).

There's no effective answer to the implied question, "How can we stop Facebook from being evil?" Even if the poisonous head of the snake is cut off, there is enough financial interest for remaining executives (and board) to continue along the same general path.

My answer is this: smart startups identify the key value features of Facebook and implement them independently. This is a long play, but it could work.

One example is how Facebook is used for communication and coordination of groups that share common interests. In this example, it's really just a little bit of communication features missing from meetup.com to replace this (and be better than what Facebook offers).

<comment><USER47> I'm not sure that advertising markets are efficient.

Many people who advertise get a certain gratification in hearing their name (or business name) on the radio. More than one salesperson for newspaper advertising I have talked to tells me that their best line for retaining customers is that "if your newspaper ads disappear people will assume you went out of business." Political campaigns will spend hundreds of millions in election years, enough to drive up the cost of TV advertising for car dealerships, causing a drop in car sales.

Often the audiences for ads are not consumers, but shareholders, politicians, employees, business partners, etc. Why else did IBM and GE run so many "lights on and nobody home" ads before shareholders finally made them stop? Why else do I see so many ads for cable providers that don't do business anywhere near my area? Does this play a role in why mall stores are dying (e.g. they believed their own illusions and didn't realize they were out of touch with consumers?)

When Warren Buffet dies those GEICO ads will be the first thing to go, but they help keep the news media sweet and uncritical of a once superstar investment firm that now burns shareholder dollars while contributing to everything wrong with our economy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Argument could potentially be interesting save for the fact that the pudding really is in advertiser repeat business. The metrics (of click per ads, fake accounts, what have you), are utterly irrelevant. If advertisers keep coming back for me, Facebook has a viable business. And, until now, that seems to be the case. Maybe there's just tremendous lag in the feedback loop for business to see that there's no value in FB advertising and they'll experience a reckoning down the line, but it's been around FOR A WHILE, and ad revenue is strengthening, not declining.

Again, it's important to disassociate that and the claims that it is a Ponzi scheme and unsustainable business. Both of these things can (and I think probably are) true: Facebook can have a much bigger privacy/fake account problem than it lets on AND also have very real, sustainable revenue from advertising. These things aren't mutually exclusive.

</comment><comment><USER49> I know people who spend large budgets on Facebook and Google ads. What I hear almost universally is that they aren't effective, yet everyone feels compelled to pay for FB ads and Google ads because they see everyone else doing it. The customers I have spoken too feel that it simply isn't working but they're afraid to stop buying the ads for fear of slipping into online oblivion. Numerous people have shared the same experience with me and nobody is happy. Now there is the chance that I just happen to know only statistical outliers, the people who pay a lot of money and feel they aren't getting anything in return but feel compelled to continue. Maybe I just happen to know a dozen or so very unlucky resentful people. I don't have solid "evidence". It's all anecdotal. That said, this experience I've just described is most likely common and hardly unique.

</comment><comment><USER50> FTA:

>In other words, Facebook is growing the fastest in the locations worldwide where one finds the most fraud. In other other words, Facebook isn't growing anymore at all—it's shrinking.

Look I hate Facebook as much as the next guy but this is clearly specious logic. The existence of fraudulent accounts does not preclude growth in new accounts.

</comment><comment><USER51> My naive question here re: fake accounts + advertisers is why should I care? If these big corporations want to blow their money shouting about gay scuba diving into the ether, what's the harm?

</comment><comment><USER52> For those out of the loop and feel like this essay feels a bit "bitter," Aaron Greenspan, the article's author claims that he invented the idea behing Facebook back in 2003.

</comment><comment><USER53> Saying it's a Ponzi scheme is a stretch, any business knows that FB provides the most targeted ads because of all the user data they have access to.

<comment><USER54> I hear this all the time, but every time I ask for the data (I have actually asked people whose job is to do marketing for businesses) I'm told "just trust me."

I am not saying they are lying, it would be truly surprising to believe such an elaborate house of cards could stand for so long. But I am asking for evidence.

<comment><USER55> What's your explanation for why they would make such a claim if it weren't true?

<comment><USER54> People lie to keep their jobs all the time. They might also just not know, but because it's standard practice to use Facebook for advertising they just do it and say it's a necessity.

What reason do they have to obfuscate the data unless the data shows something they don't want you to see?

<comment><USER55> > What reason do they have to obfuscate the data unless the data shows > something they don't want you to see?

I mean, it seems like an internal corporate metric. I would expect to be refused that simply on the basis of it not being my business?

<comment><USER54> I've asked people at companies I work for. I've asked people at companies I've invested in. So in those cases, I already signed all the legal documents and NDAs.

I've also asked people who did it for companies after they shut down. The only thing that's obvious is nobody wants to share the data. I suspect it's because the data is not as positive as we're supposed to believe.

<comment><USER55> But even just working for a company doesn't mean you're entitled to see business metrics?

<comment><USER54> I am not saying I'm entitled to it (although I think it should be available for an investor upon request), I'm saying the widespread refusal to share the evidence is a yellow flag that something is wrong.

<comment><USER55> I mean, it's possible, but I'm trying to say that I would expect _every_ such request to be refused to a regular employee regardless of whether something is wrong or not.

<comment><USER54> That doesn't explain the scenario where the company is shut down or I'm an investor.

My question to you is: why would you ever trust a claim without evidence (especially when the people making that claim stand to personally profit from it)?

<comment><USER55> The investor case -- I mean, it depends on how much of an investor you were, and what the relevant rules are. But if anybody could become an investor in the company, then it's obviously not a real barrier... giving it to every investor would be like giving it to everyone, which they obviously wouldn't want to do.

The shut-down case: well, maybe you feel they don't have a reason not to tell you internal info for a dead company, but the general hesitation would still be there, and I don't see what they would gain from it either. Hardly seems like evidence for hiding information.

> My question to you is: why would you ever trust a claim without evidence > (especially when the people making that claim stand to personally profit > from it)?

"Ever"? I mean, it's a case-by-case thing. I might do it if the evidence isn't available to me, and the opposite might imply believing there's a large-scale conspiracy to lie. Or I might not. The lack of someone telling an outsider internal information is not really strong evidence either way.

<comment><USER54> I think everything you're saying is reasonable, but I think we just have to agree to disagree since there is no evidence either way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That is some massive reification for fake accounts - just because they are named the same doesn't mean they are similiar.

There is a massive difference between "letting people create accounts for their pets, spammers put up fake accounts" and "fake financial accounts out of whole cloth to create false profits".

</comment><comment><USER56> This is the first time, in my life, that I've seen an article criticizing Facebook's business practices without having a 'like on Facebook' icon.

Fortunately there is a Twitter icon, so you can rest safe knowing this outraged person is still giving free publicity to a social media company.

<comment><USER28> It's a shared blog, so the presence of particular icons doesn't indicate the author's feelings towards any in particular.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Where are the arguments? He is bad, I'm saying so, listen to people with experience like me.

