SourceForge.net Gets a Shiny New Look - <AUTHOR> http://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforgenet-gets-a-shiny-new-look/

<comment><USER2> I realize now why Github is so awesome. For a site named _Source_ forge, it sure takes a lot of searching to find the source code of whatever project you're looking at.

With Github, the source is the most important part of the site as a whole, and it shows.

<comment><USER3> Just spent about 10 minutes searching for how to get the source code for a project and I'm utterly unable to find it. Care to enlighten us all? Do you need to be logged in?

<comment><USER4> It may depend on the project, but here's one positive example. I went to the home page, then clicked on one of the featured projects. I've used Chicken of the VNC before, so there I went: <http://sourceforge.net/projects/cotvnc/>

Next, click on 'Develop.' On the new page under Repositories > CVS, there is a link to 'browse code': <http://cotvnc.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/cotvnc/>

Agreed, it is _definitely_ not GitHub.

<comment><USER3> Thanks! It definitely seems to depend on the project. If there's no repository configured then you can't browse the source. I made the mistake of assuming everything would have a repository though. Some projects (e.g. 7zip) seem to rely on you going to a separate home page and finding the source there instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not a fan. I usually like "clean" designs but it doesn't automatically make it good.

Project homepages are the worst pages I've seen so far. Example: <http://sourceforge.net/projects/sevenzip/>. The details aren't well layed out and there's a lot of wasted space.

<comment><AUTHOR> You probably didn't see what kind of crap SF.net was before this redesign. I think they did a good job of redesigning homepage but project pages stlll look like they are work in progress..

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wish they would respond to my numerous password recovery requests (which were due to them getting hacked few months ago and subsequently resetting all user passwords) instead of spending time on shiny stuff. And that's not even considering the existence of GitHub that's pretty much "SourceForge done right".

So, yeah, I don't know. I have few projects hosted on SF back from 5-6 years ago, but I think SF's time has passed, new look or not.

<comment><USER7> try #sourceforge on freenode; live support from 8-5 on weekdays

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's a great redesign (even if it's clear where they got the inspiration from) and one can only hope for a " _simple foundation for the rebirth of the entire SourceForge.net site_ " as they say on the front page. Because it's been a while since I hosted my last project on SF, and it's been ages since I last saw _anyone_ else use anything but GitHub for a code repository. SourceForge has de facto become a free distribution mechanism for binary installs now, but the actual source management has gone elsewhere. I love GitHub, but I'd really like to see SF stay competitive, too.

<comment><USER9> BitBucket's popular in the Python community, and I see a fair amount of stuff on Google Code. Open-source projects who want to use git but prefer a FOSS forge tend towards Gitorious. Some people even use Launchpad, although that tends to be mostly just Canonical.

Of course, none of these sites are Source Forge. Too little, too late.</comment></comment>


The Last Professor - <AUTHOR> http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/18/the-last-professor/

<comment><USER2> I will share my unpopular opinion. The concept of equality has destroyed the university. Not everyone is capable of digesting a humanist education; however, in the attempt to make sure "no child is left behind," the university has thrown its doors wide open. The result is that those who would best profit from a university, the capable minds, are left behind. Thus, I propose a new battle cry for the day, one meant to capture the true essence of the modern movement: "only capable minds left behind."

<comment><USER3> There's more to it. You're right that this is a part of the problem.

The collapse of academia, of which professors have been by and large victims, is a rather revolting phenomenon, but professors share some segment of the blame. At some point, many professors developed the attitude that research is their real work, and that teaching is commodity labor that can be passed off to semiskilled TAs, never mind that there's a vast discrepancy between the effectiveness of a good teacher vs. that of a mediocre one.

Physics professors can get away with this attitude, since physics research is extremely important; without it, there would be nothing to teach. And there are some brilliant researchers who are terrible teachers, and they're valued contributors to the academic mission. Literature professors can't get away with this. First of all, literature would still exist if there were no "researchers". Second, the entire purpose of their existence is the transmission of culture from one generation to the next, e.g. teaching.

The bureaucrats in charge of the universities have come to agree with (some) leading research professors that research is the real work of an academic, and the work by which one professor can be distinguished from another, and that teaching is secondary, replaceable grunt work. The humanities academics have been royally screwed by this attitude.

<comment><USER2> Research can be incorporated into learning, but not in the current university. If the modern-day university was smaller, then research and learning could be conducted side-by-side. The problem plaguing the system today is that there are too many students, mostly of incapable mind; there is only so much room in a research lab. I know this because I worked in one at the University of Florida. It could easily fit five to seven students in addition to the chief researcher. If we cast out those incapable of receiving a true education, we could fit the rest into a lab; research and teaching could coexist. It is an elitist viewpoint, but a valid viewpoint.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another possibility: The humanities and other non-practical research aren't _declining_ , but rather _failing to expand_ along with the rest of college education. I would think that most University of Phoenix students wouldn't have gone to college a generation ago. Is the number of traditional humanities professors per-capita really _smaller_ , per capita? I doubt it.

</comment><comment> puzzle-out This article: a paraphrase (of a book by the writer's former student), uncritical, little use of evidence, largely anecdotal = book plug.

<comment><USER3> It also pertains to a critical issue facing our society: the catastrophic loss of a culture, driven by the shortsighted bureaucrats and uncultured moneymen who have infested and gained control over academia. Any time an essay on this topic is featured in the major media, it draws attention to this problem, and that's a good thing.</comment></comment>


John Gustafson's crusade to replace floating point with something better - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/07/08/new-approach-could-sink-floating-point-computation/ <comment><USER2> Here is the official site[1] of the project. There is a request[2] to add it in the Scryer Prolog[3] (ISO Prolog implementation in Rust). And implementations in Rust[4] itself, and Julia[5] language.

[1] [https://posithub.org/index](https://posithub.org/index)

[2] [https://github.com/mthom/scryer- prolog/issues/6](https://github.com/mthom/scryer-prolog/issues/6)

[3] [https://github.com/mthom/scryer-prolog](https://github.com/mthom/scryer- prolog)

[4] [https://gitlab.com/burrbull/softposit- rs](https://gitlab.com/burrbull/softposit-rs)

[5] [https://juliacomputing.com/blog/2016/03/29/unums.html](https://juliacomputing.com/blog/2016/03/29/unums.html)

<comment><USER3> That's great, but if the hardware doesn't support it, then wouldn't the implementation would be slow?

