U.S. Farmers Are Being Bled by the Tractor Monopoly - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-23/u-s-farmers-need-a-better-way-to-fix-their-tractors <comment><USER2> Farmer here - 200 head of grass fed cattle plus hay operation.

Just to be clear, the problem described in the article does not affect many (probably most) farmers; it primarily affects large scale grain operations that have harvest combines that use a lot of onboard computers.

It's a bit dramatic to frame this as "US farmers are being bled". Guys who grow grain on huge farms in the Midwest are not happy about the implications of the TOS they signed with Deere when they, grownups who can read, bought their tractors a few years ago. There, fixed the headline for you.

<comment><USER3> Is there an alternative where they don't sign an equivalent TOS and still get the same features? Perhaps they have to pay for the privilege? Or is this a unilateral power grab by the manufacturers?

<comment><USER4> > Is there an alternative where they don't sign an equivalent TOS and still > get the same features?

I mean, the clear alternative is to buy tractors without the same features.

I'm not sure why manufacturers are obligated to sell certain features without a TOS.

> Or is this a unilateral power grab by the manufacturers?

How is this a power grab? That would only be true if the only tractor manufacturer in the world is John Deere.

<comment><USER5> Can you legally fix your car or your older tractor? Has that always been true? You can't legally fix these machines because the manufacturer says so. That's new(ish) and a power (money) grab.

<comment><USER4> > Can you legally fix your car or your older tractor? Has that always been > true? You can't legally fix these machines because the manufacturer says so. > That's new(ish) and a power (money) grab.

Contracts that limit your ability to do things are very common.

If you buy a pure bred dog, you will typically be required to sign a contract that requires you to not breed it and to get it neutered after a certain period of time. If for some reason you need to give it up, you will have to return it to the breeder.

If you buy a movie on DVD, you can enjoy it in your home, but you can't set up an impromptu theater by projecting the movie on the side of a building.

The import thing, was the customer provided notice of this restriction at or before the time of sale. It sounds like the answer to this question is: yes.

You may be tempted to to claim some sort of power imbalance, which I don't buy in the general case, but in this particular case it is even less relevant. Large farms that use automated machinery costing many hundreds of thousands of dollars is the very definition of sophisticated customer, capable of hiring legal help and evaluating options.

<comment><USER6> I don't know about tractors, but there's nothing legally preventing you from fixing your car. The problem is technical: the diagnostic tools may only be available to authorized dealers/repairpeople.

That said, despite all the crying about people not being able to work on cars any more, I just don't see it. I change my own oil on my 2015 Mazda, and I can easily change other parts on it too. Maybe there's certain brands that intentionally throw up roadblocks? But I don't see it with mainstream Japanese brands; these cars are very easy to work on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Disclaimer: My father worked as an engineer for John Deere for 35 years. I interned at John Deere writing code that runs on the tractor controllers.

Discussions on this topic always end up one-sided and simplistic. Hopefully I can shed some light on the more nuanced reasoning behind John Deere's position.

Having the DRM in place allows Deere to reduce manufacturing expense and increase platform flexibility. There is a very wide array of needs that farmers have based on what they do. Deere allows buyers to customize tractors to their needs for everything from engine horsepower, to wheel count, size, and type, cab quality-of-life, to hydraulic hookups for implements. Some of these changes are just a software change, while others are a software + hardware change.

Engine horsepower, for example, can be increased by a software update. Techincally, this is pretty cool. Designing and manufacturing engines is expensive. This allows them to manufacture fewer different engines that can cover a wider variety of use cases. It also allows farmers the flexibility to upgrade their engine horsepower at a future date. If I remember correctly each extra 50hp above the base costs ~10k, so the large configurations subsidize the cost of the base configurations.

With that understanding, think of how this can apply to Deere's obligations to the EPA or to warranties. Years ago, farmers found a hack where they could put a resister in-line between the diesel temperature sensor and the ECU and increase their horsepower. The hack spread like wildfire. This made the engines run in a configuration that had not been tested by Deere or approved by the EPA. Who would the EPA go after if it had caused emissions issues? Should Deere honor the warranty in this case of those who did the hack? How would Deere know if someone did the hack, borked the engine, then removed the resistor?

Liability is the enemy of automation. Deere has added some automation over the years, allowing the tractors to drive straight down the field without intervention, and executing perfect turns at the push of a button. This is functionality that no companies would let end users change. Much like my dad, a tractor is not a cell phone. Installing a custom rom on a cell phone is one thing, updating the autonomous driving of a 10 ton tractor is quite another.

There's got to be some middle ground, but I don't know what it is.

<comment><USER8> Why are the tractors any different from cars? If I buy a car, I can do anything aftermarket to it I want. If the car is in warranty, those mods do not allow the manufacturer to not continue to support it (well established case law), and the EPA doesn't care once it's been sold (individual states like CA might have issue, but those are with the owner, not the manufacturer, if it's been modified).

This is all well-settled in the automotive world, why is JD 'different'?

<comment><USER9> > This is all well-settled in the automotive world, why is JD 'different'?

Because laws were passed in the US that specifically allow these kinds of things (like customer repairability and modification) for cars. Those laws do not apply to tractors.

<comment><USER6> Yes, actually, they do. The Magnusson-Moss Warranty Act of 1975 applies to everything, not just cars, even though it was really aimed at cars. But it applies to anything consumers might buy, whether it's tractors or TVs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am for "right to repair" but one thing that has been left out of this narrative/discussion, in this article, and elsewhere is that when making payments there are insurance and/or warranty riders on these contracts when John Deere is providing the financing. They do this because they want the equipment repaired in a manner that meets JD's engineering specs. On the flip side I have seen certified JD mechanics, at a dealership, break off something as simple as the BlueDef/urea tank on a tractor because they didn't know how to fix it, forcing the tractor to remain in the shop while parts were reordered. In return they lent a similar tractor out at no charge because hay was already on the ground and rain was coming. This works well when the dealership is literally 6 miles down the road...not so good when its 60 or 160.

<comment><USER11> Sorry for being naive, I am not american. Can you tell, why those farmers aren't buying tractors from other companies? Those news always contain Deere name, I don't see similar critique against say Valtra or Belarus.

<comment><USER10> John Deere tractors have held their value historically better than Kubota, Mahindra, New Holland, and Massey Ferguson. These are the main dealers in our area. I can't speak for the midwest.

<comment><USER12> In some areas of tech people only buy Intel. AMD might sell cheaper chips but people that place a premium on floating point performance, e.g. because they do 3D modelling, aren't going to be interested. Your gamer who has similar demands might go for price (so they can spend more money on games).

If it is the main tool for your job then you aren't going to want anything less than the best. John Deere seem to have that going for their business strategy.

The tractor business model reminds me of how workstations and mini-computers were sold with vendor lock in. That market didn't survive the 1990's and the onslaught of affordable PCs. There is nothing on the horizon to disrupt the tractor business, it is not as if new affordable mega-tractors are going to come along at ordinary car prices to encourage masses of people to go 'back to the land' and put the likes of John Deere in difficulties.

Bigger and bigger agri-business can't go on forever though, it is built on assumptions about the inputs. Half of the food on my plate tonight comes from places too far away for me to ever fly to myself, but, if climate change action is to happen then my diet and everyone else's will have to be a lot more locally sourced.

<comment><USER13> > Half of the food on my plate tonight comes from places too far away for me > to ever fly to myself, but, if climate change action is to happen then my > diet and everyone else's will have to be a lot more locally sourced.

An excellent point that I've have views about for years. Reckon we need to cover this under a separate topic as it's a huge one and covers such issues about what is and is not or should not be permitted under capitalism and free trade as we understand them today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Outside of the large corporate farms I think you are going to see an increase in farmers continuing to refurbish older tractors that are pre computers and then begin to retrofit those tractors with third party systems that won't give them complete vendor lock in. A good example is Welker Farms. They run Big Bud tractors from the 70s refurbish them every decade or so. And have added in gps guidance and other things as 3rd party mods. Also they have a great YouTube channel[1].

1 [https://www.youtube.com/WelkerFarmsInc?uid=tKUW8LJK2Ev8hUy9Z...](https://www.youtube.com/WelkerFarmsInc?uid=tKUW8LJK2Ev8hUy9ZG_PPA)

<comment><USER15> That's the thing. This big iron equipment doesn't just quit working and fall apart after a few years. It's expensive enough that you rebuild engines, weld up parts that break, redo seals in the transmission, etc, and keep it going for decades.

I've driven Cat D6 bulldozers that were older than I was when I was in college, and they are still going, a decade later.

