Dropbox jumps more than 40% in trading debut - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/23/dropbox-dbx-ipo-stock-starts-trading-on-the-nasdaq.html <comment><USER2> Why do stocks have to sell at one given opening price? I ask this honestly- I don't understand how public markets work in this respect.

What if instead, a giant silent auction occurred. All potential buyers would submit how many stocks and the price they want to pay for them, then the submissions could be sorted from most to least expensive and sold at that submission price until there are no stocks left. This would maximize the income for the founders/investors and achieve a market rate that is fair and accurate.

<comment><USER3> The auction you mentioned would not be a good one. If bidders don't know that they will be protected by a single clearing price, they will drastically reduce their bids. It would basically guarantee that everyone who won the auction would be immediately under water. This risk aversion leads to people bidding under their expected value of the stock, and instead results in them choosing a price that they're much more (e.g. 90%) confident will be good.

Generally speaking, the highest single price that clears the entire demand is best, and would result in bidders submitting their most honest and aggressive bids.

The problem with IPO "auctions" is not that they're at one price, but that they aren't really auctions at all. It's just a private negotiation wrought with many conflicts of interest. Dropbox, for example, had 25x more demand to pay $21 a share than actually traded. And instead of raising the price further to clear the market at a fair valuation, banks instead used this archaic matching system to give shares at below-market valuation to themselves and their friends in hedge funds.

<comment><USER4> > It would basically guarantee that everyone who won the auction would be > immediately under water.

That's why you'd use a second price auction, or similar structure - accept a list of buy offers (price + quantity of shares), sort by price, and then choose bids in order until you've raised all the money you want to. Charge all bidders the price of the lowest offer that you satisfied. I don't think there would be a 40% pop if they'd sold shares initially like that.

The reason people use this system is that it enriches the banks that recommend which system to use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think most people don't understand that if your prices shoot up so high that means your bankers underpriced it too much and their clients made a boatload and the company missed out.

<comment><USER6> They only sold ~10% of the company.

So pre-IPO shareholders still get most of the upside. $250 million to the float, $2.2 billion to the rest of the shareholders.

It can still be a mispricing, but it isn't so drastically painful if you look at it that way.

<comment><USER7> You could argue that the existing shareholders, who own 90% of the stock are better served in the long run if the stock has positive momentum.

The calculation for if it's better to sell the other 90% into a hot market would be: 40% of 10% is only 4%. So if the initial pop has a long term positive impact of 4.4% on the price, then the existing shareholders come out ahead.

It's debatable, but I think there are two sides.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Were I a pre-IPO stock holder, I'd be extremely annoyed with the advisers right now.

<comment><USER9> Seems they would be happy with the bump?

<comment><USER3> What are you talking about? The "bump" off of the fake price that got made up yesterday?

Dropbox was worth $12b yesterday, just like it is today. And a few banks suckered Drew into screwing himself, his investors and his employees by selling shares at a $8b valuation.

<comment><USER10> They mean the set of people who actually sold to institutional investors at that price, in the process of listing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> While Dropbox rose, Box shares fell 8% today even though their annual report released yesterday states YoY growth, delivering their first full year of positive free cash flow. They only mention Dropbox as a competitor "to a lesser extent"[1] in comparison to Microsoft and Google

[1] [https://www.last10k.com/sec- filings/1372612/0001564590-18-00...](https://www.last10k.com/sec- filings/1372612/0001564590-18-006572.htm/#ITEM_1A_RISK_FACTORS)

</comment><comment><USER12> Congrats to Dropbox and to Y Combinator for their first IPO.

</comment><comment><USER13> So, basically they set the price wrong?

<comment><USER14> No, the bankers set the price perfectly. They just made $360M in a day.

<comment><USER13> For the bankers, yes. But Dropbox appears to have set the price wrong, and left a huge amount of money on the table for somebody else (the bankers) to take instead? Or does this 40% jump help Dropbox the company in some way I'm not understanding?

<comment><USER14> The bankers will sell this as building "momentum" for the stock.

It does not benefit Dropbox directly in any way, it is literally $360M that could have gone to Dropbox but went to the bankers and their clients.

<comment><USER15> Banks would make money even if stock goes down, through "stabilization" [https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-11-25/appeals-c...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-11-25/appeals- court-concludes-that-ipos-are-legal)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Would you buy their stock? What are their opportunities to grow market cap the next 5-10 years?

<comment><USER17> They have a good product, no doubt - also interesting that "Box" stock has dropped some as of this hour.

However, to become the next giant, I would imagine they need to branch out and gain traction for tangential products. They've tried (dropbox paper) but not sure it has enough market share to make a dent just yet.

<comment><USER18> I really enjoy Dropbox Paper fwiw. I use it for just about all of my note- taking now, which the calendar integration makes even better.

Off the cuff, I can see a few things that they can expand to from where they are:

1\. Give better central visibility into tasks/action items created in Paper docs without having to open them.

2\. In my opinion, they should attempt to purchase Remember the Milk. It's an extremely polished to-do system that IMHO would be well served as a rebranded Dropbox Todos/Tasks product. If that were to happen, then it would also become the ideal destination for tasks created within Paper. The ability to share task lists would also align nicely with shared folders.

3\. Get into the voip fax space by allowing users to sign up for a number, route the documents to specific folders or select an existing dropbox document and fax it to a number.

4\. Get into the Docusign/Ecosign/Rightsignature space by allowing a user to select a document and send it to people for signing. They already have all of the tools they need to make this work in terms of sharing and view tracking. They've also got built in version control, so all that's really needed is the interface to designate complete-able fields and actually go through with the signing. It might make more sense to acquire one of those.

5\. 3-4 could very easily create tasks in the task system, with direct document links and the ability to auto-complete them once the document was viewed or the task was completed.

6\. This one might be a bit more of a long-term stretch, but if they completed those steps they'd have a system that combined document management and task tracking...and at that point they'd be very well positioned to break into the BPM game for small businesses. I've believed for a long time that a more accessible BPM solution could be big...and if you've addressed the passing docs around with tasks, then tracking completion and responses part you've got 90% of the human interaction side of a BPM system covered. Maybe even just direct integrate with Camunda?

<comment><USER19> Also they could take over handling county and government forms. So much email or fax that it hurts. Imagine you fill out a form, scan it and Dropbox it into the right folder (or form upload or even email the Dropbox link as a stepping stone).. basically replacing fax and email for secure document sending.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The pressure is now on to match that price with quarterly revenue/profit, should be interesting.

Too bad crystal balls are only a thing of fantasy, I remember seeing Google's post IPO stock price @ ~$81 and saying how absurdly over priced...oh well :)

<comment><USER21> Interestingly enough, Google's initial share price wasn't set by the banks, where they took the Dutch auction route.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Meanwhile, Box is down 6% with a market cap 1/6 that of Dropbox.

</comment><comment><USER3> Add losing $300mm to friends of Goldman, JP and DB by letting them screw Drew &co on their IPO pricing to the long list of ways Dropbox has found out how to lose money.

</comment><comment><USER23> Much congrats to the Dropbox team. I know they've been wanting this for a while.

<comment><USER24> Maybe now the public stockholders will finally kick Condoleezza Rice out of their board.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Honestly, Dropbox was interesting years ago. Now it doesn't offer much if anything unique.</comment>


Indian mobile games approach critical mass - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/technology-topics/11562456/Indian-mobile-games-approach-critical-mass.html

<comment><USER2> For a title like this, they couldn't find any Indian with a smart phone or someone actually playing a game on it.</comment>


The Doctor and the Deadly House Call - <AUTHOR> http://strangeco.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-doctor-and-deadly-house-call.html <comment><USER2> Something that should shed some light on the mystery - eyewitness testimony is often incredibly inaccurate, especially when the people questioning them allow their assumptions to slip into their questions.

The fact that all the eyewitness testimony is contradictory is due to this.

</comment><comment><USER3> Clearly a case for Sherlock Homes</comment>


Sequential A/B testing at Optimizely - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.04922 <comment><AUTHOR> Seems more natural to take Evan Miller's approach and use the random variable defined by the difference in conversion counts between the treatment and control populations. See:

[http://www.evanmiller.org/sequential-ab- testing.html](http://www.evanmiller.org/sequential-ab-testing.html)

I could be wrong though, I only skimmed the paper.</comment>


Songbird beta launches (includes integration with Songkick for concert tickets) - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080822-hands-on-singing-along-with-songbird-0-7.html

<comment><USER2> Wow - so that's what you guys have been working on :). I'll play with this tonight. Cheers Songkickers.

</comment><comment><USER3> Will Songbird ever support DAAP shares? That's the one critical feature that keeps preventing me from moving away from Rhythmbox to other, more featured music players. I refuse to keep a copy of my 20GB+ music library on every single computer I own, when I can just keep it on my file server and share it on the network using DAAP...

