Son-of-a-bitch, it worked. My first step down the customer development path… - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/lean-startup-circle/browse_frm/thread/da93cc7340c96327 <comment><USER17> Erm. So he never tells what his product is, what questions he asked or what responses he got. Then he claims success before the product has even launched. And all people over here immediately throw their arms up to praise the new, awesome, groundbreaking methodology.

What is it with us nerds that we fall so easily for every new XP, agile, scrum, CD brainfart of the week? Is it that our brains are, on average, so exhausted from the constant hacking, that we crave to outsource at least the higher level thinking?

<comment><USER18> He had an extremely productive conversation with a cold prospect. From it, he got a compelling argument not to build a product he was otherwise ready to build. He didn't declare his business a success. He declared Steve Blank's recommendation a tactical success. And he's right.

Customer development isn't a software development methodology. Steve Blank is just talking about basic fundamental marketing, and giving it straightforward steps.

<comment><USER17> Well, that's fine and all. I think this approach was called "market research" or just "common sense" for a few decades, at least before Mr. Blank came along.

I'm not saying it's a bad idea. I just fail to see how it is a _new_ idea in any way.

<comment><USER18> That observation would be a lot more witty if so many people didn't know how to do basic market research. I most definitely include myself among them.

<comment><USER17> I'm sort of baffled in two ways here, because neither do I think this is necessarily a prerequisite to launching a successful business, nor do I think someone who seriously _needs_ that kind of advice has a snowball's chance in hell to actually create one...

Either you have a strong vision and go for it no matter what, or you feel a need to validate and know the right questions to ask. No book can tell you the right questions for your particular product, nor how to interpret the answers.

And for many products, especially the truly great ones, it doesn't even make sense to try and squeeze any kind of judgement out of potential customers. Can you imagine the google or twitter founders getting any useful feedback out of such a questionare?

Everyone would just have told them to stop and get a real job at the time...

<comment><USER19> I couldn't disagree more. Maybe the _pundits_ would have told them to go get a regular job, but the _users_ were clearly very passionate, or they wouldn't have continued iterating and developing the product. Believe it or not, there were a ton of people who got very addicted to twttr when it first came out, and I'm absolutely positive that, without their feedback, the product wouldn't be the massive success it is today.

<comment><USER20> i agree with you because the pundits should og told them to get a proper job on the other hand the product is a massive succes so really its 50/50

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This sounds like unit testing. It sounds good when you hear about it, and you think you probably should be doing it, but you figure you're okay even without it.

And then you actually try it and then BAM! you realize its value and the difference it makes.

<comment><USER22> The first time I tried CD on a new product idea, I quickly realized that my idea was wrong. I can't thank Steve enough for saving me the weeks/months of development I would normally have put into a project only for it to be mediocre performer in the market. I honestly wrote no software at all for the first time, called/met with a ton of people, and learned a lot in the process about how wrong ideas can be :)

I feel like this mentality changes you in ways you can't imagine until you do it. Recently when approached by a local businessman about a really lucrative project instead of doing the coding internally, I simply outsourced all the customer development through elance. So far results are everything we thought they would be and more. And I've done almost no work.

This is lightyears ahead of where I was years ago - I remember blowing hundreds of thousands of dollars on projects that never even got to market! Now I'm spending ~500$ to outsource customer development (in specific cases - depends on business model of course) and getting better results.

<comment><USER23> I would really be interested in hearing something specific about one of these projects, as a kind of contrast. When you say you outsource the _customer development_ onto Elance, what does that mean? Isn't the customer development the part you _have_ to do?

<comment><USER22> For example, come up with a quantitative market hypothesis (e.g. X% of Y businesses contacted by method Z in will be interested in buying the "software". Also problem statements etc etc etc - anything quantitative. We setup a simple data collection form (a-la kissmetrics) for the minions at elance and set them at finding out the answer. They generate target lists (web scraping etc), contact them, collate the results and the rest is pretty simple. I've done it in stages so it's not all the same people doing the work.

Now we are starting to outsource the development of a repeatable sales process, which will be an interesting thing. It'll be the first project I've done almost no work on, but could be the most lucrative!

So we are still doing _some_ of the CD, but the hard part (getting out there and finding early adopters, interviewing them, collating feedback etc) is automated.

<comment><USER24> Could you maybe write a blog post with a concrete example of a project you researched and rejected like this? I'd love to read that....

<comment><USER23> Yeah, I'd like to read that, too.

<comment><USER22> I'm not the blogging/twitter type. Never done it actually, and don't plan to. I'd rather be doing things than writing about doing them :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The next time you guys all think that the "business guy" in start-ups is overrated, think about the time you clicked the up arrow here.

Your eureka moment here is is a akin to a business guy setting up his first website.

<comment><USER26> "The next time you guys all think that the "business guy" in start-ups is overrated, think about the time you clicked the up arrow here."

The business guy is someone who has read Steve Blank's book and put it into practice?

Any "technical guy" can read the book and put the ideas into practice (far easier than a business guy teaching himself to code ). Talking to your customers is hardly magic. Why do they need a "business guy" again (again confining the discussion to the kind of activity talked about in the bog entry. Anyone can do this. There _are_ specialized business skills which do call for "business guys" but talking to potential customers when you plan a startup is hardly a specialist skill).

EDIT: I am just playing the devil's advocate here. I think there is insufficient information _in the blog post_ to make it some kind of paean for the "business guy" and/or a counterpoint to the supposed underrating of "business guys".

<comment><USER19> Not sure I agree with that. While in theory, _anybody_ could apply this advice equally well, there are certain types of people who are too far down the rabbit hole to properly process feedback.

For us, it's definitely been very helpful to have a non-technical founder on board, someone who can push for problems to be solved even when they're inconvenient (or technically insignificant), because they don't code on a day- to-day basis.

I suppose this is more a case for a "savvy product guy" than a "business guy" per se, although both refer to non-technical people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> "However, a class on product realization at _Stanford_ peaked my interest and I decided to pitch my idea to get into the class."

I'm already not listening. Why is it when somebody from any other school in the U.S. except for top-10 schools says something like this it goes:

"However, a class on product realization at school peaked my interest and I..."

I now know that you think your idea is on shaky ground and you have to plug your school to make you and your idea seem legit.

Note to top-10 U.S. schools, you _need_ to have a required 1-credit class that all students must take. In it, the only thing that is taught is that students are not ever to refer to their overpriced place of education except when asked. It's insufferable and only makes the speaker/author sound like they are incapable of providing strong ideas of their own and have to bolster their statements with a brand label.

If it's not clear why this is necessary (i.e. you went to a top-10 school and this concept completely mystifies you) pretend we are talking about something else, say the recent snowfall on the East Coast of the U.S. and I say "When I was out shoveling snow in my Louis Vuitton coat..." or "I was loading groceries into my Mercedes..." or "I realized I was running late to the meeting when I noticed the time on my Blancpain..." -- I sound like a pompous asshole with a pathological need to insert needless and content free information.

People who go to top schools in other countries don't feel the need to constantly remind the world of this (well, unless they went to Oxford or Cambridge I suppose, but even then I find remarkable restraint). I can't ever recall hearing "When I did some mundane thing at the University of Tokyo..." or "There I was, doing some typical activity at the University of Heidelberg..."

Seriously, stop. And tell all your friends. It's really only hurting them.

<comment><USER28> I understand your dislike of egotism around schools. This is certainly an issue that requires education on "not being a jerk". That being said, this author used it in a relevant context - because he was attendig Stanford, he could go directly to Steve Blank for advice. You can't do this in the real world without paying his consulting rates. This isn't egotism, it's simply a perk of attending Stanford.

<comment><USER27> I admit to overreacting and I sincerely apologize for it. Upon further review (and skipping the first paragraph), he makes a good point.

But I do stand by my general point that he fell too easily into the insufferable trap of school egotism. I've made it a policy to pretty much just ignore anybody from the moment they start a sentence with "When I went to <insert specific school>...". It could be a top-10 school, or it could be some Tier-3 school. Unless the point is hyper-specific to that school, the school is really immaterial to the point.

Coincidentally when a school _is_ named in a sentence like that it's almost always a top-10 US school. This is a common phenomenon for these schools.

I did some quick spot checking just to make sure I wasn't suffering from some kind of confirmation bias...