<comment><USER4> As far as I read [https://posithub.org/docs/Posits4.pdf](https://posithub.org/docs/Posits4.pdf) there are FPGA implementations. Also in systems where floating point arithmetic isn't supported in hardware (i.e. Arduino Uno) you rely on soft fp.

<comment><USER5> Benchmark performance analysis of accuracy and speed on AVR platforms would indeed be very interesting and an actual, possible, immediate implementation scenario...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Posits and other floating variants are seriously cool, and Gustafson work is amazing.

Sadly, the guy has a very annoying writing style that makes him sound like a crackpot. The advantages of posits would shine much more if they were not mixed with ridiculous language (posits _are_ floating point numbers, thus they cannot _replace_ them) and outlandish claims (IEEE floating point is deterministic, to the apparent contradiction of many sentences written by Gustafson). It does not help either that Gustafson work only seems to attire the attention of semi-illiterate journalists who do not really understand what they are talking about.

<comment><USER7> > _IEEE floating point is deterministic, to the apparent contradiction of many > sentences written by Gustafson_

What about this then, which somebody comments below:

"On old x86 systems, the x87 registers were 80-bits and the bottom bits were undefined. You could theoretically have a 1-bit difference on some results depending on what the bottom 26 bits (that were undefined, because you had 64-bit floats most of the time, even though the machine did things 80-bits at a time)."

And below:

"I spent a long time once debugging an issue arising from this. Code was basically:

      double x = y;
      [...]
      if (x>y) fail;

Nothing in between the assignment and the check changed the value of x or y, yet the check triggered the fail condition. Turned out to be that one of the value stayed in the 80 bit x87 register and one was written to RAM as a 64 bit value, then loaded back into an x87 register for the check, resulting in the inequality. Running in a debugger wrote both values out of the registers before the check, making the problem unreproducible."

This behavior might not be IEEE defined, but even as IEEE undefined (and implementation dependent), it still qualifies those IEEE compliant implementations as non-deterministic.

Or how about:

"parallel systems, most likely GPUs, where it is common to have slightly different results even on the same operation, on the same system. This is due to the fact that several pipelines will do calculations in parallel and depending on which pipeline ends first (which can depend on many factors like current temperature) the sums can happen in a different order, leading to different rounding results."

due to fp associativity?

<comment><USER8> Those are not problems a new number format can fix though. The issues with x87 precision are due to compilers freely converting between different representations without this being indicated in the program.

Posits also can't achieve associativity in all conditions, you need to use "quire" accumulators with higher precision. However, if the decision of using quires were left to the compiler, you'd end up with the exact same problem of unclear precision as for x87. To avoid that, those accumulators will need to be annotated in the code, and straightforward programs that do not use them will continue to exhibit non-associativity.

<comment><USER9> The observation that all of the +-*/ operations in a basic block can be reduced to a single round with the quire would get you a reasonable way with the compiler alone.

Overall I'm not sold on the quire thing. It seems like a great big accumulator is a solution that is fairly independent from the floating point format.

<comment><USER10> > _It seems like a great big accumulator is a solution that is fairly > independent from the floating point format._

It could still be a good idea to mandate a standard version in the spec for consistent behavior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A thread from 2015: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9943589](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9943589)

2016: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11573172](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11573172)

2017: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15617633](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15617633)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14669913](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14669913)

Many other articles (but not many comments):

[https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story...](https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=unum)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story...](https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&page=0&query=gustafson)

<comment><USER12> The proposed format has changed several times since 2015, so not all those threads are discussing the same thing as this one.

Posits are Type III Unums IIRC, the original proposal was with Type I Unums.

Previous proposals were variable length formats, which is pretty much a nonstarter for a variety of reasons. This proposal (posits) is a fixed length format with variable length fields.

<comment><USER13> There have been several papers and blog posts written about the more recent posits proposals.

[https://marc-b- reynolds.github.io/math/2019/02/06/Posit1.htm...](https://marc-b- reynolds.github.io/math/2019/02/06/Posit1.html) [https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01959581v2](https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01959581v2) [https://hal.inria.fr/hal-02131982](https://hal.inria.fr/hal-02131982)

The bottom line is they are a tradeoff; they certainly aren't purely better than IEEE floats. Plus they seem to have a non-trivial hardware cost (one of the linked papers shows the adder is twice as large as the equivalent IEEE adder and has double the latency!)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Very few developers truly understand floating point representation. Most think of it as base-10, and put in horrific kludges and workarounds when they discover it doesn't work as they (wrongly) expected. I shudder to think how many e-commerce sites use `float` for financial transactions!

So as far as I'm concerned, whatever performance cost these alternate methods may have, it would be well worth it to avoid the pitfalls of IEEE floats. Intel chips have had BCD support in machine code; I'm surprised nobody has made a decent fixed point lib that is widely used already.

<comment><USER12> Replacing all the IEEE 754 hardware with posits won't fix this, though.

If you don't care about performance, then the actual solution has no dependency on hardware:

1\. Replace the default format for numbers with a decimal point in suitably high level languages with a infinite precision format.

2\. Teach people using other languages about floating point and how they may want to use integers instead.

The end. No multi-generation hardware transition required.

IMO, IEEE 754 is an exceptionally good format. It has real problems, but they aren't widely known to people unfamiliar with floats (e.g. 1.0 + 2.0 != 3.0 isn't one of them).

<comment><USER15> I'm pretty sure that 1.0 + 2.0 == 3.0 in IEEE 754. :) Now, 0.1 ...

<comment><USER16> They are not the same thing, but they are close enough most of the time.

The issue with floating point arrises when comparing very close numbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Obviously for any 32 bit value there's only 2^32 possible values. So logically, a better number format is all about the distribution of values and reducing redundancy.

It sounds like the basic idea here is that rather than a fixed amount of significant figures, you get more precision in the middle. Meanwhile, you can also get larger exponents. Is that right?

<comment><USER18> The ideas are (1) gradual instead of hard overflow [IEEE floats do gradual underflow via denormals], (2) crowding representable numbers more precisely around 1 while letting very large or very small numbers get less and less precise, vs. floating point which (except for denormals) is scale free within its range, (3) making a format which can be extended by just adding bits without new definitions, so that you can get more or less precise numbers as needed by just adding zeros or truncating, (4) a it more uniform logic for basic arithmetic with fewer edge cases.

It's a bit sad that many of the creator's claims are exaggerated and his examples cherry-picked though.

<comment><USER19> > floating point which (except for denormals) is scale free within its range

Presumably that's what you mean by scale free, but let's spell it out:

It's denser around 0, then has uniform density between, say, 1/8 and 1/4, half that density between 1/4 and 1/2, half that between 1/2 and 1, half that between 1 and 2, etc. etc.