</comment><comment><USER58> Whatever one thinks of the article or its case, this is an interesting thread. I've turned off the flags on it and, because some people were presumably flagging because of the baity title, replaced that with a representative phrase from the article.

</comment><comment><USER59> First: advertisers know about fake accounts.

Second: it's not like investors are somehow unaware that FB cannot grow forever. In 2013 the PE ratio was more than 120, and it is now 30. That is investors adjusting their expectations about future growth.

</comment><comment><USER60> the same kind of accusation was poisonning google ads for a long time but it was called click fraud. numerous customers were suing google over billing them for fake clicks. Ultimately, google proved to be better than other sources of online advertising regarding fraud detection, and so people continued to buy ads.

The problem is the same for facebook. Major advertiser track clicks up to purchases over months , sometimes years. So they are perfectly aware of which users are bogus, which impression are actually never seen, etc. Ultimately the only thing that counts is whether the investment is worth it.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is about more than just click fraud. False claims of user growth have propelled Facebook's stock upward. That's securities fraud.

<comment><USER60> Do you think the market actually looks for users growth on facebook.com that much, now that it has passed the billion mark, has proved to be profitable with ads, and is making a huge chunk of its latest growth using other sites and apps (mainly instagram and whatsapp) ?

I wouldn't say fb is totally pure, but hyping number is i think the general rule with companies whether they are public or private. That's why we have analysts, notation agencies, and why stock exchange requires publishing hard facts, which analysts can cross and match with high scrutiny.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I always log in and out of FB on a computer in one browser type and don't have it on any phones. One thing that always strikes me as odd:

Click your picture or add an account, and Add account and in big type: Create a new account. It's free and always will be (un etc fields, birthdate) The whole front page is set up to encourage multiple accounts and presumably easy to automate the creation of thousands of fake accounts, which as we know is very prevalent. Great hard hitting article Aaron.

<comment><USER62> Many stock camera apps access Facebook on startup. Even if you aren't logged in I wouldn't doubt that FB can gather enough data to correlate your account to the phone.

<comment><USER61> even when I never access FB from my phone via app or browser? I do have instagram on my phone, often wondered whether that has a back door to FB

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> It's interesting that at footer of the page in hebrew it says:

אריכות ימים חברתית דרך האמת וחדשנות

"Social longevity through truth and innovation"

</comment><comment><USER64> I advertise on Facebook and I have no idea what the Facebook user growth numbers are - and I don't care. We advertise on Facebook because it works. We pay money to Facebook and acquire new users for our product in return.

Facebook actually under-reports the ROI for us (we acquire 2x more customers through Facebook ads than Facebook says we do), because ad blockers block the Facebook tracking pixel.

</comment><comment><USER57> This is much cleaner than Greenspan's article

</comment><comment><USER65> How do you fix this? do you KYC everyone?

</comment><comment><USER66> Hard to take seriously when the author doesn't know what a "ponzi scheme" actually is.

</comment><comment><USER67> This is no longer news.

</comment><comment><USER68> >namely, genocide, a role in putting a fascist, white supremacist in the White House

A lot of people stopped reading the article right there.

Writers like this only reach a certain audience.

</comment><comment><USER69> Can't algorithms for spam mail detection be useful for detecting fake users and bots ?

</comment><comment><USER70> Fake accounts aren't a Ponzi

</comment><comment><USER47> This explains quite a few things about Facebook.

Sheryl Sandberg hasn't been thrown overboard because if she is thrown overboard she might talk.

Mark Zuckerberg won't allow the appointment of an independent Chairman of the Board because one thing about people who run Ponzi scams is that they try to keep as small a circle of people as possible in control so that news won't leak out.

</comment><comment><USER71> > So what is that magical ingredient, that secret sauce, that "genius" trade > secret, that turned an over-funded money-losing startup into one of > America's greatest business success stories?

False. Facebook made $50M in profit the year before it took its Series A. It has always been a profitable company[0].

[0] [https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/FB/facebook/profit...](https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/FB/facebook/profit- margins)

<comment><USER2> _> It has always been a profitable company[0]._

No, Facebook was founded in 2004 and it took 5 years to make its first profits in 2009: [https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2009/09/faceboo...](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2009/09/facebook- turns-a-profit-users-hits-300-million/26721/)

Your cited chart only begins at 2009 instead of 2004.

Also, if we count Accel Partners $12.7 million in 2005 as the "Series A" investment, Facebook was not yet profitable at that point. ([https://fortune.com/2011/01/11/timeline-where-facebook- got-i...](https://fortune.com/2011/01/11/timeline-where-facebook-got-its- funding/))

<comment><USER71> > According to the S-1, Facebook made a modest $382,000 in revenue 2004, $9 > million in revenue in 2005, $48 million in revenue in 2006 and $153 million > in revenue in 2007, with no reporting of net loss.[0]

Seems like we're both wrong. FB was profitable before '09, but it did have a couple years of loss.

[0] [https://techcrunch.com/2012/02/01/facebook-ipo-facebook- ipo-...](https://techcrunch.com/2012/02/01/facebook-ipo-facebook-ipo-facebook- ipo)

<comment><USER2> No sure where the journalist (Alexia Tsotsis) got the data to write: _" $382,000 in revenue 2004, $9 million in revenue in 2005, $48 million in revenue in 2006 and $153 million in revenue in 2007, with no reporting of net loss."_

Those figures are not anywhere in the actual S-1: [https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000119312512...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000119312512034517/d287954ds1.htm)

In fact, page 40 of the S-1 clearly shows a 2007 _loss_ of -$138 million which contradicts what the Techcrunch author wrote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Some embarrassingly very ignorant statements here by Greenspan.

> a company that was out of users in 2012 managed to find a wellspring of > nearly infinite and sustained growth that has lasted it, so far, half of the > way through 2019. So what is that magical ingredient, that secret sauce, > that "genius" trade secret, that turned an over-funded money-losing startup > into one of America's greatest business success stories?

Facebook has been wildly profitable since approximately the end of 2008. Five years after its founding, in 2009 - long before Greenspan's setup premise - they turned a $229m profit on $777m in sales. For fiscal 2011 that was a billion in profit. Any start-up in world history would be envious of that extreme profitability so early into existence.

In terms of millions of daily active users or users in general, Facebook wasn't suffering in terms of growth in 2012 or 2013. Greenspan is flat-out lying here. They went from 483 million daily active users at the end of 2011, to 665 million at the end of 1Q13. They added 135m daily actives in 2012, 28% DAU growth after eight or nine years. A strong number given their immense size at that point.</comment>


Ends Don't Justify Means (Among Humans) - <AUTHOR> http://lesswrong.com/lw/uv/ends_dont_justify_means_among_humans/ <comment><USER2> The ends are the only way to justify the means; what the sloppy thinkers who recite "The ends don't justify the means" really seem to mean is that some means are not justifiable. Which is undeniably true, but because they don't really think their position/slogan through, they often end up gathering a bunch of nonsense along with it.