According to Google the phrase "What I was at <insert school>" occurs with the following frequencies:

School - Google Returns - US News Ranking

Harvard - 2,280,000 - <USER14>

Columbia - 1,300,000 - <USER3>

Yale - 976,000 - <USER11>

Stanford - 962,000 - <USER12>

Princeton - 651,000 - <USER14>

MIT - 607,000 - <USER12>

Duke - 553,000 - <USER13>

Brown - 485,000 - <USER9>

Cornell - 418,000 - <USER10>

Compare to Tier-3 schools with large student populations

KSU - 91,300

Biola - 56,800

DePaul - 45,200

UVA - 45,600

Some of the schools barely register at all, even reasonably notable ones. I even tried a couple versions of their names to get more results...

George Mason University - Which has the largest student population in the state, and is #1 on USNews's list of Up-and-coming National Universities has the #1 public policy school in the nation, and several other top-10 and top-20 schools and programs (Economics, Political Economics, Law and Economics) etc.

GMU - <USER11>

George Mason - <USER12>

Old Dominion University - one of only 101 public universities with a Carnegie/Doctoral Research-Extensive distinction, large student population

ODU - <USER13>

Old Dominion - <USER14>

Kettering University (formerly GMI) - Ranked consistently as one of the best Engineering Schools in the U.S.

Kettering - <USER16>

GMI - <USER16>

<comment><USER29> The college I went to beats all of those on the same Google search. Does that mean I went to school with a bunch of snobs who thought they were better than they are :(

<comment><USER27> Your school is a top ranked Tier-1 school isn't it? USNews ranks them in the top25.

I've also noticed a similar phenomenon among schools with a strong sports program. (Ohio State _cough_ _cough_ ).

It would be an interesting little research project to come up with a set of typical self-referential statements like my sample one, and go through every school in the country and see where they show up.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that these are not quality schools by any possible stretch of the imagination. But I'd be willing to bet a dollar that the delta between the average Kettering grad and the average MIT grad in the same field is not as high as the ego driven self-referential usage patterns would imply (the average MIT grad is not 80,000x better or more desirable than a Kettering grad).

What's usually surprising is how many of these types of statements ("When I was at...") usually end in a completely banal statement that any university student would be able to complete. Yet these statements are made with the kind of breathless urgency that would make the listener assume there was something really _special_ about this particular permutation of a common experience that only a person who attended that school could really appreciate.

"When I was at Harvard College just a few years ago, there was never any question among young women that we would have both successful careers and successful families." - Caille Millner - [http://www.imdiversity.com/villages/woman/careers_workplace_...](http://www.imdiversity.com/villages/woman/careers_workplace_employment/pns_summers_women_0105.asp)

"When I was at Harvard four years ago, two of my roommates campaigned for George W. Bush..." - Aaron Greenspan - <http://www.aarongreenspan.com/essays/index.html?id=18>

"I told her that, when I was at Harvard in my Freshman year, I played football but I broke my wrist mid-season (true) but it still bothers me (false)." - John Vincent "Brother" Quinlan, Jr. - [http://www.currentobituary.com/ShowObit.aspx?id=54113&me...](http://www.currentobituary.com/ShowObit.aspx?id=54113&member_id=23)

and many many others....

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's weird when you do it, but it works.

Many years ago I was involved in an expensive automotive hobby. I had an idea for a product that I needed and called one of the well known catalog suppliers and asked if they would carry my product if I built it. The owner was immediately excited since it was apparently something he had been asked for a few times before, but he didn't have a source. Same deal here: he told me what features it would need, what an approximate selling price would be, promised to feature it in his catalog as soon as I could build a few, etc...

Then my need for the product went away and I never built a single one. Sometimes wonder what would have happened if I did. I (obviously) didn't have the entrepreneurial mindset back then; now I'd jump on any idea like that!

Still, it's an amazing feeling when you get the "I knew I wasn't the only one thinking this" feedback.

</comment><comment><USER31> ...which also points to a problem a lot of startuppers have: Their product is too broad. Of course, we like to think of what we build as having broader appeal. However, the boarder something is, the harder time you'll have finding a customer to even do CD.

<comment><USER32> I think it isn't just people that are doing startups that have this problem. I see it in almost any project. Usually it starts out small but as you go you feel like you can build more and more into it, and that that will produce a 'better' product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> great article. Nice to see that Steve's principles worked out. Let us know how it goes tomorrow!</comment>


Command&Conquer in HTML 5 - <AUTHOR> http://www.adityaravishankar.com/projects/games/command-and-conquer/

<comment><USER2> site is down

<comment><AUTHOR> Site works for me but the blog was down earlier. Anyway here is the google cache for the blog [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.adi...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.adityaravishankar.com/2011/11/command- and-conquer-programming-an-rts-game-in-html5-and-javascript/&hl=en&strip=1)</comment></comment>


Help Name Android N - <AUTHOR> https://www.android.com/versions/name-n/ <comment><USER2> In this case, the best troll answer would be Android Null.

[http://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/](http://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/)

<comment><USER3> I'm voting null I suggest we all do the same!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Namey McNameFace has a good ring to it.

<comment><USER5> Also my first thought when I saw that headline :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nerds.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerds_(candy)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerds_\(candy\))

</comment><comment><USER7> That video was excruciating. Someone at Google thought it was funny? And why was the main actor doing an impersonation of Cam from Modern Family?

That aside, what is the point of this page? The small print says:

No Purchase Necessary. The opportunity to submit a name will begin at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time ("PT") on 18 May 2016 and end at 11:59 p.m. PT on 8 June 2016. This is solely intended to be for entertainment purposes; the name(s) that you submit will not be judged and there will be no prizes or compensation awarded to any participant.

</comment><comment> King-Aaron I don't know if it's a thing in the US, but those biscuits you have with tea/coffee called "Nice" would be a good name I think. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nice_biscuit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nice_biscuit)

</comment><comment><USER8> Since it has to be a food i would go with Android Noodly McNoodleFace

</comment><comment><USER9> Android Nutella :D

</comment><comment><USER10> "Nonpareil" seems suitably uncommon.

</comment><comment><USER11> Norton (commander)

</comment><comment><USER12> Android N McNFace

<comment><USER13> We've banned this account for trolling.</comment></comment>


Feds charge professed White Hat hackers in breach of AT&T iPad customer data  - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2011/012411-bradner.html

<comment><USER2> I really wish people would stop calling Goatse Security "white hat hackers." As an information security professional, it irks me to think that this is how people think of my industry.

Goatse Security (yes, named after _that_ Goatse) is a subsidiary of the GNAA (excuse my vulgarity, but it stands for the Gay Niggers Association of America), whose sole purpose is to troll the Internet.

All these news outlets giving Goatse more publicity and even worse, calling them _security professionals_ brings a bad name to my field.

<comment><USER3> They do security research. Furthermore, they practice responsible disclosure principles (sometimes). That is pretty much the definition of a white hat hacker.

I think using professional to describe them is a stretch, but classifying them differently because you think they are icky is childish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> [http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/011811-feds-hackers- at...](http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/011811-feds-hackers-att-ipad- data.html?hpg1=bn) this is the article that matches the headline, the current link is about the IETF</comment>


How-to: Handsfree Siri-iOS maps replacement with Google Maps - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/sameerb/status/280365425093644289 easy workaround; no typing, handsfree <comment><AUTHOR> screenshots step1&2: <https://twitter.com/sameerb/status/280365425093644289> Step 3: <https://twitter.com/sameerb/status/280365863276793856> Step 4: <https://twitter.com/sameerb/status/280366043711557632> Step 5: <https://twitter.com/sameerb/status/280366946023784450></comment>


Google Woos Partners for Potential China Expansion - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-woos-partners-for-potential-china-expansion-1534071600 <comment><USER2> This is a move in the right direction but I think Google has no chance in hell of establishing a serious footprint in China. They've poked China in the eye too many times on human rights issues and regardless of your moral stance here, China is not going to help a company that does that.</comment>


Biggest Risk Factor for Depression: Low Income - <AUTHOR> http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/03/biggest-risk-factor-for-depression-low.html

<comment><USER2> " We now have strong evidence that a reliable and effective way to reduce the incidence of depression (and concomitant medical spending) in the U.S. is to reduce poverty and increase income levels generally."