<comment><USER4> Anyone can make add-ons for it. Check out the forums and see if someone can make one..

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very interesting. Can the concert suggestion feature recommend artists who I'm _not_ familiar with? Maybe with some sample music? I'd love to hear about new artists and genres and maybe find something new to like.

</comment><comment><USER6> been using it for a while - great tool!

<comment><USER4> I just started using it earlier this month. The 0.7 version is a great improvement.

It reminds me of moving from IE to Firefox way back (in this case iTunes>Sonbird).

 _sorry I downmodded by accident_

<comment><USER7> Hopefully, Songbird will take the Firefox approach and start innovating more. It's good to see it copy iTunes, because iTunes has a great user interface, but at some point, they'll hopefully exceed iTunes, just like Firefox exceeded IE.

<comment><USER6> I currently use Foobar to play my music library; the last.fm client to play custome radio streams from my friends, or based on my past listening habits, etc - and Songbird for mp3 blogs (I _love_ the way it lists all mp3's on a page on the standard music library format, with easy download links), and to check the Songkick plugin. If songbird was lighter and snappier, it could take on all of the above functions for me. Hopefully as it nears 1.0, a lot of work'll go into optimisation and streamlining</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The need for an Open Fitness Format - <AUTHOR>

Hypothesis: The proliferation of quantified self and fitness gadgets is leading to a new proliferation of formats and locked-down databases. We need an Open Fitness Format to complement other well-documented, open data formats which permits exchange of information between fitness apps and long-term archiving.<p>Is anyone working on this and what do manufacturers, developers think? <comment><USER2> TCX is reasonably open and extensible for any new geegaws that come along, I think.

[http://developer.garmin.com/schemas/tcx/v2/](http://developer.garmin.com/schemas/tcx/v2/)</comment>


Fuck it, Ship it - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/fuck-it-ship-it-905afd092547 <comment><USER2> Agree, without feedback you're coding in the dark and it's way to easy to get caught up in the turd polishing game. Unless you're just trying to squeeze money out of it, then by all means; polish those turds until they shine like Facebook; or better yet, get a life.</comment>


I'm not a spammer, I just need to blast these potential customers - <AUTHOR> http://rethink.unspace.ca/2010/9/5/not-a-spammer

<comment><USER2> I don't want to be "pro spammer", but this article has some sort of attitude. I usually call it 'easy elitism' - when a person can easily label a group of people 'criminal'. It does not automatically follow that people doing something criminal are doing something morally repugnant.

There are plenty of people doing non-double-opt-in mailing lists out there in the world, there are plenty of mail services that look the other way; this is reality, legal or not.

<comment><USER3> They are willfully wrecking a worldwide communication medium just to save marketing costs by forcing the burden onto innocent people. They're doing more harm to our civilization than the average thief or killer. If there were a way to ban them from ever touching a networked computer for the rest of their lives, I would.

<comment><USER4> _They're doing more harm to our civilization than the average thief or killer._

I'd be interested to hear the argument for this.

<comment><USER3> Email is a reliable, negligible cost, vendor neutral communication system that's accessible to about two billion people worldwide. There has never been anything quite like that in history, and a mere handful of spammers (probably thousands, definitely not millions) are making it unusable. If those spammers had instead each gone on a local crime spree, any carnage and mayhem would have gone completely unnoticed by 1.99 billion of those people.

<comment><USER4> So they have a global effect, true. But with spam filters that effect is very small. One or two spam messages get through now and then, but you delete them and move on. If you get murdered you stay dead, people around you mourn, and your neighborhood is perceived as less safe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm curious what people would think of this scenario:

You have made a niche software product that targets a very specific kind of small business (hair dressers, say). The product is genuinely interesting to many of them; it will save them time and money.

You have a big list of email addresses of such businesses, but no prior relationship with them. Is it okay to send all of them a one-time polite mail about the product?

<comment><AUTHOR> If you take the time to research every person on said list and construct an email _to_ them instead of _at_ them, then I don't see the harm.

A good baseline test is whether you're working from a template or not — and the answer should be no. Of course, you might have some bits that you paste in that would be repetitive to type, but in general there's a world of difference between composing an email and targeting a campaign.

Now, this might be OT but I have noticed that the most successful start-ups are run by an entrepreneur with a very specific unfair advantage: history/experience/connections in the target domain.

That's not to say you won't pull it off, but if you have to cold email everyone you hope to sell to, perhaps you should considering partnering with someone that already knows the folks you'd be pitching.

It seems obvious, but it's amazing how many folks are arrogant enough to think that they can walk into any vertical and take over.

<comment><USER6> I don't think legal templated emails are particularly harmful provided your targeting is sufficiently precise for the content to be relevant to most of the recipients even without you knowing explicit details of their individual circumstances

"Are people more likely to actually express an interest in buying the product than unsubscribe?" is probably a good rule of thumb (and that goes for opt-in emails as well)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The law referenced is Canadian, but I've often wondered which set of laws cover something like an email list (and things like affiliate links on blogs). What if my potential recipients span several countries? Should I abide by my local rules? The local rules for my email list provider (if I'm using something like Mailchimp)? The union of all of the recipients' local rules?

<comment><AUTHOR> Your local laws are the ones that you could potentially be held accountable to.

MailChimp is American, Campaign Monitor is Australia. They are subject to the laws of their lands.

However, the rules that apply to you most directly are the rules of your upstream SMTP provider. They will be more harsh than your legal restrictions, and with good reason. If we relied on the courts to keep us free from spam, then we'd drown in it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> OT: That site has a beautifully fluid layout. It's a wonderful change from mobile layouts like WordPress.com's mobile blog layout that absolutely refuses to let you view text at anything larger than 'tiny' on the Droid.

Though I think this may be an issue with the Android browser giving websites too much latitude in fixing font sizes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

Full credit to our incredible CSS master, Shawn Allison.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow - this post is so factually misleading for vast majority readers not living in Canada.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm a Canadian. Not really planning on normalizing my writing to American laws just yet, sorry.

For what it's worth, only a small portion of my article deals with Canadian spam laws. The majority of the links are to MailChimp FAQ pages, and they are an American company.

<comment><USER9> Considering _you_ posted this to HN, you have at least some responsibility to take your audience's location into account. I'd suggest a little note stating you're referring to Canadian law.

Honestly I am not certain about the point of your post. If it was that "hey make sure your unsubscribes stay under 1%", there are easiesr ways to communicate that without bashing small businesses or linking to spam laws local to your country.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yesterday, I didn't realize that companies like MailChimp had 1% tolerance, and I was hoping the article would start a conversation; it did. It seems as though this is a common enough problem that people are tweeting about my article, regardless of where they live.

You know that there is a huge start-up culture in Toronto, right? Hacker News has hundreds of Canadian readers.

Anyhow, unspace.ca implies Canada to me. I'm sorry you were confused.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The assertion that spammers in Canada are "criminals" is incorrect. Canada does not currently have anti-spam laws on the books, as far as I am aware. The author does not understand the difference between a bill and a law.

</comment><comment><USER11> as long as you provide an unsubscribe link(and the people actually subscribed) it shouldn't matter what you do with an email list.

if you send them crap, they can always unsubscribe

<comment><USER12> You're only considering one of the three parties; the spammer.

Party #2 is the spammee: "they can always unsubscribe" shows a callous and naive disregard for the depth of the problem. The spamee has incurred a small cost in time to deal with this particular spam; this may not seem much but soon multiplies; If the spammer is now dealing with tens of crap messages, on their mobile phone, during a ten minute lunch break, the spammers have just suceeded in breaking the spammee's email system. Completely.

Party #3 is the legimate email sender. Sending email is now so complicated that legimate mail users must delegate to ever more technically proficent third parties to deliver legitimate mail, and the deliverability of mail between consenting parties is compromised.

Whether or not they "subscribed" is irrelevant, due the number of ways people get "subscribed". What they actually wanted was the item they purchased online, or the service they are paying for, or whatever; not an inbox full of special offers.

Interestingly, this debate is about to blow up in a different area. The cost of access to the PSTN from disposable numbers is collapsing thanks to competition in the VOIP space, most PSTN terminals have zero filtering, and unlike email, the PSTN started being used for important stuff long before anyone started abusing it. Voice spam will be huge in 2011.

<comment><USER11> i recognize the legitimate concerns where you fill out a registration form/buy something, and they sign you up by default...but otherwise I don't see what the problem is.

If you give me your email to receive my newsletter, it's not spam if I send it to you.

Especially since it only takes 1 click to stop getting it.</comment></comment></comment>


It's Time to Fix the Broken Food System - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@G_stordalen/it-s-time-to-fix-the-broken-food-system-63877ae3465d <comment><USER2> > This week, the countries of the United Nations will sign the most important > document they have ever produced.