Particularly the stuff that is built for heavy usage has to be used hard, patched together with limited repair facilities in remote places, and handled by inexpert operators.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is a HUGE problem. If John Deere were to go out of business tomorrow, a huge swath of our world's farmers would be unable to produce anything thanks to tractors turning off and not working properly. Remember that old game you like with online validation for single player mode? Remember how it stopped working when the servers went offline. There's a DMCA fair use exception to allow you to circumvent that DRM thanks to the EFF and the MADE, but there is no such fair use allowance for tractors....

<comment><USER17> Surely some party would come in and fill the gap, reverse engineer the thing, whatever is necessary. Food security is a national security priority for the United States. We wouldn't go hungry if John Deere went under instantly. There would be a response.

<comment><USER18> That is certainly the _hope_. What is the _plan_?

<comment><USER17> People are already hacking JD equipment with firmware found online. I don't have an exact answer to your question, but this thread seems over-blown. Somebody will know how it works, or learn how to work on it. I trust the ingenuity of this nation wouldn't leave us with an unmaintainable or unhackable tractors without "John Deere" the business existing, in the same way the technique for jailbreaking the latest version of iOS comes relatively quickly. The country that went to the moon can reverse engineer a tractor. It's not like we need to prove P = NP or not to start getting people fed again, to fix the problem.

<comment><USER19> I personally agree the problem's being overblown here, and I agree with what you say about technology like that, but, just to counter a bit, when it comes to agriculture, time's not always available. Depending on when that theoretical stopping of Deere's servers were to occur. There could be massive crop failures. It's all well and good to get everything back up again, but by this time a loaf of bread costs $50 and everyone's flipping their shit.

Not that I think any of this is ever likely to happen, but even small disruptions to the food supply can have large consequences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is stranger than fiction. I would have laughed 15 years ago if someone suggested DRM and electronic licensing would ever be applied to a _tractor_.

<comment><USER21> This comment might apply to cars 15 years from now.

Tesla is likely the closest to "car as a service" but it has been coming along for a few years across the entire auto industry.

<comment><USER22> My understanding is that ford is really really bad for this as well, requiring incredibly expensive computers, software packages, and training to repair even basic things without it pissing off the ECU

<comment><USER23> This is why I will never again own a Ford. (That, and the endless recalls.)

<comment><USER24> And the bits falling off the car within the warranty period, that turn out not to be part of the warranty after all. In my case: a transmission brace that broke under light use in under a year on an F150.

<comment><USER25> Or the aluminum hood on my car that has a massive paint defect that isn't covered by the paint warranty because it needs to "rust" through for them to cover it. They added that clause to the warranty agreement knowing that aluminum will never rust, rather than fixing an issue they knew about for over a decade.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The real problem I see for modestly sized farms's is they are massively underserved by modern tractors. They are over complicated and over priced. Most of the farmers I know still use tractors from the 1950s-1970s as their primary workhorses because they're simple and reliable. No one builds tractors like that anymore, in part due to the shrinking demands and in part due to regulation.

Why would I pay $50k+ for a new tractor that does way more than I really need, breaks down often and I can't service when I can get an old but just as useful tractor for $3-5k.

The companies that have sprung up to build parts for these ancient tractors is absolutely fascinating. Outside of perhaps some of the larger cast pieces, you can replace almost everything with new parts.

<comment><USER27> >The companies that have sprung up to build parts for these ancient tractors is absolutely fascinating. Outside of perhaps some of the larger cast pieces, you can replace almost everything with new parts.

There is a literal workforce dedicated to fixing or fabricating these old parts.

Find your nearest custom machine shop. One-job shops. They exist to build or fix a million things one time, instead of production machining where they build one thing a million times.

These people are mad-geniuses at reverse-engineering and figuring out how to make things based on burnt-out or broken pieces.

Source; My father is a master machinist at one of these shops. He has worked on everything from re-building hydraulic cylinders for local guys to one-off parts for prototype cars that we can't discuss the name of to rebuilding structural supports on a bridge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> As a Minnesotan (but not a farmer), I'm extremely exited to see so much progress with Right-to-Repair legislation (see [0]), especially since it should benefit consumers nation- or even world-wide. If one US state passes the bill, we're unlikely to tech companies create a "Minnesota Edition" device with repair manuals only accessible to Minnesota residents. More likely, compliant businesses will offer this information freely and benefit everyone.

[0]: [http://www.startribune.com/right-to-repair-bill-appears- head...](http://www.startribune.com/right-to-repair-bill-appears-headed-for- first-time-to-floor-of-minnesota-house/507485152/)

Also: [https://states.repair.org/states/minnesota/](https://states.repair.org/states/minnesota/) and [https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2019/04/24/minnesota-could- be...](https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2019/04/24/minnesota-could-be-the-first- state-to-pass-a-right-to-repair-bill/)

<comment><USER29> We're down to the wire in Minnesota. If you want to see the bill happen, call your reps today. A vote could happen as soon as tomorrow, but only if the noise level is high enough.

<comment><USER28> Living in the 3rd congressional district, I'm assuming that I would be contacting [solved and redacted; I realized how closely this tells you of my location]. I haven't done this before for any issue while living in this state.

I also found the full text of the bill, which is very easy to read and a lot shorter than I expected! I see nothing about when the bill might be voted upon, but I'm very hopeful it will get passed.

[https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/text.php?number=HF1138&type...](https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/text.php?number=HF1138&type=bill&version=1&session=ls91&session_year=2019&session_number=0)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Related:

[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xykkkd/why-american- farme...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xykkkd/why-american-farmers-are- hacking-their-tractors-with-ukrainian-firmware) (Why American Farmers Are Hacking Their Tractors With Ukrainian Firmware)

[https://tractorhacking.github.io/](https://tractorhacking.github.io/)

<comment><USER31> _" The project is through California Polytechnic State University's Capstone I/II class and sponsored by iFixit. Material on this site is protected from DMCA takedown by a DMCA exemption granted by the US Copyright Office."_

Yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> [https://www.ft.com/content/ff8abbc2-7302-11e9-bf5c-6eeb83756...](https://www.ft.com/content/ff8abbc2-7302-11e9-bf5c-6eeb837566c5) Good Rana Faroohar piece that touches on this:

'concentration of power in agribusiness has been a bigger and certainly a longer-term problem for American farmers than China. As a few companies gained control of key areas of the food supply chain, spending on research and development fell, input costs rose, and margins for individual farms went down. The CAP report also documents small farmers being forced into opaque contracts and held up by ridiculous rules, such as those forbidding them to repair their machinery without permission from John Deere or other large manufacturers'

</comment><comment><USER33> If you can't fix or tinker with it then it's not yours, and if it isn't yours it's not worth "buying" it but rather renting. Does JD lease their equipment? Or do they hope to?

On another take, I can imagine old, repairable tractors going up in value at some point. You can traditionally keep those going for decades.

<comment><USER27> For smaller operations like mine, those older tractors are already valuable. I run Massey's from the 70's and 80's that I can fix on my own as long as I can find parts.

For large operations (and the way the entire ag economy is moving is large operations) this doesn't matter. They lease their machinery anyway, so what does it matter if they can't work on them? JD will come to the field to fix it if it breaks down. It's a cost savings for them.

This is just another nail in the coffin of rural america/family farms.

And before the next person tells me 'most farms are family farms', I need your citations, and I want to see it broken down by family owned corporations v actual family farms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I worked in another industry with an effective monopoly in a subset of the market. When setting our prices, we evaluated behavioral game theory, and determined that we could claim 60% of the gains produced by our technology innovations without upsetting our customer. As we planned for that financial model, we realized that GMO seeds had a similar ability to extract fractions of their productivity gains. We planned to investigate just what fraction they were extracting, and expected it to be a much higher percentage, as Monsanto doesn't need to worry about upsetting a single customer, they could extract 90% of the gains, and any farmer who didn't settle for those remaining 10% would be our competed by their peers. Does anyone know how much GMO seeds cost relative to their standard cousins, and how much the cost of growing each and the productivity of each type? The Tractor companies are simply following the seed companies models.

</comment><comment><USER35> Please don't take this comment as "there is nothing wrong" and don't take it as "there's nothing to talk about here". Clearly this is a problem that needs to be discussed and brought to people's attention. This is a response to people taking this article and interpreting it as though there is some injustice being done to farmers and that we need some sort of government intervention:

How is it a monopoly? There are like 8 or 9 different major tractor brands to choose from. The word is out on the street (or fields?), and I've seen articles like this for well over 5 years now.

There's a simple solution for farmers that don't want the costs (and benefits presumably) of these restrictive deals: don't buy a tractor that has these restrictive terms of service.

<comment><USER36> I agree that what we are seeing is not really a monopoly. The issue is better defined as "industry realities prevent effective use of voting with their wallets".