If x = 1.0e22, you can add a million and it's still the same.

<comment><USER20> I recall in some of these earlier conversations, people pointing out that there are game engines where they invert some of their calculations to prevent artifacts caused by loss of significant figures with certain numbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Better yet, he claims the new format is a "drop-in replacement" for standard > floats, with no changes needed to an application's source code.

Claims like that are best taken with a grain of salt:

> It also does away with rounding errors, overflow and underflow exceptions, > subnormal (denormalized) numbers, and the plethora of not-a-number (NaN) > values. Additionally, posits avoids the weirdness of 0 and -0 as two > distinct values.

Ok, so posits will probably work fine as a drop-in replacement when my application makes simple use of floats. But, assuming my application is doing non-trivial math, it's probably aware of the above edge cases. Thus, dropping in posits might have lots of weird side effects where I had to work around weird side effects of floats.

<comment><USER10> > _But, assuming my application is doing non-trivial math, it 's probably > aware of the above edge cases. Thus, dropping in posits might have lots of > weird side effects where I had to work around weird side effects of floats._

Yeah, but posits appear to have _fewer weird edge-cases_. Plus the people trying out posits are constantly trying to find methods to work around the limitations too.

During this years conference on posit maths Florent de Dinechin had a really nice talk bringing up all current issues with posits and ways that floating point maths had found workarounds over the year, as a kind of challenge to make posits catch up[0][1]. The community took it really well, as far as I can see, and Gustafson in particular seemed delighted because he genuinely wants everyone to start using better numerical methods.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOstJ2IVC4Y8mbgN0IsowKw](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOstJ2IVC4Y8mbgN0IsowKw)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcX2nRCdZvs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcX2nRCdZvs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Choosing to have -infinity and various nans can be done independently from choosing to add regime bits, one could as well design this system to include them by adding more special values.

I didn't find a resource specifying how many exponent bits to actually use? (The 'es' value)

I don't see anything different in this system than regular floats that would ensure consistent results across machines/compilers/...? It's floats plus unary encoded regime bits to have var length exponent, so everything that can make floats inconsistent can still happen here: non commutativity, different exponent sizes or precisions of intermediate values, different rounding modes, ...

<comment><USER9> I just read the paper. Standard es bit counts are covered in section 7.2

Long story short: es=log2(nbits) -3

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > It also does away with rounding errors

What? Surely it does not have infinite precision with a finite number of bits, and also doesn't seem to be a rational number representation.

<comment><USER24> Hm, perhaps the answer is a subtle definition of "rounding error".

A rounding error is when you have a number, lets say 0.75, and due to rounding it is recorded as 1.00. The "rounding error" is 0.25.

An alternative to rounding to 1.00 would be to have a mechanism which says "the value is between 0.50 and 1.50". This way, there is no actual rounding, as it doesn't commit to a rounded value, so there is technically no "rounding error".

A neat advantage of recording an interval rather than rounding is that the "error" is preserved in the data through arithmetic, so if there is some following code that runs x * 100, a rounding mechanism would say "the value is 100" whereas an interval mechanism would say "the value is between 50 and 150". Then, if the user only looks at the output, it will be clear that there is a wide error range and something needs to be fixed, rather than the output indicating a precise answer when really it suffers from significant rounding errors.

<comment><USER25> I like posits, but they do not encode intervals. His older ideas on that are crap and that's part of the problem getting posits accepted IMO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> found this from Kahan in 2016 [https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/UnumSORN.pdf](https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/UnumSORN.pdf)

[https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/EndErErs.pdf](https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/EndErErs.pdf)

[https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/SORNers.pdf](https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/SORNers.pdf)

<comment><USER19> Thanks, came to say the same thing - wondered what William "Father of IEEE 754" Kahan had to say about this.

I haven't had time to digest it all, but he is certainly critical of Gustafson's proposals. Not sure though the articles linked above cover the latest and greatest Unum III. At any rate, I'd pay close attention to Kahan's critique.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> "(even the same computation on the same system can produce different results for floats)"

wait...what? Is this real?

<comment><USER28> Yes and no.

1\. Yes -- On old x86 systems, the x87 registers were 80-bits and the bottom bits were undefined. You could theoretically have a 1-bit difference on some results depending on what the bottom 26 bits (that were undefined, because you had 64-bit floats most of the time, even though the machine did things 80-bits at a time).

2\. No -- Modern x86 systems use SSE registers, which are 64-bits. There are a whole slew of configuration options, but if Windows / Linux does their job, you should have the same rounding-errors across your program (unless you manually change the rounding options, but that's your own fault if you go that route).

3\. Kinda yes -- Floating point operations are NON-associative. (A+B)+C does NOT equal A+(B+C). The best example is Python:

>>> (1+1)+2.0 __53 9007199254740994.0 >>> 1+(1+2.0 __53) 9007199254740992.0

2 __53 is the first value which starts to "round off" 1.0 in double-precision. So (1+2.0 __53) == 2.0 __53, because the value was rounded off.

Due to #3, even if you did everything correctly (ie: set the rounding flags so they were consistent), if your arithmetic happened in slightly different orders (very common in network-games, where different players may have their updates in slightly different orders), you end up with a 1-bit error between clients... which completely borks your simulation.

Because #3 is nonintuitive, many people think that you get different results when using floats. But its simply due to non-associativity.

<comment><USER29> > Modern x86 systems use SSE registers

Are your sure of this? It's my understanding that SSE registers require the use of a special API and standard floating point operations do not use them.

But the last time I worked with them was writing a SIMD vector library 7 years ago.

<comment><USER30> > It's my understanding that SSE registers require the use of a special API > and standard floating point operations do not use them.

No, SSE registers are used by most compilers that do floating point these days. They support all the usual IEEE float math operations and a host of bit twiddling operations as well as vector operations. The vector operations do still require using compiler intrinsics in C++, although some autovectorization does occur in gcc, icc, and llvm.

<comment><USER29> Ah yes. This is what I was remembering. For vector operations you have to use special intrinsics

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> How does the implementation of an FPU for this compare? I thought the existing IEEE 754 floating point standard was focused on reduced complexity of addition and multiplication hardware. This seems more complicated.

<comment><USER32> having implemented it, with unoptimized verilog (ok, i wrote a verilog generator to generate it), it requires about 30% fewer LUTs on a FPGA relative to berkeley hardfloat implementation.