<comment><USER3> You're right. Slaughtering 20 junior school students and a crossing guard are not acceptable means to get your daughter from school to her dentist appointment on time.

It is however acceptable to kill 20 enemy combatants to rescue a dignitary from a besieged embassy.

<comment><USER4> > _"It is however acceptable to kill 20 enemy combatants to rescue a dignitary > from a besieged embassy."_

Even if the dignitary was Von Ribbentrop?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joachim_von_Ribbentrop>

Semi-deontological ethical rules suffer the same problems as deontological ethical rules.

<comment><USER5> Germans (or at least Nazis) would, at the time, have considered it to be entirely worth it. I believe that the intended context was that the dignitary was a member of the same organization/country as the people trying to rescue him/her, while the enemy combatants would be from a group opposed to that country. Your response, on the other hand, seems to suppose the existence of a third party (the dignitary, enemy combatants, and in addition a group which dislikes the dignitary and knows that he's a horrible person).

<comment><USER4> Although you are correct that I am assuming a third party, it is only in the role of judging the described actions as just or unjust that a third party is assumed...namely the gentle reader - a necessary assumption in any discussion of hypothetical ethical scenarios as the example of the school children illustrates.

There is a convention to these things - one doesn't assume that the dead school children were carriers of an incurable virus and that only their death prevented a deadly pandemic etc.

As I am sure you recognize, a patriotic motivation does not make an action right - even if your assumption that the rescuers and rescued share political affiliation might often lead one to assume your holding such a belief.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The objection is he making is essentially the objection a rule- consequentialist would make. Which is that although in this particular situation it would produce better consequences to kill the innocent man and save the 5 people, overall it would produce worse consequences if everyone followed the rule that killing innocent people is an acceptable means to some end.

<comment><USER7> I think it's a bit more subtle than that, although he _does_ point out the danger of imitators. See my reply at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2088562>.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure.

Here is the rule: "Do no harm."

Why should we follow it?

A rule-consequentialist would say, "Because if everyone followed that rule all the time it would lead to better consequences, on average, than if people tried to calculate the consequences of each individual action and act to maximize them."

Why would that lead to better consequences?

A rule-consequentialist could say, "Because people are quite bad at calculating consequences, especially in the tumultuous time before making a critical ethical decision. While we have had the time to think and properly calculate the hypothetical consequences of everyone following the rule."

I think that's exactly the argument Eliezer is making.

<comment><USER7> Put like that, I agree - I had a different meaning of "rule-consequentialist" in mind than you, apparently. (I'm not too familiar with the vocabulary of such discussions, sorry!) Thanks for clarifying.

<comment><USER6> Don't worry, like any academic field philosophy is filled with jargon, but knowing the jargon doesn't make you any smarter and not knowing doesn't make you any dumber.

Both you and Eliezer made good arguments and points, they just happened to already have a name in the philosophical jargon.

If you're interested, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at plato.stanford.edu is the greatest repository of philosophical knowledge on the Internet.

They have an article about rule-consequentialism: <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism-rule/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> too much faith in 'friendly AI'. Friendly my ass! Doesn't this guy consume Science Fiction?

Seriously, I would extend his argument to assume that all 'hardware is corrupted' as he puts it, though I think it's more accurate to say 'all software is buggy'. For this amazing AI to even exist, it probably had to be pretty damn selfish, pushing out all other potential AI's to get to the top of the heap.

Just saying.

</comment><comment><USER9> But people do make these decisions all the time. Closing watertight doors on a warship? The first responders at Chernobyl? Kamikaze?

Not only do we condemn other innocents to death, but also ourselves.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is an incredible stretch of what I'd take "The Ends Don't Justify The Means" to be. The whole "killing one person to save ten" thing really isn't related.

The way I see it, it's about externalities. I push someone onto a train track to save ten people in a mineshaft, fine. Somebody else watches me push someone on a train track, doesn't see the mineshaft, and goes on to push 25 people onto train tracks in the future. Perhaps that's contrived, but when he describes coups in the same terminology it's a lot less so.

</comment><comment><USER11> So let me get this straight.

The author is saying that his answer to the the classic hypothetical dilemma in ethics of "is it right to do harm (murder one) to prevent a greater harm (death of five)" which usually framed in utilitarian-ish debates is:

 _a hypothetical incorruptible super awesome version of me would murder the innocent person but as I am not that type of being (and only that type of being can answer the question) I am not going to answer the question_

But why not go all in and pose it thus: "is it better for one person to suffer eternal suffering to free all others from any type of suffering"? And that's why Jesus died for our sins you know. And that really happened. And Jesus was smarter than a hypothetical incorruptible super awesome version of you. Therefore ... I'm not sure where this is going.

Maybe what I'm trying to say is (and by all means argue the toss with me and don't shoot me down) Eliezer Yudkowsky _sounds_ a lot smarter than he actually is.

<comment><USER12> Did you miss the bit where Jesus asserted power over death and came back to life after three days? The sacrifice was a _blood_ sacrifice, not a _soul_ sacrifice. Eternal suffering doesn't come into it.

<comment><USER13> Theologically Jesus is to have suffered all that humans can suffer. So, even though He resurrected in 3 days, that doesn't mean He couldn't have experienced an eternity of torment. By His own account, He experienced complete abandonment by God.

<comment><USER12> It said he was tested (tempted) in all ways. Hell isn't a test or temptation, I don't think it counts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It is never right, to do wrong, for a chance to do right.

</comment><comment><USER15> Surely a sufficiently advanced AI would simply send a warning signal to the train driver to "hit the brakes quick". Next problem please.

</comment><comment><USER16> The means produce the ends.

</comment><comment><USER17> A creature running under that paradigm is abandoning their humanity. We can only exist as human beings with rights if we respect our fellows' human rights.

<comment><USER18> So if your daughter is kidnapped by the a Colombian Drug Cartel and you decided that since you're a badass, you're going to go save her. Then you kill 20 baddies that are themselves cutthroat murderers that would have undeniably killed a greater number of people. Can you really tell me that the ends wouldn't justify the means?

If MI-5 kills 4 terrorists which where preparing to bomb a bus station with hundreds if not thousands of people, they're in the wrong for not respecting the rights of the terrorists? Or would they be in the wrong for not protecting the citizens of the country they're supposed to be protecting?

The ends will always justify the means in the mind of the person doing the act. What makes the actions of one person (or government) right is that in the minds of other people the means are also justifiable.

If someone is willing to not respect my rights and kill me to steal my wallet, I'm willing to forgo their rights because lets me honest, the ends do justify the means if it benefits not only yourself, but the rest of the population.

<comment><USER13> Rights are a social contract. You give up your rights once you violate those of others.