Glad to see that we jump straight to the incredible hyperbole right with the first sentence.

<comment><USER3> One might also see it as damning by faint praise...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Fixing the global food system. The damage this system wreaks is shocking."

If we could only invent a teleportation device...

Also, shipping massive amounts of free grain around the world wreaks havoc in local markets, driving small farmers out of business in poor countries.

We need efficient supply chains, efficient market pricing and efficient crops, such as golden rice.

Instead, we get governments interfering in market prices, blocking food supply chain companies in the name of "tradition" and blocking GMO development and usage in the name of religion and bogus science.

<comment> super-serial Over the last few years I've seen many comments on Hacker News that are pro- GMO. The thing is... I don't understand how any respectable developer could support programming DNA with current technologies.

You know how they code new organisms? They rip out code from one organism and then they randomly insert it somewhere in the DNA code of another organism. They do this thousands of times... 99.999% of the time the cell dies. So they keep trying to compile random variations of code and it keeps crashing. But let's say they get lucky one time and the code compiles. The cell lives, and then they use that cell to create a new organism. If that organism has the one property they wanted to port over from the new DNA code, they call it a success. They don't do any unit testing, they can't possibly test every scenario this new organism would be used in production, and yet no one cares.

Would any software developer use a process like this in a production environment? No - it's obvious this way of coding would would cause drastic unintended consequences. With GMOs you get malformed proteins, new chemicals/toxins, and interbreeding with other plants that could cause even more unintended consequences.

Usually I'm all for technological progress. But until we understand DNA inside and out and can precisely edit just the code we want, GMOs seem very dangerous.

<comment><USER5> Nice scare analogy for GMOs. The problem is that if you do the same thing to traditional breeding, its even worse: rather than ripping out code that you know performs the function you are looking for and inserting it into another code base, randomly or not, _traditional_ breeding (and especially the modern, accelerated forms) is a variety of different combinations of randomly mixing code from codebases that each have some of the features you want and inducing random bit flips throughout the code base, testing for the features you want, throwing out code that doesn't have them, and hoping you don't have unnoticed unintended consequences. (And _natural_ breeding is pretty much the same as traditional breeding, but without the selection for traits desired by humans.)

That's not to say traditional breeding or natural breeding is bad, but it is to say that if we reason at the level of your scare analogy, we just would avoid food entirely, rather than avoiding GMO-food specifically; you don't really provide any reason to think that GMO food is _worse_ than the alternatives.

<comment> super-serial I think there's a reason nature doesn't allow a frog to breed with a plant.

You can call it a scare tactic... but with GMOs we're doing things that would be impossible to try with traditional methods.

<comment><USER5> > You can call it a scare tactic...

I can, because that's exactly what the software development analogy is: a scare tactic that relies on ignorance of how the alternatives would work if looked at the same way.

There is _no method available for crop development_ that is analogous, in the manner that things were framed upthread, to good software development. (And there won't _ever_ be, unless, through experience with the use of the gene editing tools we have now, we develop much better tools.)

> but with GMOs we're doing things that would be impossible to try with > traditional methods.

With "traditional" (which mostly means non-GMO -- the methods that fall under that label now are often as new, or newer, than the GMO methods) methods we are also doing things which would be impossible with the traditional methods available before the time when we started doing GMO.

That's not really surprising, the advance of technology usually involves doing things impossible with earlier technology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The first problem they mention is that we waste 30% of our food. A recent study found that for seafood in the U.S. it's even worse, we waste almost 50%....but that waste is mostly at the consumer level. I don't see how that's fixable. You're not going to stop people from throwing out leftovers.

[http://phys.org/news/2015-09-seafood.html](http://phys.org/news/2015-09-seafood.html)

<comment><USER7> I wonder how restaurants factor into that, especially fast food. Any place that preemptively prepares food is very likely to waste a lot of it. Having worked at an am/pm for my first job, I was blown away by how much food is thrown out after 3 hrs from when it was cooked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "They require fewer animal proteins and more plant-based foods."

It's very hard to get the general public to reduce animal product consumption. I tried as a bachelor, but I just couldn't figure out how to make a tasty meal without a big hunk of meat.

When I met my wife, who is vegan, it suddenly became easy to lower my animal product consumption. This was because I had a good example to follow.

It's a very strange challenge, because meat is so damn tasty.

<comment><USER9> > It's very hard to get the general public to reduce animal product > consumption.

That's because animal proteins and animal fats are vital nutrients the body needs. It's also the most efficient method of transport for these nutrients; industrially grown crops cause far more damage than pastured livestock.

[http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/reversing-desertification-with- li...](http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/reversing-desertification-with-livestock) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI)

</comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands It's interesting the author points out the effects on the environment and economies, but completely omits how much violent conflicts are direct drivers of poverty.

[https://microconflict.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/conflict- trap...](https://microconflict.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/conflict-traps-how- does-poverty-cause-war-and-how-does-war-cause-poverty/)

 _This year's World Development Report, published a couple of weeks ago, emphasises the fact that one of the biggest drivers of poverty in the developing world is violent conflict. One of the biggest risks for developing countries, it argues, is that of being caught in a conflict trap – a vicious circle whereby poverty stokes conflict, and conflict in turn increases poverty._

Not sure how eating less meat is going to compete with social and religious conflicts which cause and sustain far more poverty.

</comment><comment><USER10> For those interested in this subject, there's a great documentary that was just released on Netflix, it's called Cowspiracy.

It was produced independently and now is being backed by Leonardo DiCaprio. The facts and interesting story behind the movie are covered in this Rich Roll podcast episode: [http://www.richroll.com/podcast/cowspiracy-how-animal- agricu...](http://www.richroll.com/podcast/cowspiracy-how-animal-agriculture- is-destroying-the-planet-what-you-can-do-about-it/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Can anyone get us to give up meat? Or at least drastically reduce our consumption?

I still enjoy a good burger once in a while and a side of bacon with Sunday breakfast is a slice of bliss. But I find myself the exception; most people I know expect to have meat with at least one, if not two, meals a day. Animal based food products are not as easy to scale up as vegetable based proteins.

Interesting work has been going into lighting systems whose spectrum is optimized for photosynthesis and is being used to grow lettuce in great quantities indoors[0]. We can make this happen for hybrid plants with the specific nutrient and protein properties we need.

We can even grow bugs at scale and harvest the meal...

but beef? pork? chicken? Seems to be an intractable problem.

[0] [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/japanese-plant- exp...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/japanese-plant-experts- produce-10000-lettuces-a-day-in-led-lit-indoor-farm-9601844.html)

<comment><USER12> Third world countries with starving children aren't going to turn down mostly vegetarian food. It's actually a good opportunity to create a larger market for vegetarian food options.

First World countries are another matter though. Meat is often a staple. I'm not sure how to fix that one.

<comment><USER13> Passing laws that prohibit factory farming of animals and thus raising the price of meat quite a bit would probably go a long way.

<comment><USER12> You have a catch-22 though. Such a law is probably politically untenable. Due to lobbying and the simple fact that Americans love their meat.

In order to pass you you probably have to win a culture war first.

<comment><USER14> And one should think twice about engaging in a war, cultural or other, _with the people who supply your food_. There are many ugly ways that could end very poorly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> And not a single mention of Glysophate and how it's killing the environment (and us) far more.

But Monsanto (and GMO) will save us all, right ?

</comment><comment><USER16> The problem with strengthening government and institutional influence over the food supply is that the when it comes to nutrition, the big US institutions are loudly proclaiming that up is down and black is white, particularly with regard to salt and fat. If we succeed in importing our dietary advice to poorer countries, we'll cause them to have obesity epidemics, too, without solving their hunger and malnutrition problems.

<comment><USER17> But the evidence shows salt and fat have been demonized. I know, it'll take a generation (current convinced people grow old and die) before we can kill those old ideas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> There are some problem inherent to coordinating anything on a multi-billion person scale that are monumental. You could even narrate a history of people on earth using ability to coordinate at greater scale as your x axis.

I've heard an interesting theory about homo sapien "victory" over neanderthals and other archaic humans. In some versions it's upper paleolithic culture over lower paleolithic culture of which neanderthals, early sapiens and all the grey arrears around those groups.

In any case, the theory/hypothesis/narrative is that the difference between anatomically modern humans and their close cousins and homo sapiens sapiens was their ability to coordinate on larger scales than the biologically determined "band" size. Chimps, Gorillas and presumably earlier hominids live socially in groups that vary in size within a range determined by their biology. There are no chimp kings, tribes or limited liability companies, just troops and bands. Their bonding and cooperation mechanisms are based on biologically determined behavior. Environment and even culture play a role, but 250 chimps controlling a territory that would otherwise be controlled by more smaller troops is not in their repertoire.