> There's a simple solution for farmers that don't want the costs (and > benefits presumably) of these restrictive deals: don't buy a tractor that > has these restrictive terms of service.

...and lose compatibility with a large number of add on equipment and related software. Much like the AAA games industry moving towards micro-transactions, your ability to avoid suppliers that require that is limited and you are the one that ends up losing out.

How do we solve these issues? No idea. But expecting farmers (in this case) to take the hit themselves in the hopes that enough of their peers do the same to create a big enough financial incentive for vendors to change their ways is unlikely to succeed.

<comment><USER35> I appreciate your points, I just really dislike paternalism, especially when it means treating farmers who are probably pretty savvy and creative like they are helpless.

I'm fairly certain that building compatible equipment is totally legally protected in the US. It would seem like a huge opportunity for some people living in farm/manufacturing country to start building adapters or other compatibility mechanisms to use add on equipment across tractor brands if the tractor manufacturers aren't interested in doing it. If Henry Ford could build a car in his garage, I'm sure there are plenty of people out there that could make a combine work with a tractor that doesn't have the right logo on the side.

<comment><USER36> > I'm fairly certain that building compatible equipment is totally legally > protected in the US

Once software is involved, this isn't true. And software is rapidly involved in every device.

Sure, you could go back 100 years and use equipment from then - but yields are increased since then for a reason, and variable-rate-seeders, planters that adjust depth based on soil type (from data), charting your harvester yields and planting density, a crap ton of interactions with fertilizer application/herbicide/fungicide, etc, are a part of that reason. Farmers are perfectly savvy enough to know this, but their options are (1) get the new equipment with the restrictive terms, (2) not get any of that new tech, or (3) change into a new field and try to build what they would want, taking on the big giants that are perfectly willing to Embrace/Extend/Extinguish, etc. Of those options, the savvy person will do #1.

Your listed proposal of adaptors isn't legal if software and EULAs are involved, which is where the whole right-to-repair movement gets involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It's not a "monopoly," technically. It's an oligopoly. John Deere having 53%; CNH (International Harvester, New Holland) having 35%, AGCO 7%, and miscellaneous players fighting over the last 5%.

Article: [https://www.farm- equipment.com/articles/15962-manufacturer-c...](https://www.farm- equipment.com/articles/15962-manufacturer-consolidation-reshaping-the-farm- equipment-marketplace)

Image: [https://www.farm- equipment.com/ext/resources/images/issues/2...](https://www.farm- equipment.com/ext/resources/images/issues/2018/FE- September-2018/MarketShare.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER38> Been long outraged at this kind of lock-in problem, wherever it is found. My first thought on reading this kind of article is "what a great opportunity for a startup".

Then, I immediately realize that there are likely no VCs that would fund such a thing.

It seems that every (ok, a vast majority) new business models that gets funded either start with or soon add some kin of lock-in even when completely unnecessary. they tout it as a "cloud" feature, but in reality it is just a DRM lockup.

The real problem is VCs and founders failing to truly compete on features, and instead trying to compete on network effects and lock-in to build an extractive business model -- just lock 'em in and charge the highest rent/rates you can.

</comment><comment><USER39> I can't think of why this would be unique to farmers, perhaps aside from a push towards autopilot systems.

Mining equipment, road building, all of that hyper-specialized stuff for slicing and dicing trees, I would think they all have this issue. Perhaps it's the greater prevalence of owner-operators.

I've probably bought the newest car I ever will (which is now 15 years old), so it would be nice to steer clear of the dealer-only craziness and the inevitable spying on you that new vehicles are going to accrue. I can just imagine how ticked I'd be if the tech juggernaut was messing with my income in a bad way.

<comment><USER40> An amusing anecdote: At my workplace, the software developers decided that I didn't deserve to have a "seat" of their magnificent development tools. I downloaded a copy of Python. Now my entire work group runs on Python.

A couple years later, same story with the embedded systems developers. Now we all develop on Arduino.

My side business, manufacturing a hardware gadget, runs entirely from open source tools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Information asymmetry. I would humbly posit that this is one of the biggest challenges that the information security community has to tackle on the face of the planet, and it is not just a technological one. Farmers are at the mercy of equipment manufacturers, who are centralizing control. A model with distributed control is more robust in the long run, and should be an option for consumers. Are there any competitive open source tractors out there?

</comment><comment><USER42> It must not be that huge of a problem because farmers are continuing to purchase the most up-to-date tractors with all the wing-dings, bells and whistles they can afford. The guidance consoles are not tied into the machine and don't care how old the equipment is, so why again do you need that brand new $200k tractor? Perhaps this will be a wake up call. Stop buying new equipment and fix your already existing, already purchased, old equipment.

<comment><USER43> The fixable equipment without electronic black boxes is several decades old and increasingly difficult to come by.

New farm equipment is financed with loans/leases, trade ins and depreciation in ways that make it a sort of trap that is difficult to escape buying new things all the time.

<comment><USER42> Not the first time I have heard that and yet I see thousands of machines in hundreds of machine graveyards where old equipment has been sitting for decades collecting rust spread accost the country side. The same can be said about cars and the people who own the old equipment are basically giving it away if not paying people to take it... The problem, imho, is that people actually don't want to be able to fix their machines themselves because they don't want to spend the time it takes to do it. They want to be able to pay a guy to do it for them and even then they complain about the cost or the hassle involved in making that happen. Today's farmers are not the farmers of 20 years ago. They are the same as everyone else, to busy playing angry-birds to learn how to fix a carburetor.

<comment><USER27> From experience - it's not that simple.

I run 70's and 80's Masseys. I have to fix them constantly, by myself. The biggest hassle is waiting for parts. The last time I needed a part from an implement or salesman that I couldn't get from a junkyard took 2 weeks for delivery, once they found it. It was 20 days total from breakdown to fix, and all but 12 hours of that was out of my control.

So, put yourself on a broken down tractor in harvest season with rain in the forecast for two days from now. That white glove treatment you get with new machinery looks pretty nice when that happens.

That being said, I agree that people want to complain more than they want to fix anything. I enjoy working with my hands as a hobby, so I'm odd, I think. Most people just want their machines to work, with no inputs.

<comment><USER42> Agreed but as the article noted finding yourself on a broken down tractor during harvest season isn't dependent on having a new machine. In fact, I would argue you are MORE likely to find yourself in that position with one of these new machines.

At least in your position you knew what was wrong, you knew what part you needed and you knew how to install it. These new machines are specifically being designed so that a layman such as yourself can't fix them.

Big AGG isn't stopping there either. They aren't just trying to cut you out. There trying to cut out the repair guys and the suppliers. They want to own everything: the repair shops, the delivery shops, the manufacturing plants... their even trying to purchase the intellectual properties. Truth is no one needs a brand new machine just like no one needs a brand new car or a brand new house, imho.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I'm not a farmer, but I wouldn't even buy a John Deere lawn mower for exactly this reason. The tractor I did buy is a Branson. The engine comes from the same factory that Cummins engines come from (matter of fact, some JD engines come from the Kukje factory) and everything is built with durability in mind. Yes, the dealer is 135 miles away, but since I'm not really depending on the machine to make a living, I can live with that.

</comment><comment><USER45> I got a small old grey-market tractor made by Mitsubishi. Most of the wiring is shot, only ignition, sparkplugs and battery-to-starter is working. The rest is destroyed by someone previously. (alternator is probably also dead). And it works awesomely! Just gotta charge the battery once in a while in the garage. That is tractor.

What is sold by JD - is semi-authonomous sophisticated machines with equally sophisticated service network, not a tractor :P

</comment><comment><USER13> How did we ever get into the situation where we cannot repair our own stuff—stuff that we have actually purchased ourselves? The situation that we've now reached where technology is now being locked up and out of sight in large corporations is frankly damn disgraceful and we really need to act and to do something about it ASAP. This new trend is deskilling the workforce and population generally and it's not in the national interest for society to allow this to continue. …And that's just for starters.

There was a time early in my career when anyone who purchased any hi-tech equipment would have expected to receive a comprehensive operational manual with the equipment and optionally a proper service manual with a comprehensive description of equipment's operation and procedures to fix it. And of course spare parts would have been available as a matter of course. It was so common that no one would have ever thought it possible not to be able to get maintenance manuals.

My introduction to electronics and technology generally was by way of equipment manuals and I learned a great deal from them.

Home appliances such as radios and televisions often had the circuit diagrams inside the back of the case at the time of purchase. Mechanics manuals were always available for cars and other vehicles and so on.

I recall quintessential examples of this with manuals from companies such as Tektronix whose oscilloscopes manuals were a remarkable sight—they were truly wonderful.