No, we don't. We don't know if low income causes depression, if depression causes low income, or if something else causes both. All three may be true for different cases. You cannot make a statement like "money buys freedom from depression" willly-nilly. Think of all the possible ways in which depression could cause low income: you lose your job because you can't get out of bed, you're not motivated to work and you get fired, etc. Think of all the things that could cause both: e.g. a crippling accident that leaves you unable to do your job, and of course makes you depressed.

[The examples above are not hypothetical, I know those people in real life]

All we know is that depression and low income are correlated, but OP's conclusion is downright irresponsible.

<comment><USER3> This is one of my biggest problems with social sciences. In my opinion it is just pure dishonesty, if not outright lying to make such simple, causational claims on complex phenomenons.

The sad part is, that non-critical media and people are eating this up and using exactly these kinds of "scientific facts" to advance their ideological agenda.

<comment><USER4> Social sciences aren't all bad, and can be used properly. Experimental economics is an example of a field with very interesting, solid scientific insights.

Unfortunately, far too much of the social sciences are funded by extrmely politically motivated and/or sensitive organizations. A big bias I've seen in social sciences, which is present in this particular case, is an acute and completely non-scientific aversion to "blaming the victim." There is clear, and obvious to the layman push to always blame external factors, despite the obvious and persistent presence of possible internal factors.

Poverty isn't rape. Victims can often times be at least partially to blame for their state. However, these studies are often funded by sympathetic groups who are seeking to ascribe external causes whenever possible.

If you have ever known a severely depressed person, I can assure you that they will find a way to make themselves poor very quickly. I could insert my many, many family members and friends who have struggled with depression into this, but it would all be anecdotal. Instead, I'll stay abstract:

1) Depression lowers energy levels 2) Depression drastically inhibits motivation 3) Depression destroys relationships 4) Depression causes self- destructive behavior

All of these things, by themselves, will serve to decrease a person's income. Put them all together and you have a poor person in the making.

Couldn't resist 1 anecdote: My mother was given a very, very generous alimony (house, car, shitloads of money) by my father. She was depressed. She blew through it all. Never got off her ass. Self-destructive behavior meant she drank away her medication's effectivesss. She's been broke (homeless half the time) for the last 25 years. Poverty didn't cause her depression. Depression (and lots of bad decisions) causer her poverty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well. Some nitpicks: low income may not be causing depression, depression could be causing low income. Secondly, just because low income is correlated with depression does not mean that there is not a genetic component. Germ-line genetic variations might also predict low income which causes depression OR predicts depression which causes low income. Implying that this somehow shows there is no genetic component is unwarranted.

</comment><comment><USER6> There's a similar observation at the book the spirit level,by richard wilkinson who show the link between income inequality and bad results in numerous health and social attributes. And it really moves the political inequality debate to a more scientific field , which is nice.

One supposed reason for the link is that inequality(and low status) causes stress. Which hurts health, causes depression, etc.

<comment><USER7> It does need to be pointed out that the academic literature gives a fairly poor support for a link between the level of inequality and population health. For example, the most thorough review (I have seen) of the the research on this topic finds that "there is little support for a "strong" psychosocial version of the income inequality–health hypothesis that it [the level of inequality] is a major, generalizable determinant of population health among or within rich countries" [1]

[1] [http://www.milbank.org/publications/the-milbank- quarterly/fe...](http://www.milbank.org/publications/the-milbank- quarterly/featured-articles/article/2427/is-income-inequality-a-determinant- of-population-health-part-1-a-systematic-review)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Flagged as spam. This guy has submitted the same blog (but different posts) every day this year, and each and every single one of those posts was demonstrably and incredibly _wrong._

Why do people keep falling for this?

</comment><comment><USER9> bad blogger

<https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=techdog>

</comment><comment><USER10> The same graph could be shown for AIDS instead of depression, and the same conclusion could be reached with the same line of logic.

My feeling is that the author doesn't consider depression a medical condition. I'm not sure if I disagree, but I just thought it would be worth bringing up the point since many people have different views on what "Depression" is.

</comment><comment><USER11> Money might buy "freedom from depression," but I suspect it does so by buying antidepressants and therapy.

I think Robert Sapolsky is on to the best explanation of depression: it's a disease rooted in biology and genetics, similar to (and exacerbated by) chronic stress. (Here's a lecture that I'm sure has been posted here before: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc>). Reducing stress can alleviate the symptoms, but really effective treatments treat depression as a disease.

</comment><comment><USER12> How about something as simple as lack of emotional support? How does one actually place a price tag on a true confidant?

</comment><comment><USER13> No shit? someone had to do a study to figure out broke people are more depressed than rich people? I should be a journalist.

</comment><comment><USER14> financial hardship probably causes depression, but low-income does not necessarily cause financial hardship unless you live beyond your means (or make below the poverty line).</comment>


SaltStack wins Gigaom Structure - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2013/06/20/devops-player-saltstack-wins-structure-launchpad-competition-and-investor-interest/

<comment><USER2> We use SaltStack for both the development environment under Vagrant/VirtualBox ([https://github.com/saltstack/salty- vagrant](https://github.com/saltstack/salty-vagrant)), and in production; and are pretty happy with this setup.

I tried looking at Chef and Puppet, and was scared away by the complexity thrown at me upfront. I find Salt way easier to pick up. I like its being declarative, concise, and unsurprising. Also, it has received a seal of approval from our admins. That doesn't happen here with software often :)

Thanks! And congratulations!

</comment><comment><USER3> Recent hire and long-time community member here. Salt has been a very fun project on which to work. Very proud of our team.

</comment><comment><USER4> SaltStack is awesome. I use it a lot.

<comment><USER5> As do I, a great project!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've never worked with better people or software.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Disclosure: I'm an early employee at SaltStack.

</comment><comment><USER7> Congratulations guys!</comment>


Visual Map of Your Name's Online Presence - <AUTHOR> http://personas.media.mit.edu/personasWeb

<comment><USER2> Without the ability to drill down into the different categories, this is meaningless. For example, as a serial entrepreneur in the financial services industry, why is 15% of my online presence in "Art"?

<comment><USER3> Because it's not 'you' it's every person who shares your name.

<comment><USER4> And I happen to share my name with some one far more famous than me....

<comment><USER3> I share my name with several more famous than me. However there was a certain point around the turn of the century when it was just me. Sucks to be eclipsed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> sorry to say this, but typical media lab project - looks pretty, sounds groundbreaking, but is completely useless. I bet whoever made this got an A though.

<comment><USER6> i disagree. this is a great project. the project demonstrates the ability to quickly cull information from different spaces and combine that information via some algorithm for presentation.

what i see are two separate achievements here. collection and analysis. the collection looks good and they have implemented some algorithm. the efficacy of their algorithm may leave something to be desired in terms of accuracy, etc. nevertheless, the algorithm may be tuned/replaced/compared going forward.

i wont even go into the many many applications that something like this can have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pretty animation. Actual information = 0. Especially when using my first+last name since there are quite a few of us with the same name.

Without being able to see what was used to generate each category it is nothing more than eye candy.

<comment><USER8> I enjoyed the difference between my real name (Jacob Aldridge) and my HN name (jacobaldridge) - the latter felt more accurate, though I support the various comments here about the arbitrary and unexplained sorting of the data.

Would imagine most HN users, whose name here is very different to their real name, would see a bigger discrepancy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Seems to be made up. I have a unique name and really am not interested in the military or sports, but they still took up 1/3 of my characterization. And what the hell is "illegal" ??

<comment><USER10> I searched for my handle, the military stuff came from Everquest discussions on other message boards. In particular it seemed to be focusing on words like "tank" which describes a role in a "raid"; which are actually part of a fantasy video game not a real military discussion.

For my real name, I got a lot of sports stuff because there's a guy of the same name who writes sports books.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I repeated this three times with my name. It gave me _completely_ different results each time...

<comment><USER12> 4 times here - completely different each time... Only thing consistent was it said that I went to the University of Tennessee, which I did not...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Try using "Paul Graham". The visualization is quite interesting.

<comment><USER14> Paul Graham is a little bit late to really shock us all with this headline on such an obvious topic. - a result from the visual map of "Paul Graham"

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> All I see is "increase your window size please".