<comment><USER18> Oh I agree. The moment you go on a killing rampage to rescue your daughter from the cartels, you justify other people taking action against you to protect themselves. The thing is, there needs to be someone that resigns their rights and does the right (so to speak) thing. Someone needs to keep the terrorists at bay. Someone needs to protect the citizens from the gangs. Morally objectionable? Maybe. In the eyes of a few. In the eyes of the rest, these people are heroes.

<comment><USER13> No, those actions are morally right. Those people have already violated their part in the social contract.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


PostgreSQL 9.2 released - <AUTHOR> http://www.postgresql.org/about/news/1415/

<comment><USER2> We've been pretty excited about this release to come for some time at Heroku as its loaded with great features. In addition to the JSON datatype here's a bit of a longer list of features that are pretty noteworthy in the release:

\- Allow libpq connection strings to have the format of a URI

\- Add a JSON data type

\- Allow the planner to generate custom plans for specific parameter values even when using prepared statements

\- Add the SP-GiST (Space-Partitioned GiST) index access method

\- Add support for range data types

\- Cancel queries if clients get disconnected

\- Add CONCURRENTLY option to DROP INDEX

\- Add a tcn (triggered change notification) module to generate NOTIFY events on table changes

\- Allow pg_stat_statements to aggregate similar queries via SQL

\- text normalization. Users with applications that use non-parameterized SQL will now be able to monitor query performance without detailed log analysis.

</comment><comment><USER3> Since postgres has basic json type support now, and PL/Javascript exists, it's only a matter of time until an extension appears that lets you deploy javascript applications directly to the database.

Who needs CouchDB or Node.js when you can just say CREATE EXTENSION 'couchnodegres.js'

<comment><USER4> Once the database can start receiving and returning json, then you can treat it as a webservice and not have the client involved in SQL. I think this is _huge_.

<comment><USER5> Can you elaborate a little bit on how an architecture like that would look like? I had great hopes for CouchDB once.

<comment><USER6> HTML/JS frontend calls simple node server that does nothing but call a stored procedure like

       spc_handle_request(req_headers, req_body, http_method, ...)

stored procedure does simple routing and does something like

      insert into table (a, b, c) values (to_json(req_body).a, to_json(req_body).b, to_json(req_body).c);

or

      to_json(select * from emp);

Time to implement simple crud app: 10 minutes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am actually pretty excited about the native JSON support, and overall I am a huge fan of Postgres, but this is the most press-release-y press release ever* . By that I mean that the quotes are way too "perfect", the kind you only see in press releases. Some PR or marketing guy wrote them then showed them to the person to whom they'd be attributed to get their ok. Nothing inherently wrong with it, just struck me as funny.

* having written more than my share of press releases in my time

<comment><USER8> > I am actually pretty excited about the native JSON support

There really isn't much to it yet, it's basically a varchar field with JSON validation, it's not like you can query or index it.

I actually find the `row_to_json` and `array_to_json` functions more interesting for now (though strangely enough there's no `hstore_to_json`)

<comment><USER9> Eh, if you want to index it you have the hstore. I do wonder why they don't deserialize to an hstore type, though.

<comment><USER10> I'm sure something like that will be added. One of the issues there facing is that hstore is a string => string map, so a conversion from json to that will be lossy (i.e. 'that "true" in hstore, is that the string "true" or a converted boolean true from json?').

What you can do right now though is use PL/V8 to query the JSON fields. Then you can use functional indexes to still being able to speed up queries. Yes. You could that before but now there's a guarantee that a field of type json contains just that, meaning that your application logic will get simpler.

<comment><USER8> > One of the issues there facing is that hstore is a string => string map, so > a conversion from json to that will be lossy

Or the insertion/conversion routine can assert that the JSON object is a string:string mapping only.

<comment><USER4> Why would that be helpful? I'd want arrays, hashes, integers, etc.

<comment><USER8> You won't get them _in an hstore[0] column_ , which was the context of my reply. Of course in a JSON column you want full JSON support, but my and my parent's post were about converting back and forth between hstore and json.

Since hstore only handles string:string mapping, the choice is either to silently corrupt data by stringifying all values in the json->hstore encoding, or erroring out if the input data is anything other than string:string.

The latter would be what I'd prefer, and more in line with usual Postgres behavior.

[0] <http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/hstore.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My two favorite features are not so high on the PR docs though.

The first is SECURITY BARRIER and LEAKPROOF which gives us an ability to rethink how to multi-tenant applications. This is a game changer and will get even better in future versions I am sure.

The second is NO INHERIT constraints, which I will certainly be making good use of. It is also a complete game changer when it comes to table inheritance and partitioning, and my main use will be things like CHECK (false) NOINHERIT to ensure that a table in fact never has rows of its own.

There is an amazing amount of good stuff going on around Postgres right now. Postgres-XC was recently released, and more. It is an amazing data modelling platform and ORDBMS.

<comment><USER8> Could you talk about them further and explain why they're your favorite new features?

<comment><USER12> Regarding the inheritance features, he's been writing an extensive series on the subject recently:

[http://ledgersmbdev.blogspot.com/2012/08/intro-to- postgresql...](http://ledgersmbdev.blogspot.com/2012/08/intro-to-postgresql- as-object.html)

(though he should provide forward/backward links in the posts -- as it stands you need to find the other parts in the archive links on the right)

<comment><USER11> Managing the forward/backward links in a series this long while it is still coming out is a pain. They will be added as the series draws to a close next week though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm always impressed by the PostgreSQL team.

Personally, I'm excited about the range types and I can see immediate usefulness for them. My own applications aside, anything that helps developers create schemas that are better able to handle temporal data is a good thing.

<comment><USER14> Range types combined with exclusion constraints solve the problem of not allowing overlapping bookings using a database constraint. The solution is simple, clean, and flexible unlike the workarounds.

Example of adding such a constraint:

      ALTER TABLE reservation ADD EXCLUDE USING gist (room WITH =, during WITH &&);

In this example a room cannot be double booked.

EDIT: This is a feature entirely unique to PostgreSQL.

<comment><USER12> I'll be speaking on this use case next week at Postgres Open ( <http://postgresopen.org> ) as part of a larger demo of temporal databases in postgresql.

Jonathan S. Katz will also be presenting on Range Types.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was expecting the json support, but SP-GiST is a very welcome surprise. <http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/spgist-intro.html>

User-extensible spacial index types. This makes Postgres perfect for online machine learning.

</comment><comment><USER16> direct link to what's new: [http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/What%27s_new_in_PostgreSQL_9...](http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/What%27s_new_in_PostgreSQL_9.2)

</comment><comment><USER17> Now someone please make usable tools for it on OSX. Postgres badly needs front-end tools of the quality of sequel pro.

I am a huge fan of Postgres, it's never let me down. But data exploration, ad hoc querying and such is a pain in psql. These tools are badly needed.

<comment><USER18> pgAdmin not work on OS X? I'm pretty sure it does.