<comment><USER33> Is the variable length regime handling that much easier to deal with (space- wise) than the NaN and subnormal handling needed in IEEE floats? I'd think that the regime scheme would effectively be equivalent to creating a multitude of different-width subnormal routes. Is it really the NaN handling that kills IEEE float performance?

<comment><USER32> It's basically a barrel shifter; for addition you're going to need it anyways. Multiplication is a bit nastier, but most of multiplier gates are the adder gates anyways. I made a useful insight that negative numbers are basically the same as positives, with a "minus two" invisible bit.

Here is a sample 8-bit multiplier. All code was generated using a verilog DSL I wrote in Julia for the specific purpose. All verilog is tested by transpiling to c using verilator and mounting the shared object into a Julia runtime with a Julia implementation.

[https://github.com/interplanetary- robot/mullinengine/blob/ma...](https://github.com/interplanetary- robot/mullinengine/blob/master/multiplier/posit_mult.v)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This may be good for numerical simulation, but I doubt this will ever replace common ieee754 float in general purpose programs. Two problems I can see right away:

\- Sometimes, one needs precision for numbers not close to 1. A UNIX timestamp is a good example -- for the current date, it provides ~1uS resolution in 64-bit ieee754. I could not calculate what the resolution would be for posits, but I suspect much worse.

\- The lack of positive and negative infinites will break naive min/max calculations which start accumulator with +/-inf.

Now, you might say that those things should not be done, and that software that uses those patters is defective. But even then, there is a lot of software like this, and so posits will never become a default "float" type.

<comment><USER35> UNIX timestamps are normally stored as 32-bit or 64-bit signed integers, not as floating-point. If you want better than 1-second precision, then the type "struct timespec" (specified by POSIX) gives you nanosecond precision. Fixed- point types can also be used in languages that support them.

<comment><USER36> I thought unsigned in 64 bits, holding the number of nanoseconds since the Unix 0 time (which might be 1970, but i forget).

<comment><USER37> UNIX time is _seconds_ since epoch (hence year 2038, that's the limit for a signed 32b time_t).

gettimeofday() and clock_gettime() provide higher resolution timestamps (respectively µs and ns), using typedefs instead of just numbers.

Some APIs return floating-point UNIX time in order to provide sub-second accuracy (the decimal part is the fractional second). Python's time.time() does that for instance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> The paper for this was published in 2017[0]

[0] [https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3148220](https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3148220)

<comment><USER39> It's odd. Someone told me about that on irc at the Time. People were feeling strongly about the topic. Quackery, mythomany,.. nobody wanted to hear about anything but IEEE standards.

<comment><USER40> > Quackery, mythomany,.. nobody wanted to hear about anything but IEEE > standards.

Mostly because there is no good evidence that what is being proposed is better.

This isn't the olden days when it was difficult to demonstrate on a large enough CPU and dataset. Today we have cloud computing. If you create something better, you can demonstrate it by putting it into a numerics application and blow everybody away.

The CFD people are _always_ looking for better solutions. The numerical simulation people are _always_ constrained.

Until you do that, people have a right to blow you off.

<comment><USER41> This paper on UK weather simulation, cited in the article, seems like pretty good evidence: [https://posithub.org/conga/2019/docs/13/1100-MilanKlower.pdf](https://posithub.org/conga/2019/docs/13/1100-MilanKlower.pdf)

<comment><USER40> That only really compares posits to Float16 in a domain where the paper admits roundoff error mostly isn't really an issue even at single precision.

I'd be much more interested to see how these handle stiff systems with multiple time constants. That's a domain where everything has problems and improvement is going to actually move some things from completely infeasible to actually simulatable.

That's a _much_ stronger use case. And you don't have to worry about implementation efficiency since the improvement ratio is "infinity"\--you went from can't do it at all to actually being able to do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The curious skeptics here might want to check out the videos from CoNGA'19[0]. There are talks about posits being used and tried out in the wild with impressive results. For example, according to Millan Klöwer, 16 bit posits could be accurate enough to replace 64 bit floats in certain climate modelling problems[1].

EDIT: just realized that the example was mentioned in the article, with a link to the slides. Still, the YT talk may add some context

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOstJ2IVC4Y8mbgN0IsowKw/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOstJ2IVC4Y8mbgN0IsowKw/videos?disable_polymer=1)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XazIx0cMVyg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XazIx0cMVyg)

<comment><USER16> The innovative idea from posits are they use Golomb-Rice prefix to encode exponent numbers. The Golomb Rice prefix let you encode exponent closer to zero using less space.

For example, the posit16 with nbits=16 and es=1 encodes the exponent like:

01.0 = 0 01.1 = 1 001.0 = 2 001.1 = 3 0001.0 = 4

The format has a normal exponent field with es bits that encodes exponent in binary. When it overflows, it encodes the carry as unnary format. In the unnary format the run-lenght of the same number encodes a number. For example: 0001 would be 3, 001 would be 2, etc. Of course, the posit format is a bit bore complicate than that (it supports negative exponent, for example). But the ideia is pretty much this.

Because of this encoding, if you are working with numbers that have small magnitude posit will have a LOT of more precision than your floating point format.

But the claim that posit16 can have as much precision as binary64 from ieee-754 is misleading. The posit16 can have _up to_ 16-1-2-1=12 bits of precision. While binnary64 always has _53 bits_ of precision.

They likely compared the binnary64 with posit16 using the accumulator (aka quire). I'm not sure how the quire would map to real world FPU, it uses a lot os space.

<comment><USER42> > They likely compared the binnary64 with posit16 using the accumulator (aka > quire).

Which I always find deceptiv because nothing stops us from using a quire with classical floating point arithmetic.

It is in fact a comparaison betwen a summation and a compensated summation : it is more precise because the algorithm is different not because of posits or floats.

They tell you that the quire is even faster than a traditional sum while being more precise but reading the associated reference reveals that it only hold with specific hardware which could also be used to use the quire with floats.

(and, arguably, I would love to know that every programmer is aware of a solid implementation of compensated/exact summation/dot-product and uses it when appropriate)

<comment><USER16> > They tell you that the quire is even faster than a traditional sum while > being more precise but reading the associated reference reveals that it only > hold with specific hardware which could also be used to use the quire with > floats.

Precisely. Once the posit in unpacked they are indistinguishable from a floating point. It is not fair let posit use a massive accumulator while working with a tiny ieee-754 floating point accumulator. Like I said before, the precision of a number represented in binnary64 is greater than posit8. This comparation ignores the biggest advantages of posit: efficient data format.