For the younger generation who has never experienced what is was actually like to be able to get detailed information from a manufacturer then download this Tektronix oscilloscope 7834 manual dated 1977 from the Internet Archive: [https://archive.org/details/tektronix_7834](https://archive.org/details/tektronix_7834). (I actually purchased several of these instruments so I've firsthand knowledge.)

Even if you don't understand a word of this manual nevertheless even just a glance at it will show you what we've actually lost as a society by manufacturer's refusing to release information.

It's a nonsense when manufacturers claim that they shouldn't have to release proprietary information as it would aid competitors. Clearly, the release of this information by Tektronix never affected its bottom line. In fact, this instrument reigned quite supreme at what it did for years. In fact, hiding circuit information and obfuscating source code has been detrimental for security and other reasons. If Volkswagen had not obfuscated its embedded code then it wouldn't have faced the multibillion dollar fines that it's had to endure.

BTW, IBM provided circuit schematics and BIOS source code for its first PCs—the XT and AT.

Oh, how times have changed for the worse.

<comment><USER46> >How did we ever get into the situation where we cannot repair our own stuff—stuff that we have actually purchased ourselves?

People purchased items that they cannot repair, for myriad reasons, and did not purchase items they could repair. I don't know anyone that wants to fix their phone, they want to walk into a store with a broken one, and walk out with a working one and restore their settings. That's a relatively small value item, but same applies for home appliances and automobiles.

<comment><USER47> > People purchased items that they cannot repair, for myriad reasons

The primary reason being that they are 97% of the available items, forcing any repair shop to get by through fixing the 3%. This results in a tug-of-war between repair shops being too far away (fewer of them) or too expensive, closing in on the price of a new disposable item.

Right-to-fix isn't about me being an expert on how to fix things, it's about me being able to get things fixed by someone other than the manufacturer. This increases the number of repairmen, which increases the attractiveness of repairable items in a virtuous circle.

edit: also in a lot of these manufacturer repair situations you're talking about _mailing_ the item somewhere, not walking to a store and walking out with a new one. A world in which you arrive at a familiar repair shop, they transfer your data to a loner phone, and you get your phone back in a day or two and rsync the diff back - that doesn't sound radically different for the customer than the status quo, just radically cheaper and more environmentally friendly.

<comment><USER13> > it's about me being able to get things fixed by someone other than the > manufacturer

Right, it is about manufacturers being in a monopolistic position to dictate after sales service, sales of spares, etc. When manufactures gain control over the after sales service they essentially double-dip—they benefit from both the profit from the sale as well as the after sales service.

When manufacturers turn after sales service with them from being optional to compulsory, they are effectively adding a rent factor to their product. There are several issues here:

(a) Monopoly laws should be strengthened to stop such practices. This would effectively force a return to the past status quo where it was accepted practice for third parties to repair equipment/supply spares etc.

(b) If that is not possible—that's to say that copyright, patent and contract law cannot be changed and thus permit this situation to continue—then in my opinion it should be unlawful for the seller not to make this fact fully clear to the buyer/owner upfront.

(c) It follows that it should be unlawful for manufactures to lock out users or repairers with electronic locks that prevent them maintaining their equipment and or using spares and consumables supplied by third parties (for instance, printer manufacturers locking out ink cartridges from third party suppliers).

(d) Moreover, it should be unlawful for manufacturers/sellers to force conditions of sale or use onto the buyer/user that would permit them (the manufacturers) to gather data about the consumption of spares, consumables, ways of use or application, owners' names and other personal data without explicit permission of the buyer/owner. (It should be noted that manufacturers are not paying users for this information). Such a change in the law would again only return us to the status quo before the on-line era.

It is not only the 'ownership' of tractors where users experience these problems; they are appearing everywhere these days. For example, again, printer manufactures engage in blatant and outrageous price gouging for ink consumables (where the price of ink per ounce approaches that of expensive perfumes).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> What I dont understand is why farmers are still being brand loyal to companies like John Deere. There are quality tractor brands from Italy, Germany, Finland, Japan and Korea etc.

Would jumping to these brands be a easy fix or is there an issue with dealer networks and part there?

Seems to me while getting right to repair rules are still important, farmers of an area should be setting up coops for parts and swapping brands. Is that over-simplifying things?

</comment><comment><USER49> It's just one case of many in a system where financialization and extraction have taken precedent over companies competing to provide fundamental values to consumers. There isn't enough competition, there isn't enough access or willingness for capital to take risks (how many farmers with deep understaning of the ag market have access to capital to start a rival tractor company?).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> John Deere is also buying or investing in automated farming equipment(Blue River Tech being their biggest acquisition) and farm robotics. They now have a Silicon Valley VC/investment arm in San Francisco.

A lot of new technologies that are being developed are bought out by the big fish and banished to a dark vault to die to kill competition.

Net net..farmer never wins.

</comment><comment><USER50> This is just another example of the increasing "___ as a Service" model that is flowing through many, many industries. Manufacturers and service providers are trying to manage their cash flow in a different way by getting people to pay regular ongoing fees instead of larger, one time fees at intermittent intervals.

</comment><comment><USER51> At one point, there was talk of the industry moving to a pay per hour of horsepower model or something similar where you are basically paying for guaranteed uptime. I don't know if there is still an effort to move towards that or not, but that would change this discussion quite a bit.

<comment><USER43> Just a little supporting fact most people wouldn't be aware of, when you're buying a used tractor the "odometer" you look at isn't in miles but hours which is tracked in the same way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Foreign import knock off tractors will take care of this problem and then U.S. manufacturers will be crying unfair "foreign competition" and then they will get bailed out, time and time again until they can no longer compete even with the bail out.

</comment><comment> new-day-rising Large scale grain farms (aka commercial farms - not the historical family farm) typically run combines 24-7 during harvest and use the combines for 1 harvest only. They lease them and don't own them. Smaller operations buy them refurbished...

</comment><comment><USER53> Farm and ranch families comprise just 2 percent of the U.S. population. [https://www.fb.org/newsroom/fast-facts](https://www.fb.org/newsroom/fast- facts)

<comment><USER54> ... and they keep the other 98% alive

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> > U.S. consumers may be unaware of the farmers' plight

Sadly, the vast majority of the US population only really care about things in their own home/backyard. The concept of awareness at even a national level is lost on most.

<comment><USER56> Many farmers in the Midwest are actually millionaires that own large swathes of land. Yes, they work very hard, but they also like to complain a lot despite the fact that many of them are better off than many non-farmers in the Midwest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Sounds like it's a really great time to be a farmer in the US.

<comment><USER58> I suspect you're being sarcastic and I agree. The US has been a tough place to be a farmer since the 80s.

[https://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/14/us/farmer-suicide-rate- sw...](https://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/14/us/farmer-suicide-rate-swells- in-1980-s-study-says.html)

[https://www.motherjones.com/media/2018/07/the-cdc-just- retra...](https://www.motherjones.com/media/2018/07/the-cdc-just-retracted- its-farmer-suicide-data-that-could-be-terrible-news-for-farmers/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Another example how DRM is a crooked tool that should be banned.

</comment><comment><USER60> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uO5EWOFpV1E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uO5EWOFpV1E) Matthias explains what makes a good farm tracker.

</comment><comment><USER61> this was predicted by Lenin in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, a good portion of which is dedicated to the unstoppable gradual rise of monopolies and cartels. more people here should read it.

<comment><USER62> Or, for those who are allergic to Lenin, Adam Smith made pretty much the same point in "The Wealth of Nations".

<comment><USER13> Whether a generation takes Smith's or Marx's line, lessons learned will be forgotten within a generation or two and the arguments start over again. Tragically, this is a part of the human condition and it is not just limited to politics and the economy but also applies to many other fields of human endeavour.</comment></comment></comment>


Please "seek to educate people, not cancel them" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/EmmaWedekind/status/1167841071780548609 <comment><USER2> What is the context here? This thread seems a little isolated.

