Apple bans vaping apps from the iOS App Store - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/11/apple-bans-vaping-apps-from-the-ios-app-store/ <comment><USER2> Apple is taking a moral stance against addictive substances? Perhaps they should ban Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram next, to really free us from these unhealthy addictions.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is just another warning to avoid being dependent on Apple and the App Store. Imagine being a hardware startup that invested in a mobile app to control your device and then mass produced and marketed that device only to have Apple pull the app without warning.

<comment><USER4> I'm not defending this Apple decision, but in general I'm very tired and annoyed with hardware that insists on unnecessary apps. Especially when they are 5% useful and 95% data mining.

Both Bose and Sony were found to be scraping listener data via their apps. I believe these are both optional for now, but companies keep normalizing apps being required and I'm very uncomfortable with it.

<comment><USER5> Someone on here a while ago said "protocols and not apps." That's definitely the right way to look at things, especially when it involves hardware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Signaling and politics. Called it in a previous post - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20942910](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20942910). If a person or entity has no skin in the game WRT a prevailing topic, but there is moral high-ground to stand on, they will get involved or form an opinion _solely_ for the opportunity, essentially a photo-op, of them standing on that high-ground. "Protect the children" is probably the most popular high- ground used in this way.

Apple doesn't make a vaporizer, nor do vaporizing apps amount to more than a rounding error in revenue for them. Right on cue, they take the opportunity to make this token action, so that this article can be published.

It is a selfie of them standing on the high-ground; in the same way people stage a carefully framed IG post of them out "exploring" when they are actually in their backyard.

</comment><comment><USER7> I checked Storz & Binkel app, and it's missing from App Store. S&B makes vapes for dry herb, which are completely outside of the controversy. Fortunately, most of their models are perfectly usable without the app so no real harm for users has been done.

While Apple policy seems heavy handed and completely out of touch, I hope situations like this will bring back physical controls to devices.

</comment><comment><USER8> What on Earth is a "vaping app"??

<comment><USER9> It controls the hardware e-cigarette.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Seems like there are still a lot of cigar-related apps in their app store. What say you, Apple?

I really can't stand all the double standards, hypocrisy, and ignorance around vaping.

</comment><comment><USER11> Steve jobs knows what is good for you. Other people same bad practises.

<comment><USER12> Steve Jobs has been dead for over 8 years.

<comment><USER11> Exatly. But they still follow his bad principles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> American tech imperialism in the real world. Apple thinks the US has the moral authority to ban the vaping apps...except maybe the rest of the world disagrees.</comment>


If you can read this you are very lucky - <AUTHOR> http://www.ahumanright.org/

<comment><USER2> Tries to be anonymous, but Google knows better. Looks like this is mostly a Deutsche Telekom AG project. _Someone_ has to make money providing this "right".

 _Currently, ahumanright.org is designing a pilot program for a developing country to roll out 10,000 end-user devices and ground stations to test the feasibility of such an idea using pre-existing satellite infrastructure. On their board, the organization has had people like the late Senator Gaylord Nelson, principal founder of Earth Day International; Lon Levin, founder of XM Satellite Radio; and Simon P. Warden, Director of the NASA Ames Research Center. So far, ahumanright.org has secured funding from Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile) and are looking for volunteers._

[ [https://www.stanford.edu/group/sdg/cgi- bin/dev/liber/?q=node...](https://www.stanford.edu/group/sdg/cgi- bin/dev/liber/?q=node/437) ]

 _Palomar5's main sponsor has been Deutsche Telekom AG, one of the world's leading telecommunication companies._

[ <http://www.gaffta.org/tag/palomar5/> ]

EDIT: As if to prove my point:

 _As the CTO of Deutsche Telekom Thomas Curran advised us: "You're evangelizing for access, expanding it. That can only help the industry."_

[ <http://www.blog.ahumanright.org/2010/10/buy-that-satellite/> ]

</comment><comment><USER3> Not lucky so much as able to Select All and then stand about 4' back from the screen.

What a horrible design.

<comment><USER4> You're not supposed to be able to read the majority of the text. That's the point, analogous to the majority of the population which doesn't have access to broadband. It's supposed to feel frustrating and exclusionary.

<comment><USER5> As nice as the concept sounds, they probably should have pointed it out. It's too subtle, seeing as most of us missed it. Even something like "You think this is hard to read? Imagine being..." would make it work better.

Making your entire message a pain to read seems like a bad idea, either way.

I sat there expecting a background image to load but ended up closing the tab, assuming the page was broken.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think it is a mistake to make something a human right that has to be provided by somebody else.

<comment><USER7> > I think it is a mistake to make something a human right that has to be > provided by somebody else.

So you don't believe in property rights; the right to an attorney; the right to a trial by jury; the right of a speedy trial; protection from unreasonable search and seizure; the right to confront your accuser? All of these things require someone else to do something they might not be paid to do or would be paid by the government to do through tax revenue.

<comment><USER2> Everything that you just mentioned is a limitation on what a person can do to another person. They are fulfilled by people doing _less_ , not _more_ , except for the right to an attorney. Free attorneys are only provided in criminal cases (which are brought by the state at great expense), and so you could say that this right is also merely a limit on the state's ability to punish individuals.

Usage of the term "right" as a benefit and not a limitation comes generally from humanitarian groups. For instance, there is no "right to clean water". If you choose to live in the middle of a desert, you can't expect someone else to bring you water.

The "right to use the Internet" is absurd. It implies the right to a free, usable computer, and free, well functioning communication systems, with free electricity. If you live on an island hundreds of miles off the coast, do you still have this "right"? Who will you expect to provide these for you? This makes no sense.

<comment><USER7> > Everything that you just mentioned is a limitation on what a person can do > to another person. They are fulfilled by people doing less, not more

Simply not true.

Property rights require someone to enforce them; police don't work for free.

Jury's require jurors who very often don't want to be there.

Speedy trials require judges and jurors to work efficiently, and again, not free.

Protection from unreasonable search and seizure requires someone to enforce it.

The right to confront your accuser requires the accuser to testify.

> The "right to use the Internet" is absurd.

I never implied otherwise. I was objecting to your conclusion that rights shouldn't require other people when the facts are, many of your existing rights do.

<comment><USER2> _Property rights require someone to enforce them;_

No, property rights and enforcement of property rights are separate things.

 _Jury's require jurors who very often don't want to be there. Speedy trials require judges and jurors to work efficiently, and again, not free. Protection from unreasonable search and seizure requires someone to enforce it. The right to confront your accuser requires the accuser to testify._

The inability to confront your accuser, produce jurors and promptly render a verdict results in the inability to prosecute, not the inability to have your trial heard by jury.

 _Protection from unreasonable search and seizure requires someone to enforce it._

This someone is the judicial system, which is (likely) the same system conducting the searches. It is again a "safe by default" system.

 _I was objecting to your conclusion that rights shouldn't require other people when the facts are, many of your existing rights do._

It is true that you never implied that the right to the Internet was absurd. That was a comment on the discussion at large. However your arguments that rights require the actions of others is unconvincing. My argument is that rights are a limit on the actions of others, and paid for by the agressor. When they are paid for by idle bystanders (likely through taxation), they are a form of socialist benefits and not "rights".

<comment><USER7> > However your arguments that rights require the actions of others is > unconvincing.

As are your rebuttals.

<comment><USER2> I'm glad that you found a friend to upvote you, but that is a ridiculous retort. If you are going to spend the time typing a reply, you should do us the courtesy of making it worth the time everyone else spends reading it.

I wonder if there is notion of wall-time in the HN codebase, with which we could only allow a reply that took at least a minute to compose.

<comment><USER7> Whatever, get over yourself. I'm not here to please you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Agreed about the lucky part, but I generally disagree with saying "X is a human right." Because different resources are always competing with each other at the margin so if you put in a huge campaign for Internet access, etc, you're probably crowding out other valuable infrastructure, like plumbing or electricity.

Furthermore you can take things too far. Water is so cheap in the US because "it's a human right" but this doesn't mean that it's above the laws of supply and demand, which in Southern California anyway means that people still take long showers during droughts, because the water's not priced at market level. See more here [http://search.forbes.com/search/colArchiveSearch?author=davi...](http://search.forbes.com/search/colArchiveSearch?author=david+and+zetland&aname=David+Zetland)

On another note, just putting in Ethernet lines and computers won't have magic side effects. I was in India last spring, and when I went out to the field most places generally had a computer. However it was almost always under- utilized; for example in one place the computer had been off for 2 months because the mouse was broken, and another place had Photoshop and was using it only to resize images because they didn't know how to use it.