<comment><USER16> If you have any kind of toolbar in your browser (e.g. are using Firefox with Stumbleupon or WebDeveloper toolbar) hide 'em to maximize browser-rendering real estate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It will be me, but... I. Don't. Get. It.

</comment><comment><USER18> As with most searches, using my real name pulls up nothing to do with me, even though I use my real name in many places (in addition to 'randallsquared', which I started using back in 1999 precisely because 'randall randall' was effectively unsearchable).

</comment><comment><USER19> Neat. I like it. It surprized me that the result for the same name was different on succesive attempts.

But why in god's name did I have to increase my window size?

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe that the window size thing reflects that its more of an experiment and possibly even an art piece, so they're managing the aesthetic experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> also, the only way i got it to work was by fullscreening the browser.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is helpful: <http://personas.media.mit.edu/> Would be great to see a profile comparison feature.

<comment><USER21> Very interesting...

"In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrates the computer's uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant."

The poor performance is part of it. That's pretty interesting. I wonder if they intentionally degraded it, and if a more sophisticated implementation would avoid some of the problems they hint at.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> On my netbook it just says "increase your window size please". The screen resolution on the MSI Wind is 1024x600.

</comment><comment><USER23> My most common screen name produced reasonable results, but my real name is way too common to produce anything meaningful (unless I wanted to prove to someone that I am the most interesting man in the world).

<comment><AUTHOR> i think part of the point of the project is that the online presence of our names is often misleading or totally unrelated to ourselves. If someone was searching for you, this is what they might find.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Bleh: "Express Install is not supported on this operating system."

</comment><comment><USER13> From the visualization, it looks like it runs search queries on the name given, then categorizes the words it finds into the colours/categories you see in the bar.

</comment><comment><USER25> Having a last name that is commonly used as both a noun and a verb makes this sort of thing pretty useless. I can't really effectively Google myself either.

</comment><comment><USER26> Put your online identity in for a much more interesting visualization. I used "blhack", and it was much more accurate and interesting to watch.

</comment><comment><USER27> Come on, its not even a Friday today, its just a tool that looks pretty and makes no sense.

Oh yeah, very suitable for HN.

</comment><comment><USER28> I get a stupid "increase your window size please" message when I visit the link. Not ready for prime time.

</comment><comment><USER29> Takes the top 3 google results and associates semi-arbritary categorys to certain words.

</comment><comment><USER30> I find it interesting that no matter who i search for i get 'no digital traces found'.

<comment><USER8> The ultimate insult in an online world?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> completely wrong in my case.

</comment><comment><USER32> I dont see a thing!

</comment><comment><USER33> Doesn't accept "ø" which is actually a real world letter that happens to be found in my name. Useless.

A plea to developers: If you are going to do filtering and sanitizing on your input, at least make sure you get it right.

</comment><comment><USER34> Call me back when it computes the results in less than a couple of seconds.</comment>


Twitter's Verified Identity Crisis - <AUTHOR> https://ryuk.ooo/thoughts/twitter.html <comment><USER2> > Without knowing what makes an account badge-worthy, the only irrefutable > significance of a verified badge is that the account has Twitter's approval. > By making the badge exclusive to a small portion of users, and keeping the > requirements for a badge secret, Twitter has turned their "badge of > identity" into a "badge of approval."

Spot on.

It has been always unclear as to the reason or knowhow as to 'why' a particular user has a 'verified checkmark', other than having some sort of following as one of the requirements, but even that is inconsistent. But still, it really does sound like a 'badge of approval' based on some secret criteria.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wrote this before the Minneapolis riots, so I don't mention Pres. Trump's tweet about the riots, or the implications of Twitter's response. I'll discuss that another time.</comment>


Have the Tech Giants Grown Too Powerful? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/magazine/facebook-google-uber-tech-giants-power.html <comment> white-flame The "tech giants" are creating and controlling core forms of communication, both interpersonal and broadcast/public. That's too important and fundamental to the health of society to allow it to be arbitrarily engineered, filtered, and slanted for maximizing profit.

If they were acting like common carriers, it would be a completely different issue. But they're not; they have business models that necessitate the manipulation of communication.

<comment><USER2> I don't buy this argument.

The internet providers are de facto pretty close to the common carrier status (except maybe in cases of huge scale, like Netflix or google, where explicit net neutrality might be desirable). There are no huge technical or financial barriers to entry if you want to build a platform for communication over the internet, nothing comparable to e.g. telecom networks (either in 1950s or now).

The cost of acquiring a millions-strong audience, operating at that scale, and becoming essential for large swaths of society can be pretty low, both in financing and manpower; if Instagram is not a good example for you, take more extreme examples of Wikipedia or SciHub.

Would you like newspapers (e.g. that very NYT) be governmentally regulated because they are "too important for society"? It's dangerously close to the late Soviet Union. How effective NYT would be e.g. in uncovering the Watergate case were they regulated "for the common good"?

There's a particular fallacy that makes people think that some centralized regulation would be more efficient and lead to better outcomes than self- regulation on a level playing field. The efficiency is there in very few cases, mostly those that seriously defy common sense (e.g. control over antibiotics), or set safety guidelines against mass illness (e.g. food safety control). In most other cases, a bureaucratic body has as skewed incentives as a for-profit corporation, but much fewer reasons to improve anything.

<comment><USER3> > Would you like newspapers (e.g. that very NYT) be governmentally regulated > because they are "too important for society"? It's dangerously close to the > late Soviet Union.

I can agree with the first part of your argument, but you're going overboard here by declaring any form of regulation to be totalitarian in nature. Considerations on the interests of companies versus the interests of society as a whole can be made (and are made) in well-functioning democracies. It's continually difficult to strike a balance, and overzealous mistakes may be made or the process might be corrupted. Still, you can't wholly dismiss governmental regulation as the modern world simply functions on it.

<comment><USER4> Well it is more the regulation of their constraints on power that is inherently totalitarian exploitable as a power consolidating move - even if the passers don't do it with bad intentions it /will/ be exploited for all it is worth later. Operating under the assumption that every bill should be evaluated as if it will be done in bad faith is wise for the same reason the first rule of networking security is never trust the client.

It would be like ammending the constitution to allow punishing the supreme court for making bad decisions - technically it holds others accountable but that is not what it will be used for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> super-serial The ISPs and mobile carriers are too powerful. At least Google/Facebook have to innovate, or buy companies like Instagram or Whatsapp that innovate. ISPs get their billions in revenue from monopoly. All they have to do is buy off politicans and put people like Ajit Pai in power. Now that they've started to acquire tech companies like Yahoo, no one can stop them from giving preferential treatment to their content and streaming services eventually threatening the ability for tech startups to compete through innovation.

<comment><USER5> I'm still baffled by the focus on FANG as too powerful and inescapable, especially from generally left/liberal writers. They're not always friendly or easy to avoid, certainly, but they're far more escapable and far less legislatively malicious than Comcast, AT&T, and their ilk.

Obviously lots of people are mad at those companies too, but it's frustrating to see "hit Google with antitrust suits!" getting high-profile NYT billing while "hit Comcast with antitrust suits!" doesn't.

<comment><USER6> Google and Facebook are allowed to maintain data about me and my life, sell that data to others, and I have no recourse. My broadband and mobile providers see a much slimmer cross section of my life, and are far less capable as data aggregation and warehousing systems comparatively speaking.

Google and Facebook (and Amazon, to a lesser extent) are for-profit surveillance systems at their core. How could you _not_ demand oversight and regulation of such systems in a democracy?

<comment><USER7> Why aren't you complaining about Equifax instead then? Now there's a company who absolutely deserves scorn.

<comment><USER8> That's just a red herring you're dangling in front of our noses to distract us.

There's no law of the universe saying one has to address bad actors in a specific order or sequentially.

Furthermore, Equifax is a problem that the US needs to solve by themselves. Google & Facebook are a global problem.

<comment><USER7> Equifax (and Facebook) actually had an exfiltrated event. And they didn't get punished.

Don't lump Google in there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm probably in the minority, but the negatives don't seem that bad when compared to the benefits we get from the tech companies: free email, free or cheap access to information on almost anything you could be interested in, junk entertainment that people seem to enjoy. The negatives are less tangible: giving up your personal data (this is complicated by the fact that the data didn't exist until you used their services), targeted advertising, I'm not sure what else there is.