</comment><comment><USER3> Bigots aren't uneducated. They know what they are doing and saying, they are simply hateful.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> That's one of the messages I like more from Emma.</comment>


Request HN: Optimize vote-arrows and YC logo - <AUTHOR> tl;dr:
1) Please replace "grayarrow2x.gif" with Unicode arrows &#9650; and &#9660;
2) Please replace "y18.gif" with a higher-res YC logo image, or text "Y" with FF Meta Pro Normal web font
---
I've been a regular reader, and very occasional poster, on HN for nigh on ten years now.
I always loved PG's iconoclastic/idiosyncratic "brutalist" aesthetic, but the UI GIFs have felt obsolete since I got a smartphone. I remember the up/down voting arrows started looking blurry on my iPhone 3G, and then sometime later they got better on mobile with the introduction of the higher-res "grayarrow2x.gif".
Now on a retina display, by now I just take the blurry arrows (and YC icon) for granted. I was building an HTML table with column sorting today, and made use of Unicode characters ▲▼ "BLACK UP-POINTING TRIANGLE" (&#9650;) and "BLACK DOWN-POINTING TRIANGLE" (&#9660;). How about swapping out grayarrow2x.gif for these text arrows? I just tried the substitution via Chrome dev tools, and it was a trivial change and looks crisper to me. I'm not aware of any compatibility/support issues with these Unicode chars, but maybe some technical reason not to make this change...
The blurry 18×18 "y18.gif" could be replaced either with http://www.ycombinator.com/images/ycombinator-logo-fb889e2e.png, or with a box containing a text "Y" – looks like the YC logo's FF Meta Pro Normal is available on Typekit: https://typekit.com/fonts/ff-meta/details/meta-pro-normal
These might seem like niggling issues, but unlike other seemingly low-hanging UI improvements (e.g. increasing font size, which looks kinda tough with how the CSS is structured), I think both of these changes could be made in just a few minutes, and I'd appreciate it on every upvote! <comment><USER2> It astonishes me how much bikeshedding there is about the superficial UI of HN and how little talk there is about the low relevance of content on HN.</comment>


The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace - <AUTHOR> http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/23638511/the_lost_years__last_days_of_david_foster_wallace/print <comment><USER2> For anyone who hasn't read it, 'Shipping Out (on the nearly-lethal comforts of a luxury cruise)' is an absolute blast.

[http://harpers.org/media/pdf/dfw/HarpersMagazine-1996-01-000...](http://harpers.org/media/pdf/dfw/HarpersMagazine-1996-01-0007859.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> I feel like any random page of Infinite Jest is touching autobiographical commentary.

'Many times the same. Winning two and three upset matches, feeling suddenly so loved, so many talking to you as if there is love. But always the same, then. For then you awaken to the fact that you are loved for winning only. The two and three wins created you, for people. It is not that the wins made them recognize something that existed unrecognized before these upset wins. The from-noplace winning _created_ you. You must keep winning to keep the existence of love and endorsements and the shiny magazines wanting your profile.'

Best 1079-page book ever.

</comment><comment><USER4> I dearly hope that some day soon we will find the cause and the cure for this disease that has tortured so many.

</comment><comment><USER5> "At Amherst David perfected the style he would wear for the rest of his life"

When I got to this I realized I was reading the wrong magazine's article about him.</comment>


Tell HN: Setting up a live-in hacker house - <AUTHOR>

We're looking at putting together a hacker house within a 20 minute driving radius of Mountain View and I was hoping to gauge interest. Is anyone looking to move to/around the area in the next few weeks? There are a number of houses available and finding an apartment is a pain. Plus, living with like-minded individuals is always nice :)<p>Feel free to ping me at ainsleyb at alum dot mit dot edu <comment><USER2> A lil off topic but somehow when I read this, the first thing that leapt to my mind is the LikeALittle HQ @ Palo Alto. Have you seen it on techcrunch?

<http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/04/tc-cribs-likealittle-lal/>

I can imagine the sights and smells of your hacker house will end up somewhat similar to this guys within a few months of moving in.

Tip: It will be prudent to make sure the house is female-friendly. :)

<comment><USER3> There's also been a Palo Alto hacker house for several years. I met a couple of the guys at Startup School and they seemed pretty cool. <http://hackerhouse.bluwiki.com/go/Hackerhouse>

<comment><USER4> It's too bad the site doesn't seem to have seen any love in a while. Last update to the main page there was over a year ago and a few of the external links seem to be broken.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you end up finding enough interest, it would be awesome to know how this works out. Any chance you will write about this more in the future?

Also, this is when I wish that I was in the bay area instead of Middle-of- Nowhere, Midwest.

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely. I'm still trying to figure out the best place. Some people are up for the idea of being further away in something really nice, and others want to be in the thick of things. Optimal situation would be to find a happy medium :)

<comment><USER4> Awesome! Here's to hoping it will all be positive news.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Awesome! I had a similar idea -- will email you.

Just a note, in case the primary motivator for getting a house is cost: most of the time, apartments are cheaper per bedroom than houses.

<comment><AUTHOR> We've actually found it much easier and cheaper to find houses in this area. Granted, we moved here with the major influx of interns :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What kind of price range of house are you looking at?

</comment><comment><USER7> Sure. I have odd circumstances, but I'll ping ya.

</comment><comment><USER8> great idea!

</comment><comment><USER9> Genius idea! Would love to do something like that when I graduate - I don't feel like working for a big corp & earn piles of $$$, would love to start my own thing

I only gotta figure out how to tell my parents.. :p

<comment><USER10> Easy! "Mom, I can make $100k now, or $6M in 3 years. You tell me which you'd prefer." And then just make sure to not tell her the stats, of course ;)

<comment><USER11> Eerily close to what I said to my mother when I moved from NC to CA around the age of 17-18.

I was on the right track, but I'll be damned if that dot-com bubble didn't stop me :P</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: I've launched, users have dried up, what's wrong? (repodrop.com) - <AUTHOR>

I've recently launched RepoDrop - Private Git Repository Hosting.  I'm an experienced developer, but marketing is a whole new ball game.
I got my initial interest through blog posts, had some beta signups and emailed them at launch.  About 10% signed up, not bad I thought.
However, since then there have been virtually no new signups, I thought the site was broken at one point!  I've tried some targeted Google Adwords and Facebook Ads that have generated clicks but no signups (even though it is free to sign up with no commitment).
I think this is a common slump to end up in for techies-turned-entrepreneurs but like many before me I was blinded and thought it would be fine for me.
This is the product url: https://repodrop.com/
Can you see anything obviously wrong with the product, homepage, signup, features, copy etc..?  Do you have any advice what I can do to get some interest?  Have I  completely misjudged the market?
Admittedly it is a MVP at the moment and I plan to iterate on the product, but people aren't even finding out that it is an MVP at this stage and I don't have enough users to gather enough opinion on the required future feature set.
Thanks. <comment><USER2> 1) No clue what the interface looks like aside from the poor-looking screenshot above the signup button.

2) No "About Us" section other than the link to moocode.com.

3) Not sure if I can do public repositories too.

4) I already use github for $7/month.

</comment><comment><USER3> For starters you could redesign your home page. Its very confusing in my opinion. The product features is in the footer, also the screenshot is not clear. No offense, this is not the design, I'd trust to open my wallet. :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Why would anyone use you over GitHub ?

</comment><comment><USER5> Adding some depth to the pitch might help. It appears on first glance to be one page - try showing users how complete and useful the service is with more screenshots and examples of use. Since security is a primary value prop it would be nice to know more about how the site is more secure than github.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a crowded market with some well established fast-growing leaders. Why do you want to compete with them? Have you thought of building on top of the existing players and creating value-added services?

</comment><comment><USER7> Can you provide numbers on visitors? There's more to the conversion funnel than just signups; i.e. could it be that you have no signups because there are no new visitors?

<comment><AUTHOR> About 400 unique visitors in the past two weeks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Clickable: <https://repodrop.com/>

</comment><comment><USER9> My guess is because you offer less product than GitHub, and charge more for it. Unless you make your value proposition clear, I don't see any reason for anybody to use your service.

<comment><AUTHOR> A common theme seems to be that I'm not making the value proposition clear. Github actually charges $22/month for 20 repositories and 10 collaborators. Repodrop is $9/month for unlimited repos and unlimited collaborators. I will have to make this clearer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't really get the service. You should explain it in the homepage.

My questions: \- Is this a replacement for GitHub? \- Or is this like a cloud host for Git repositories? \- I already have a private Git repository.. so your service is just a backup? \- This sounds like a lot of hidden work. Be more transparent on what I'd need to do.. Show some command lines like Heroku does to show me how easy it is to use it.</comment>


WikiLeaks releases files from the US Govt on the 9/11 terror attacks - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gadsden0/wikileaks-9-11-files <comment><USER2> These aren't new: they were actually re-released in 2011.

The original site is: [https://911.wikileaks.org](https://911.wikileaks.org)

That site explains what the data is:

 _9 /11 tragedy pager intercepts.

From 3AM on Sunday September 11, 2011, until 3AM the following day (US east coast time), WikiLeaks is re-releasing over half a million US national text pager intercepts. The intercepts cover a 24 hour period surrounding the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington.

The messages are being broadcast "live" to the global community — sychronized to the time of day they were sent. The first message is from 3AM September 11, 2001, five hours before the first attack, and the last, 24 hours later.