</comment><comment><USER9> I would like to believe these guys but the figures seem a little low and I couldn't find a citation. What does 'access' mean here? How do they define 'broadband'?

</comment><comment><USER10> Their campaign to try to equate internet access with a human right is unfortunate.

It takes whats a very sensible overall idea that almost everybody agrees with (increasing the unhindered flow of information) and immediately makes it sound bad or controversial to a large and influential part of the technical community.

</comment><comment><USER11> Wait, wait. It's "A FREE COMMUNICATION NETWORK AVAILABLE ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD" yet only accessible to "95%" of the world's population? .. either "95%" have the technology to access it, or 5% live in outer space .. or did I miss something.

<comment><USER12> Or 5% live on Earth, have the access available, but don't have the cognitive ability to use it (babies, mentally disabled, physically disabled, presumably).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> You can't have a basic human right if someone else has to be involved for that something to happen.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think this is a really interesting idea, but this site serves only as a frustrating introduction to a blog post that explains everything.

<http://www.blog.ahumanright.org/2010/10/buy-that-satellite/>

<comment><AUTHOR> agree

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Readability design is apparently _not_ a human right.

</comment><comment><USER16> Apparently they also believe in super fucking annoying websites.</comment>


Ask HN: What is an economic way of thinking for developers? - <AUTHOR> What does economic thinking mean for developers? Do developer need to have an economic way of thinking? <comment><USER2> A developer should think of the value of their labour and how much surplus labour is being extracted. You can determine whether you're better off working on your own project and receiving 100% of your works value or working on an established project that will pay more than your work could amass on it's own. Furthermore, evaluating new job offers based on their level of security, growth potential, etc—based on your economic knowledge—is a good idea.

Last but not least, your economic ideals and positions will play a part in matters like licensing; e.g. you may want to be part of something that has a strong open source component/contribution level.

</comment><comment><USER3> In my view _one_ way of economic thinking for developers is to look at the specific value that their work delivers to the client or a specific business niche.

I see myself as a problem solver. Most of the time the solution is a system of systems with some programming included. The programming is a means of interconnecting the subsystems and coordinating their functionality.</comment>


Show HN: Endel – sound environments to help you focus - <AUTHOR> Hey, Hackernews! We are working on a technology to help you focus. Endel generates personalized sound environments to help you focus faster, stay in the zone for longer periods of time and relax better. It's an evolved procedural version of everyone's favorite Music for Programming podcast.
We are currently going through Techstars Music program in LA and we need your help. We have created a web prototype of Endel that works in the browser. Can you please test it during one of your deep work sessions and provide feedback? There's also an iOS version available by request.
Please visit https://work.endel.io and see if it's working for you! <comment><USER2> FWIW, the website just seems to load [https://work.endel.io/8_stream.mp3](https://work.endel.io/8_stream.mp3) via an IceCast server. Huh.

And if your preferred media player doesn't like MP3s directly you can also use [https://work.endel.io/8_stream.m3u](https://work.endel.io/8_stream.m3u).

I've personally found good success with just wget (and mplayer).

\--

Hmm. The sound is a little glitchy. There's one definite spot in the bit I've recorded where it's very obvious it just switched tracks.

<comment><USER3> Hi, this is right, this is what we mean by "web proto". This web demo is indeed very limited. Basically, it's a 24h mp3 recording with time zone support.

Currnently proper adaptive procedurally generated experience is available in our iOS beta (pleaae submit a request on the website and we will be back with a TestFlight invite shortly). Thanks for testing it out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm clearly missing something: I don't understand why I schedule a session instead of just starting one. Do I need to be a user of the Music for Programming podcast to understand this?

<comment><USER5> After taking a 5 second look:

My guess is that the calendar invite includes a link to the site. I've known people who will block out periods of time for "Deep Work" sessions on their calendar. Could just be a convenient way of helping people schedule those and drive them back to the app. You def. don't need to use this feature.

<comment><USER6> But that doesn't explain why you can't just start a session.

<comment><USER3> why can't you just start a session? Click "Play" and Endel will start playing

<comment><USER7> lol, totally didn't realize either that the play button wasn't just there for show.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm a user and a fan. I like to use it to sleep more than anything.</comment>


For the love of God, please tell me what your company does - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/hackernoon/for-the-love-of-god-please-tell-me-what-your-company-does-c2f0b835ab92 <comment><USER2> This is so True! It is highly frustrating, wastes everybody's time and in general the companies come off as "untrustworthy" since it is clear that they intentionally obfuscate their products/services.

I work in the Tech Domain and understand Technology reasonably well. However when i go to the websites of the various Cloud/IoT/AI/ML/BigData/Analytics companies, i am always mystified as to their offerings/USPs. The verbiage, jargon, claims made etc. are so over the top and obfuscatory that you really don't understand what they actually do. The result is that, instead of taking a bet on them, people go with a safer/well-known company a la; "nobody gets fired for buying IBM". Then the company wonders why their product/services don't take off.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think I remember hearing that companies stay elusive about the concrete parts of their business because a simplified description may be easily dismissed too soon.

The full context may be hard to explain on paper in our climate of impatience. So necessitating a higher bandwidth conversation to learn about the business allows them to free you from your own prejudices with a realtime description catered to your needs.

Infuriating and interesting.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yes, this.

Among my earliest popular HN comments, from 2014:

Please Forward to Marketing: How to present your products to customers (or would-be customers)

[https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/27d5xr/please_...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/27d5xr/please_forward_to_marketing_how_to_present_your/)

(Redrafted into a Reddit post, originally: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7489870](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7489870))

I'm thinking customers isn't who these firms are talking to.

</comment><comment><USER5> A related frustrating indirectness gives rise to another popular internet game:

      Go to the home page of an open source software project
      then try to discover the (primary) programming language.

The result can be given in minutes, or perhaps the number of links followed. In some cases, the only method is to download the zipped src, or click through to the src directory, if it is a code repository.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Found this under the comment of the cruise post. Pure GOLD</comment>


The Javascript memory leak we all do - <AUTHOR> http://atkinson.posterous.com/javascript-closure-memory-leak

<comment><USER2> The OP is confused --- a proper garbage collector _will_ collect cyclic structures.

The situation that he describes was a problem in versions of IE prior to ie8 because of limitations on its garbage collector --- specifically that it was unable to collect cycles _if the cycle involved a DOM element_. This is fixed in ie8 (and, presumably, subsequent versions), and even in ie7 the situation gets cleaned up when the user navigates away from the page (although JS that creates a lot of "throwaway" DOM elements could still get into trouble). So, most programmers really have to worry about this only if still targeting ie6.

(By the way, if you are afflicted with ie6, the jQuery 'data' APIs work around this misbehavior; other libraries often have similar tricks.)

The official scoop from Microsoft: [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/dd361842%28v=vs.85%2...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/dd361842%28v=vs.85%29.aspx)

<comment><USER3> Indeed. Last I checked, jQuery breaks the cycle when elements are removed from the DOM by going through all their event handlers and data members and dropping them.

<comment><USER4> I don't think jQuery is necessarily relevant in this discussion. This post is talking about JavaScript closures in general, regardless of whether or not it's DOM events or plain old callbacks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not a JavaScript expert, and so I didn't understand this bit:

> create a circular reference and thus, a memory leak

It was confusing because JavaScript uses mark-and-sweep collection, which can handle circular references just fine.

A bit of googling turns up this link, which explains it:

<http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-memleak/>

The problem is that the DOM is reference counted (at least in some browsers, at least back when that article was written). So, you can get memory leaks in cases where JS intersects with the DOM.

<comment><USER6> > so I didn't understand this bit:

That's because it's wrong.

> It was confusing because JavaScript uses mark-and-sweep collection, which > can handle circular references just fine.

I don't think that's mandated, you could probably implement a refcounted JS interpreter.

> The problem is that the DOM is reference counted (at least in some browsers, > at least back when that article was written). So, you can get memory leaks > in cases where JS intersects with the DOM.