> (and, arguably, I would love to know that every programmer is aware of a > solid implementation of compensated/exact summation/dot-product and uses it > when appropriate)

I like the idea of making the accumulator type (quire) accessible to the programmer. I think this brings awareness of the underlying hardware implementation to the average programmer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> > It also does away with rounding errors, overflow and underflow exceptions, > subnormal (denormalized) numbers, and the plethora of not-a-number (NaN) > values.

All of those are important and useful features. Presenting their absence as some kind of advantage shows that Gustafson has no clue.

<comment><USER44> The article is too sloppy on details: these can be found in the specifiation and are not what the journalist writes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> One annoying part about floats is the abuse of the NaN space. Some runtimes like SpiderMonkey, JSC, and LuaJIT abuse the NaN space to store pointers in doubles. This practice is often called nan-boxing, but has a few variants. A more efficient use of bits like with Posits will break this.

As for the claim about a FPU taking up less space and power for posits than floats, facebook made that claim: [https://code.fb.com/ai-research/floating- point-math/](https://code.fb.com/ai-research/floating-point-math/)

<comment><USER6> > One annoying part about floats is the abuse of the NaN space.

I would say that this is certainly my favorite feature of IEEE floats :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Do these techniques make it easier or harder to implement hardware floating point units?

Storage and transmission speed have progressed exponentially while execution units have become the bottleneck. A floating point format that is 20% denser or more accurate but that requires a 2x number of gate delays to implement is major step backwards, except maybe in highly specialized applications.

<comment><USER47> From [1]: " The standard 32 bits posit adder is found to be twice as large as the corresponding floating-point adder. Posit multiplication requires about 7 times more LUTs and a few more DSPs for a latency which is 2x worst than the IEEE-754 32 bit multiplier." It's for an FPGA implementation.

This being said, I object to your premise: transmission and memory storage are getting comparatively more costly vs computation. From "Computer Architecture, A Quantitative Approach", 6th edition in figure 1.13 there are some values for the TSMC 45nm process, so hardly the leading edge and it only gets worse with finer nodes: \- 32 bits integer multiplication: 3.2 pJ \- 32 bits float multiplication: 3.7 pJ \- 32 bits read in a small 8 kB SRAM: 5 pJ \- external DRAM 32 bits read: 640 pJ

We have a lot of transistor nowadays, and as long as the computation can be pipelined halving the memory accesses could be a win (TBC).

Also on from the same Inria team as [1], and also covering hardware cost but more than this: "Posits: the good, the bad and the ugly": [https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01959581v3/document](https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01959581v3/document)

[1] "Hardware cost evaluation of the posit number system", [https://hal.inria.fr/hal-02131982/document](https://hal.inria.fr/hal-02131982/document)

<comment><USER32> I'm not sure the inria team used the correct optimization for posit addition. You do yourself a disservice by treating a posit like a float and bifurcate the cross (negative/positive) from the negative/negative and positive/positive branches; since posits are twos complements the posit adder should be smaller, not bigger.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> This has always been interesting to me. It's been awhile since I read about it last, though, and I remember reading some criticisms or concerns that posits (or unums? what's the difference?) would end up being slower for some reason. I don't remember the arguments though, or where I saw them; I think the idea was that there were some edge cases that were common enough in practice that overall it would slow things down. It would be nice to see a balanced discussion of the ideas (pros and cons).

</comment><comment><USER49> Performance per transistor has barely budged in thirty years. Posits seem like a very good development in that direction.

</comment><comment><USER50> Is there any FPGA implementation of his ideas?

One can then solve some ODEs to check how these implementation are performing.

Ofcourse the speed will be far slower but one can get number of instructions.

</comment><comment><USER51> This sounds really good. I find floating points completely unusable for any situation where accuracy is important. It's fine when being vaguely in the right ballpark is good enough, but I don't want to have to deal with 2 + 4.1 = 6.1000000001, or x/1000000 + y/1000000 != (x+y)/1000000.

<comment><USER42> Well, those will not be solved by posits, it is still an approximate floating point format. What it does is redistribution the precision to what Gustafson considers a better default and dropping edge cases in order to get more bits for precision.

edit: One of several examples found in the "Posits: the good, the bad and the ugly" paper linked in the thread : 10.0 * 2.0 = 16.0 in posit8

<comment><USER51> Really? My impression from the article was that this was exactly one of the things posits were supposed to fix, at least for numbers with small exponents.

I'm not sure how 10.0 * 2.0 = 16.0. I'm not sure what posit8 means, but it can only be correct if it switches halfway from base 8 representation to base 10, which is a bit weird, but at least the calculation is correct. (Otherwise it would be so incorrect to be unusable for anything.)

<comment><USER42> I am serious (and recommend reading the paper I quoted to have a good understanding of the trade-of offered by posits).

Overall, posits are a new trade-of that will give you better precision (nothing exact, it is still an approximation) when you manage to keep all your number in a small range. Once you get out of that range precision drops significantly (whereas the precision of classical floating points drops gradually).

Posit8 are equivalent to 8 bits floating points (minifloats) making them an easy target for pathological cases but the example still illustrate the fact that, contrary to floating-point arithmetic, multiplication by a multiple of two is not exact with posits (one of several good properties we take for granted and would lose when switching to posits).

<comment><USER51> If it's just a variation of the same problems behind floats, then I'm not that interested. Well, I guess it depends on how small the range is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> This is awesome. Doubling performance for free sounds good to me.

<comment><USER53> Well, we still need to replace all the floating point hardware in everything. So not exactly free...

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Gustafson commented on the article this morning.

</comment><comment><USER55> At the risk of a "flame war" where there are no winners, I would like to comment on some the statements here before they get stale. If we avoid ad hominem attacks and stick to the math, the claims, and counterexamples, this can be a useful scientific discussion and I very much welcome all the criticism of my ideas.

The irreproducibility of IEEE 754 float calculations is well documented... on Wikipedia, by William Kahan, and in an excellent paper by David Monniaux titled "The pitfalls of floating-point computations". It is amazing that this is tolerated, but IEEE 754 has done a great deal to lower the expectations of computer users regarding mathematically correct behavior.