It's easy to criticize things, but it's harder to come up with an alternative system that would provide many of the same benefits. I'm not defending the current legal and regulatory system that large corporations operate in. I think they receive large amounts of corporate welfare from the government that are harmful overall, but that's an economy wide problem, not one confined to the tech industry. It also has more straightforward solutions: begin eliminating some of the subsidies these businesses receive.

<comment><USER10> It's interesting that you've done the calculus on these same issues, and come up with a completely different answer than me. I weighed free email etc. against giving up personal data etc. and I came down decidedly on the side that it's _not_ worth it. And because there aren't alternatives, I just don't don't do some things anymore, wherever I can. That means no facebook. No smartphone. No twitter. Not IG. No googling as much as I can. Sometimes I just have to be fine with not knowing things that I could easily look up.

Maybe it's age? How old are you? Not to be that old guy (I'm not even old) but I'm old enough to remember a time when I didn't have the internet, and I didn't have a smart phone, and I didn't even have a computer. And life was... well actually okay. It was fine. I got by day to day and I lived. Today, anyone under 25, all they know is life with the Internet and smartphones. I can't even begin to comprehend that worldview.

<comment><USER9> Mid 20s. The only social media I have is IG but I only follow people I know in real life. I don't find FB worthwhile because it made me dislike many people I know after seeing how they express some of their political opinions (on both the left and right). The other ones just seem like wastes of time.

I still use Google regularly and I have a smartphone, but I would give up a smartphone if there were a decent phone with email and google maps as built in applications.

I agree that giving up personal data can be concerning for many people, but at the same time, people don't want to pay for the services, so it's a catch-22.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Corporations have been "too powerful" in this country since its inception. Public policy, culture, politics, style and all other aspects of daily life have all been constantly influenced or outright driven by conglomerates in media, banking, big oil, defense etc.

The only difference is that now tech, which had till recently been on the very fringe of this, is starting to upset the established order.

<comment><USER12> American corporations have only been powerhouses capable of dominating the policy aspect of public life for 95-110 years.

I know it seems pedantic, but it's annoying to watch people rewrite history. The industrial revolution weakened the power base of a strong American aristocracy, the majority of which had already been crippled after a brutal civil war. These were the ashes upon which corporate America was built.

<comment><USER13> America didn't really have an aristocracy. It had something that if left unchecked would probably become an aristocracy, but it didn't exist in that form yet.

<comment><USER14> Depends on your definition of aristocracy. Remember, you used to have land to be able to vote.

<comment><USER13> You're right, that did limit enfranchisement. That was gone well before the Civil War, though. That would be an unusual definition of aristocracy, but I get it. By the same token, we currently limit the vote to people over 18 that are citizens. Are we currently aristocrats?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm OK with giant tech companies. America isn't the only place in the world and doesn't hold a monopoly on tech. If it's not American tech giants, it'll be Chinese or some other countries tech giants.

<comment><USER16> > America ... doesn't hold a monopoly on tech

Certainly seems that way.

<comment><USER17> Perhaps it only seems that way for household names like apple, Facebook and google.

There are a lot of less well known technology giants elsewhere in the world. E.g. ARM from the UK (now owned by Japanese giant SoftBank) has pretty much total domination on the smartphone CPU market (licensing anyway - lots of manufacturing is done by e.g. Samsung of Korea)

My mum will have heard of Facebook and Google, but I guarantee that she and probably most other people's mother's have never ever heard of ARM.

Just one example - countless others.

<comment><USER18> What's another example? This one strikes me as unique because ARM just sells their IP.

Sure, our mothers probably haven't heard of ARM but that's more like saying they haven't heard of x86. Our mothers have almost definitely heard of Samsung and Apple, both of whom manufacture a large number of ARM chips.

There's even a decent chance they've heard of a company like Qualcomm that's not as well known as Apple or Samsung.

<comment><USER19> Foxconn, SAP ? These are good examples aren't they.

Edit: Not nvidia. Realised OP was asking for None-US companies

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The problems with tech companies are not that they are big, but people follow them blindly.

These companies only work for making money and are not around to help people.

This other day a journalist asked a big computer game producing company why they are selling in-game stuff to kids (like Overwatch). They refused to answer. They are not around to help people.

A hospital in Tanzania was in dire need for an upgrade of there IT-system connecting a X-ray machine to doctors for image analysis. They had no budget. 2 helpful guys from Europe searched the Webb for free software. On there free time they built a system which they installed themselves. The big companies are not around to help people.

<comment><USER18> In 2016, Google donated $167 million in cash and $1 billion in their own products to charitable causes.

Microsoft - $135 million in cash, $922 million in product

Cisco - $41 million in cash, $245 million in product

AT&T - $112 million in cash, $7 million in product

Verizon - $56 million in cash, $32 million in product

While these companies are around primarily to make a profit, I'm sure that their $460 million dollars in cash donations sure helped a lot of people. Not to mention all the jobs they create (also helping people), the wealth they generate for their shareholders (also helping people), and the individual charitable donations of those shareholders.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/most-generous-companies-in- am...](http://www.businessinsider.com/most-generous-companies-in- america-2015-2016-6#23-verizon-communications-3)

<comment><USER21> A viewpoint: charity is power. These companies have control over where this money goes, and are likely to spend more on things that make them look good, or provide long term benefit to the company over things that don't.

Another approach might be to take the charity money away from the companies, and have those funds distributed to worthy causes by a democratically appointed body instead: giving the money to causes that benefit everyone, not just the company's PR department. You could call this system 'taxation'.

A case study: Flint water. Nobody's done anything about it for _years_. Now there's a PR opportunity so Elon's going to fix it. The people of Flint will get drinkable water (hopefully) and Elon will get another PR lift. This problem could have been fixed years ago (and perhaps should never even have happened), but the people who decide when these big social problems get fixed is no longer the people (almost all of whom think it's an unacceptable travesty, especially in a rich, developed nation), but the billionaire class, who require something back in return.

<comment><USER18> > A viewpoint: charity is power. These companies have control over where this > money goes, and are likely to spend more on things that make them look good, > or provide long term benefit to the company over things that don't.

They are more likely to spend it on things that make them look good, which has absolutely nothing to do with my point that _these companies are helping people_ , even if their primary goal is not to help people.

> Another approach might be to take the charity money away from the companies, > and have those funds distributed to worthy causes by a democratically > appointed body instead: giving the money to causes that benefit everyone, > not just the company's PR department. You could call this system 'taxation'.

All of these companies are taxed, according to the rules set by the democratically appointed body you mention. I don't understand why you included this part of your comment.

> This problem could have been fixed years ago (and perhaps should never even > have happened), but the people who decide when these big social problems get > fixed is no longer the people (almost all of whom think it's an unacceptable > travesty, especially in a rich, developed nation), but the billionaire > class, who require something back in return.

Just so I have this straight - you're saying the reason that the people of Flint haven't had their water problems fixed yet is because the billionaire class only cares about getting something in return from such an action?

I'd like you to tell me what exactly you think should have been done in Flint and how the billionaire class subverted the will of the American people by not doing it.

<comment><USER22> Yes, I agree they are helping people. But who are they helping? They don't seem to be helping the little people like that Tanzanian hospital the way the developers did who found a free software solution. It seems we weaponize situations of desperate need in order to accomplish our own means. If these companies truly cared for the people they are helping, they wouldn't even bother with the PR side of it at all. Their help certainly makes a huge difference, I agree, but intention is everything, and if they intend to aid their own purposes, that is what will see the most benefit from their efforts.

<comment><USER18> > intention is everything

I'm sure the people that received Google's millions of dollars would disagree with that statement.

> If these companies truly cared for the people they are helping, they > wouldn't even bother with the PR side of it at all.

Why? Does getting good PR from helping someone diminish the help that said person receives?

> if they intend to aid their own purposes, that is what will see the most > benefit from their efforts.

I have not once disagreed with this statement - companies _primary_ goal is to make a profit. However, they also provide a tremendous amount of help to those who need it and I don't think people should dismiss that so easily.

> They don't seem to be helping the little people like that Tanzanian hospital > the way the developers did who found a free software solution.