Just found this: [http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Community_Guide_to_PostgreSQ...](http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Community_Guide_to_PostgreSQL_GUI_Tools)

<comment><USER11> The complaint usually is "it doesn't look like a native app." Mac users are famously picky about only using apps that look native ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The absolute best feature of 9.2 is that you can now add \x auto to your psqlrc file and never have to suffer unreadable results again

<comment><USER4> what does '\x auto' do?

<comment><USER12> It's a display feature in the "psql" client program.

Normal result:

         column1 | column2 | column3
        </comment></comment></comment><comment>---+</comment><comment>---+</comment><comment>---
               1 | a       |     9.9
               2 | b       |    19.9
        (2 rows)

Using \x:

        -[ RECORD 1 ]-
        column1 | 1
        column2 | a
        column3 | 9.9
        -[ RECORD 2 ]-
        column1 | 2
        column2 | b
        column3 | 19.9

The first form is tabular and works well for a few columns; but doesn't work well when there are many columns, because the lines start to wrap. So you use \x for wide tables to make the result readable (but, obviously, fewer rows are shown at a time).

Using "\x auto" automatically chooses which format to use based on your terminal width.

<comment><USER4> Nice!

I tried using it for a result that contains really wide columns. I'm seeing a screen full of hyphens separating the rows.

You'd think that the hyphens would stretch across just one line of the screen, instead of across the whole result set. See [https://img.skitch.com/20120910-fn1abpp3w94yhg63hc8yemt4a4.p...](https://img.skitch.com/20120910-fn1abpp3w94yhg63hc8yemt4a4.png)

<comment><USER12> Oh, interesting.

That's a problem for very wide fields, which aren't going to be handled very well even using \x.

\x was meant to handle large numbers of fields, or slightly wider fields.

But you're right, maybe that could be cleaned up a little more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> "PostgreSQL 9.2 will ship with native JSON support, covering indexes, replication and performance improvements, and many more features. We are eagerly awaiting this release and will make it available in Early Access as soon as it's released by the PostgreSQL community," said Ines Sombra, Lead Data Engineer, Engine Yard.

</comment><comment><USER14> One thing I love about PostgreSQL development is all the small nice fixes added in every version.

Of the small fixes in 9.1 my personal favorite is probably the cleanup of pg_stat_activity. There are also many other nice small fixes like improved tab completion for some commands and the ability to set environment variables in psql.

</comment><comment><USER20> We are excited about Cascading Replication because it reduces network data transfer over WAN when we have multiple Read Replicas within and across datacenters.

</comment><comment><USER21> mysql only gets mentioned 2 (now 3) times in this thread? oracle seems to be doing a job!

<comment><USER22> Why would anyone bring up mysql?</comment></comment>


Google pressured by Brussels over privacy in coronavirus tracing apps - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/f705b090-7c91-49eb-8d00-490da4c6a017 <comment><AUTHOR> > A version of the toolbox seen by the Financial Times warns that "deployed > without appropriate safeguards" contact tracing apps "could have a > significant negative effect on privacy and individual rights and freedoms". > It warns that the potential threat to individual rights could be exacerbated > by a disjointed approach. "A fragmented and uncoordinated approach risks > hampering the effectiveness of measures aimed at combating the Covid-19 > crisis, whilst also causing serious harm to the single market and to > fundamental rights and freedoms," the paper reads.</comment>


Compiling machine learning programs via high-level tracing [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.sysml.cc/doc/146.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> Those code examples look very clean:

[https://github.com/google/jax/tree/master/examples](https://github.com/google/jax/tree/master/examples)

</comment><comment><USER2> So the benefits of this are...?

Simpler code?

Higher performance?

Ability to target many architectures without tuning?

It would be nice to have numbers proving/quantifying the above.

<comment><USER3> Presumably the main benefit is:

         ... capable of scaling to multi-core Cloud TPUs.

This is Google after all.</comment></comment>


Reflecting on our "SourceSafe Must Die" Campaign - <AUTHOR> http://www.ericsink.com/entries/why_so_serious.html

<comment><USER2> >In high school, popularity is correlated with several factors

Most notably it is NOT associated with intelligence, competence, or quality. As pg noted in his nerds essay, it is mostly correlated with having nothing better to do with their time.

So I guess your point is that SourceSafe is better than Vault, but you should use Vault to be a cool, non-nerd?</comment>


Small Business HOWTO: Buy a networked copy/scan/fax/printer - <AUTHOR> http://blog.seliger.com/2009/10/25/tools-grant-writing-and/

<comment><USER2> I suppose some people need something that beefy but I can't imagine many startups need it their first couple years.

We've gotten by with just a cheap Brother networked laser printer for 3 years. If we need to fax something, we walk a block to the blueprint shop and pay $1

<comment><AUTHOR> It also depends on the nature of your business -- in our case, we deal with a lot of paper and a lot of technologically unsophisticated clients. And when we need to prepare a proposal for submission on a deadline, having the copier in- house and with zero problems is crucial.

"If we need to fax something, we walk a block to the blueprint shop and pay $1."

Right -- and if you fax something once a month, this makes sense. But if you fax something once a week, it probably doesn't -- especially if you need to, say, scan multi-page documents regularly, and so forth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I just want a scanner with wifi that will save direct to a Dropbox account or fax direct with eFax. < $300

<comment><AUTHOR> Try the Fujitsu Snapscan. I think you can set an automatic folder.</comment></comment>


A Rabbi Selling Kosher Vibrators - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-05-20/toy-vey-the-rabbi-selling-kosher-vibrators <comment><USER2> I find it surreal how this article is reporting about a business based in an Israeli settlement in the Palestinian West Bank as if that's completely normal and isn't part of a horrible colonial occupation by any international standard.

</comment><comment><USER3>
       Israel's ultra-Orthodox population is a significant and
       growing market, making up about 11 percent of the
       country's 8.3 million people. The community is expected
       to comprise about 18 percent of Israel's population
       within 15 years, according to government statistics.

I just can't understand how this is happening. This is not how it -- meaning the progress of civilization -- was supposed to go.

<comment><USER4> This comment seems strange and misguided at best. Practice of religion or beliefs (especially when not infringing on other's rights to do so) is, I can only hope, _exactly_ how civilization should progress.

Instead, looking down on a group of people because they are ultra-orthodox (in any religion) - is "not how it...was supposed to go."

<comment><USER5> Ultra-orthodox members are not known for their tolerance of other people's freedoms. That's one _giant_ caveat you've got there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yet another extreme religion being incredibly damaging to society and women in particular.