The posit approach is not merely a format but also the Draft Standard. Whereas floats can arbitrarily use "guard bits" to covertly do calculations with greater accuracy, the posit standard rules that out. Whereas the float standard recommends that math functions like log(x), cos(x) etc. be correctly rounded, the draft posit standard mandates that they be correctly rounded (or else they have to use a function name that clarifies that they are not the correctly-rounded function). By the draft posit standard, you cannot do anything not specified in the source code (like noticing that a multiply and an add could be fused into a multiply-add with deferred rounding, so calling fused multiply-add without telling anyone). The source code completely defines what the result will be, bitwise, or it is not posit-compliant. It cannot depend on internal processor flags, optimization levels, or special hardware with guard bits to improve accuracy; this is what corrupted the IEEE 754 Standard and made it an irreproduci ble environment to this day.

The claim that posits is a "drop-in" replacement for floating point needs a lot of clarification, and this is unfortunately left out of much of the coverage of the ida. Clearly, if an algorithm assigns a hexadecimal value to encode a real value, that will need work to port from IEEE floats to posits. The math libraries need to be rewritten, as well as scanf and printf in C and their equivalent for other languages. However, a number of researchers have found that they can substituted a posit representation for a float representation of the same size, and they get more accurate results with the same number of bits. I call that "plug-and-play" replacement; yes, there are a multitude of side effects that might need to be managed, but it's nothing like the jarring change, say, of moving from serial execution to parallel execution. It's really pretty easy, and it's easy to build tools that catch the 'gotcha' cases.

Some here have suggested the use of rational number representation, or said that there are redundant binary representations of the same numerical value. Unlike floats, posits do not have redundancy. I suspect someone is confused by the Morris approach to adjusting the tradeoff between fraction bits and exponent bits, which produces many redundant wa6s to express the same mathematical value.

Perfect additive associativity is available, as an option, with the quire. If needed. Multiplicative associativity is available, as an option, by calling fused multiply-multiply in the draft posit standard. Because quire operations appear to be both faster (free of renormalization and rounding) and more accurate (exact until converted back to posit form), I am puzzled regarding why anyone would want to do things more slowly and with less accuracy.

Kulisch blazed the way with his exact dot product; unfortunately, any exact dot product based on IEEE floats will have an accumulator with far too many bits (like 4,224 for IEEEE double precision) and an accumulator that is just a bit larger than a power-of-two size. The "quire" of posits is always a power- of-two, much more hardware-friendly. It's 128 bits for 16-bit posits, and 512 bits for 32-bit posits, the width of a cache line on x86, or a an AVX-512 instruction.

"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing." In evaluating posit arithmetic, please use more than what you see in a ycombinator blog. You might discover that there are several decades of careful decision-making behind the design of posit arithmetic. And unlike Kahan, I subject my ideas to critical review by the community and learn from their input. The 1985 IEEE format is grossly overdue for a change.

<comment><USER56> I want to add a few comments as most of the discussions here concerned the hardware implementation and only few pointed to possible applications. I work on weather and climate simulations, but my opinions should apply in general to CFD or PDE-type problems.

Yes, having redundant bitpatterns is not great when designing a number format, however, even for Float16 (half-precision), making use of the 3% NaNs is wise, but not going to be a gamechanger. Some others discussed pro/con for neg zero and also neg infinity: In my view you want to have a bit pattern that tells you that the answer you get is not real, but whether it's +/\- Inf or some NaN is pretty much irrelevant. Using these bit patterns for something else sounds like a very reasonable approach to me. Furthermore, I've never come across a good reason for -0 in our applications.

When it comes to weather and climate models in HPC, I see the following potential for posits: Similar as BFloat16 is supported on TPUs, I could see Posit16 to be supported by some specialised hardware like GPUs, FPGAs etc. I'm saying that because for us it's not important to have a whole operating system running in posits (although I probably wouldn't mind) but to have them for some performance critical algorithms. Unfortunately, weather and climate models are far more complex than some dot products and we usually have to deal with a whole zoo of algorithms causing weather and climate models to cover easily several million lines of code. Now let's say we know our model spends 20% of the time in algorithm A which only requires a certain (low) precision to be stable and to yield reasonable results, then it would be indeed a big game changer if we could run this algorithms in, say, 16bit. In exchange of precision for speed we would probably want to push things to the edge, i.e. if we can just about do it in 16bit, then we should. Now there are several 16bit formats: Float16, BFloat16, Posit16, Posit16_2 (with 2 exp bits), and technically also Int16. Let's forget about the technical details of these formats and let's focus on where they actually considerably differ: What is the dynamic range and where on the real axis do I get how much precision to represent numbers. Yes, from a computer science perspective also the technical details matter, but from our perspective most of it is pretty irrelevant and what actual matters are these two things: dynamic range and where is the precision. Because these two really determine whether your algorithm is gonna crash or whether you can use it operationally on your desktop computer or in a big fat $$$ supercomputer.

For PDE-type problems (that includes CFD and also weather and climate models) I came within the last year of my research to the following preliminary conclusions regarding dynamic range and precision with respect to the above mentioned formats:

Int16: Let's forget about it. Float16: The precision is okay, but rarely needed towards the edges of the dynamic range. Floatmin might work, however, floatmax with 65504.0 is easily a killer. Might work with a no-overflow rounding mode and smart rewriting of algorithms to avoid large numbers. BFloat16: For our applications having only 7 significant bits is not enough, I didn't come across a single sophisticated algorithm that works with BFloat16. Posit16 (with 1 exp bit): Great, puts a lot of precision where it's needed but also allows for a reasonable dynamic range. Posit16 (with 2 exp bits): Probably even better, the sacrifice of a bit precision in the middle is fine and the wide dynamic range gives it the potential to also work with algorithms that are hard to squeeze into a smaller dynamic range.

In short, posits actually fit much better the numbers our algorithms produce. And this can indeed be the game changer: If a GPU supports posit arithmetic and we can run algorithm A on it in 16bit: Wonderful, contract sold! But if we couldn't with BFloat16 or Float16 than there is no future for 16bit in our field.

I explain more about this in this paper: dx.doi.org/10.1145/3316279.3316281

And there are two talks which tell a similar story: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XazIx0cMVyg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XazIx0cMVyg) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp7AYMWlPLw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp7AYMWlPLw)

or simply drop me an email if you have questions (unlikely respond here) that you find on my website: milank.de

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Posits seem great, but LLNL seems to favor ZFP[1], not posits.[2] Maybe new chips should then implement both posits and ZFP.

[1] [https://github.com/LLNL/zfp](https://github.com/LLNL/zfp)

[2] [https://helper.ipam.ucla.edu/publications/bdcws2/bdcws2_1504...](https://helper.ipam.ucla.edu/publications/bdcws2/bdcws2_15049.pdf)

<comment><USER57> Unrelated as far as I can tell. Posits are an alternative floating point format, not an array compression algorithm. The "compression" benefits from being able to use posit floats instead of ieee754 doubles, because of the better precision.