Imagine a population of archaic humans who, by use of language, religion, symbolism, abstract concepts of some unknown kind, oral history or some other means were able to coordinate 500 individuals, with 200 fighters. In a lot of contexts (the most obvious being war), that group would be at a huge advantage. These are our ancestors. It also suggests a gnarly explanation to the genetic bottleneck question.

This process continues through history. Mega bands become clans and tribes and super tribes and nations and all sorts of affiliations. They get bigger and more effectively coordinated. Economic and political dynamics emerge. We get ideologies and organized religions, feudalism, socialism, slavery, capitalism, monarchy, nation states, empires, manchester united and political party nomination betting odds (BTW, Trump is at 3-1).

Anyway.. food.

Based on current grain prices, the daily caloric requirements of a person costs cents, ¢10-¢50, depending on what you plug into your back-of-the- envelope calculator.

I'm not bringing this up as proof that caloric deficit is easily solvable, I mean the opposite. The fact that it persists in the face of this fact means that it is simply very difficult to do anything on a entire species scale. "We" here is a very tricky concept. There is no real "we" yet in the practical sense of an actor with agency.

</comment><comment><USER19> "Fixing" things on global scale with expectation people won't exercise their legal rights against the "fix" without any external threat (I'd say influence, but threat brings more results) is a fairy tale, utopia to be precise.</comment>


The experience of an 8 yr old in one of the best hacker cons in the US - <AUTHOR> http://prudentgames.com/derbycon-experience-8-year-old/

<comment><USER2> Reuben is a good hardworking kid, learning daily and humble at heart. We wish him the very best and pray that he makes a difference in the infosec space (for the good).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I met him and he is an awesome genius child. The info sec community should expect great things from him.</comment>


Middle-School Dropout Codes Clever Chat Program That Foils NSA Spying (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/09/new-encrypted-chat-program-thwarts-nsa-eliminating-metadata/ <comment><USER2> For those of us with adblock.

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:cUCyD5z...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:cUCyD5zSoGkJ:www.wired.com/2014/09/new- encrypted-chat-program-thwarts-nsa-eliminating-metadata)

Also 2014 article.

</comment><comment><USER3> seems to work OK with uBlock

EDIT: i forgot that I also use [https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts](https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts) so it might be either uBlock or the hosts file that kills adblock in my case not sure

</comment><comment><USER4> "Wired puts up adblocker interstitials and immediately loses the entire HN userbase."</comment>


Why React's new hooks API is a game changer for development - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ryardley/why-reacts-hooks-api-is-a-game-changer-8731c2b0a8c <comment><USER2> Appears to be replacing "mixin magic" with "useState" and "useEffect" bullshit. What is this? It does not seem to be any sort of improvement on the existing structure; sneaky side-effects and requiring a linter is the wrong direction IMHO.</comment>


Ask HN: I've written iOS Middleware. How to market it? - <AUTHOR> I've build PSPDFKit - solving a common problem in Apps, PDF display. Getting it fast is actually pretty hard. Now I build this awesome framework (extracted from a real world app), set up the site - how do I market it? Already tweeted and got about 1k visitors, but no sales. Is the price to high? Even made three categories for optimal customer segmentation. Suggestions?<p>http://pspdfkit.com/ <comment><USER2> 1\. It took me longer than I expected to figure out what it is: a drop-in developer library to help in almost every aspect of rendering a PDF in my application. The fact that I wasn't able to recognize this in the first few seconds was an immediate turn-off.

2\. Why would I need one of these? As a customer I had to think for a while to realize that this would really help if I was distributing content, like an article or magazine, converted to a digital format. I'm sure there are plenty of other use-cases. But that's not something I want to have to convince myself about. You should be the one telling me all the cool ways I can use it. A video showcasing how it works would be superb.

3\. The name. You're probably already invested into it at this point, but there's a very low chance I'm going to remember it.

4\. The price might be a tad high. The more important point here is: this isn't like a $0.99 app; you're probably not going to get sales in the immediate future. At this point I'd start aiming at companies that can use your product, reaching out to them and trying to do some old-fashioned salesmanship. Expecting people to come to your page blind and make a purchase of that size is a bit... much.

Best of luck, it certainly looks like a very neat piece of middleware!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! This is superb feedback - I updated the website to reflect your suggested changes - much, much better!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I love this BTW...

1) I think the price tiers may be a little high. Independent developers even bitch about the $99 Apple developer account fee. You need to make binary release a little more accessible.

2) This may not be in your scope, but I could have REALLY used a nice library to generate PDF's. I don't know if you are attacking that but I would definitely use it.</comment>


Mira: create simple read-only APIs from CSV files - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/davbre/mira <comment><USER2> This is not the same as, but quite similar to, 18F's Open Data Maker.

> The goal of this project is to make it easy to turn a lot of potentially > large csv files into open data via an API and the ability for people to > download smaller csv files with a subset of the data.

[https://github.com/18F/open-data-maker/](https://github.com/18F/open-data- maker/)

<comment><USER3> Interesting, I was looking into doing something similar when I wrote jquery- csv.

Have you considered including the YAML metadata directly in the CSV file using front-matter? That would make the data + schema more portable/reusable.

Also, keep an eye on the WHATWG. They recently formed a working group specifically focused on CSV. Looks like they're working to add CSV support as a web standard including inline validation. [http://www.w3.org/2013/csvw/wiki/Main_Page](http://www.w3.org/2013/csvw/wiki/Main_Page)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is pretty much EXACTLY the application my team was about to write from scratch some time in the next month. Using Mira is gonna save us a ton of time. Thanks for the awesome tool!

<comment><USER5> This is pretty much EXACTLY the application my team should have written instead of trying that buggy redis-based solution. Using Mira would have saved us a ton of time. Thanks for the awesome tool!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You've got to respect a project with 44 commits but a Gemfile that hasn't changed since the very beginning - that's some very impressive planning!

</comment><comment><USER7> Reminiscent of "Dos on Dope" (from 2005... [http://www.secretgeek.net/dod_intro](http://www.secretgeek.net/dod_intro)), to wit: "In DoD we embrace the NoSQL movement and jump straight to the data- store of the future: a CSV file."

</comment><comment><USER8> This is really interesting! Can I ask what the specific business use case(s) were behind this?</comment>


"Considered harmful" articles considered harmful - <AUTHOR>

Am I the only one? <comment><USER2> This meme has been circulating for almost as long as the considered harmful. Now I think it's time for

""Considered Harmful" articles considered harmful" articles considered harmful.

And proof by induction demonstrates that a countably infinite number of subjects can be generated by this method.

In other news, the Russians now have an "anti anti missile missile missile"

<comment><USER3> Are you suggesting we should consider considering consider harmful harmful harmful?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> See [http://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html](http://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html) from 28 December 2002, titled: "Considered Harmful" Essays Considered Harmful .</comment>


How SF-Based Shuttle Startup Chariot Crowdsourced Its New Commuter Route - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/26/chariot-new-route/

<comment><USER2> SF MUNI needs competition. Badly.

There was a time (ironically, I read this in the MUNI museum near the Ferry Building) when SF had multiple, competing services. They would compete with each other on getting people from the Ferry Building to (wherever) the fastest.

MUNI gets a good chunk of its funding from the City government; it averages around $1/ride. Services like Chariot (I have never used it, and don't know anyone who uses it either) should be able to get similar funding from the government, if they are providing local transportation. It's only fair.

<comment><USER3> Generally speaking, municipal bus systems tend to have profitable routes and unprofitable routes. The subsidy is to run the unprofitable ones. Of course some commercial entity can come in and compete on the profitable ones, but that doesn't mean they should get a subsidy too unless they also run the unprofitable routes.

<comment><USER4> __Drive-by downvoters: at least post a reply and explain which part of this you disagree with...

The larger problem is that Muni's quality of service is terrible on all of its routes. The buses are usually filthy, late, slow, vastly overcrowded, falling apart, and frequently contain dangerous and/or insane people.

If the bus system were better on any routes, there would be proportionately less need for private mass transportation.

Combine this with Muni's seeming inability to run enough trains and buses on high-demand routes, and inability to even operate what would be very profitable routes on high-demand corridors such as the Marina to downtown, and we have our situation today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> San Francisco had many private bus lines until the 1970s. They were called "jitneys." The city made them illegal as Muni service continued to degrade, to shield Muni from competition.

It's unclear how Chariot is getting around San Francisco's anti-jitney regulations. My guess is they're just ignoring it and operating illegally.

<comment><USER5> "It's unclear how Chariot is getting around San Francisco's anti-jitney regulations."

From the article:

"... Vahabzadeh says it has received support from SF city Supervisors in neighborhoods that it currently serves."