<comment><USER7> Unfortunately we see people continue gullible to extremism in order to find a life purpose, but it's maybe a commentary on our materialistic and empty capitalistic system (which has all the wrong incentives lined up to stifle education about the wealth of life experiences you could have to find purpose) that religion has been steadily on the rise. Religion gets adepts both from oppressed camps as well as disillusioned followers of the "things" religion-- that is, more power and things as a life purpose. Extremism happens because it's much easier for a person made ignorant and alienated by our society to accept a system of thought wholesale, as a framework, otherwise there would be too much friction in their heads to enjoy the religious experiences (much like an athlete can't have cognitive friction when performing). It's the sense of bonding, community and shared powerful, meaningful experiences that keep extremists together. Once our educational system gets its act together on teaching how people can find these things elsewhere it should get better.

That said, in this case, the article points to some rabbis with a more progressive mindset who may shake things up a bit from inside their society. Not necessarily promising but it's nice to hear of an oasis of good sense/empathy/tolerance once in a while.

<comment><USER6> The most progressive rabbi would not be a rabbi at all.

Fairy tales are for children, most people outgrow them.

Mass religion is very damaging to mass society.

<comment><USER7> Actually the article states the views very clearly: orthodox rabbis who believe deeply in their mindset but accept modern life's progresses as not being a threat to them. They deeply believe something yet accept/tolerate those without the same strict views. I find it to be a good compromise (for them, not for me.) I'll give you that "progressive" was not a good word, though I was talking about whatever you'll call the rabbis described in the article.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why is nobody making a bank for Virtual Currencies? - <AUTHOR>

I just had this weird idea of having a central bank like place for virtual currency and wondered how come nobody has done it. Is it because of a non standard market or because there is just no market? The closest thing I could find was http://www.vencurrency.com/ <comment><USER2> Right now I think noone is building such a thing because it's not clear that the feds won't shut it down as soon as they notice. This isn't a big problem for _users_ of virtual currencies, but people running an exchange market could be prosecuted on money laundering charges at the very least.

If there were legal precedent that virtual currencies are fully legal to exchange with USD, I think you'd find that exchanges would mushroom overnight, and that virtual currency (particularly Bitcoin) would have a huge spike in value.

<comment><USER3> But "virtual currencies" are fully legal to exchange with USD. Purchase Facebook Credits for cash. And perhaps this could be an exchange for just non- monetary currencies. Credits for Credits.

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately the law doesn't always make logical sense. The real question is, do you think the government will accept the full use of an untraceable, uncontrollable, hard-to-audit, hard-to-tax alternative currency without any kind of opposition?

<comment><USER4> I agree. Theres also barriers with banks/exchanges getting in the way and lobbying a startup out of existence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The big virtual currencies - Facebook credits, cash and coins in Zynga games - don't work like regular currencies. You can't exchange them for cash, you can't send them to other people, and at any time the entity that controls the currency can change the amount you have.

So a third-party bank doesn't make much sense. The companies that created the currencies want to retain control over them.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very interesting Wednesday morning thought, might take a little while to implement. Let me know if you need any help. Don't know why people "need" to trade virtual currency aside from buyers remorse, money laundering or tax evasion. It could definitely cover a wide variety of digital goods. Virtual currency will be big.

</comment><comment><USER6> What about BitCoin? <http://www.bitcoin.org/>

I think one of the more compelling aspects of these virtual currencies is the decentralized nature.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is the thing. There are so many of them, Bitcoin being the most extreme in the spectrum of being virtual. Others being Facebook credit, Zynga Cash, Playdom Credits etc. With so many forms should not one have a central form to manage and transfer them. I mean it is certainly way ahead of it's time and assumes virtual currency will be big, but still.</comment></comment>


UpCounsel Shutting Down - <AUTHOR> https://www.upcounsel.com/blog/we-thank-you-for-your-support <comment><USER2> Silicon Valley has consistently failed to disrupt legal markets, not just because lawyers are a protectionist guild, but also because clients seem to want to overpay. It's a pathology that has something to do with the idea that the higher cost is worthwhile. As a lawyer who has been both a BigLaw attorney and in-house counsel, I find the premise that name brand law firms are worth their fees to be totally wrong. The incentives for any lawyer who is on the clock are contrary to your own best interests, and even more so when they have to pay for a pyramid scheme of senior partners, expensive offices, first-class airfares, etc.

Try going through a funding round with well-known VCs. I bet they all still use Gunderson and Wilson Sonsini instead of the "disruptors" in their own portfolios.

<comment><USER3> I think the customers don't know how to _use_ legal counsel and somehow don't want to learn. I agree it's bizarre.

I have used Gunderson Dettmer since they started (was before that one of VLG's first accounts) and have very low legal bills. But I know when to use them and when not to. And when a partner is needed (almost never) and when I can get as good or better from an associate.

Another weird thing is that many customers value the firm and not the partner (I don't really use the firm GD, I use specific people). I "used" Cooley for one specific firm but really I used one person and when he decamped for another firm my company moved with him. Likewise just because that company used Cooley for general corporate law didn't mean we even considered their patent team.

<comment><USER4> I really hope I never have to learn how to use legal counsel.

Businesses, of course, have to, but even there it's hard. How does one "shop around" for a lawyer? On what basis can I judge whether somebody is sufficiently smart, hard working, and experienced in the domains I will require?

If I had to do it every day, I'd learn through a series of mistakes. In fact, that's basically what I have done, on the few occasions I've needed a lawyer -- I'm pretty sure I've gotten poor-quality work, but even now I don't really know. I know that I'm not happy with the results in every case, but I have no idea if a different lawyer would have done better.

That has mostly left me really hoping I never need an attorney for my personal life. Which I will, some day -- and suspect my heirs will complain about my choice.

<comment><USER3> You should meet a friendly lawyer (perhaps an ex classmate who went to law school) and have them "show you the ropes". There's a ton of unnecessary crap that customers (err, "clients") ask for or could and should do themselves.

And there are places lawyers can help a lot (hint: typically _not_ business decisions).

<comment><USER5> hijacking this to show off something my lawyer friend and I are working on (we're in YC startup school now). we both agree with some of the comments in this thread. this is a lite landing page but we have mvp almost complete: [https://thecaseyak.com/](https://thecaseyak.com/)

It's a ML backed plugin that helps injured people receive a data backed case estimate for a personal injury claim, and law firms receive leads with the data backed case value (it's also available in Spanish and fully accessible).

We're looking for beta testers right now - if anyone is in the PI law world and wants to try it out, let us know!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> \- "journey": check

\- "humbled, honored": check

\- complete shutdown < 30 days: check

\- no context on what, why, and how it happened: check.

This is a sour post, sorry for that. Startups are hard, no question about that.

But as mentioned elsewhere, this type of posts just adds more damage and unclarity to a situation that is probably pretty dramatic for the founders, customer and employees.

<comment><USER7> These are the scammers that would report 4,000 5 star reviews for tiny law firms supposedly handling high end ip matters? It was a total scam set of ratings (they claimed to just use top 5% of firms as well but the "ratings" they claimed users left were garbage) - their transparency might have to be "we were caught making up reviews of attorneys on our site"? Don't know details but someone could find a bar complaint or lawsuit I think

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> So I started legal tech myself and am familiar with Upcounsel.