<comment><USER58> Posits also take less space for the same total accuracy, they use less space on disk, ram and less memory bandwidth.

<comment><USER57> It occurs to me that maybe you are referring to unums? The "unum" format discussed in "End of Error" is variable sized. However they since dropped that design and switched to fixed-sized number formats (16-, 32-, or 64-bit) with adjustable division between exponent and fraction bits, the "posit."

So "posit" numbers get you the ability to tradeoff precision and range, but they're not anymore highly compressed than regular old IEEE floats. Unless, as Gustafson argues, you didn't need a double in the first place and the added features of posits let you switch to a float.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Let's change the world.</comment>


Show HN: Utilizing Gamecenter in apps that are not games - <AUTHOR>

We were able to successfully get an app into the App Store that utilized Gamecenter, but was not a game.
It is called Reminders with Friends.  We used the turn based matchmaking in order to send and receive data (in this case reminders) between Gamecenter friends.  We then use these reminders to set off time based or GPS based reminders.  This was the first app that we found that was able to utitilize Gamecenter in this way.
If you have any questions, I would be happy to answer them.
Link to app: http://itunes.apple.com/app/reminders-with-friends/id486230629?mt=8
Link to website: http://slyceapps.com/reminders/ <comment><USER2> There's a bunch of gamified todo list things on the App Store that do this.

Also: "This is the only reminder app in the App Store that allows you to create location based reminders and alarms and send those reminders to friends and family."

Really?

</comment><comment><USER3> All the WiST apps use GC to synchronize the start and bpm of music apps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, I did not notice those. They are most likely the default Gamecenter multiplayer mode where all the participants are connected to the "game" at the same time. We found a lot of limitations in this because you could only have one "game" connected at a time and this was not feasible for a reminders app. The new turn based game mode worked best for us because not everyone had to be connected at once for you to start and you could have multiple "game" sessions going on at once.</comment></comment>


The Craigslist Lawsuit - <AUTHOR> https://3taps.com/the-craigslist-lawsuit.php <comment><USER3> Greg Kidd, the founder of 3taps, did not have to keep fighting this fight - <USER2> ALL. He is one of the top execs at Ripple Labs, was in the first round of Twitter (and Square), and doesn't have his net OR self worths tied up in 3taps. He continued this because he believes it was right - and I, for one, thank him for it.

<comment><USER4> Right for repurposing someone else's data without permission? Nothing right about that.

<comment><USER5> You can't usually convince anyone that they're wrong just by rephrasing some situation in a way that's more favorable to you.

"Right for using information freely provided by Google to help people find homes?" See? Now we have both found a way to describe the same situation in ways that makes it sound like two entirely different situations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> a-dub Back when the first bubble burst in late 2001, I scraped a bunch of historical craigslist data from a secondary archive and built an interactive gnuplot webpage of post-traffic by category over time. At the time, it got slashdotted, a couple hundred thousand people looked at it and it was all fun and good.

So I thought afterwards, hey, the economy is kinda sketchy still and looking at this stuff sure is neat... I should build a real tool that robustly and respectfully logs daily post totals for more locales, and maybe build out a cool little graph portal. Maybe I can even do a little NLP to make it smarter. hey, it's craigslist, they're community minded.. they thank me when I post, they won't mind. They give pencils to teachers even.

So I email them, and Craig responds in a cc'd message with a 'hey cool, can this guy use our RSS feeds'? At which point, the assholes that worked there started inventing every excuse under the sun as to why doing so would totally damage their infrastructure (because you know, polling RSS every half an hour is total abuse.)

Anyway, that's when I realized that all the hippie-dippie stuff was just window dressing and that I really truly was dealing with a really special species of asshole.

I put the project down and walked away. The end.

<comment><USER6> Hey, can you post some quotes from those at Craigslist who were against you using their data for various graphs?

<comment> a-dub In the end they shut me down with this (names redacted, of course):

\--snip--

We already have all this done in house. If our CEO decides to publish it we can do so easily.

Please understand it's not that I think you are trying to do something wacky, it's just that I really am in the business of not working our servers any harder than they need to.

Sorry,

\--snip--

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _the same statute that led to the demise of Aaron Swartz_

For fuck's sake.

CFAA criminal sentencing guidelines may very well have contributed to Swartz's suicide. They incentivized prosecutors to create complex, showy indictments cross-linking multiple felony charges (because exploiting unauthorized access in furtherance of other felonies is an accelerator in the CFAA). CFAA may be broken in several ways.

 _But CFAA is also the sole federal statute governing unauthorized access_. In civil litigation, CFAA is the only statute that provides a civil cause of action relating to unauthorized access to computers of any sort.

People like to write about civil CFAA as if it was some sort of nuclear option. But civil and criminal cases are worlds apart. If you're going to sue someone for misusing your computer systems, or even just violating your terms of use, CFAA is merely the statute that enables that. That has nothing whatsoever to do with overzealous prosecution.

Invoking Aaron Swartz in an argument over who's allowed to show apartment ads where is manipulative and grotesque.

<comment><USER8> As the EFF argues in the linked brief, there shouldn't be _any_ "civil cause of action related to unauthorized access" when the data in question is made publicly available on the internet.

Craigslist was abusing the CFAA with an expansive interpretation – treating unapproved _use_ as if it were the same thing as _unauthorized access_ – similar to that of overzealous federal prosecutors. Craigslist's argument, if embraced by the courts, would make other cases imposing penalties on the reuse of otherwise-public data easier.

The reference is fair to make these points to a mass audience, although a bit macabre.

<comment><USER9> > As the EFF argues in the linked brief, there shouldn't be any "civil cause > of action related to unauthorized access" when the data in question is made > publicly available on the internet.

Why?

The principle underlying the Craiglist lawsuit is centuries old. Craigslist is like a shop open to shoppers. The shopkeeper makes the premises open to the public, but the scope of that access is limited by the shopkeeper's purpose in granting that access. If a member of the public accesses the property for improper purpose, a civil action for trespass arises.

The fact that the premises is an Internet website changes nothing.

<comment><USER10> _The fact that the premises is an Internet website changes nothing._

It absolutely should. There is no _accurate_ physical analogy for an HTTP server that responds with "200 OK" and valid data for a given set of "GET _whatever_ HTTP/1.1" requests. Rather than contort existing trespass law to match the Internet, we have to derive meaningful boundaries for the Internet from ethical first principles if we want the conclusions to be remotely sane.