Seems like they have at least some political support.

<comment><USER4> This seems likely. SF supervisors are innundated with citizen complaints about poor Muni service on a daily basis, and seem to be unable or unwilling to do anything about Muni itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Chariot is fantastic. I live in the Marina and work on Market. Taking the 30 sucks, period. As does Muni in general. I moved back to SF in September after being away. After a month and half of constantly being reminded just how often Muni failed, or was unreliable, I gave up and bought a bike.

Which was great, but there are PLENTY of days when it's either rainy, or cold, or I just don't feel like dealing with the bike. Chariot makes those days sooo much better than facing the 30 (or whatever I'd have to take if I were still working in SOMA.)

There's apparently so much of a market here (for a commuter service not as terrible as Muni) that another company, Loup, seems to be completely cloning what Chariot is doing, complete with having people go up and directly try and steal customers while they are waiting at Chariot's stops.

</comment><comment><USER7> _...services like Chariot could end up funneling away revenues that would have otherwise gone to public transportation services. At a time when only 30 percent of public transportation funding comes from passenger receipts, squeezing those funds even further could have a significant impact on those services._

That logic is backwards. If 90% of funding came from riders, then reducing ridership would be a real threat to the system. Since only 30% comes from riders, the implication is that even if ridership went to zero they could probably keep _something_ going.</comment>


Perl Founder Larry Wall Explains His Po-Mo Creation - <AUTHOR> http://bigthink.com/ideas/21762 <comment><AUTHOR> Complete list of Larry Wall interviews (video): <http://bigthink.com/larrywall></comment>


How do you implement DI and Interfaces(Contracts) & Implementations on Golang? - <AUTHOR> I'm newbie gopher and I know there is no inheritance in Golang so how do you accomplish above purpose??<p>Thanks. <comment><USER2> In Golang, interfaces are used to circumvent that feature. There is no inheritance, instead Gophers use interfaces in code to share functionality between structs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Got it. Thank you.</comment></comment>


The man who helped Facebook beat Snapchat - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/15/instagram-kevin-weil-helped-facebook-beat-snapchat.html <comment><USER2> The interesting flipside to the copycat issue is that Snapchat _intentionally_ did not copy Instagram. And that was probably a mistake.

Spiegel was explicitly against the concept of "accumulative" profiles.[1] The accumulative feature they rolled out last year was Memories, a _private_ gallery that only the user could see and show to people in person. And he was explicitly against making it easy to add tons of friends on Snapchat. He wanted it to be about your "seven most important people."[2]

Well, turns out people do in fact like their Instagram accumulative profiles to store and share highlights with their followers. And it turns out people like getting engagement and adulation from a broader network of followers.

So, as much as I dislike the crass copying that Instagram/Weil did and his attempt to pass it off as just a "format" \-- that's bullshit, they copied vast aspects of Snapchat stories and messaging.. calling it a "format" is naked intellectual dishonesty. I noticed Weil back in the Twitter days and this intellectual dishonesty makes me respect him less.

But Snapchat also did not make the right strategic product decisions here. Spiegel, to his credit, went with a bold vision and strategic analysis about what people want. Turns out it was just wrong with respect to how people want to engage with and present their experiences to a broader set of friends.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykGXIQAHLnA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykGXIQAHLnA)

[2] [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/17/technology/snapchat- ipo-v...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/17/technology/snapchat-ipo- video.html)

<comment><USER3> I sometimes use snapchat, I never use instagram. There's nothing wrong with occupying a niche.

<comment><USER4> I use both here and have some friends using both. Different purposes, though. We post an occasional staged "trophy" pic on Instagram and get polite, complementary comments and likes and follows from places like restaurants we visited. It's not intimate or close at all, it's more like bragging.

Snapchat is very different, however. Every day has dozens of conversations with people or groups full of silliness and poking fun. It's like being with your friends in person. I would never post a Snap of myself dancing with a hotdog, or a love portrait with one on my House of Curry shots on Instagram, or have a competition with someone posting our grocery receipts trying for a certain number, or send a cute good night sticker, but it's all normal in Snapchat.

If it gets a laugh and some happy communication out of your friends it feels worth it in a way Instagram doesn't.

Disclaimer: I work for Snap, but the views and opinions offered here do not necessarily represent those of any past, current, or future institution and/or employer :)

<comment><USER5> Yup, i'm 24 and my experience is exactly the same. All the jokes or whatever embarrassing pictures or politically incorrect jokes my group of friends have are on snapchat or group chat in messenger. Instagram is mainly for decent pictures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd rewrite the title: "Man who helped Facebook shamelessly copy Snapchat's best features without giving any credit"

<comment><USER7> There is nothing inherently righteous or honorable about allowing another company to lay exclusive claim to features. That "shameless copying" is an example of competition, and it's what turns the wheels of capitalism.

What would you have Facebook do? "Well, darn. I guess we can't implement those features, Snapchat beat us to it! Time to just lay over and let them churn our users." This is not how any rational company works, and every major tech company has copied others many times.

<comment><USER3> >an example of competition

Not when you are leveraging monopoly power to gain market share somewhere else. This kind of capitalism tends to degenerate.

<comment><USER8> They gave a massive buyout offer before copying. There was only one thing left to do after that.

<comment><USER3> If you're arguing that Facebook behaved rationally, then we aren't in disagreement. If you're arguing that Facebook acted in the public interest, then you're going to need a different argument.

<comment><USER9> So you seem to be implying that ONE company having a feature is somehow better for public interest than TWO companies having that feature?

Or that it is better for public interest that people prop up companies with multi billion dollar valuations on the basis of trivially copy-able features?

<comment><USER3> If that were a complete accounting of the variables then yes, that is what I would be saying. That is not a complete accounting of the variables though.

It is harmful to the public interest to allow a company to use its monopoly status as leverage to monopolize other markets. Facebook is competing for image messaging in the same sense that Lance Armstrong was competing in the tour de france.

Monopoly is the degenerate case of capitalism, and this kind of behavior by monopolies is how the degeneracy reproduces.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I really dislike the feature of Instagram that imitates Snapchat. When a software tries to make more than one thing, it loses it's identity. I am surprised that people are still using it, but about the long run, nobody knows.

I saw a funny tweet that someone just wrote "A fear" than an image of Twitter print, of the mobile version, with small spheres on the top (like the ones suddenly appeared on Instagram), so I realized that it's not just me that think Instagram got worse with this feature. And the design solution they found, really annoys me. Now we have this on all Facebook products (WhatsApp and Facebook itself).

Talking about the software identity, I don't remember successful products that tries to do more than one thing. I think it's wrong, but it's apparently working, so I am observing and learning.

<comment><USER11> I'm on the flipside of this, I think my Instagram use is better as a result.

I shared the same friend (mostly) list between Snap and Instagram and with the introduction of stories my Snap use dropped to basically zero. Instagram is a one stop shop for the accumulative feed, stories, and video DMs. No need to switch apps.

That said, I didn't get a ton of direct messages on Snapchat, probably because I'm older and the kind of 1-1 communication I saw teens doing on Snap isn't as common for my age group, however that feature is there in IG.

I might be an outlier, though I don't think I am judging by the numbers.

On a more crass note, from the business perspective, Instagram is in a much better ad position than Snap because it's really easy to buy ad space. Not only that it's going to be easier to develop content for AR filters on Instagram because they have an actual developer pathway for that.

As far as I can tell, Snap highly curates all broadcast content and advertising, and there is no third party developer support.

Not sure why anyone wouldn't see how bad that is - if anything Snap should have learned from Twitter that third part devs are core to longevity.

<comment><USER12> I'm a pretty casual user of Instagram and I _hate_ the disappearing stories. I've never posted one, and I don't like the time pressure to view them rather than catching up at my leisure. I've never used Snapchat.

Can you explain the appeal?

<comment><USER11> The idea is that it's a more natural, free flowing expression because it's a low bar of entry that has no memory. So in that sense it can be anything you want without you having to worry if it's going to be indelible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am curious how many people actually feel this is cool that Facebook can simply copy everything Snapchat comes up with? I understand that this is the way of the world. Big fish eats smaller fish yada yada. But is it good in the long run? I don't know how to do this, and I understand any solution will probably be riddled to the core with loopholes. But I do feel like there should be some way to prevent this kind of monopolization. What do you all think from a long-term, idealistic perspective?

<comment><USER14> From an ethical perspective, I think the amount of truly unique ideas is actually very, very low, I think most ideas (including all the snapchat UI concepts) have been had by multiple people, so I do not think it makes sense to give people a monopoly on ideas since by doing so you are restricting others who may have even come up with the same idea. The amount of obvious patents vastly outnumbers the amount of non-obvious ones.