It's easier for us to grasp a situation in which a few developers help out a few people who need it. It's not easy for us to parse "$150 million in charitable donations" in the same way, but I assure you there are thousands of "helping the little guy" stories you can craft out of $150 million.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> They are powerful for sure, but I wouldn't say they are too powerful. When the media or politicians can brow-beat tech giants into submitting to their demands, you really can't say tech giants are too powerful. I'd say "too big to [f|j]ail" banks or "too big to [f|j]ail" oil companies are too powerful right now.

But tech giants have the potential of becoming too powerful as they "collude/merge" with media and government. It's worrisome that giant techs are now moving into news media and working so much government.

</comment><comment><USER24> As someone old enough to remember when IBM seemed too huge to ever lose in the market, along came Microsoft. Then when Microsoft felt like it was unstoppable, along came Google and Amazon. Now those companies are reaching the same terminal velocity and a new breed of companies will rise up and dethrone them.

<comment><USER25> AT&T still dominates telephone service. Most phone companies are renamed Baby Bells.

Facebook has the analytics information and wealth to buy any competitor.

IBM gave itself away to Microsoft when an exec handed Bill Gates a sweetheart deal for DOS.

Microsoft is still the dominant force in its original industry (desktop computing) which is still significant.

The Internet disrupted companies that weren't ready for it. Do you think something new is coming alomg to replace the Internet?

Even so, when one giant replaces another, so what? What problem does that solve? "When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers."

<comment><USER24> > The Internet disrupted companies that weren't ready for it. Do you think > something new is coming alomg to replace the Internet?

Yes, this is the way of technology and it's happening faster and faster. One of the biggest reasons Microsoft ended up on its back foot in the 2000's was because it disregarded the threat of Linux, and woke up too late to the mobile revolution. In all these cases there's hubris mixed with inertia and when the landscape shifts these giants aren't paying attention.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The problem isn't that they've grown too powerful, it's that they either haven't recognized their own power or have willfully rejected the responsibility attached to it.

<comment><USER27> > or have willfully rejected the responsibility attached to it.

There is no responsibility attached to it, at least not legal responsibility. Even that isn't enough for anyone that gets to powerful and beyond enforcement.

The truly sad thing is that you expect them to act responsibly. Companies will (and have) work children to death if it helps maximize output, if you expect them to act benevolently then prepare for disappointment.

<comment><USER28> This is one of the central questions of our age.

In an ideal capitalist free market companies are almost necessarily amoral (Friedmann doctrine ), they can only make choices based on profit. In real life you have barriers to entry and PR concerns that let companies at least pretend to waste some profit-making opportunities on doing good.

I don't know if the right answer is consumer unions, or benevolent government regulation, or giving up and making do with what we have, but this discuss I see on this issue seems so polarised (not unique) that progress will be hard to come by.

<comment><USER29> > This is one of the central questions of our age.

I think the question is what to do about it, not whether it's happening. We have reams of evidence that it's happening, and "doing good" for PR reasons is just more of the same - it's more important to look good than to be good, and looking good without being good is more profitable and thus more desirable.

Unfortunately, because so much of our media runs in the same system, it can be difficult to have a clear conversation on the topic.

<comment><USER30> You're right, the central question we are facing is how to structure our society, what values, incentives we should use as its foundation.

The current (capitalist) system uses self interest and profit as an incentive, and we see where that got us. We can mitigate some issues with tweaks like regulation, but it's also valuable to ask more fundamental questions. Is there a different incentive other than profit we can use? What are the effects on society of the incentives we use? What values do we want to promote? How can we do that?

The difficulty of having this complex and nuanced discussion shouldn't discourage us from having it. We must find our way together.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Am I surprised that the New York times doesn't ask "Have the banking giants grown too powerful?" No I am not. I am also not sure why the NYT feels compelled to bash the Bay Area from time to time but whatever.

Do I think there should be more privacy reform? Yes. Do I think there should be more banking reform? Yes. Do I think for a minute that the current state of the world will persist for a decade? Not really.

<comment><USER32> > "Have the banking giants grown too powerful?"

The New York Times never asks this question because it doesn't make for news and the answer has basically been the same since the emergence of banking giants. Asking if banking is too powerful will always yield an affirmative, and the discerning NYTimes reader will react with a justified, "No shit Sherlock".

> I am also not sure why the NYT feels compelled to bash the Bay Area

The issue is cultural. Folks from the Bay Area tend to couch their money- making schemes with nonsense about making the world a better place. Finance workers in NYC have no need to sugarcoat what they do and are unabashedly trying to make ludicrous amounts of money. In New York, calling people out on their bullshit is deeply culturally ingrained, and the Bay Area is clearly full of it. :. The NY Times gives its primary demographic what it wants.

<comment><USER31> Fair enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The tech giants have grown too profitable, at the expense of stuff they should be doing like paying taxes, or hiring enough people to oversee click fraud, or hire enough people to oversee counterfeit fraud, or hire enough people to oversee how companies use highly personal data. They hire just enough people to dodge taxes and somehow not be complicit in anything they directly profit from.

</comment><comment><USER34> This article is a bit meandering. Most of these are not really scale-specific issues, or are but in a roundabout way.

Here's (imo) the most obvious reasons.

Political Power- We used to complain about Rupert Murdoch's power. Media and journalism are a leg of democracy, so having a corporate oligopoly controlling it was worrying. Zuck's influence is way bigger. There have already been a handful of revolutions that started on FB, a dozen attempts at revolutions, full scale coups and thousands of elections where fb played a bigger role than any past media company. They didn't even notice this until it was Trump and/or stuff FB-ers cared about personally.

(1) This is too much power. (2) FB are pretending this has nothing to do with them. They don't care about journalistic integrity, or feel it applies to them. They let anyone with a credit card sign up and run political ads. extremely irresponsible, at best.

Monopoly - Thiel put it best, startups are about monopoly-or-bust. Uber wants to be the only ride app. YouTube the only free video site. FB the only networking app.

The pattern is often: Innovate. Win. Then milk it with ads and spying and/or stop innovating. YouTube for example, it's nowhere near as good as it could be, but why bother.

Data - data gets different qualities as it grows. A lot of the creepiness of targeted ads have more to do with how many people's data they have, not how much data they have about you. It locks in monopolies. It's also the newest category of "IP," which is (imo, but not gonna support it here) a current and future driver of wealth disparity.

We're now (definitely in Europe) in a period where the public/legislators are very keen on regulating. This will likely lock these monopolies further into place. 4 out of 5 times, regulation is incumbent friendly.

</comment><comment><USER35> The nytimes publishes an article like this every few months. It's not like they're impartial in this area -- tech took news's audience. Don't give this attention it doesn't deserve.

</comment><comment><USER36> Collectively all large corps in America have too much power, so i'll assume we mean "more power than the other corporations"

I'm that case I'll believe that they're "too powerful" when a tech company mismanages itself to bankruptcy and gets a bail out from tax payer funds. Or when other companies are forced by the government to use (and pay more for) software and tech from a specific company or group of companies (maybe software from "defense" contractors counts?).

Until then i'll continue to believe that banks, coal, and oil companies have too much power.

</comment><comment><USER37> It is a particularly dangerous moment for American Tech giants.

In the US, liberals / Democrats hate them because: Tech is the biggest reason behind the decline of existing publishing business model and people in those industries lean liberal, Tech's contribution to rising inequality (due to automation etc), very apparent gentrification by Tech workers in places like SF / NYC.

Conservatives / Republicans hate Tech because of its perceived liberal bias - see Facebook controversy in 2016 about suppression of Conservative topics, or Eric Schmidt campaigning for Hillary, or overwhelming majority of left-leaning people in these companies.

Apart from US, other countries (eg. EU) hates Tech because they are foreign companies who are blind to local cultural sensitivities (eg. privacy, right to be forgotten, free speech to a near-absolute degree), and also the reasons why US left hates Tech (see above).

Countries like China hate US Tech co's maybe because geopolitical reasons and CCP wants to nurture local Tech giants instead of rolling out a red carpet to American Tech.

American Tech giants should really be nervous.

</comment><comment><USER38> They certainly have from the perspective of a website creator or business owner. If you're running a business (or hell, any service in general), then you have to either play by Google and Facebook's rules or risk being rendered totally irrelevant and inaccessible to large portions of the population.