Text pagers are usualy carried by persons operating in an official capacity. Messages in the archive range from Pentagon, FBI, FEMA and New York Police Department exchanges, to computers reporting faults at investment banks inside the World Trade Center

The archive is a completely objective record of the defining moment of our time. We hope that its entrance into the historical record will lead to a nuanced understanding of how this event led to death, opportunism and war._</comment>


Continuations in Racket - <AUTHOR> http://www.michaelburge.us/2018/03/06/continuations-in-racket.html <comment><USER2> > _`begin` does not create a new continuation frame, so its expressions are in > the top-level prompt._

Just a reminder. (begin ...) sometimes is too magical, specialy inside modules. If someone want the nn magical versión, it should be replaced with (let () ...).</comment>


73-Year Old Librarian Has Been Donating All Earnings To The Poor For 30 Years - <AUTHOR> http://www.thebetterindia.com/12607/man-donated-every-rupee-earned-help-poor-kalyanasundaram-librarian/

<comment><USER2> "The International Biographical Centre, Cambridge, has honoured him as 'one of the noblest of the world'."

The International Biographical Centre is a notorious scam.. you can simply pay a few hundred $ to get your name in the "outstanding intellectuals of the 21st century" [1]

Just because it's in Cambridge doesn't mean it's good.

[http://consumerwatchdogbw.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/internation...](http://consumerwatchdogbw.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/international- biographical-centre-more.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing this. It did indeed cross our minds that such a award sounds dubious (just by its title!). We've removed its reference. The other awards he has won are genuine and verified by us.</comment></comment>


Free Unix (1983) - <AUTHOR> http://firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER2> On Chrome, this will transform the entire web to look like that page. (It's very quick-and-dirty, so not everything works.)

1\. Install the Stylebot extension ([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylebot/oiaejidbm...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylebot/oiaejidbmkiecgbjeifoejpgmdaleoha)).

2\. Click the "CSS" button added to the right of the omnibar.

3\. Click "Options..."

4\. Click "Styles" in the left sidebar.

5\. Click the "Edit Global Stylesheet" button.

6\. Enter the following:

        @font-face {
          font-family: GlassTTYVT220;
          src: local("Glass TTY VT220") local("Glass TTY VT220 Medium") url(http://waltergr.com/misc/Glass_TTY_VT220.ttf) format("truetype");
        }

        * {
          color: #e5b800;
          background-color: #0a0600;
          font-family: GlassTTYVT220;
          font-size: 20px;
        }

7\. Click save.

8\. Load / refresh a page.

9\. Bask in the amber glow.

I didn't want to hotlink the font on someone else's server so I uploaded it to one of mine. You should probably put it on a server you own, which is accessible via SSH, and change [http://waltergr.com/..](http://waltergr.com/..). to //yourserver.com/...

Here's a screenshot of the front page of HN: [http://waltergr.com/misc/chrome- vt220-screenshot.png](http://waltergr.com/misc/chrome-vt220-screenshot.png)

<comment><USER3> Dude. Thanks for this. First thing through my head when I saw this was retro font FTW.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > I have worked extensively on compilers, editors, debuggers, command > interpreters, the Incompatible Timesharing System and the Lisp Machine > operating system.

Glorious times! You might be given bare metal and full freedom to create new operating systems, invent languages and write compilers/debuggers/editors for them. Nothing can ever make a software engineer happier than this. In my view anyway.

Will this ever happen again?

<comment><USER5> It does, especially in the embedded world. I spent a good portion of my two last years working on an operating system for very resource-constrained devices.

The web kids get all the rage, we get all the fun.

<comment><USER6> How did you get into that line of work?

<comment><USER5> I didn't do anything special, really. I spent most of my teens hacking around quite eclectically, and especially played with a lot of operating systems and computers, old and new. Other than that, after finishing university, I applied for a job, went to the interview, got the job and so on. Nothing special.

One thing that probably did help me was that, while still being a competent enough programmer (working part-time included), I got my BSc in Electrical Engineering, so it was especially easy to get into the embedded world (being able to go from reading a schematic to writing the driver, while being able to debug stuff with the logic analyzer and the oscilloscope are good assets). But that's not a rule, I was the only one in my team with a degree in something other than CS/CompEng, and I'm still in a minority everywhere I go.

Edit: oh, yeah. The other thing is, I started at a small company. A lot of companies nowadays tend to overspecialize even their fresh-out-of-school junior programmers. It doesn't happen everywhere, but where it does, it's a disaster. I worked on a lot of stuff in my first year, from various peripheral drivers to factory test routines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Amazing how much more reasonable Stallman seems in that, a fantastic bit of history.

<comment><USER8> The most innocuous mention of Stallman's name inevitably provokes an emotional remark.

I was struck most by the date of that announcement. Stallman has dedicated 30 years "[putting] together a sufficient body of free software so that I will be able to get along without any software that is not free". _That_ represents a monumental commitment to principle.

You can call him unyielding, uncompromising, demanding, and I won't quibble. But unreasonable? That word has too many connotations of unfairness or lack of consideration, a bit ad hominem for my taste.

We _need_ leaders at the extremes, the deep thinkers, the rabble rousers, for these are the people who actually change the world. The politicians moderate those influences, making the compromises that are necessary, preventing wild swings of the needle. Be glad that RMS isn't a politician - he is more effective where he is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> And it's yet to be released.

<comment><USER10> Only sorta. They've written a TON of valuable code, released and used by millions. They've yet to put together a competitive system of _only_ GNU code, though nowadays Debian does let you install Hurd underneath (I'm not sure how much this breaks, but at least many things work).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This might be the empire game envisioned by Stallman, but it's not a GNU project: [http://www.wolfpackempire.com/](http://www.wolfpackempire.com/)

</comment><comment><USER12> I couldn't help but think, would Stallman have used something like Kickstarter?, had it existed back then. Or would he have perhaps added a bitcoin address for donations, if it existed?

<comment><USER13> "It's been three months since $425,000 was donated to this project and I _still_ don't have a working version of HURD. I demand a refund!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great post!

Did anybody else have quirks in their vision after reading this?

I went from reading this: [http://article.olduse.net/771@mit- eddie.UUCP](http://email@example.com) to this: [https://37signals.com/svn/posts/3633-on-writing- interfaces-w...](https://37signals.com/svn/posts/3633-on-writing-interfaces- wells) and had some weird focusing issues.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'd guess that he composed that message on a Lisp Machine and not a CRT, e.g., something like this: [http://s7.computerhistory.org/is/image/CHM/500004885-03-01](http://s7.computerhistory.org/is/image/CHM/500004885-03-01)?

<comment><USER16> It also has a CRT ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathode_ray_tube](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathode_ray_tube))

<comment><USER15> Yes, the lisp machnes used CRTs, but they did not look like the classic terminals from that era. IIRC they had much higher resolution and were black and white.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> That font.

<comment><USER18> DEC VT220, here's a recreation of that font's appearance: [http://asdasd.rpg.fi/~svo/glasstty/](http://asdasd.rpg.fi/~svo/glasstty/)

<comment><USER19> That magic hacking glow :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Fascinating. Is that how it used to be back then?

<comment><USER16> It you were lucky! (* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAtSw3daGoo](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAtSw3daGoo)) Good amber glow screens were better compared to the green ones. High (invisible) refresh rates were also "professional" equipment. I worked at home by having the computer connected to the antenna input of the plain small black and white CRT TV. That's 50 Hz refresh of the screen. Interlaced. If you grew up on LCD screens you certainly don't know how 50 Hz refresh feels. And I saved the assembly code to the cassette tape recorder. If I was lucky, if it didn't crash and cause the whole RAM to be wiped out before. And I was lucky that I didn't have to key the sequence in with the switches on the front panel, that I also did earlier (not on this one, but the picture is good: [http://www.vintagecomputer.net/MITS/680/altair_680_front_pan...](http://www.vintagecomputer.net/MITS/680/altair_680_front_panel_right.jpg)). And that all is even not a joke (as in the video I linked first).

<comment><USER20> Well that is interesting. I started off on a celeron/pentium system so I have no clue how these work. Actually never even came across one of such system in my life. Also since all the old usenet stuff are found on Google Groups, I never even came across this interface before.

<comment><USER16> If you refer to the picture, it's of Altair "the first home computer," the computer for which Bill Gates wrote his version of BASIC which was practically an OS for that computer.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC)

Ever heard of the computer bus -- you know the thing that all extension cards connect to -- well on the panels of old computers you were able to see the state of the bus or to change it with the switches. You've actually felt the bits with your hands and saw them on the lights -- you were able to turn on and of each one with the switch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Great copywriting! Go for it dude!</comment>


Bootstrapping a $30k profit/month company from our internship earnings (Part 3) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fiplab.com/bootstrapping-a-30k-profitmonth-company-from-18973

<comment><USER4> I love these posts, and I am rooting for you guys, but find it a little depressing that you first started making real money by _cloning_ someone else's crappy novelty fluff app.