There is an argument that says that large companies are better at execution, and so will just reap the rewards of other people's ideas, but I think that big companies are actually bad at execution and they are currently benefiting far more from the current legal regime.

So, all in all, we should abolish all patent law.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Instagrams revenues are increasing because Facebook advertisers unwittingly are having their ads run in Instragram. You have to opt-out. Found that out after blowing through and ad budget that got consumed more quickly because of Instragram.

Instagram users as a cohort are the worst audience for advertising. Low conversions, lots of impressions and just all around less profitable than the exact same ad on Facebook itself.

Even music acts that would seem to be a tailor made product for Instragram – still, in my anecdotal experience, a complete waste of money. Instagram the "thing" might be a fun product, but Instagram as a provider of cost-effective advertising, no way.

<comment><USER16> Ultimately this should hurt Facebook if advertisers are tracking ROI they may just stop campaigns and go into other channels entirely.

<comment><USER15> One would think, but I think big brands don't care. They are after "awareness" and not actual conversions. It's like TV, how does one measure the ROI on a national Coca Cola ad? (I actually don't know.)

<comment><USER17> What you seem to be saying is that Instagram is a good brand building platform over the longer-term vs platform to generate leads and transactions over the short term. Unless, there is a study to prove that I am not too sure. I usually find media agencies and platforms make this argument when they cannot justify the RoI of their platform in a direct and measurable sense. It is much like how Google tries to prove effectiveness of its display ads using a fuzzy metric called view-through impressions.

On the coke bit, coke actually does measure the RoI on its TV using a mix of brand track studies and marketing mix modelling. I know this because I have worked with agencies that Coca-Cola engages to do both and is really scientific and serious about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm surprised it took Instagram this long to copy Snapshot. This guy seems super impressive but adding a competitor's features to your product to increase market share seems like a pretty obvious move.

<comment><USER19> It might be that it's all a part of execution of the product. Google tries and fails with their social networking efforts and they are also doing the obvious move and they can't .

<comment><USER20> This is such a good point. Personally, I'd rather not copy to win but in business, it's easily possible to copy poorly and fail hard.

There's a saying in Hindi - you need brains to copy well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Most of this will come down to brand equity anyway. I have to assume there are people using Lyft over Uber because those people have negative associations with the Uber brand. Uber and Lyft both provide the same products, but people prefer one brand over another.

People prefer Gucci over Versace, North Face over Patagonia etc.

Inevitably, the same will be true for Facebook vs Snapchat. Snapchat will likely prevail in a way because the "brand" ecosystem, talent pool(pr, actors, producers etc.) are concentrated largely in Los Angeles due to the existing Hollywood system.

Proximity to the talent might not have much to do with it, but I imagine Snapchat has been developing those relationships for a while.

</comment><comment><USER22> Looking at Linkedin, he's had a remarkable career. Wow. He's made it from Engineering lead at 28 to SVP and Head of product at 34.

</comment><comment><USER23> At the time the DOJ began seriously looking into Microsoft about anti-trust abuses derived from their monopoly, there were still a vast number of medium to large software & tech companies that competed head on with Microsoft. That of course meant there were a large number of parties that could sign on to the aggrieved list against Microsoft.

As Facebook formally kills off Snapchat in the next few years, it's a curious problem of which companies will supply the ammunition to go after Facebook for anti-trust abuse. Said companies will be the biggest motivating factor for the US Government to act, their prompting will drive the case.

Given the scale we're talking about now (Facebook is already more profitable non-inflation adjusted than what Microsoft was at the height of its power; and they might double their profit in a few years up to $20 billion before any government action would come through). I would expect companies to begin lining up with their hands out. Twitter as one example, stands to easily land maybe $5 billion or more as compensation for being one of the few survivors of Facebook's social monopoly. Something that has changed a lot in the last 20 years, corporate fines & costs of negative legal outcomes have skyrocketed in practically every industry. Google's worsening EU disaster is just the latest example of that. Facebook will need tens of billions of dollars set aside for settling with governmental entities and competitors (even semi-dead competitors like MySpace - its owners will show up with their hands out for a settlement, and they'll definitely get some crumbs as Facebook will settle just to move on as the lawsuits stack high after the blood hits the water).

As the world witnesses Facebook intentionally kill off Snapchat by leveraging its monopoly in nearly every way it can, there are going to be few people remaining in the Facebook defender camp as the number of major social players in the US & EU markets drifts toward just a few small competitors left standing. Snapchat better have been worth it, as I can assure you that crushing Netscape wasn't worth what it cost Microsoft.

<comment><USER24> > Facebook is already more profitable non-inflation adjusted than what > Microsoft was at the height of its power

As a nit, what's the point of using a non-inflation adjusted comparison? You wouldn't say have compared Facebook to Standard Oil :).

It turns out that 1998 to today is only a 50% change according to CPI [1] and MSFT had $4.5B in net income for FY 1998 [2]. So your point still stands given Facebook's massive ~$10B FY2016 net income [3].

[1] [https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm](https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm) [2] [https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar98/fins.htm](https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar98/fins.htm) [3] [https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release- details/...](https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release- details/2017/facebook-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full- Year-2016-Results/default.aspx)

<comment><USER23> Ok, serious answer. I used the non-inflation adjustment specifically because while I recognized enough time had passed to cause a not-entirely-trivial adjustment, I didn't regard it as enough time to matter enough to warrant a distraction to the more core points. Inflation adjustment precision is a notoriously disagreed upon thing, the more near term you get the less valuable the matter becomes. I knew that someone might lodge that point, so I wanted to potentially preempt it (hoping that it would make the responding comment not worth bothering with, that the person writing it would be too lazy to bother writing a comment just to argue inflation adjustment numbers for ~1997-2017). Why bother making the point at all then? Because it highlights Facebook's growing financial power. If their net income isn't beyond Microsoft's on an inflation adjusted basis today, it will be very soon (perhaps by the end of fiscal 2017 or mid 2018 on a run rate). Further, I suspected most people realize that while there has been some inflation since the late 1990s, it's not N hundred percent.

<comment><USER24> No problem! I'm notoriously incapable of guessing how much inflation has happened in the last {20, 30, 50} years. I was _surprised_ it was only 1.5x (I had predicted ~2). I agree that CPI is a particularly clumsy measure (not mentioned is the fudge factor in how accounting for stock/option-based compensation has changed).

Your comment had the desired (ultimate) effect though: I really haven't been watching how much cash Facebook has been generating, and it's amazing to compare it to Microsoft at peak monopoly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Good prescient analysis of the same topic from a year ago [https://stratechery.com/2016/the-audacity-of-copying- well/](https://stratechery.com/2016/the-audacity-of-copying-well/)

</comment><comment><USER26> This seems like PR fluff...

</comment><comment><USER27> This may be an unpopular opinion but I feel strongly against titles like this. They could have very well gone with "...Facebook take Instagram Market share" but they wanted to make it personal and human.

I'm disgusted by the choice of words here. One company gained an advantage over there other in a market, big deal! They're competing businesses and eventually one will up the other but there's no point in saying "down to its knees"

<comment><USER23> You're spot on that it's a bit ridiculous. It's intentional however and it's going to get a lot worse yet. Over the next few years the press will start using increasingly violent-sounding, negative, stark headlines against Facebook. Associated headline words will shift toward aggressive tones.

It's a portrait. They do the same thing to most dominant companies once they grow out of the up-and-coming phase. Amazon for example is starting to get deluged by such press coverage; Google has been the subject of it for years; and of course Microsoft went through a solid decade or more of it. Once upon a time, Walmart was portrayed as a cute & fuzzy hayseed retailer just looking to save the good 'ol consumer a buck or two.

<comment><USER28> It's not surprising that Trump rails against the mainstream media when it's becoming increasingly obvious that the news is written to rile people up and get clicks. The news is like professional wrestling - there are heroes, villains, story arcs, winners, losers, and the more you understand a topic the more you realize the press gets it completely wrong. But maybe it's always been this way, and I wasn't as aware before.

<comment><USER29> Interesting perspective, but I don't think it makes sense to take sides politically in this argument.

All media is sadly going this way, the argument could also be made that link bait titles are partly responsible for Trump's popularity. ALL media is sadly going this way. If you think Fox or Drudge or whatever are above these sad tactics, look closer.

I'd like to ask the bigger question of, how do we fight/protect agains this?

<comment><USER30> The problem is that journalism is unprofitable. They have to fight dirty just to survive.

<comment><USER31> This is why I take a nuanced view of so-called Net Neutrality. In such a world, how does anyone monetize? Well we have seen: through sleazy tracking and sly tricks to capture personal data. Personally I liked it the old way: you paid cash money upfront and then you got the product in your hand and the transaction was closed.