If your company's website is banned from Google, that can effectively be game over for the company, especially if you can't get reconsidered. Same if they move into your industry in many cases.

</comment><comment><USER39> OP should include the full NYT title that answers it's own question

</comment><comment><USER40> Have the news media giants grown too powerful?

<comment><USER41> Oh yeah, sure. Most of them are owned by the same people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Unless you work for one, or have founded a company purpose-built for acquisition, I don't see how the answer can be 'No'.

For entrepreneurs, the monopolistic stranglehold these companies have, make them impossible to beat with a better product. The best possible outcome is acquisition. You may join, but never beat them.

For Free Software hackers, the giants turning away from open standards, and towards DRM and abuse of the CFAA, is chilling.

For a free society, surveillance capitalism needs to die.

If you have ambitions in life beyond RSUs and a regular massage, yes they are too powerful.

<comment><USER18> > For entrepreneurs, the monopolistic stranglehold these companies have, make > them impossible to beat with a better product. The best possible outcome is > acquisition. You may join, but never beat them.

Isn't this exactly what everyone said about IBM until Microsoft came along, and then what everyone said about Microsoft until Google/Apple/Facebook/Amazon came along?

Why is this time different?

<comment><USER43> Microsoft only stopped being a destructive force of nature after the Department of Justice gave them a kick to the face.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> There's always someone that's powerful. If it's not tech, it's media or finance or someone else.

</comment><comment><USER45> Fun exception to Betteridge's law of headlines [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

</comment><comment><USER46> LOL. What's next. "Have opioids been overprescribed?"

</comment><comment><USER47> Looks like old media is feeling threatened.

<comment><USER48> You are being downvoted but, regardless of whether the argument has merit (it does IMHO), it is a fact that traditional media companies have been negatively affected by the rise of the new tech giants, and can be scarcely objective in the matter.

Some of the biggest support to the recent copyright law rejected by the EU, came from traditional news outlets.

<comment><USER47> I'll charitably assume I'm being down-voted more because of how short and dismissive my remark was than anything else. Truth be told that's all I think the likes of the NYT deserves. Even the POTUS calls it "Failing New York Times".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I really don't understand the self destructive desire to domestically pile on our tech firms while they are being shutout of the Chinese market by the government there which apparently appreciates the importance of these firms so much as to support their local companies financially, politically, and intellectually and on the other front the EU is using every tool at its disposal to hamstring US tech firms.

Some comments here and elsewhere indicate that some pitchforks wielding folks are conflating this issue with the outcomes of recent political contests, the source of this confusion is poor-old media companies that keep feigning powerlessness while conveniently pointing the finger at business rivals.

<comment><USER50> I don't believe it's self-destructive to hold our companies accountable for what they do. Many of us also agree with what the EU is doing, and wish our government would get up off it's ass and do the same thing.

<comment><USER49> The EU is targeting US firms as a protectionist measure, you can read transcripts of their politicians' grandstanding and parroting local lobbyist to get the picture, they're not shy about it.

<comment><USER50> They're targeting those firms because they're the ones running roughshod over users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Yes, far too powerful. Both in society and within the tech sector.

Break 'em up!

</comment><comment><USER52> That's a question we should have been asking a few years ago.

</comment><comment><USER53> It's interesting google maps came out with a new pricing model as mapbox gained popularity. It became more expensive and made the market easier for mapbox. Usually google would offer a cheaper, more competitive product but this wasn't the case.

</comment><comment><USER54> Yes. But we have to be careful here. Investors want every quarter of every company they invest in to be better than the previous quarter. They don't care about your 5 year goals or your 10 year goals. They want returns now. Companies do what they can to make that happen. If we say this is just a Tech problem, we're wrong. Tech is just where most of the money has flown because, dare I say, it's relatively easy money.

</comment><comment><USER55> Yet more pointless anti-tech drivel. I wish HN had a downvote option for articles (though I know some use the flagging feature for that). The cycle: news domain hosts newsless anti-tech article, people here and elsewhere say "yeah!", site gets clicks, narrative steered as intended, repeat tomorrow. We get it, many here and mass media are against big tech, can we just wait for news or at least unique perspectives before upvoting?

<comment><USER56> > _Please don 't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is > spam or off-topic, flag it. ... If you flag something, please don't also > comment that you did._

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER55> To clarify my point, I don't believe it is spam, off-topic, or flaggable. I just disagree with the frequency across the spectrum. Not specific to HN so, granted, maybe I shouldn't have mentioned HN in my comment.</comment></comment></comment>


Firefox Heatmap - How People Use Firefox's Interface - <AUTHOR> https://heatmap.mozillalabs.com/ <comment><USER2> If I read this correctly under Customizations: 95% use the "Status Bar" (though in which way is unclear) Yet the status bar was removed from the default UI with the argument that the space was wasted. (and replaced with the optional Add-On bar, taking up the same space)

Easier to have just provided the option to hide the Status bar for the 5%?

<comment><USER3> This was based on an old study from Firefox 4 Beta when the status bar was still on by default. (The study was in July 2010, when Firefox 4.0b1 was out; the status bar was replaced about four months later in Firefox 4.0b7.)

The "Customizations" number just means that 95% of users had the status bar enabled (i.e., did nothing and ended up with with the default setting) while the other 5% customized Firefox by disabling the status bar. It says nothing about how many users "used" (interacted with) the status bar.

Customization is not a good measure of usefulness. We know that 97% of participants never used the RSS button in the main toolbar in Firefox 4.0b1, but that doesn't mean that they all took the time to customize their toolbar to remove the button.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Based on over 117,000 Windows 7 and Vista Test Pilot submissions from 7 days in July 2010

It's the old 2010 study...

<comment><USER3> You can find results from the more recent 2012 heatmap study here:

[https://blog.mozilla.org/ux/2012/06/firefox-heatmap- study-20...](https://blog.mozilla.org/ux/2012/06/firefox-heatmap- study-2012-results-are-in/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting, but note that it's a 2010 study. See also <https://testpilot.mozillalabs.com/testcases/betaui>

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm assuming that they only tracked mouse usage, but I would assume many "advanced" users would make extensive use of the default keyboard shortcuts. I wonder if it could skew the data.

</comment><comment><USER7> The first thing that jumps out at me there is the use of the vertical scroll bar and back button, instead of hardware scrollers and back buttons.

<comment><USER8> The scroll bar numbers make me further believe that OS X Lion's scroll bars are a bad design. My computer is not a tablet... saving ~10 of 1920 pixels is not something I needed or wanted.

<comment><USER9> I have turned my scrollbars back on, not because I want to use them, but because I want to look and see how much of a page is left without moving my mouse over there. I never actually click on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think the only UI features I regularly use are the Firefox button and the URL bar.

Everything else has been replaced either by hardware buttons (back/forward/scrolling/new tab) or by extensions (reload with mouse gestures etc.)

As has already been said the use of the scroll bar especially seems odd to me, I'd have thought middle clicking would have nearly killed it off.

<comment><USER11> Try CTRL + L to jump into the location bar (that's if you have a keyboard.)

With regard to middle clicking, I assume you mean a scroll wheel on a mouse. Which some users still don't have! (I know it seems hard to believe.) Also trackpad users need to dupe this functionality somehow, and some haven't picked up on the shortcuts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looks like it's time to get rid off the navigate to visit URL button like Chrome did, nobody uses it. Interesting to see so many people use the search field in the browser, don't think I've ever used that before to do a search I search via the URL bar.

</comment><comment><USER13> I know this is an old study, but I'm amazing at how many people use the back button. I wonder if that's how a lot of people deal with search results that didn't pan out (they hit back to go to Google, instead of opening them in a bunch of tabs).

<comment><USER14> I'm a web developer, and I use the back and forward buttons* all the time, especially if I'm being lazy. For example, if I'm shopping for something, rather than opening a whole bunch of tabs, I'll just bounce back and forth using forward and back. I think I do this especially when I'm farther away from what I want, and as I start to zero in more, I start opening more tabs at once so I can compare.

Also, from some usability studies we've done at my job, it seems that most people are almost completely unable to deal with window management. We rolled out functionality for a while that broke the back button (poorly-implemented infinite scroll) and found that our pages performed very poorly, because people would lose their place and just leave. We kind of had assumed that most people would use tabs, but that turned out not to be the case at all.