<comment><USER5> Thanks doomlaser. With little money (especially back in September), it's incredibly risky to innovate, and in today's world, everything is a derivative of the other in some form. e.g., Facebook from MySpace, Lamborghini from Ferrari. Talking Gremlin was exactly this, on a smaller scale.

This is our philosophy: Find a successful business -> Discover as much as possible about it -> Re-implement it all -> Then battle them for supremacy. Having an enemy brings out our primal instincts. Boom. :)

<comment><USER6> Very smart. Your goal is not to innovate, it's to succeed.

This is very important as it's counter to the common belief that success is based on having a "new" idea instead of just taking over an existing market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> HN discussions for parts 1 & 2...

Part 1: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2955214>

Part 2: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2965929>

</comment><comment><USER8> There's a real nugget of wisdom in listening to angry customers. So many customers will say something nice to not offend.

When someones passionate and says you've got it wrong and here's where - <USER2> should pay careful attention. Perhaps 20% are trolls you can safely ignore but the rest will tell you what people were thinking but were too polite to say.

So many fellow entrepreneurs tell me breathlessly about this person or other who liked their startup. I always ask did anyone say they didn't like it? Usually they say sure but I just ignored them - big mistake.

<comment><USER9> I believe Erik Ries said much of the same thing in a talk I saw once (can't find it now, of course). The gist of it was that nobody likes to get angry, and angry customers are therefor especially important because they actually _care_ enough about your product to get angry at you for screwing it up.

<comment><AUTHOR> if people complain, you know you have something worth complaining about :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Thanks for sharing as well. Seems that you had a three pronged approach to success:

1\. Create something that has a proven market, and do it well (Talking Tom Cat clone) 2\. Viral marketing (Youtube videos and Facebook sharing) As well as cross app promotion 3\. Create more apps with the same formula and framework already set up.

This should work for a lot of other devs as well, although they may not see the same level of success as these gentlemen.

</comment><comment><USER11> Curious what Mac App Store revenues are like. Can you share any rankings-to- downloads stats for FaceTab and some of your other Mac apps?

<comment><AUTHOR> Will do in Part 4!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> As a fellow indie dev with some success in the app store, I'm always happy to hear of other indies become successful. I think the App Store has really flipped traditional software sales on its head and made it possible for the likes of you and I to compete head to head with billion dollar companies. It's quite remarkable and I hope this is just the beginning.

<comment><USER5> @bignoggins - Absolutely, I could never have imagined I would be running a business where we make our own products from scratch, without all the large scale corporate mumbo jumbo.

p.s. great website, good to see you're able to live the dream and travel the world!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Anirudh/Rishi,

Great story, I'm a long time lurker but created an account to comment/question. From what I could gather in the 3 posts, it looks like neither of you guys were technical at the very beginning. Did one of you eventually learn to code/design, or is that portion still hired out? What qualities did you look for when hiring coders?

Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, glad we got you to sign up to HN :)

Great question, I'm pretty technical since I've was developing websites for several years before starting FIPLAB. At times, I even figure out how to code things when our programmer can't figure it out. I always look for the simplest way to build something, especially when we are under a tight deadline and need to ship before the competition does.

Also, I still do a lot of the design work myself (obviously not the 3d modelling/animation though) - but more UI/Icon design.

As for hiring coders, the number one thing we look for is a proactive and 'never give up' attitude. Can't stand it where in the past a programmer has given up after spending just 1 hour trying to code a particular feature. If they can't be bothered find/figure out the solution, then they'll never mix well with our team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Great series, thanks for sharing.

I am especially curious how effective you guys found paid advertising to be - the conventional wisdom I've heard is that it's pretty pointless for advertising App Store apps.

Are you guys still doing any paid advertising these days, or is it mostly organic/word of mouth/cross promotion at this point?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Paid advertising is pretty much useless, unless you have very deep pockets. We just splashed a bit of cash on it as we needed to do everything possible to break into the Top 25 'Golden Zone'. We also got a very good deal at $0.01 CPC and they matched our initial deposit of $250.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for confirming. Do you think the initial ad spend was worthwhile? (Do you think you would have gotten into the Top 25 without it?)

<comment><AUTHOR> probably could have broken into the Top 25 without it, but didn't want to risk not advertising, just in case we didn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm really enjoying these articles. Thanks for sharing.

Since iAd eCPM has dropped from 15$ to around 1-3$, from my personal experience, have you found that your revenues have also dropped 5-15x? Or has the volume, or other monetization techniques helped recoup the difference? In other words, did you find that period to be the peak income period for the Talking Gremlin app?

<comment><USER5> Hi, Anirudh here, and thanks for reading. Although iAds eCPM has dropped, we normally still manage high single digit figures. Our revenues from ads have roughly halved, but there are the odd anomalies in eCPM rates. For instance, yesterday was pretty stellar at a $17.7 eCPM average. Certainly, late last year, especially when iAds was first launched in the UK, ad revenue and CPM rates were at their peak.

However, by moving onto the Mac App Store at an early stage with popular apps, we have shifted from solely relying on large ad revenues as our income source to paid app income. Our overall daily turnover ratio between paid app earnings and ad revenue is now roughly 50-50.

Open to answering any more questions directly here on HN, so do keep them coming.

<comment><USER14> Thank you so much for the response. It's really insightful. I haven't read too much about developer experiences on the Mac App store, so I'm really looking forward to your next blog post. Thanks again!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> On your website it says "If you have an interesting project to propose to us then we'd love to hear from you." Is that still the case, or are you guys swamped at the moment ? If you are still accepting new projects, would you perhaps go into some detail on the workflow/costs etc. Thanks much.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not currently accepting new projects, hit us up in the middle of October - <USER3> might have more time on our hands then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I see all your apps are free, what are your thoughts on paid apps?

<comment><AUTHOR> paid apps are great, we have a few: FaceTab Pro, MailTab Pro, Disk Doctor, London Cycle Pro etc... about 50% of our income is from paid apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Starting to see a pattern here with the App Store. Are you guys just -really- unlucky, or do these sorts of bugs in the charts happen a lot?

<comment><AUTHOR> The bug at Christmas actually happened the year before too, and it was hell for a lot of developers when the same bug happened again last year.

But I guess you learn to get used to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Please don't take this the wrong way, this is a serious question, and I hope you give it some serious thought before you answer.

Do you feel fulfilled? Do you feel like this is the most you can contribute to human civilization? If you could, how would you most like to make the world a better place?

<comment><USER19> I always am left wondering what people think gives them the right to ask that question of other people.

Isn't it hard enough figuring that out for your own life?</comment></comment>


CAP Theorem Explained - <AUTHOR> http://robertgreiner.com/2014/06/cap-theorem-explained/ <comment><USER2> Unfortunately, this guy doesn't understand the CAP theorem at all.

Once you are distributed, P is not an optional. Rather, in the case of network failure, consistency or availability is what suffers. A system cannot be both CA and distributed.

So, for example, Elasticsearch is not a 'CA' solution despite the diagram in the article, but is actually closer to PC (although, in practice it is far more subtle than even that as it is not perfectly consistent, and configuration options allow for some trade-offs between availability and consistency in the case of communication errors.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's some debate on the Elasticsearch forums around CA vs. CP - with the overall consensus in favor of CA. Elasticsearch doesn't perform well across networks so in practice, most deployments have multiple nodes in a single datacenter - CA.

Thanks for your feedback though, I have some posts queued up on more of the subtleties in the model, this was just meant to be an introductory post.

<comment><USER3> Elasticsearch actually sacrifices both consistency and availability during partitions, even when inside a single datacenter (trust me, they happen in production).

If you configure ES to prioritize consistency _somewhat_ (minimum_master_nodes), it prevents writes during a partition—but there's at least one "split" partition scenario where even minimum_master_nodes doesn't prevent inconsistent writes. If you configure ES to prioritize availability during a partition, it isn't consistent. Remember, ES doesn't claim to be consistent and doesn't even use any sort of consensus algorithm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As others have said, that article is very misleading. Some better ones:

* [http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=1926...](http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=192621) \- including a very nice way of thinking about CAP and tradeoffs)

* [http://www.infoq.com/articles/cap-twelve-years-later-how-the...](http://www.infoq.com/articles/cap-twelve-years-later-how-the-rules-have-changed) \- a good perspective on CAP, and why many people still don't understand it clearly.