<comment><USER32> Agreed. I would rather have silence than constant trickery and scammy sales everywhere I turn.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


VMS OS Is 30 Years Old; Customers Believe It Can Last Forever (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://www.informationweek.com/vms-operating-system-is-30-years-old-customers-believe-it-can-last-forever/d/d-id/1061051? <comment><USER2> "Serious professional users will run out of things they can do with UNIX. They'll want a real system and will end up doing VMS when they get to be serious about programming."

Ken Olsen, founder and president of Digital Equipment Corporation. DECWORLD Vol. 8 No. 5, 1984.</comment>


How the cancel culture was leveraged against RMS - <AUTHOR> https://blog.dachary.org/2020/02/10/how-the-cancel-culture-was-leveraged-against-rms/?ref=h <comment><USER2> RMS comment was entirely reasonable if rather perilous to write: "We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates".

In no way did he ever say that "an enslaved child could, somehow, be "entirely willing"", just that she could have presented herself as being willing... The thing is there's no denying that Marvin Minsky was extraordinarily stupid to associate with someone who had a prior conviction as a sex offender and furthermore to have sex with anyone when invited by that person but that doesn't change the fact that RMS argument was mischaracterized and should not have resulted in him resigning...

This kind of mischaracterization and excessive outrage destroys rational discussion between people. It just creates a culture of fear and forces people to hide behind anonymity when engaging in any discourse over this.

<comment><USER3> As far as I know Minsky declined to have sex with her. Yes, he was stupid to associate with a convicted rapist, but he was at least smart enough to not have sex with girls accompanying the rapist. Not a high bar, but still a bar he cleared.

<comment><USER4> At the time Epstein was not a convicted rapist. However he certainly was a shady character and it is likely Minsky had every opportunity to distance himself from him. But he did not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Even more telling is how quickly this article was flagged and erased from the front page.

Cancel culture has existed in one form or another since the dawn of time, and it seems that nobody is above this behavior; not even the HN crowd.

<comment><USER6> Have you ever had to work with RMS when young women were in the room? Have you ever been called by a woman who has locked herself in a conference room to get away from RMS? Have you ever had to deal with the legitimately batshit crazy narcissism of RMS and decided that the guy was capable of pretty much anything? Well, I have. I have dealt with him a small number of times for no more than a couple of days together and in those short times he did literally dozens of things that indicate he is either nuts, a total calculating mysoginist or worse, and that he is unable to be made aware of the fact that you don't touch women's asses without their consent, that you don't corner young women in a room, and the list goes on. He can't be told. He doesn't believe it. He's not all there. And THAT is why he took the fall. I'm absolutely sure that this was the straw that broke the camel's back for MIT and everyone else that has had to deal with his shit.

<comment><USER5> So basically, if I understand correctly, the ends justify the means.

He was an unstoppable monster who could only be brought down by lying about him, and everyone in on the conspiracy should be hailed as heroes.

<comment><USER6> nope. the means justify the means. what I am saying is that in this situation, in this society, in this instance, I see a lot of people saying a lot about a lot of things that he did that should have ended his role at MIT and should have resulted in a conversation about how to keep someone like him from doing these things again. And, more than that: I myself, a person, a real person, really saw him do some of those things, too -- enough of those things, in fact that just what I saw myself would justify "the ends." no one needs to lie. and many people didn't, I think. And I know that _I_ haven't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > In both cases there were many witness who did not intervene for fear of > being the next target.

That's the heart of the problem, and I see no solution at all. Every successful offensive operation makes them more powerful.

</comment><comment><USER8> See also: _Low grade "journalists" and internet mob attack RMS with lies. In- depth review._

[https://sterling-archermedes.github.io/](https://sterling- archermedes.github.io/)

</comment><comment><USER9> The big problem is that far too many people care about the man who lost his job and far too few people care about the underage woman who was coerced.

If this happened again, exactly the same arguments would be made as to why the woman should not have reported it and why nothing should happen to the perpetrators.

<comment><USER10> _> The big problem is that far too many people care about the man who lost his job and far too few people care about the underage woman who was coerced._

It's actually the opposite, far too many people get easily influenced by propaganda, hence why the man lost his job.

On top of that the man lost his job is a fact, but a claim of an underage woman who was supposedly coerced is not and is not verifiable, it's just white propaganda. If people weren't so naive and accepting of propagandistic authoritative claims, this wouldn't have happened.

<comment><USER6> There are many, many, many reports. The fact that you are focusing on one and then questioning the veracity of just that one report to make an argument like this is vile. Vile. As in if this is the way you're rolling you are vile. Literally a perpetrator of rape culture. Many reports means that if you don't have mitigating information you listen instead of speaking. Me? I witnessed, with my own eyes, RMS committing acts that merit is firing. And it would seem that I am far from alone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Glad this post is flagged, because it's a bad, disingenuous argument that elides the central truth: RMS's dirty laundry was dragged into public view AFTER he made firing-worthy comments on a university listserv. The chain is causality is blatently misrepresented in this piece.

Here is the bulk of the email that got RMS rightfully roasted:

>The announcement of the Friday event does an injustice to Marvin Minsky:

>"deceased AI 'pioneer' Marvin Minsky (who is accused of assaulting one of Epstein's victims [2])"

>The injustice is in the word "assaulting". The term "sexual assault" is so vague and slippery that it facilitates accusation inflation:

>taking claims that someone did X and leading people to think of it as Y, which is much worse than X.

>The accusation quoted is a clear example of inflation. The reference reports the claim that Minsky had sex with one of Epstein's harem.

>(See [https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/9/20798900/marvin-minsky- jef...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/9/20798900/marvin-minsky-jeffrey- epstein-sex-trafficking-island-court-records-unsealed.)) Let's presume that was true (I see no reason to disbelieve it).

>The word "assaulting" presumes that he applied force or violence, in some unspecified way, but the article itself says no such thing.

>Only that they had sex.

>We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates.

>I've concluded from various examples of accusation inflation that it is absolutely wrong to use the term "sexual assault" in an accusation.

>Whatever conduct you want to criticize, you should describe it with a specific term that avoids moral vagueness about the nature of the criticism.

</comment><comment><USER12> Thoughts by someone who -- unlike most commentators on the subject -- has actually worked with Stallman for years:

[https://firstname.lastname@example.com/a-reflection-on-the- depa...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com/a-reflection-on-the-departure-of- rms-18e6a835fd84)

<comment><USER13> It should be noted that Bushnell has disliked Stallman ever since Stallman dismissed him from the Hurd project due to inactivity. It's not clear how much of what Bushnell says is true. I haven't stumbled on anyone willing to corroborate his claims and a couple people directly contradict him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Richard Stallman has been saying hurtful, offensive things for years, and it doesn't take a cancel culture conspiracy theory for that to have real world consequences. I saw him speak about a decade ago, and though I've never agreed with his paranoid rants, I really never cared much either way about him personally until he started airing his views on child porn. Hearing him in person really drove home how creepy his is.

</comment><comment><USER15> This keeps coming up.

You don't know why MIT fired RMS. What is known is they didn't have to go to tabloids or blogs to find people complaining about him, people in his group, and many historical reasons.

[https://medium.com/@selamjie/remove-richard-stallman- appendi...](https://medium.com/@selamjie/remove-richard-stallman-appendix- a-a7e41e784f88)

</comment><comment><USER16> Who cares about what crazy ideas RMS has about assault? If RMS was giving money to rapists I might care. That RMS hangs out in /b isn't on my concern radar.

I fail to see how being so easily offended is good either for an individual or society. Quick to outrage doesn't strike me as particularly mindful or consistent with best namaste practices.

<comment><USER12> The issue of "offense" is a common misunderstanding. Suppose some respected person at a company says something like, "all French epmloyees are morons and thieves." This actively harms French employees in the social dynamics of the company even if not a single one of them was present or heard of it. These "offenses" are not about feelings being hurt, but about the social standing of people being actually degraded when people of a certain status express biases without being confronted and without harm to their status.

I am not saying there can't be pitfalls and dangers, but if you care to know what the perspective of those of us who are in favor of repercussions for people who promote dehumanizing views, _that 's_ what we're talking about.

<comment><USER16> I agree that you don't want someone with strongly bigoted opinions leading an organization. That's a far cry from ruining someone's career because they hold opinions that aren't approved by a vocal segment of the intelligentsia.

<comment><USER12> That's true, except I don't think that's the case here, or in most other notable cases that some vocal segment calls "cancel culture".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One of the troubling aspects of all this was John Gruber's decision to intentionally lie about Stallman and only write a correction after the intended effect had occurred. (Intentional because there was no effort to counteract the effect his original story had on the anti-Stallman effort.) [https://daringfireball.net/2019/10/correction_regarding_an_e...](https://daringfireball.net/2019/10/correction_regarding_an_erroneous_allegation)

<comment><USER9> Why have you turned "repeat someone else's misattributed anecdote" into "decision to intentionally lie"? Isn't that the kind of thing people are complaining about here?