And the main culprit was, as is usually the case, Internet Explorer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a well-known issue that we shouldn't still be discussing in 2011. Any sane JavaScript implementation already addresses this issue, and any responsible JavaScript framework will address this issue for you for the sake of older browsers (e.g. see the jQuery source at [https://github.com/jquery/jquery/blob/master/src/event.js#L1...](https://github.com/jquery/jquery/blob/master/src/event.js#L141)).

To say that we _all_ do this is more than a bit of an exaggeration.

<comment><USER8> It's definitely a stretch to say we _all_ run into these issues, but you'd be surprised how many beginner and intermediate-level developers don't know about this issue precisely because they've been insulated from it by frameworks.

There are plenty of situations where developers can find themselves dealing with insane JavaScript implementations and irresponsible JavaScript frameworks. While the article doesn't explain exactly what the issue is and which browsers it affects (leading me to believe the author himself doesn't truly understand these memory leaks), the recommendation given is a sound one.

<comment><USER6> > It's definitely a stretch to say we all run into these issues, but you'd be > surprised how many beginner and intermediate-level developers don't know > about this issue precisely because they've been insulated from it by > frameworks.

Or by most browsers not being broken anymore.

> which browsers it affects

Internet Explorer up to version 7.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Has this actually been tested? Does it really create a leak, and does the second code really eliminate it?

And with the way Chrome handles tabs (in separate processes) does it really matter, since closing the tabs releases the memory?

<comment><USER6> > Has this actually been tested? Does it really create a leak, and does the > second code really eliminate it?

it does not create a leak in any modern browser. The only older browser in which it does is Internet Explorer, up to (and including) version 7.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Using jquery will avoid this issue, because it automatically removes event handlers when a node is taken out of the DOM tree.

</comment><comment><USER11> See the internet explorer memory leak section at the end of this article for a full explanation: <http://jibbering.com/faq/notes/closures/>

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't really get the difference, in both cases the a,b will be stored somewhere no? I mean, when you return that function it references a and b as the original function would have and you've done absolutely nothing different.

Can someone explain this a little better?

<comment><USER13> The argument is that because in the first case, the closure is created in a scope where _element_ , _a_ , and _b_ all exist. So _element_ is available in the closure even if it's never used.

Since now _element_ has a property which closes over _element_ , he argues this is a circular reference, which will eventually become a memory leak.

It seems to me that a smart JS engine could avoid this by noticing that there's no possibility of using _element_ within the first closure, but I'm not an expert. Also it seems like a small price to pay unless you are constantly creating and destroying such widgets; surely anything associated with an unloaded page can be GC'ed regardless of circular references?

<comment><USER6> > It seems to me that a smart JS engine could avoid this by noticing that > there's no possibility of using element within the first closure, but I'm > not an expert.

They don't even need that. Any garbage collection strategy (including refcounting) have no trouble reclaiming cycle (the only GC type which may have problems are refcounting GCs, and they usually have a cycle detector for exactly that purpose).

The only way for this issue to arise is to involve two runtimes, each with its own garbage collector, able to create references between one another.

A cycle crossing the boundary will not be detectable by either GC, and will lead to a leak.

This is exactly what happens in Internet Explorer up to (and including) version 7: JavaScript lives in the jscript engine and the DOM lives in COM, each has its own GC, and they can have references to objects living in the other runtime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just a quick point, but rather than using the DOM0 interface, use the DOM2 addEventListener method.

</comment><comment><USER15> So the issue is only with DOM elements in IE 6, right? If I write:

        function foo(huge) {
            some_global_thing.call_later = function() { 42 }
        }

And call foo with "huge", huge is not saved in call_later's closure, right? And it doesn't change if I do:

        function foo(huge, x){
            blah_blah_blah.whatever = function() { x + 1 };
        }

We're still only closing over "x", right?

<comment><USER16> Unfortunately, eval() complicates things. Consider:

        function foo (x) {
          return function(what) {
            return eval(what);
          };
        }

        var theClosure = foo(42);
        var theX = theClosure("x");
        document.write(theX); // displays 42

Even though "x" is never explicitly used, it's still accessible through the eval'd expression.</comment></comment>


This Founder Made $99 from $82.5mn Exit; The Lesson? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nextbigwhat.com/founder-exit-negotiation-casestudy-297/ <comment><USER2> If I remember correctly from another article yesterday, the company went through 7 more rounds of funding after the founders were kicked out. Most of the heavy lifting was done after their ouster, so quite frankly they don't deserve anything from the sale. The company could have easily folded and everyone could have gotten zero.

</comment><comment><USER3> Basically blogspam version of the NYT article that was discussed yesterday:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6764482](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6764482)

</comment><comment><USER4> The story is originally from the DailyMail [1]. For those who don't know it, the DailyMail is a tabloid.

EDIT: It seems the original source is actually the New York Times [2], so I stand corrected.

[1] [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2317924/Five- founder...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2317924/Five-founders- left-split-just-36-000-tech-startup-gets-sold-82-million.html)

[2] [http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/in-venture-capital- de...](http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/in-venture-capital-deals-not- every-founder-will-be-a-zuckerberg/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing! NBW clearly chose a much better title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I took a class at the University of Michigan called "Entrepreneurial Business Fundamentals for Scientists & Engineers" that goes into a lot of the mechanics behind different investment avenues and the risks/rewards of venture capital.

If you ever intend to seek venture capital, it would do you well to play around with the numbers in a capitalization table. You can find decent ones online from a search. What you'll likely realize is that venture capital is only good for the founders when things go perfect -- that is, when the business does nothing but grow and never has a low-growth moment. If you ever have a "down-round" (a round where the valuation of the company is lower than the previous), that will sabotage basically everything. Therefore, if you don't believe your product is going to be a complete revolutionary slam-dunk, please save yourself and the VCs pain and misery and seek means of finance elsewhere.

Another thing to remember is that VCs typically project out for a 7-10 year exit. If you don't do that, they consider it a failure on their end. Bloodhound got their Series A in 1999 and sold in 2011, so the VCs were likely in failure-mitigation mode by that point.

</comment><comment><USER6> For the record, my unfunded startup makes me more cash every time a customer pays.

</comment><comment><USER7> It doesn't matter if you're a founder or a janitor; what matters is how many shares do you have? Just because you're a "founder" doesn't give you any special fiduciary powers; you're just a person with lots of shares to start with.

<comment><USER8> Exactly. This wasn't "his company" the instant he took funding. Investors do not give out loans, they buy ownership stakes. Multiple rounds of funding will reduce the founder's ownership to a tiny share if they are not careful with terms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Rule number one of business: do it because its fun. Rule number two of business: rule number one is wrong.

Founders can get hung up in either of these two issues, I think, in the negotiation of early capital seeding. If you're doing it because the customer wants you to do it for them, then you've graduated. Hold on to everything you're making, and don't give it up: keep the customer always in your sights. So-called capital often costs soul. Good businesses, with soul, have it because their customers give it to them - not 'capitalists'.

</comment><comment><USER10> Not a great article. I'm assuming it refers mainly to liquidation preferences but erroneously states "give away too much of their company too early".

</comment><comment><USER11> The picture of Steve in that article is just classic. I couldn't help but smile - what a funny look and turtleneck.

<comment><USER12> I still have that turtle neck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> investment is always a bad idea if you don't need it imo.

i don't particularly think venture capital is a 'morally upstanding' industry. its always painful to see rich people get richer because they are rich (even if it is because they are making smart investments and are really earning that money).

<comment><USER14> In a capitalist system, there are two ways to make money: labor and capital. Labor makes money from the production of some good or service resulting from the labor. In the case of a startup it is the founders' time, effort, and expertise in starting the company. Capital makes money off the use of the capital. In venture capital, the use of the capital (money) comes with a high risk, that the venture will not succeed. Therefore, there is a higher return. Nothing immoral about it.

<comment><USER15> Nothing immoral about it, but it's not quite as rosy as you portray it to be. Most venture capitalists don't play with much of their own money, but rather play with the capital of their limited partners. As an industry, they provide pretty anemic returns to those limited partners. But almost all make a lot of money personally, because their standard arrangement with their limited partners is to charge a portion of the principal and a portion of the return as a fee. Why do limited partners keep taking those deals? Who knows? A combination of inertia, desperation, and bad judgment. Many big institutional pension funds are under tremendous pressure to yield very high returns and at the same time often aren't run by the best and brightest Wall Street has to offer.

Also, as a startup founder, your investment of labor also comes with a high risk in the form of opportunity cost.