* [http://lpd.epfl.ch/sgilbert/pubs/BrewersConjecture-SigAct.pd...](http://lpd.epfl.ch/sgilbert/pubs/BrewersConjecture-SigAct.pdf) \- don't get put off by the formal language. Gilbert and Lynch is still (IMO) the best explanation of what CAP means, and what it implies.

* [http://blog.cloudera.com/blog/2010/04/cap-confusion-problems...](http://blog.cloudera.com/blog/2010/04/cap-confusion-problems-with-partition-tolerance/) \- Some good criticism of the way CAP is frequently explained.

* [http://codahale.com/you-cant-sacrifice-partition-tolerance/](http://codahale.com/you-cant-sacrifice-partition-tolerance/) \- Why CA systems don't actually exist.

* [http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dna/papers/abadi-pacelc.pdf](http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dna/papers/abadi-pacelc.pdf) \- PACELC, maybe a better model.

* [http://dbmsmusings.blogspot.com/2010/04/problems-with-cap-an...](http://dbmsmusings.blogspot.com/2010/04/problems-with-cap-and-yahoos-little.html) \- Another look at PACELC, with some examples.

</comment><comment><USER5> For those who want to read about real tests of how various common software fares under network partitions, here is some amazing work done by aphyr and his infamous Jepesen tests:

[http://aphyr.com/tags/jepsen](http://aphyr.com/tags/jepsen)

This post has some info on elastic, but nothing in excruciating detail: [http://aphyr.com/posts/288-the-network-is- reliable](http://aphyr.com/posts/288-the-network-is-reliable)

<comment><USER5> Won't let me edit it, but there is now a full test on elasticsearch here: [http://aphyr.com/posts/317-call-me-maybe- elasticsearch](http://aphyr.com/posts/317-call-me-maybe-elasticsearch)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You can't sacrifice partition tolerance: [http://codahale.com/you-cant- sacrifice-partition-tolerance/](http://codahale.com/you-cant-sacrifice- partition-tolerance/)

<comment><USER7> I'm sorry, but when I read this, I thought of SimCity...

"YOU CANT REDUCE FUNDING TO PARTITION TOLERANCE. YOULL REGRET THIS."

I wonder if anybody's made SimDataCenter?

<comment><USER8> _" I wonder if anybody's made SimDataCenter?"_

That would be really interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In many talks and presentations, I have heard that only eventual consistency was possible in a distributed system. since, A and P are already needed, you can only compromise on C.

Therefore, I am curious in knowing. Here's my question: how do they configure production systems in order to get reasonable or 100% maybe consistency? In other words, the reads must factor latest write into account. No, stale reads.

</comment><comment><USER10> "Consistency around CAP is similar to what you find in a typical ACID model - except that, now, we're in a distributed model."

I thought that consistency in ACID meant that data was always consistent with the rules of the database, whereas in CAP it means that the same data held in different locations is the same? Is that not right?

<comment><USER11> You are right. The article is totally wrong.

From Eric Brewer himself: "The relationship between CAP and ACID is more complex and often misunderstood, in part because the C and A in ACID represent different concepts than the same letters in CAP..."

(from [http://www.infoq.com/articles/cap-twelve-years-later-how- the...](http://www.infoq.com/articles/cap-twelve-years-later-how-the-rules- have-changed))</comment></comment>


More time in the classroom doesn't always mean better scores - <AUTHOR> http://hechingered.org/content/more-time-in-the-classroom-doesnt-always-mean-better-scores_3945/

<comment><USER2> This is not exactly shocking. The quality of education has to be a factor as well. I am sure for most people an hour of one on one tuition, is more effective than a number of hours in a large class. Even more so if the rest in the large class are not interested in learning.</comment>


Crazy 3D browsing experience works in Safari and some versions of Chrome - <AUTHOR> http://html5samples.appspot.com/3dCube.html

<comment><USER2> In only spins on the x-axis in my version of chrome... 9.0.597.98

Is it supposed to rotate on the z-axis?</comment>


Ask HN: Are there any designers out there keen to contribute to the OSS world? - <AUTHOR>

Many open source projects tend to have awful or non-existent logos/branding, with websites that look like they were designed by us programmers, because they often are. I've read a few times including here on HN, that there are many designers out there who want to contribute to open source projects, but don't know where to get started. I'm looking for these kind of people, to offer them just that opportunity.
I'm looking for someone to create the branding (logo/style guide) for our new project, which is in a nutshell, an open source project building the hardware and software which controls autonomous vehicles. What do I mean by that? Think of awesome things like quadrocopters and homebuilt flying drones :-) We create the hardware an software needed for this and open source it all, and our users take it to have fun and do awesome things we never thought of. We have our first device/"product" ready to be released into the wild in a few weeks, but we would like to get some proper branding for the NFP organisation and to set-up the website properly before we do that.
Anyway, hopefully I have caught the attention of a few interested people. If that's you, please feel free send me an email at angus@omniloco*org <comment><USER2> Try http//www.WeekendHacker.net you might find some designers there (disclaimer:I am the creator)

I have tried to contribute but one of the problems is the design is an afterthought on most of those projects. I sent you a mail with some suggestions.</comment>


Microsoft Zune is retired as of Nov. 15 - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/nov/16/microsoft-ends-zune-music-streaming-service-apple <comment><USER2> I still use a Zune 30GB player. When my original one finally stopped holding a charge, I got a refurbished one for under $100 on Amazon to replace it. The sound quality is pretty decent, which is the main thing I care about, and the Zune software is okay - a bit less loathsome than ITunes in my experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> I always thought they looked like pretty good devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Anyone looking for a dedicated music player device should check out FiiO. They have high-quality audio components and support a wide range of lossless and lossy formats.

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

<comment><USER4> FiiO are only really popular with audiophiles who claim they can hear the difference. For everyone else, if you're going to blow $200 on an MP3 player you may have well get an iPod (e.g. iPod Touch) since it unlocks far more potential (apps).

I am personally rather partial to the "Sandisk Clip Jam." It is roughly $30-40, is a glorified micro-SD card player (up to 32 GB), and has tons of battery life. Great for when a smartphone is too large and cheaper than a iPod Nano.

The FiiO is just either too expensive or too large.</comment></comment>


Biologists find cave life that may be 50k years old - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2017-02-biologists-weird-cave-life-years.html <comment><USER2> National Geographic covered this story in greater detail here [http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/02/crystal-caves- min...](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/02/crystal-caves-mine- microbes-mexico-boston-aaas-aliens-science/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm cautiously optimistic about these findings. As long as she doesn't name them something like 'Penelope Deserves Tenure-01'* we should be good...

*[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFAJ-1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFAJ-1)

</comment><comment><USER4> maybe. this was the group that made the splashy but totally wrong assertions about arsenic-incorporating extremophiles a few years ago, so i'll pay attention only after peer review.

<comment><USER5> Skepticism is a good thing, but I think you are painting with an pretty broad brush. Penelope Boston was not an author on the arsenic extremeophile paper. The only connection I can come up with is that the lead author of the arsenic paper was affiliated with NASA's Astrobiology Institute and Boston is now director of the institute.

<comment><USER4> yes. different author; same group, same research culture.

<comment><USER6> Actually, not even the same group(s). They have a strange sort of structure where the institute is made up of a rotating cast of academic and NASA teams: [https://nai.nasa.gov/teams/](https://nai.nasa.gov/teams/) It looks like all the groups around during the GFAJ era have been replaced.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is he wearing cool-packs?

<comment><USER8> > Is he wearing cool-packs?

"They were also so hot that scientists had to don cheap versions of space suits—to prevent contamination with outside life—and had ice packs all over their bodies."

<comment><USER9> Specifically, up to 136˚F and 99% humidity. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_the_Crystals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_the_Crystals)

<comment><USER10> That'S 58°C</comment></comment></comment></comment>


EU breaks silence on US snooping scandal - <AUTHOR> http://euobserver.com/justice/120437

<comment><USER2> The EU is not going to do much. The reason is that all these nation states are in bed with each other and if there is one doing something like this you can bet that the rest of them are engaging in similar activities (probably with a few exceptions).

<comment><USER3> Many of them are dependent on USA directly when it comes to military power maybe this will open their eyes to some extent.</comment></comment>


Yipes:'Facebook Is Officially the Worst-Performing IPO of the Decade' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/05/facebook-is-officially-the-worst-performing-ipo-of-the-decade/257703/

<comment><USER2> ... on a hand-picked list of 7 companies after 5 days of trading...

This is extremely selective and misleading. You could also flip this around and say the underwriters did the best job getting maximum value for their client.</comment>


Google to spend more than $1bn on satellite internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/02/google-to-spend-more-than-1bn-on-satellite-internet-reports-indicate

<comment><AUTHOR> if google succeed. will this kill a bunch of sat-com companies?</comment>