<comment><USER17> That's fair. dang admonished me for my wording as well.

I had written it that way because journalists can choose how carefully to fact-check what they write, and how much energy and timeliness they apply into corrections. This gives journalists an ability to "optimistically" publish errors and give misunderstandings narrative momentum. I believe Gruber wielded those tool in his Stallman piece and the correction, and I thought the proof was that he did not to try to correct the perception resulting from his original story. But, as dang said, I don't have a mind-reader, so I had broken the site guidelines by writing as if I knew that for sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> He was not shunned upon due to an unjust weaponization of cancel culture. He has a long, documented history of expressing very concerning beliefs and of extremely inappropriate behavior towards women and the latest comments were just the straw that broke the camel's back. Here's a short compilation thread of unacceptable behavior and accusations with sources

[https://mobile.twitter.com/_sagesharp_/status/11739031026231...](https://mobile.twitter.com/_sagesharp_/status/1173903102623154176)

<comment><USER19> > I'm sure Richard Stallman still thinks sex with teenagers is acceptable.

This is my red flag for someone who's being intellectually dishonest about RMS. It's also the signature move of cancel culture -- aggressively reducing someone's opinion to one that can be easily canned as intolerable.

<comment><USER6> Using this to erase the many, many reports of his behavior is tragic. You're pulling one thread and saying that the rest don't exist. This is the central activity of rape culture.

I've seem RMS at work first hand and my experiences fit right in with the experiences being reported. I get that people don't want him to be the person that is being described: this is a natural response. But I am using my voice to say that just the small bit of RMS that I experienced first had is enough to justify his loss of position and status. And from the look of it my story is just one of a very large number of similar and worse stories.

<comment><USER19> > You're pulling one thread and saying that the rest don't exist

That's the thing: most of the oft-repeated threads are unconvincing at best and plain dishonest at worst. If there better examples of RMS's inappropriate behavior we should be focusing on those.

<comment><USER6> There have been many examples. I myself have typed what I personally witnessed multiple times. I'll just put it this way today: I saw more than enough for him to be fired and more than enough for him to be demoted from his leadership roles. I am a real person, former Senior Director of Engineering at a fortune 50. I saw what I saw.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Interview with Andrew Ng [audio] - <AUTHOR> https://behindthetech.libsynpro.com/003-andrew-ng-influential-leader-in-artificial-intelligence <comment><USER2> Andrew Ng shares his impressive knowledge on Coursera (which he is a co- founder of). For those interested:

\- [https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine- learning](https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning) (Machine Learning Course)

\- [https://www.coursera.org/specializations/deep- learning](https://www.coursera.org/specializations/deep-learning) (Deep Learning Specialization)

<comment><USER3> I didn't find the machine-learning course to be that great, but I don't know anything about machine learning.

<comment><USER4> Additional perspective: I consider it to be the best online course that I've taken. (I've taken a dozen or so.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm curious about the submission's title change which was originally more informative about context (who is interviewing, blurb about interviewee, etc): Is it useful to know that the interviewer is Kevin Scott CTO of Microsoft? Does that change the style of the interview? Is it useful to know who Andrew Ng is?

</comment><comment><USER5> First question: "So you grew up... in Asia?"</comment>


HyperCard: What Could Have Been - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/commentary/cultofmac/2002/08/54370

<comment><USER2> FYI... This is from 2002. I was hoping for some new info as I loved working with HyperCard during college.

<comment><USER3> This came up recently in reference to Steve Jobs terminating with extreme prejudice an iPad HyperCard ... after saying someone should do it.

runRev says they have Hypercard for a variety of platforms, but they'll be punting for the most part on the iWhatever ecosystem: [http://www.runrev.com/company/runrev-blog/revmobile-and- appl...](http://www.runrev.com/company/runrev-blog/revmobile-and-apples- iphone-sdk-agreement/)

As for a grander vision of Hypercard as discussed in the article, I'm not sure, but you can check their site and see what they say.</comment></comment>


Acer will have a tough time using Chrome OS, Android to offset sliding PC sales - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/08/acer-will-have-a-tough-time-using-chrome-os-and-android-to-offset-sliding-pc-sales/ <comment><USER2> If anyone else notices the odd tone I checked the byline which explains it: "Peter Bright / Peter is a Microsoft Contributor at Ars.".

I'm too young to remember the era before Microsoft. I grew up thinking computer == windows. That a major Windows OEM is hoping for a saviour in linux distros and that this is not big news is amazing. That a self-proclaimed Microsoftfy's biggest "concern" is profit margin also underlines how _far_ the world has changed. Granted Android and ChromeOS are not the linux distros slashdot hoped would rule. I would take issue with this and yet the freedom to be different is a culmination of the four freedoms. It took a while but open source's fundamental advantages are pulling it ahead bit by bit.

<comment><USER3> Peter[1] is not a "microsofty" (actually, I'm not quite sure what that is). He's a journalist who covers MS related news for Ars, and he has done so for years. He's highly opinionated, but I wouldn't say he has a strong pro- Microsoft bias anymore (he did in some of his early writing).

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=DrPizza](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=DrPizza)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sounds like someone is upset Acer is "quitting" Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER5> As long as they start doing Ubuntu Tablets and Phones, it's all fine by me.</comment>


Ask HN: Why was HN down? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> My Guess would be server updates. There was some Linux security updates done recently that required a reboot. They must have ran them.</comment>


Ask HN: How to confirm that over 500,000 Android devices are activated daily? - <AUTHOR>

This following is stated by Andy Rubin in his tweet (https://twitter.com/#!/arubin).<p>"There are now over 500,000 Android devices activated every day, and it's growing at 4.4% w/w" <comment><USER2> Why? Furthermore, how do you go about verifying any company's data? It's either deducible from their financial paperwork or it's not.</comment>


Be the next Facebook? Rent their old downtown Palo Alto offices - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2009/03/11/be-the-next-facebook-rent-their-old-downtown-palo-alto-offices/

<comment><USER2> That would be like hanging out at City Lights because some dead writers used to. Sad and stupid. Dave Eggers started a magazine in the _same office_ that Wired started in! He was so excited! Later he started 826 Valencia across from a furniture wholesaler and an empty lot. Guess which one succeeded?

<comment><USER3> _That would be like hanging out at City Lights because some dead writers used to_

I actually think that's why most people go to City Lights. It certainly is one of their main marketing points.</comment></comment>


What's New in Bootstrap 4 - <AUTHOR> https://scotch.io/bar-talk/whats-new-in-bootstrap-4?imm_mid=0d7e38&cmp=em-web-na-na-newsltr_20150902 <comment><USER2> duplicate of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10116916](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10116916)</comment>


Privilege Checking the Privilege Checkers - <AUTHOR> http://quillette.com/2018/01/23/privilege-checking-privilege-checkers/ <comment><USER2> There is some balance needed.

Take "speech is violence", for example. I've seen a family member destroyed by verbal abuse. I've seen a friend destroyed by gossip, and thought that it might have been kinder for them to just stick a knife in his back. Some speech really does qualify as a kind of violence.

And yet, most (90%? 95%? 99%?) of the "speech is violence" stuff is "this person is criticizing my ideas or beliefs and it makes me feel bad" variety. The correct response is some variant of "grow a thicker skin".

</comment><comment><USER3> Everyone's privileged over someone else in some way unless you are literally living the worst life on the planet. That's how life is. I don't even understand how that could possibly change.</comment>


Parse offers one-click migration for SimpleGeo Storage customers. - <AUTHOR> https://parse.com/simplegeo

<comment><USER2> Parse competes with Urban Airship in being a push notification service provider, so this isn't just a lifeline, it's competitive:

<https://www.parse.com/pricing>

<http://urbanairship.com/pricing/>

<comment><USER3> Its clever marketing and they're scrappy competitors to respond in 24 hours to the news and turn it to their advantage.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> TechCrunch coverage: [http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/13/with-simplegeos- shutdown-im...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/13/with-simplegeos-shutdown- imminent-parse-swoops-in-with-a-life-preserver/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Isn't this just one aspect of what SimpleGeo offered?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, we're only migrating the "Storage" product. Factual is taking over customers from the "Places" product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow that's impressive!</comment>


The music industry vs AOL - <AUTHOR> http://daltoncaldwell.com/the-music-industry-vs-aol

<comment><USER2> You can bet that if AOL had the ability to, eg, dictate the terms of access to particular websites, their business model would start to resemble that of the big media companies. Making sure the internet industry resembles Big Media as little as possible is one of the reasons net neutrality is a big deal.

<comment><AUTHOR> Excellent point</comment></comment>