<comment><USER14> Limited partners keep putting money in because they understand that it is high risk, high reward. They can put a small amount in and be in on the next Twitter. Every investor should put a small portion of their investments into such an investment. Search "investment pyramid".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Its easy to say "Many founders give away too much of their company too early" but in how many of those cases do the founders really have a choice ? Most often raising money takes too long so you are left with "go with this or die" unless you are some rockstar startup.

<comment><USER17> _do the founders really have a choice ? Most often raising money takes too long so you are left with "go with this or die" unless you are some rockstar startup._

Sure, the choice is in your second sentence there. Do the math, and if a round of funding is going to dilute you to the point that you aren't going to get any return from continuing to work on the company, cut your losses, let it die, and move on to the next thing. It might wound your pride, and nobody wants to see "their baby" die, but if continuing on means getting screwed, then _don 't do it_.

<comment><USER18> Said a different way, consider the opportunity cost of continuing to work on this idea that will probably not be a big payout for you.

If your idea will improve the world in some useful way (and if the rest of the owners will let you continue on with the company), and if you think any replacement CEO won't be able to execute your idea to your satisfaction, it could be worth it for you to persist. Or it may be better to, as mindcrime said, cut your losses and work on your next idea that will improve the world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It doesn't surprise me, many founders get carried away with the tide of funding money and associating with VC's that they loose track of their hold and control over a company that they built. Doing that at times you get hit by "Too much is too less" reality.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'd rather make money from my company in smaller amounts while remaining unfunded than to fork over huge chunks to investors. Even if the overall amount was much less, the percentage of gains would be much higher.

<comment><USER21> The point of investment is acquiring capital to build and/or grow your business. If you don't need that capital, there is no reason to look for investors.

There's a gray area when you can build the business on your own and it may or may not take off without further development or marketing. But if you have _nothing_ and you need money you don't have to build _something_ , then you either don't do anything or you look for funds. It gets less simple at that point.

<comment><USER20> Agreed. I think it's just become a bit easier to say "hey let's get investors" than to look for slower, more sustainable options for growth. The appeal of investor capital is strong and like you said, necessary in certain cases.</comment></comment></comment>


Debugging Emacs, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love DTrace (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://nullprogram.com/blog/2018/01/17/ <comment><USER2> > Naturally I wanted to get my hands on this stuff to try it out for myself. > Is it really as good as they say? Normally I stick to Linux, but it > (generally) doesn't have these Sun technologies.

Since then, bpftrace[0] has been released, supposedly it's actually better than dtrace, in the sense that it's even more capable[1].

See [https://www.joyfulbikeshedding.com/blog/2019-01-31-full- syst...](https://www.joyfulbikeshedding.com/blog/2019-01-31-full-system- dynamic-tracing-on-linux-using-ebpf-and-bpftrace.html) for a recent basic ebpf/bpftrace tutorial. Brendan Gregg also has a primer on eBPF: [http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2019-01-01/learn-ebpf- traci...](http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2019-01-01/learn-ebpf-tracing.html)

[0] [http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2018-10-08/dtrace-for- linux...](http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2018-10-08/dtrace-for- linux-2018.html)

[1] that's Brendan Gregg saying it: [http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2018-10-08/dtrace-for- linux...](http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2018-10-08/dtrace-for- linux-2018.html) — having contributed to it and being one of the leading dtrace experts

<comment><USER3> The extra capabilities Linux added made it insecure (arrays), so that eBPF needs to be disabled in production SMP systems.

There's also no existing userland support. Everyone provides DTrace probes, no one systemtap probes.

<comment> Birch-san BPF is compatible with DTrace probes.

The kernel verifier does extensive bounds checks on array uses and jumps in BPF programs.

<comment><USER3> Those checks don't save you from spectre-like cache exploitation. DTrace was designed with maps-only for a reason.

Thanksfully there's now Oracle Linux with DTrace-proper.

When the usdt syntax can use static DTrace probes, why isn't it documented then? and why doesn't it use the familiar DTrace syntax then? Why is nobody using it?

<comment> dan-robertson > DTrace was designed with maps-only for a reason.

You write this like you are implying that the DTrace designers somehow foresaw that spectre would be a thing and therefore array accesses would be a risk. This is obviously false. I'm sure there are reasonable reasons to not have arrays but predicting spectre 10 years before it was found is not one of them.

<comment><USER3> Ask Brian, he did it on purpose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Once again, a lovely article by Chris Wellons. Fun to see him having idols :)

ps: the hammer story linked at the end is worth the minute reading [http://archive.is/OV1kQ](http://archive.is/OV1kQ)

<comment><USER5> Seems likely the origin of the parable is Charles Proteus Steinmetz:

[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/charles-proteus- stein...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/charles-proteus-steinmetz- the-wizard-of-schenectady-51912022/)

From the article:

""" Ford, whose electrical engineers couldn't solve some problems they were having with a gigantic generator, called Steinmetz in to the plant. Upon arriving, Steinmetz rejected all assistance and asked only for a notebook, pencil and cot. According to Scott, Steinmetz listened to the generator and scribbled computations on the notepad for two straight days and nights. On the second night, he asked for a ladder, climbed up the generator and made a chalk mark on its side. Then he told Ford's skeptical engineers to remove a plate at the mark and replace sixteen windings from the field coil. They did, and the generator performed to perfection.

Henry Ford was thrilled until he got an invoice from General Electric in the amount of $10,000. Ford acknowledged Steinmetz's success but balked at the figure. He asked for an itemized bill.

Steinmetz, Scott wrote, responded personally to Ford's request with the following:

Making chalk mark on generator $1.

Knowing where to make mark $9,999. """

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> For people like me who are not familiar with what line buffering is, I found a good short explanation here [https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Buffering...](https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Buffering- Concepts.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm a big fan of dtrace and I use it daily. However, the system call tracing that the author did here could easily have been done without dtrace. Eg, via strace on the curl process (or truss, ktrace, or whatever your OSe's system call tracer is).

<comment><USER8> The author evidently didn't find that option attractive:

« To run curl under strace from Emacs, I'd have to modify Emacs' behavior to do so. With DTrace I can instrument every curl process without making a single change to Emacs, and with negligible impact to Emacs. That's a big deal. »

<comment><USER9> The usual trick to use strace in that kind of situation is to write a script named "curl" that runs curl under strace, and stick the script in your path.

If the author is familiar with DTrace, though, sounds like that's a great solution for them.

<comment><USER10> I don't see why "strace -f" wouldn't suffice. I use that all the time for exactly these kinds of things.

<comment><USER11> Perhaps because you don't want to strace the whole emacs just to hit the curl process that gets forked off emacs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> But the pty bug still hasn't been found?

<comment><USER13> That's certainly how I read it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> While we're on the topic of tracing, does anyone know an _easy to use_ (!) tool that would roughly mirror the functionality of Apple Instruments for user-space tracking? I know there's lttng-ust and TraceCompass, but using either (and especially TraceCompas) is worse than pulling teeth. To display a simple trace in a "piano roll" / Gantt chart view with TraceCompass one has to read an encyclopedia sized tutorial and fumble their way through obscure XML (!) files to create their own visualizations. Let's just say, ease of use did not seem to be the goal at all.

</comment><comment><USER15> > Linux has a reputation for Not Invented Here (NIH) syndrome, and these > licensing issues certainly contribute to that

I don't think the author understands with NIH means in practise, and this completely misplaces the blame. It's not as though the kernel team was completely unwilling to consider porting ZFS or DTrace, it's that for legal reasons they were unable.

<comment><AUTHOR> No (unfortunately) it's NIH and nothing more.

[https://youtu.be/TgmA48fILq8?t=4266](https://youtu.be/TgmA48fILq8?t=4266)

[https://marc.info/?l=linux- kernel&m=154714516832389&w=2](https://marc.info/?l=linux- kernel&m=154714516832389&w=2)

<comment><USER16> You've also missed what was said on the mailing list message. Sun specifically made a new license to make it legally impossible to include DTrace and ZFS (and other things) into a GPL licensed project.

That's a huge difference to what NIH means, which is that just because I didn't make it, I'm not going to use it, I'll make my own version instead.

They couldn't ever use the original version of things because they're legally bound to not do so. The kernel has had a long standing policy of not keeping APIs that either they or userspace aren't using to reduce their burden and the case of keeping that API _just_ for ZFS since literally nothing else in the kernel was using it wasn't a good enough argument to keep it. ZFS on Linux has now worked around the removal of the API.