Anecdotally, watching my mom use the computer recently was enlightening. She's been using computers longer than I have, and is very savvy with certain things (e.g., she still knows how to use Excel to solve problems better than I do, and I know Excel pretty damn well.) She seems to use browser tabs sort of like "processes", rather than "threads". For example, she'll have her "hotel search" tab, her "rental car" tab, and her "flight search" tab, and within those tabs, she'll stick to that topic, using the back buttons to look at different pages. When I switched spots with her, and started spawning a whole bunch of tabs from each tab, she started to lose track of things.

* Edit: actually, I almost never use the buttons themselves, but I use the functionality as I described. I use mouse buttons, gestures or shortcut keys, rather than the buttons.

<comment><USER15> Your mother sounds like she's using tabs like you would in Excel, where you have different spreadsheets for different types of transactions. You see that quite a lot with users who are experts in one area and try to carry over their skills to another area - rather than adapting to new ideas.

As for forward and back, yeah I use them a lot too. Normally via extra mouse buttons or keyboard though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> No, I can't believe that the URL box is used more than the search one. Thre must be an error or, more probably, a bias towards tech-savvy people. I've seen common people typing full URLs in the Google box.

<comment><USER3> You're right about the bias. If you use the filters to view only data from self-identified "Beginner" users, then the address bar usage is significantly lower and the search bar usage is higher (but still not as high as the address bar).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Disable the navigation bar, and alt+d brings up a navigation window. No more using the mouse to click on a skinny rectangle, and you get some screen real- estate.

</comment><comment><USER18> What strikes me is the low usage of the RSS button; the "RSS is dead" polemic might not be that unsubstantiated after all.

</comment><comment><USER19> Anybody else having the overlay about 30 pixels higher than the image of the browser? or is it just me.

<comment><USER9> I am. Chrome on OSX. I'm not sure if that's intentional so you can see what exactly was being clicked on, or a bug.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Beta testers are not typical users!

</comment><comment><USER19> 74% of advance users used the search bar VS 54% of beginners using it. Wonder why.

</comment><comment><USER21> What is the "firefox button"? Does this exist in the linux versions?

<comment><USER3> The Firefox button is shown when the menubar is hidden (View: Toolbars: Menu Bar, on Linux). The menubar is hidden by default on Windows Vista and Windows 7.

On Windows the Firefox button is orange and is integrated into the window's titlebar. This is not yet implemented on Linux, so on Linux it just appears in the tab bar.

<comment><USER22> exactly. I use it on my laptop (linux) to save space.</comment></comment></comment>


The Telephonoscope (1879) - <AUTHOR> http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/the-telephonoscope-1879/ <comment><USER2> The thing I love about these old illustrations that predict the future from long ago in the past is not what they get right but what they get wrong.

They focus on a singular aspect of future technology but due to the limitations of their imagination aren't able to predict other entirely new revolutionary technologies and so default to their current ways of interacting with the new tech.

So for example, they predict the cross-continent visible and audio interaction but use the large unwieldy gramophone style microphone to capture the speech being unable to imagine capturing audio from a tiny electronic device.

In other examples I've seen [1], you see a farmer with his auto-farming machinery but he's using enormous levers to interact with it. And then there's the frequent use cast iron to build some of this "future tech" when of course, not much is made from cast iron these days.

It makes me wonder what things we literally can't imagine about the future now. Or how different technologies that we can imagine could come together to produce entirely new things.

[1] [http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/france-in-the- year...](http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/france-in-the- year-2000-1899-1910/)

</comment><comment><USER3> It wasn't really a very impressive prediction though - if it even was one. I mean, the technical details are all wrong. The only correct aspect was how people would use video-conf. But I can't help thinking that this is just an encapsulation of a common human desire to connect with friends and family, rather than a prediction of technology (other than perhaps, if we're feeling generous, to note that he correctly anticipated that technology would eventually be able to do this).

To look at it another way, I wouldn't credit the writers of Star Trek for 'predicting' a transporter if one ever gets made. Or warp engines, or pretty much any of the high-tech gadgets in the series. They aren't predicting them, they are simply stating that these would be very cool things to have. The fact that sometimes engineering catches up to human desire is at the same time remarkable, and completely normal.

</comment><comment><USER4> Jules Verne predicted 'teleconference' in 1863 in one of his first books.

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

</comment><comment><USER5>
      Although titled "Edison's Telephonoscope" it is
      not, in fact, a creation of Thomas Edison's
      at all (either realised or proposed)
      but rather an imagining by Maurier...

Can't quite absolve Edison of guilt here. Maurier might have been repeating a rumor from the great man himself. Edison was a master of FUD, claiming that he had things like 3D movies with sound running in the labs and predicting their imminent release, just to keep his competitors off guard.</comment>


Ask HN: How to learn mathematics from scratch - <AUTHOR> Hey, I pretty much flunked math in high school, and now that I am passionate by machine learning and it's appliances, I would love to learn the basics, I already have experience in web development, but I figured out I need more math knowledge to get started building programs that work.
Any help? Suggestions? Thank you. <comment><USER2> Suggestion 1: Have children and help them with their Maths homework.

Suggestion 2: Signup with [https://www.khanacademy.org/](https://www.khanacademy.org/) and work through from 1st grade until you feel that you've gone as far as you wish.</comment>


David Wind (Peergrade) on the importance of collaboration in education [audio] - <AUTHOR> https://kosmosschool.com/podcast/ep1-david-wind-peergrade-on-the-importance-of-collaboration/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi!

This is the first episode of our podcast, "Kosmos with a K". Kosmos with a K is Kosmos School's podcast about the future of education with an emphasis on technology, entrepreneurship, and virtual reality. Each episode features an unedited, 1-hour long conversation between a guest and me (co-founder of Kosmos School).

Let us know what you think!</comment>


Dvorak Likes Linux - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2342703,00.asp Long time Microsoft supporting, Mac Hating columnist says: "The critical mass has been reached. Go download Ubuntu 8.10 and see for yourself what the fuss is about. You won't regret it." <comment><USER2> Well that was a surprisingly sensible article. Looks like we could be heading for a tipping point. Or the apocalypse. One of the two anyway.

</comment><comment><USER3> A couple of people I know currently have computers that are basically unusable because of problems with malware on Windows. I'm thinking of suggesting using Ubuntu to them, but I'm pretty sure they will hate the idea.

Of the people I have introduced to to Firefox and OpenOffice.org, some adjust and like using the free software, but some people revert back to IE or go and buy MS Office almost immediately. They seem to just really hate change of any kind.

Another example is the number of people complaining every time Facebook changes their UI -- the last two big changes I've been impressed at how well thought-out the changes were, but there was still those groups of people complaining and wanting things to go back to how they used to be.

Why do some people persist with what they're used to in spite of annoyances like malware? They've had to change to what they're using now at some stage, so what is it that makes them change? Is it only when something different allows them to do something they couldn't do at all before, like say a Firefox extension? Are these people more "feature driven"?

<comment><USER4> I tried to get my wife on OSX or Linux. Big problem for Linux was no Quicken (she's very particular about how she manages finances). GNUCash wasn't there yet for her -- she probably could have lived with the feature set, but the UI was making her want to break things.

The other problem is that she takes online classes and they tend to use packages that have very fussy browser support. I wouldn't trust that it would work on Linux without a thorough test -- don't want to find out you have a problem during a timed test.

Mac was rejected on cost (she went with a sub $600 laptop).

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I can appreciate why people don't switch when there's something they need to be able to do (eg. Quicken or online classes) that they couldn't with the new software.

But it seems to me that some people are just resistant to change and won't go to something new unless there's a compelling positive reason, ie. to do something new, and a negative reason (avoiding malware) won't suffice.

<comment><USER5> This is exactly it. I am certainly technical enough to run Linux (and have in the past) but there's no real good compelling reason for me to use it. I don't get malware on Windows and, believe it or not, things hardly ever crash. And you know what? I actually like using Windows. I can run basically whatever I want and use basically any hardware I want. I'd rather get work or play done on my machine instead of tinkering with every little config file and stupid little problems that always occur in Linux. Win7's UI is fantastic as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It now seems Dvorak wants to test the Windows fanboy crowd for how many pageviews they are able to generate on a pro-Linux article.</comment>