They struggled to build a sustainable network effect in their marketplace due to regulation (split fee is prohibited) and business model. Regulation deterred lots of lawyer to join in fear of losing their licence (despite the fact they already had a significant number) and thus increasing CAC of acquiring supply.

Second, legal service are very punctual (dont need them often) which mean its a low frquency purchase which again increase CAC.

Competion with traditional law firm on top of it didnt help. In marketplace you need absolutely a community that fuel word of mouth and network effect but in this case lawyer just couldnt rally as much as they wanted (regulation).

good idea, good founders, good product (yes there was some bad reviews but nothing out of the ordinary for an online marketplace/or any business) but in the end, business model didnt work. Avvo had similar issue and closed one of their product. Looking forward to their next startup.

</comment><comment><USER9> I know these situations can be painful, (and there may be concerns re: confidentiality), but I really wish more founders would share a bit more detail describing what went wrong.

This kind of candor would be hugely valuable to other founders who are still in the trenches.

</comment><comment><USER10> I just discovered UpCounsel recently and it has been extremely helpful for keeping costs down at a startup. Very disappointed as I was looking forward to using for years to come. I especially like how fees were clearly displayed and lawyers were able to compete to get the job.

<comment><USER11> You created an account just to hype a dead start-up?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> That's too bad, I'm based in Poland but I used them often to register trademarks in the US and ask legal questions about doing business there. It was very helpful and transparent with pricing.

Are there any good alternatives?

</comment><comment><USER13> A good alternative is [http://www.legal-marketplace.com](http://www.legal- marketplace.com). They also offer buy here services and the ability to get proposals online.

</comment><comment><USER14> Huh, I have just been looking to get some legal advice and this seems like exactly the kind of service I'd want to use. Shame it's shutting down.

Does anybody know similar services?

<comment><USER15> A good alternative is [https://www.lawtrades.com](https://www.lawtrades.com)

Also you can call local offices and individual lawyers and build up a long- term relationship. I've done that for previous startups and they can easily handle most general work and introduce you to any specialists you need, while saving all the overhead of going with a firm or in-house counsel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Unfortunately no details on the cause. The business model is valid and perfectly sustainable so it should be good news for LawTrades and the others.

</comment><comment><USER16> No details on the reasoning why?

</comment><comment><USER17> Ads all over a startup blog. Hrmm.

<comment><USER18> Yep, I thought that was odd too. I wonder if they always had ads or trying to milk the news they are shutting down?

I kinda always felt ads on a business blog was kinda unprofessional unless you had a general tech/news type blog or the ads on your business blog is for your own products/sponsors/community, etc instead of general unrelated third party ads.

Also I guess another flaw of using ad networks for your own company blog, someone could pay money to display ads for their competitors product on their competitors websites.</comment></comment>


Are random trading strategies more successful than technical ones? (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1303.4351 <comment><USER2> From the conclusion:

> _Our main result, which is independent of the market considered, is that > standard trading strategies and their algorithms, based on the past history > of the time series, although have occa- sionally the chance to be successful > inside small temporal windows, on a large temporal scale perform on average > not better than the purely random strategy, which, on the other hand, is > also much less volatile. In this respect, for the individual trader, a > purely random strategy represents a costless alternative to expensive > professional financial consulting, being at the same time also much less > risky, if compared to the other trading strategies._

The reference to "expensive professional consulting" doesn't make sense to me, because that wasn't a studied strategy. The non-random strategies that the study compared with were all deterministic rules based on technical indicators.

It's still interesting that those rules didn't do better than random while having higher volatility.

<comment> daniel-s Aren't fund managers on average slightly less successful than the index? Throwing darts at a board or using a capuchin monkey to decide (random allocation) is a better strategy than investing in a managed fund.

Not a joke, an actual observable/measurable fact. [1]

[1] [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/15/active-fund-managers- trail-t...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/15/active-fund-managers-trail-the- sp-500-for-the-ninth-year-in-a-row-in-triumph-for-indexing.html)

<comment><USER3> Just to clarify a bit. This is about long, passive holds compared to active trading. On average, you're better off staying long by diversifying on 500 large, successful companies, compared to picking choosing random companies on short term flips. Investing in the S&P is about as strategic and complicated as betting who is going to win in a fight: Connor McGreggor or a semi-truck carrying 50,000 pounds of lumber going 70mph. The S&P is and index of the largest 500 companies out there. Either they are doing well/better or the entire economy is going straight to shit... because, in essence, they are the economy. This article technically argues against throwing darts on a board because active managers act as the dart throwers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The basic assumption that markets are random is incorrect. Therefore you can theorize until you're blue in the face and it won't make a difference.</comment>


US warplane approaches Shanghai as tensions remain high amid consulate closures - <AUTHOR> https://sg.news.yahoo.com/us-warplane-approaches-shanghai-tensions-110237060.html <comment><USER2> Just logged in to say that a war has little to no potential strategic benefit to US and its allies.

It has several, yes, lots of downsides. Nothing like WWW3 (that's so XXs), but China will probably take the chance to hit hard, taking a long time toll from the US infrastructure, if not in US mainland (highly unlikely if they don't want to have theirs bombed), probably overseas.

They'll clear their way in, into several markets / territories, currently out of reach because US fully control them (South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Taiwan, but some African countries could easily be added to the list).

War is not really a good idea for US.

<comment><USER3> War is never a good idea for anyone. China doesn't have the resources to do great in a conventional war either, out carrier fleet outnumbers theirs about 10-1, and we have far more overseas military assets near their borders than they have near ours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Um, how many crises do we want at once?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> US gov is seriously plotting military actions to China. I don't think this is reasonable or useful.

<comment><USER3> These are unarmed reconnaissance planes. This has been going on for 70 years, Russia and China do similar things.

<comment><AUTHOR> Seriously?!

Flying warplanes near another country's border... US is so much more aggressive than I knew...

<comment><USER3> "Warplanes" is an alarmist term for a plane armed with nothing more than cameras.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to Become As Rich As Bill Gates - <AUTHOR> http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/

<comment><USER2> My favorite BillG story (told by the CEO of a startup I worked for - and just found the real version via Google). Yes, it is a standard business koan (e.g. why would I fire you because we just spend X amount educating you) but can you imagine any average CEOs doing that?

"What are the greatest business lessons Bill has taught you over the years?

Very early in my career at Microsoft, around February 1984, we found a data- crashing bug. I wondered if I would get fired over it. I went to Bill with the head of development. I was then the product manager.

It was a classic meeting. Bill was on the couch looking down. I explained that we found this bug and that we thought we were going to have to recall the product. He nodded, did his rocking thing and kept looked down. We were both wondering if we would get fired. Bill wasn't saying anything so my anxiety was growing.

I explained that we're going to have to recall the product, and that it's going to cost several hundred thousand dollars and be a hit to our reputation. Bill rocks and looks down. We didn't have anything else to say. I thought: Is this when the ax comes?