<comment><USER17> _" ZFS on Linux has now worked around the removal of the API."_

I'm just curious: how did they do that?

<comment><USER18> [https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/commit/0c593296e98e3ac95f1...](https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/commit/0c593296e98e3ac95f14704e4cee6cedb2134990) \+ [https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/commit/26a856594f731db6244...](https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/commit/26a856594f731db62446cf537659f9360261fe97)

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h > Linux 5.0 compat: Disable vector instructions on 5.0+ kernels

Isn't that going to kill performance?

<comment><USER16> Probably not going to be very noticeable, most of the cost in calculating the checksums is in IO, but it will mean that there's a lower ceiling on total possible performance.

That also assumes though that the cost for handling the vector instructions in-kernel isn't higher than doing it without them. I believe that was part of the reason that the kernel started removing this from within drivers and other parts to begin with, the cost of saving all the floating point registers and other state is actually surprisingly expensive. So it may be a complete wash in the end anyway. If the kernel is no longer having to worry about saving those registers it can mean that the userspace doesn't pay that extra cost and now your compute ability is better for it without seriously affecting any of the rest of the system.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What is the best way to hackintosh a dell XPS 15 Multimedia computer? - <AUTHOR>

It needs to get well explained if it get's to difficult..! :p <comment><USER2> This is not the place to post this question. Try searching on the hackintosh site <http://www.hackint0sh.org/> and if you can't find anything post a message there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, sorry... I'm new as you can see! :p

I posted a question on their forum, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, spelling mistake...

It needs to BE well explained if it get's to difficult..!</comment>


A movie that hasn't aired yet has 5.5 on IMDB out of 129k reviews - <AUTHOR> A movie about the Armenian Genocide, called The Promise, has received 129k reviews and the majority of them are negative.
With only 3 airings previously and an airing date today, this is clearly not right.
I hope this gets the attention of someone working on IMDB and sets this straight.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4776998/ <comment><USER2> Wikipedia has some more information on the issue:

"By the end of October 2016, before its official release and after only three pre-release screenings in September 2016 at the Toronto International Film Festival to small audiences, IMDb had registered over 86,000 ratings for the film. 55,126 of which were one-star and 30,639 of which were 10-star, with very few ratings falling anywhere in between. The majority of these votes had been cast by males outside of the US. By mid-November the total was over 91,000 votes, with over 57,000 one-star votes. Commentators assessed that these were mostly votes by people who had never seen the film, and that the one star voting was part of an orchestrated campaign by Armenian Genocide deniers to downrate the movie, which had then initiated an Armenian response to highly rate the movie."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Promise_(2016_film)#IMDb_p...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Promise_\(2016_film\)#IMDb_public_votes_controversy)

<comment><USER3> I wonder what the best solution to this is? Amazon has "Verified Purchase" on reviews that ensure the person at least has bought the thing they are reviewing. I could see a system that is "Verified Watching" which confirms the person has watched the thing all the way through. This would be easier to implement on something like Netflix where that data is already available, but you could probably work some verification process through third parties with IMDB. Of course, this wouldn't stop people from just sitting through a showing and manipulating the votes but it certainly makes it harder.

<comment><USER4> Personally I think Verified Purchase on Amazon does more harm than good.

Many of the spam reviewers are still a Verified Purchase through Amazon and were just reimbursed after (it doesn't actually provide much benefit because VP is a poor proxy for legitimate customer). I always turn it off and wish they allowed making this the default.

There are too many products, office chairs are one example, where buying on Amazon is more expensive than buying elsewhere. So in this case the verified purchase reviews are not from the consumers that did the best research... not necessarily the people you want to give credit to. Ikea products on Amazon are another example.

Still Amazon reviews have de facto standardized as the central hub for product reviews on the web. I might never buy orange juice from Amazon when it's much easier and faster to grab at the grocery store, but before I plop down $8 for a jug of organic, all natural, etc from a brand I've never heard of, it's nice to be able to validate it a little bit.

If they expanded verified purchase to include other sources, eg uploading a receipt to prove verification, then this would change my stance. However, does that really align with their business?

I think verified watching is a similar circumstance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is definitely an unfortunate event for Turks (I'm one of them) There was several facebook groups and pages distributing heavily negative opinions about movie. Comments about movie were mess. Definitely a terrible shame for all Turks. Even if they are right about history (that's really unlikely, historical evidence points opposite. As a Turk I believe that was more than a cruel war. And probably I will be down voted because of this message.) Starting a campaign against a movie they have never seen, and putting 1 star and asking for more people to thrash out the movie on IMDB, was another wrong. It won't make it right. I am truly sorry for those people who gave efforts for that movie in the name of my people. It was even 1 point last month. I tried to put my opinion about how wrong that campaign in social media. But again I have been blamed for ridiculous claims. It was just a mass mania. Craziness. Can't even find a better word to describe it. So there is clearly no hope for a Turk - Armenian peace any time soon. And I am really disappointed, frustrated for this.

<comment><USER6>
      It was just a mass mania. Craziness.
      Can't even find a better word to describe it.

I believe that you are describing it very accurately. I hope that there is at lease some research going on about how to solve issues like this because there are too many conflicts based on the lack of reason caused by mass hysteria.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> For those who don't understand the negative reviews, this is an attempt at subversion by Turkish Armenian Genocide deniers to continue a campaign of suppressing any medium that goes against their narrative.

Sadly, the campaign is working. In a time where we are as interconnected as we are, a political film with tens of thousands of fake reviews should send out a huge red flag: someone doesn't want this movie to be seen. However the reality is that not many people are even aware there are so many fake reviews. The mainstream media is not covering this issue. IMDB has not responded. I'm not sure why this is, but can guess that it's related to the subject not being newsworthy & risk of harm with Turkish relations (i.e. why the U.S. refuses to officially acknowledge the genocide).

Many people are going to visit the ratings page before deciding to watch the film, and of those some will decide it's not worth their time because of the overwhelmingly negative score.

</comment><comment><USER8> Hadn't heard about the movie but now I for sure look forward to watch it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Considering the high frequency of Turkish films on the bottom list[1], it might be the case of a number of people with too much time on their hands rather than something more serious

[1] [http://www.imdb.com/chart/bottom](http://www.imdb.com/chart/bottom)

</comment><comment><USER10> It would be so much easier to spot fake comments or highly controversial subjects if rating systems would also show how the rating is distributed. This shouldn't be very hard to implement, too.

</comment><comment><USER11> why would i use imdb without discussion boards? pretty much everything I need to know about movie i can find on TMDb.org plus discussions for each movie on top of it and if it's empty there I can just check imdb archive at hashed.io for specific movie, people should really stop using imdb after what they did in February

<comment><USER12> What did they do in February?

<comment><USER13> Amazon/IMDb closed the discussion boards. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13571893](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13571893)</comment></comment></comment>


The Great Nurdle Hunt - <AUTHOR> https://www.nurdlehunt.org.uk/whats-the-problem.html <comment><USER2> I didn't know those little plastic things had such a cute name</comment>


Netflix accused of creating fast lanes "at the expense of competitors" - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/12/netflix-accused-of-creating-fast-lanes-at-the-expense-of-competitors/?hnresubmit

<comment><AUTHOR> This is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Just so I have this straight:

\- ISP's refuse to increase peering to solve congestion issues

\- ISP's further slow down Netflix traffic while in talks to have Netflix pay for faster lanes

\- Netflix caves and pays the ISP's to fix issues for consumers

\- Netflix is made out to be the bad guy "paying for fast lanes to beat out the competition"

This whole thing stinks and the republican sounds like he doesn't know shit. So now we need to go after shop owners who pay protection money because by paying protection money and installing bullet proof windows (Open Connect) they are hurting the other store owners who don't have bullet proof windows and haven't paid out to the mob????

What fucked up logic do you have to use to get to this point?

<comment><USER2> No, this complaint is that Open Connect boxes cache Netflix streams but other cache boxes do not cache Netflix streams.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you expand on that? At the surface that seems highly incorrect. Of course OC boxes cache Netflix, they built them. I didn't see anything about other cache boxes not caching Netflix content.

<comment><USER2> I feel like I'm reading the article to you, but OK.

"Netflix has chosen not to participate in efforts to develop open standards for [caching of] streaming video. Moreover, I understand that Netflix has taken—or at least tested—measures that undermine aspects of open standards for [caching of] streaming video. _Specifically, I understand that Netflix has at times changed its streaming protocols where open caching is used, which impedes open caching software from correctly identifying and caching Netflix traffic._ ... [Netflix] is currently installing its own proprietary caching appliances throughout ISPs' networks as part of its Open Connect program. If ISPs were to install open caching appliances throughout their networks, all video content providers—including Netflix—could compete on a level playing field. If, however, ISPs were to install Netflix's proprietary caching appliance instead, Netflix's videos would run the equivalent of a 100-yard dash while its competitors' videos would have to run a marathon."

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, quoting someone who has no clue what they are talking about is useless. I can say the sky is red but that doesn't make it true.

I feel like I'm reading the article to you, but OK.

> We asked Pai's office to provide further details and sources for the claims > in the letter and received a partial response. Pai's office provided us > links to three articles describing Netflix's refusal to join the newly > formed Streaming Video Alliance, but no sources for the "fast lanes" claim > or the accusation that Netflix changed its streaming protocols to prevent > "open caching software" from working.

If I were Netflix I wouldn't join that alliance either, have you seen the members?? It would be like China, North Korea, and Russia creating a "Freedom Alliance" and then calling out the USA for not joining it claiming they must hate freedom. A name means nothing (Citizens United anyone?) and I don't trust this SVA as far as I can throw them. Pai has either been horribly mislead or is purposely spewing lies. Anyone can make outlandish claims which is EXACTLY what Pai is doing here.

Netflix has had Open Connect around for MUCH longer than the SVA existed yet Pai tries to phrase it as the SVA asked Netflix to join, Netflix said "Fuck you" and went and created OC with the intent to give their data an edge. That's NOT what happened at all. Netflix has been fighting this peering stuff for quite some time and developed OC as possible workaround. It's not Netflix's job to provide an open caching system they everyone can use and further more even if they had the ISP's would have still told them to go jump in a lake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Disgusting revisionist history. The Open Connect appliances were an option given to the ISPs complaining they couldn't handle the bandwith load, their main reason for throttling Netflix content, right?</comment>


HP to produce one more batch of Touchpads - <AUTHOR> http://h20435.www2.hp.com/t5/The-Next-Bench-Blog/More-TouchPads-on-the-Way/ba-p/68749 <comment><USER2> While selling at a loss to make profit on software doesn't look feasible in this market, here's an alternative suggestion, though I'm not sure if this is feasible either - just more likely than the first option.

Sell loads at a loss, I mean really loads. Announce that the platform isn't dead after all. Use the fact that so many people have the devices to bring in app developers, make it a more desirable platform. Then, when their future devices sell for a profit, people will actually want them.

<comment><USER3> This has been forwarded before and I agree with detractors to this kind of thinking.

First, HP is a big company that has much better ways to turn money into more money than making something people are unwilling to buy at a reasonable price.

Second, growing the webOS ecosystem in this way founds it on false principles. Everything that seems to work when you're selling for a loss, might not work at all when you're selling for a profit. Just imagine if HP started off selling a $99 TouchPad, blowing out the doors, piling up billions in debt, and then found out everyone wanted an iPad when the price went up to $500. Oops.

The best modern example of this I think is Groupon. Groupon has been growing like crazy by taking a huge loss. For every dollar it takes, two dollars go out the door in the form of advertising and client acquisition.

Groupon is already of questionable value to some businesses. When the time comes for Groupon to fix its profitability the value proposition may be lost entirely.

<comment><USER4> I might note that Microsoft lost money on every XBox initially. But gaming was a different business.

<comment><USER5> A business where they can extract _enormous_ licensing fees from content sold at a much higher price point.

<comment><USER4> You are quite right. iPad apps have a much lower price point. Apple could have extracted significantly more rent if they hadn't allowed free apps.

<comment><USER6> But I doubt that the ecosystem would be anywhere near as large if the had, so doing that could have ended up making them a lot less money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been wracking my brain on this one and have yet to come up with a theory that doesn't end in: that place is on fire. I think WebOS is wonderful, and wished HP had stuck to its guns, but this is just strange. It reeks of internal anarchy.

<comment><USER8> The HP saga is like watching an episode of "Intervention".

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Did HP accidentally just find the best way to break into the tablet market?

Sell hardware at a loss and make it up on software. Console makers have been doing it for some time now.

<comment><USER10> The analogy doesn't hold. Try to use a TouchPad without buying apps and you'll find that it works pretty well.

Try to use a console without buying games. Hope you enjoy navigating menus!

<comment><USER11> Except the PS3, which is a pretty good Blu-ray/Netflix/DLNA player and probably had problems with low attach rate in the first few years.

<comment><USER12> $300 is a pretty expensive blu-ray and streaming player.

<comment><USER13> It is now, but when the PS3 first came out it was one of the _cheapest_ blu- ray players available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Whoever made this decision should be fired.

"We took a $100m loss on the first batch of TouchPads, what's a couple million more?"

<comment><USER3> I suspect this is just HP clearing out the supply chain of already purchased parts and units still at the factory. HP's cost is probably just a few dollars per unit to ship and possibly assemble them.

I find it hard to believe anyone approved an entirely new order of parts at $300 BOM just to sell them for $99.

<comment><USER10> You may be right, but if it's not an ops guy getting fired, then it should be a PR guy. I mean, look at this:

"Before I share, let me first say thank you for enthusiasm for this product. Since we announced the price drop, the number of inquiries about the product and the speed at which it disappeared from inventory has been stunning. I think it's safe to say we were pleasantly surprised by the response.

Despite announcing an end to manufacturing webOS hardware, we have decided to produce one last run of TouchPads to meet unfulfilled demand."

They didn't decide to produce one last run to meet unfulfilled demand, they're producing one last run to get rid of unused parts. Just put the new devices up on the store and send out a tweet; don't spin this like some grand gesture to please your adoring fans.

<comment><USER14> I don't understand all the down-votes. This seems like a valid and well-meant contribution to the discussion, being voted down because it presents something slightly contrarian. Why is martingordon's suggestion any more unworthy of HN than the earlier suggestion that the person responsible for this new run be fired? They're both looking at this news inquisitively, trying to understand the forces behind the public actions of HP following their recent mutation.

If you're voting it down, just be sure you're not doing so out of disagreement with the points raised.

<comment><USER15> A downvote on a contributor can be, and frequently is, a vote of disagreement, regardless of how well intentioned and expressed the contributor was.

<comment><USER14> Hiding a valuable contribution because you disagree with it probably isn't the intended purpose of the system. Hiding something that lessens the quality of the conversation, independent of the skew it takes, makes more sense.

It doesn't matter what the common practice is. What matters is preserving the integrity of the discussion.

<comment><USER16> If it's heavily down-voted, then it's probably not conspicuously valuable. Indeed, that's exactly the point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Here in NYC there are many stores which advertise 'Going out of business sale' throughout the year to target innocent tourists. Wonder if someone in HP marketing thought that this would be the best way to jumpstart an initial pool of users.

</comment><comment><USER18> Looks to me like HP is fattening up WebOS for a resell.

<comment><USER19> I share your thoughts. It makes a lot of sense from this perspective as WebOS could be worth a billion or more so what is a loss of a few million on ensuring a good sale.

<comment><USER20> Same. Not sure they want the resale though, I think they rather get some manufacturers on board, license the OS and sell support. Seems to jive better with their current stated focus of software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> HP should do what they should've done a while ago: promise to make WebOS well- supported and well-stocked with apps, and bring the TouchPad into production at $200 or $250 to still undercut the competition but not bleed cash so profusely. I'd buy into it as a user and a developer.

<comment><USER20> Given that the tablets are still fetching that price on eBay right now, over a week after the firesale started, I think that's exactly the price they need to hit. The tablet simply had no demand at $500+, but at $250, people are willing to buy in.

$250 for what is essentially a handy, high-tech toy is about right. Plus, HP wouldn't be senselessly bleeding so much cash. Ebay sales show up people are clearly willing to drop $200-250 on the things, there's really no reason they should have or should keep selling them at $100-150.

<comment><USER22> Based on some TouchPad teardowns, manufacturing a TouchPad costs about $318 in parts plus $10 in labor. If HP sold TouchPads for $250, they would "only" lose $68.