Then Bill looks up and says: "You came in today and lost a few hundred thousand dollars. You come in tomorrow and hope you do better."

His expectation wasn't that we weren't going to make mistakes. He wanted to know that we took it seriously and learned from our mistakes. That's very motivating."

[http://www.forbes.com/2008/06/25/raikes-bill-gates-tech- cz_v...](http://www.forbes.com/2008/06/25/raikes-bill-gates-tech- cz_vb_0625techraikes.html)

<comment><USER2> And, if you harbor doubts about Bill Gates' technical ability:

My First BillG Review by Joel Spolsky

"He was flipping through the spec! [Calm down, what are you a little girl?]

... and THERE WERE NOTES IN ALL THE MARGINS. ON EVERY PAGE OF THE SPEC. HE HAD READ THE WHOLE GODDAMNED THING AND WRITTEN NOTES IN THE MARGINS.

He Read The Whole Thing! [OMG SQUEEE!]

The questions got harder and more detailed."

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html>

There is a nice little koan about technical management in that essay too: "he just wants to make sure .."

* Note - submitted this last night but should have put it in the original comment - my submissions auto-bury themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think this is about as accurate an account as you'll get in regards to how Bill Gates made his money.

Yes, his entire family was rich and his parents were well connected (when most people tell the story they leave out "Bill Gates got the call from IBM because his mother was on their board")

Yes he got unbelievably lucky (so much so that he turned down IBM, sent them to the makers of QDOS, and still made the deal after QDOS blew it)

and Yes, he's not a great hacker (he's smart and knows enough about technology but the couple Gen 1 Microsoft employees I've met say he can't code worth a darn)

But even with all that he would have failed if not for his keen business insight and technical accumen. I guess you need both luck and skill to become the richest man in the world (but I'm betting skill can still get you pretty rich)

<comment><USER4> > and Yes, he's not a great hacker (he's smart and knows enough about > technology but the couple Gen 1 Microsoft employees I've met say he can't > code worth a darn)

What? I'm pretty sure Gates is the quintessential technical founder. He wrote the original Altair BASIC implementation himself in something like a week, and snuck into University of Washington's computer labs in the middle of the night in high school. I don't think I've ever seen anything that implied otherwise.

<comment><USER3> Being able to create something quick that's workable doesn't really indicate that you're a good programmer.

As far as never hearing anything about it, I based the statement on a couple personal accounts. But "Barbarians Led By Bill Gates: Microsoft From The Inside" has an account of at least one programmer calling Gates code terrible. The programmer in question co-wrote the book so you have to take it with a grain of salt but it seems true because the story he tells is one that paints Gates in a positive light (he doesn't fire the guy for calling his code junk right to his face)

<comment><USER5> One often-overlooked aspect is that for business purposes, the first priority is to have something that gets the job done. Release early and often, then iterate towards perfection - but only for what your customer wants.

This generally means that its not great, but it works. If time permits, it is great to tidy / refactor bad code, but this is not always possible. Reminds me of an item posted a couple of weeks ago - "confessions of a terrible programmer"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've always wondered if the advice to avoid argument and criticism from "How to Win Friends and Influence People" was at odds with internal business meetings. It seems that extremely successful businessmen like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Larry Ellison create a culture where criticism and argument form the cauldron from which great ideas are culled. At the same time, the human mind is seldom changed by argument or logic.

My current opinion is that the Dale Carnegie way of business is great for sales or extremely flat organizations, but in larger or more established organizations, credible and aggressive (almost totalitarian) leadership can build "consensus" more effectively through argumentation, criticism, and decisiveness.

Does anyone have any tips on how best to arrive at decisions in a <4 person startup?

<comment><USER7> In a small place like that, consensus must rule because the founders are basically equal. At a place like Microsoft, Oracle, Apple - the answer is that the big guys built the place and gave everyone their jobs so therefore they answer to them. Who are you? Some guy who just went through college and took no risk in joining some giant in their field. Who are they? The guys who took the risks to start those places. So if they think your ideas are shit, then they can say it and you have to take it. But at a company of 4 people, who are you? You are just a co founder of a (probably as of yet unprofitable) little startup company. Where are you getting the power to call their work shit from? Plus, if its a guy like that their time is extremely valuable and you are wasting it with your shit ideas.

I bet if you go into microsoft and sit in on the development meetings between a team on basically the same level on the org chart, they aren't nearly as hostile as top down reviews.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been racking my brain for months trying to remember where I saw a quote that turns out to be in that article. "The reason that you've having trouble is that you don't know anything and you're not working very hard." Thanks for that.

Lesson 8 is the best part.

</comment><comment><USER9> Anyone with Bill's off-the-charts intelligence, business savvy, and entrepreneurial drive would end up very wealthy even if they were born in the ghetto. Maybe not Bill Gates wealthy, but more than enough that they'd have no interest in reading this sort of thing.

<comment><USER7> Anyone is a lofty standard. Some is true, but you don't hear about the super smart guy who worked really hard but for some reason or another luck didn't go his way and then he had no safety net to fall on. I can take risks because although my parents aren't leaving me a trust fund, if shit REALLY hit the fan, I could always move in with them instead of starving in the streets. If you have nobody to lean on, risks seem a lot bigger when you have further to fall.

<comment><USER9> I actually know a lot of people who did that. They all got by. America at least is a very easy place if you're smart and hard working. That is not true in many parts of the world unfortunately.

<comment><USER7> A lot of people is still not anyone. I know several people on the other side of the coin who were incredibly smart and ambitious and resourceful and failed, with no one to fall back on, and now have some serious problems in their life. There is no doubt these guys would have bounced back a lot more easily if they had a trust fund to lean on.

<comment><USER9> I don't think anyone would claim that a trust fund is a disadvantage. But if the people you know are really smart, ambitious, and resourceful, then give them time. They're still just in process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The first 3 steps seem to be optional. Larry and Sergey didn't have rich ancestors or get their ideas by buying them, and it doesn't seem to have harmed them.

<comment><USER11> True, but Google wouldn't have even been launchable without his family's connections to Sun Microsystems founder Andy Bechtolsheim and his $100k angel investment.

Mark Zuckerberg is a more apt comparison. With all of the money and privilege he had growing up, he'd better be changing the world.

<comment><USER10> Neither had family connections to Bechtolsheim that I know of. Where did you hear that?

<comment><USER12> Stanford CS "family".

Without knowing the story (but knowing some of the players), I'd guess that David Cheriton is also involved.

<comment><USER13> Stanford CS is a "family" you don't have to be born into. You can get into Stanford by being good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You are a product of your environment. --Clement Stone</comment>


The Guy Who Used To Protect Your Facebook Data Now Works For The NSA - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-security-officer-moves-to-nsa-2013-6

<comment><USER2> Does the NSA offer stock options plan? :)</comment>