[http://www.isuppli.com/Teardowns/News/Pages/HP-TouchPad- Carr...](http://www.isuppli.com/Teardowns/News/Pages/HP-TouchPad- Carries-$318-Bill-of-Materials.aspx)

<comment><USER20> Right, but recouping a $68-118 loss is more feasible than recouping a $168-218 loss. There's a decent markup on their accessories and the potential for app sales. If it drives enough demand and gets companies licensing their OS and selling hardware running it, they have a chance to make it work, and it's probably money better spent than any advertising they do. Look at it this way; before the fire sale, how often did you see stories written about the Touchpad and how many people did you know that bought or wanted to buy one? And how many stories and interested consumers did you see after the fire sale? Food for thought.

Time will tell if they can pull it off though.

<comment><USER23> I agree that this firesale is a valuable lesson in pricing, and HP clearly cut the price by more than they needed to to achieve their goal of unloading existing inventory, but there are more factors at play here than price alone. I'd bet that if HP had just lowered the price to $250 they would have sold far less units than are now selling on ebay for $250.

The $99 price point set off a feeding frenzy on this sale, and once that frenzy started people who were trying to buy the unit for $99 and failing (due to all the retailers overselling stock and then cancelling orders) were able to rationalize themselves progressively higher until they were okay with the $250 price.

I'm not convinced there would have been nearly as big an uptick if this started out with a price drop to $250. Certainly sales would have jumped, but I don't think it would have been nearly as drastic as what actually happened.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, you're probably right here. At $200-250 though, they would still be priced lower than any big brand names making tablets, regardless of OS. That alone would have sparked demand. Would it have been as explosive as it was? No, but they also wouldn't have lost as much money and might have avoided the potential doom to the platform.

Consider this as well:

[http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/hp-single-handedly- destro...](http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/hp-single-handedly-destroys-non- ipad-tablet-market/14340)

HP has set the bar pretty low for tablet pricing. All these new Touchpad owners now have $99 in their head, and when it comes time to upgrade, they will probably walk away from the more expensive options.

Personally, I don't think there is a tablet market, just an iPad market, and a big part of that has been price. Only Apple is Apple, and nobody else can demand that kind of money for what is essentially a toy and get away with it on the scale they can, for various reasons. Had HP set the bar at $200-250, they could have made the sales they were hoping to make, lost less money and still potentially make money on future, cheaper to produce hardware; or at least left that door open for another company to license their OS and do so. Nobody can make money at $99 without some huge profit margins from something else, and I don't think the tablet market has that something else (yet). Now, a lot of tablet consumers have that $99 price in their head, and it's going to be a hard sell getting them to spend more in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's pretty clear to me that they underpriced it.

They should lower the price to the point where the clear out inventory. But not lower.

Considering how much unmet demand there is at 99$ it's obvious that have not even come close to optimizing the price/demand curve.

<comment><USER25> The current lowest Buy it Now price at Ebay is $230-240. That means that's the price at which people will buy them -- but not so much that people will snap them up instantly, or the price you could see them available at would by higher.

That suggests that they could probably move units pretty well at $199 -- it's below another psychological barrier from $230, and definitely still seems extremely affordable compared with the iPad or even the Asus Transformer.

I'm not sure if they had a reason for marking the units down to $99 (e.g. "we need to get these things off the books as soon as humanly possible to get a clean slate") or if they just made a huge mistake.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Forget about HP for a minute. Are there any devs out there that are considering creating a WebOS app because of this new influx of users? I'm genuinely interested...perhaps it would be worth it.

<comment><USER27> Ok, I'll pretend to be a VC. So you make a WebOS game/app. What kind of users do you expect to have? A whole bunch of cheapos who bought the tablet because it was $99. And how much do you think those people will pay for your app?

Next question. Word of mouth. If those people like your app, they'll tell friends. Will those friends have WebOS tablets?

Let's talk about the lifetime value of your code base. How long can we expect to make sales of your app? After we have saturated the market of existing Touchpads, will there ever be another piece of hardware running WebOS to sell to new customers who might buy your app?

      =====

Right now, I'd say this is a cherry-picking exercise. If you can port an existing app to WebOS and make money on a short-term basis over and above your porting costs, fine. Otherwise... Android and iOS are the two front-runners with Windows-Phone-whatchamacallit a distant third.

IMHO.

<comment><USER28> Anecdotally, webOS devs, given the low threshold of competition and influx of new Touchpad owners, are doing pretty fantastic sales right now. Good for a quick return at least. Since HP's also being charitable and giving away 6-packs of apps for free (and paying the dev for each one at full regular 70% share), a couple of those devs picked found themselves 5-figures richer overnight. No idea how long they intend to keep doing it, but it seems ongoing for now.

Good platform for quick wins. Mid-term and longer, it'll largely depend on whether webOS finds new hardware with which to keep it alive.

<comment><USER20> I think that's the key; new hardware. If HP relies on the TouchPad for any more than 6 months, a year tops, they'll completely lose out on all their efforts. They need someone else to make better and still cheap hardware to keep people interested and buying. There are simply too many Android devices coming out, each one better than the last (forcing a price reduction of the last), to ride their current wave for any longer than that.

It's still very curious why they called an end to the hardware production BEFORE they had someone lined up to make new devices though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> They'll make it up on volume, eh?

</comment><comment><USER30> The offer they mention:

We are grateful for your patience and loyalty and to show our gratitude, we are offering you an exclusive one-time opportunity to save an additional amount on all of our products, valid through the end of the day tomorrow, Wednesday, August 31, 2011. You'll save 25% off all printers, ink, HP accessories, and PCs starting at or above $599.

Not bad, if there's something specific you want.

</comment><comment><USER31> Tangential: I think HP's stock might be selling for less than the company's liquidation value at this point, depending on what you think of their patents. That's ignoring the fact that they also have some profitable high margin businesses.

Sure, they're doing some boneheaded stuff lately, but I couldn't resist buying some. Buying $1 for 88 cents is usually a good move. I sold some TIPS bonds to buy shares.

 _Disclaimer: Obviously I just bought some of the stock. I'm not sure if they're selling for below their liquidation price. Check the financials yourself and do your own research. Etc, etc._

<comment><USER32> Dump the TIPS man.

<comment><USER31> > Dump the TIPS man.

I had some USD, didn't see any good buys, and wanted to stay liquid in USD. I figured inflation was definitely coming, so even if interest rates rose (unlikely anyways, but the only real risk) it'd likely be cancelled by the inflation premium.

The bonds appreciated around 7% in four months, so it worked out okay.

<comment><USER33> The big problem with TIPS is that the government gooses the CPI formula to understate inflation, so they're really providing an (inflation - n%) return, not an (inflation + n%) return. That being said, I also own a small amount of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I find this really annoying. I already wasted too much time trying to get one in the first round. Now I am supposed to waste time again?

I actually considered setting up a web service for companies doing such a thing. I think the proper way would be to create a lottery where everybody could register in peace and there would be a couple of lucky winners.

A similar thing happened with sparkfun electronics when they offered shopping up to 100$ (or something) for free - except it was impossible to get the order form to load, resulting in lots of wasted time.

In the end I tend to be angry at the company for wasting my time. So companies, if you want to be generous, at least do it in the right way.

<comment><USER35> Woot.com has a "woot off" every few weeks, and one of the items that goes on sale at a random time during the day is a "bag of crap". For $8, you're promised they'll send you 3 leftover products from their warehouse. Some people have gotten really expensive products, like large LCD TVs and laptop computers, so everyone's willing to give it a try for $8.

Every few weeks, without fail, before and after Amazon acquired the company, the site goes down as a hundred thousand people refresh the page trying to get the order form to load when that item is for sale. It's very frustrating and there are thousands of posts in their forums every time it happens from people that were there and tried to buy but couldn't get the order form to load before it sold out.

A lottery would be better.

<comment><USER36> Woot knows exactly what they're doing. They lose money on every bag of crap, the fact that the site goes down adds to the fun. They could rent more servers for the day (or hour) that the BOC is available for sale, but why lose even more money? They're selling out of them in seconds, and they're driving insane amounts of traffic to their site for the entire day as people hit refresh on a leakfrog looking for the BOC. That said, they have taken steps to make it a little more randomized, but only because people figured out how to game the system, and most people getting BOCs were running scripts to do it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Why would they start another production run for a discontinued product sold at a loss? Am I missing something or will HP come out next week and say "Surprise! Here is a great new update for the Touchpad" and start selling them for $200?

<comment><USER21> It may be that it's worthwhile to produce and sell them at $100-$150 given the sunk cost of their leftover unassembled bulk componentry.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually this is not as far fetched as it may seem. Here's a potential scenario, building on the above, HP may have entered into contracts with manufacturers for 'n' units. When they shut it down, they had only received 'm' units, where m < n. So, they would have had to cancel contracts and pay a penalty.

Here, they see a rather unusual demand and must have made some calculation that making the original 'n' units and earning good will by doing that, per the original contracts is better (even at a loss) than breaking contract and paying the penalty at a loss of goodwill.

<comment><USER38> Did anyone actually think this was far fetched? I thought this guy was being totally serious, and it is the most likely event, actually discussed in the article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> What are they thinking!? They are losing tons of cash on each unit and I can't believe that their app store is making up for it.

That said though, I bought one and never thought I'd love it as much as I do. Maybe I'll be able to get a 2nd.

</comment><comment><USER40> Just a possibility: HP is a large company with deep pockets, it can likely afford to sell TouchPads at a loss for quite a while. That would give them time to work out bugs, recoup some in apps and find a less costly manufacturing process (or let time do that work for them). If all they lose on it is $100 million a year, it might be a worthwhile investment in positioning.

<comment><USER41> Unfortunately with the acquisition of Autonomy, their pockets arent so deep anymore. They spent about 80% of their cash on the deal, leaving them with not much money to push devices like the Touchpad at a loss.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> When the announced this, I told my friends:

They will drop the price, and every person that owns an iPad will buy one, they might lose their ass on the hardware, but what happens when they release a really nice app store and they have a zillion people now with their product in hand?

I know it sounds far fetched, but.. its working, no? All they need now is the app store (is it already created?)

</comment><comment><USER43> They'll also make a loss with this shipment even though they won't sell them at $99 again. I think this is just to build more Web OS customers so they can open source, licence or sell Web OS and say "we have this many customers".

<comment><USER44> they bought palm for $1.8billion and packaged up a few hundred million in a few product launches. If they want to sell palm at a profit or break even, it might be really important to add 1-5 million users even if there is a $100 loss per device.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Now HP is not just selling a platform, they're selling a platform with an installed base, developer support, enthusiasts and demonstrated demand. This makes their business a lot more interesting for potential buyers!

</comment><comment><USER46> Can you also make one more batch of HP48's?

</comment><comment><USER47> The moment my eyes fell on the title of this article, my face cracked into a wry grin. Here we go...

</comment><comment><USER48> sometimes you have to lose money to make money. maybe they're trying to capture the long tail of ad/apps revenue? it's a very risky move nonetheless.

<comment><USER23> I think the first part of your post is correct, but I think it has less to do with ad/apps revenue, and more to do with engendering good will toward the WebOS brand to keep the resell value of the IP high.

The Touchpad sale thus far has tarnished the reputations of a few third party resellers who mishandled inventory management during the firesale, see:

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/seller/at-a- glance.html?ie=UTF...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/seller/at-a- glance.html?ie=UTF8&seller=A33Y0YQUZ2NYD5) (note 30 day negative percentage)

<http://www.resellerratings.com/store/Onsale>

<http://www.resellerratings.com/store/Datavis>

By making more units HP comes across as the 'good guy' here towards the (perhaps bargain-minded) early adopters and gives people an increased positive impression of the WebOS brand and I think they are hoping that'll help them get back something closer to what they paid for Palm when they attempt to resell it all (which I think they will do, though obviously this is just speculation on my part).

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> IT WAS SAID THAT ALL WHO SIGNED UP WOULD GET AN EMAIL TODAY AND THATS NOT TRUE.I CALLED AN SPOKE WITH A PERSON AND GAVE MY INFORMATION BUT DID NOT RECIEVE AN ALERT TODAY.

<comment><USER50> Did you yell at them on the phone? FYI that is why you got downvoted here. Caps lock is frowned upon and considered yelling in many online communities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> seriously?

</comment><comment><USER52> If labor and shipping per unit costs $50 (totally made up), then $99 ain't lookin so bad

<comment><USER53> No need to make up wild guesses. iSuppli says the TouchPad bill of materials is $318. [http://www.isuppli.com/Teardowns/News/Pages/HP-TouchPad- Carr...](http://www.isuppli.com/Teardowns/News/Pages/HP-TouchPad- Carries-$318-Bill-of-Materials.aspx)

Even if you think they're off by 10%, $99 would never work.

<comment><USER54> Right, but that's parts. If the parts are already bought, then only labor and shipping has to be paid on top.

<comment><USER52> yes this is what I meant. Obviously they're not going to make money on this fire sale, just hope to reduce their losses a tad and get some good PR (if they care about consumer PR anymore).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Vernor Vinge: Signs of the Singularity - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/jun08/6306

<comment><USER2> My shorthand for the singularity is that it's whenever AI becomes as relevant as we thought it was going to be. It is really a brilliant rhetorical device to discuss technology.

Similarly though, you could say that pneumatic tubes are still going to be a major technology, but first we have to reach the "tubularity." When is football going to be as massively popular in the US as the rest of the world? Well, after we reach The Soccularity. Now that you presume it's a future event, you can bracket the conversation around that.

Note that I'm not doubting the real singularity's existence, just marveling at this act of rhetorical jujitsu.

<comment><USER3> _Whose_ act of rhetorical jujitsu? Ever seen anyone define the Singularity this exact way besides you?

<comment><USER4> The definition in his first paragraph is unrelated to the criticism in the second, which is that using the phrase "The Singularity" already frames things in favor of the idea that it is a real future event.

Personally, the concept has always struck me as the childish fantasy of a certain personality type. But I think it's worth pointing out that in another current article on HN (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=205869>), Freeman Dyson has some interesting things to say about it:

 _Q: Does any of that [concept of "The Singularity"] resonate with you?

Dyson: Not at all. The technical tricks these people are talking about are only a small part of the human experience. They vastly overestimate their own importance. I look at the world in a very different way. It's partly a matter of being old, but I look at the subway networks in cities, for instance. They also have the N-squared law. If you have a subway network with N routes, its value to the passenger is N squared. That's fine. But once you get to a certain number of routes, like 20 or so, there's very rapid growth, followed by saturation. This will also happen with chips. To some extent, it already has. It's true that the price per megaflop is going down according to Moore's Law, but what you can do with the processing power isn't increasing at the same rate. I remember doing a study on the cost of nuclear power in the 1950s, when people thought it would be very cheap. We studied what the economic effect would be if the cost of electricity were zero. The answer is, "Not much." It costs far more to use electricity than it does to make it. There's about a 5 percent drop in the GNP if electricity is free. So cheap energy is all it takes. The same is true of computing power._

<comment><USER5> " _Personally, the concept has always struck me as the childish fantasy of a certain personality type._ "

Do you have some factual basis for considering the claims to be "childish fantasy"? Or is the fact that it conforms to your stereotypes is enough to dismiss it without investigating the claims?

<comment><USER6> Well its certainly fantasy. What factual basis do you need for categorising speculation?

The problem with singularity is its unchecked use of extrapolation. With any kind of prediction you ought to factor in a certain level of uncertainty based on how much you've observed about a phenomena. Considering we don't have yet what we'd call real artificial intelligence, let alone artificial intelligences creating other artificial intelligences - our level of uncertainty renders any prediction absurd.

<comment><USER7> AI is, by definition, the set of problems that are not yet solvable by computers. Ergo, all AI is fantasy. Nevermind that AI has beaten the world chess champ, is used every day for pattern recognition, stock trading, and a myriad other uses.

Those who do not prepare for the coming Singularity are going to be blindsided by it when it arrives.

<comment><USER4> _AI is, by definition, the set of problems that are not yet solvable by computers._

No it's not. At least, that's not how leading textbooks define it and it's not how McCarthy defined it. Moreover you promptly contradict it: beating the chess champ is hardly "not yet solvable by computers". Did it cease to be AI the moment it succeeded?

 _Those who do not prepare for the coming Singularity are going to be blindsided by it when it arrives._

This seems to me a religious sentiment expressed in religious language. Prepare ye the way of the Lord!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>