<comment><USER9> The law of trespass reflects a basic ethical principle: owners of private property may invite the public to access their property for a proper purpose (the scope of which may even be implied) but nonetheless retain the right to deny access and to sue for trespass those who access that property for some other purpose. That ethical principle applies just as much to websites as coffee shops. Just because Craigslist makes its website available to the public for a defined purpose does not mean it's not trespass for a company to access that data for a different purpose.

<comment><USER11> (I am going to assume we are still talking about the article.)

First of all, trespass is a red herring in this case. Defendent used Google's Cache -- _NOT_ the Craigslist website -- to gather data. Craigslist's claim is that accessing a Google Cache of its website constitutes unauthorized use.

If we're going to resort to ill-fitting metaphores, it's closer to the owner of a piece of artwork posting public notice that their art can only be viewed in their studio, _permitting_ a public gallery to show that art, and then suing you for trespassing because you looked at their art while it was in a public gallery.

Craigslist asserting copyright claims in this case is plausible if precarious (the very quietly changed their ToS just 4 days prior to filing suit -- that's bullshit if I've ever smelled it. Furthermore, as an aside, I wonder whether the rise of walled data gardens shouldn't give us ethical pause).

However, Craigslist's claim to CFAA violation in this case is absurd and dangerous. Period.

<comment><USER9> I didn't know about the Google Cache thing. The Wiki page doesn't mention it. That definitely changes at least the CFAA part of the case. Did they ever scrape CL directly?

<comment><USER12> yes, both padmapper and 3taps were scraping CL directly for some of the time

padmapper was scraping, got C&D, so moved to 3taps

3taps got C&D (and was playing dumb games like switching ip addresses to avoid blocks), then moved to scraping CL posts out of google's cache, claiming they therefore weren't bound by terms and conditions of CL. After CL blocked google from caching posts, 3taps went back to scraping CL.

<comment><USER13> Was blocking caching on Google what he referred to as "interfering with Google and other search engines"? That's laying it thick.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> We really need a non-profit organization that provides a data store with an api for common things like classified listings, sms messages, pictures, likes, etc.

That can help us move away from this sort of chicken and egg problem with user generated data. These companies are basically hogging it because they were able to build the user base.

If we can get the data in a non-profit store with a licensing scheme that basically says you must as a part of using this data add any user-generated data submitted to your website back to this store so other developers can build products on top of it, we could really innovate in classifieds and social networks.

Perhaps something like that can be funded by EFF or related organization... because then we can potentially apply governance to that user generated data which has not been possible with private companies.

The chicken and egg problem can be solved if big non-profit tech and civil rights brands like the ACLU, EFF, Wikipedia, etc. all get behind this and market it.

<comment><USER15> At least in the US, I think satisfying the 'purposes' requirement for non- profit status would be difficult. Just providing a free service isn't enough. Here's the IRS brief description:

"The exempt purposes set forth in section 501(c)(3) are charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and preventing cruelty to children or animals.

source: [http://www.irs.gov/Charities-&-Non-Profits/Charitable- Organi...](http://www.irs.gov/Charities-&-Non-Profits/Charitable- Organizations/Exempt-Purposes-Internal-Revenue-Code-Section-501\(c\)\(3\))

UPDATE: I confused non-profit and charitable organizations. Disregard.

<comment><USER16> You seem to confusing non-profit status with charitable (501c3) status; a charity is a specific subtype of tax-exempt nonprofit (most notably different from most other nonprofits in that, in addition to the organization being tax- exempt, contributions to the organization are tax-deductible for the donors.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Excellent update on one of the hard cases EFF has been fighting.

There's a link to an interesting law review article on how the CFAA can make it a criminal act for arbitrarily banned users to even browse to a public webpage: [http://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?...](http://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3216&context=mlr)

It's an absurd result and frustratingly unaddressed by the courts.

</comment><comment><USER18> > and will make its API source code, the settlement agreement, and other legal > filings and public policy resources available.

This is interesging to me. A couple years ago being young and naive i received a cease and desist order from craigslist legal team demanding i remove my craigslist scraper from github. It was largely a toy project to play around with an html parser library i wanted to learn anx thought it could be useful. Of course I now understand it was against their tos and from an ethical standpoint, avoid scraping anything unless getting permission, but at the time I was terrified I'd be sued for a ton of money. It felt incredibly aggressive to go after me , a student at the time.

So I'm curious.. is it illegal to scrape but ok to release the source code? Where is the line drawn?

<comment><USER19> That's why I would be tempted to create a craigslist competitor with really free access to the data.

<comment><USER5> Network effects: it's difficult to dislodge an entrenched competitor once they've accumulated a large enough dependent userbase.

However, a number of other services are chipping away at Craigslist, developing their own userbases in niches that Craigslist used to occupy. (e.g. Tinder)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't understand.

>> The Court has ruled that users—not craigslist—own the copyrights in their postings.

>> ... Craigslist finally conceded in Court that no such harm or impairment ever occurred.

>> Craigslist completely rewrote its Terms of Use, removing many of the most abusive clauses.

Everything above seems to be against Craigslist. Then why does 3taps have to agree to a settlement to pay Craigslist $1 million?

And if there are other parts of the court ruling that went against 3taps which this blog post doesn't mention, then how can Craigslist be forced to forward that money to EFF?

<comment><USER21> Wikipedia's summary of the case doesn't make it sound as positive for 3taps, especially as the status of the case (their motion to dismiss the case was denied) is not what they wanted: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist_Inc._v._3Taps_Inc.#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist_Inc._v._3Taps_Inc.#Opinion_of_the_Court)

Two significant problems for them: the Court sided with Craigslist's view that 3taps knew its authorization to access the website was revoked when it received Craigslist's cease-and-desist letter, so scraping past that date might constitute unauthorized access; and Craigslist's change to its ToS on July 16, 2012 to claim copyright on posts was valid, so reuse of their material after that date could constitute a copyright violation subject to statutory damages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's not clear why they are shutting down if "the Court has ruled that users—not craigslist—own the copyrights in their postings."

Maybe "3taps lacks the resources to continue the fight" implies that the lawsuit has drained their bank accounts and they are out of money.

<comment><USER23> It does say that 3taps has to pay $1m to craigslist that might have killed their onhand cash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The actual lawsuit docket is here:

[http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/k5ulex5l/california- norther...](http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/k5ulex5l/california-northern- district-court/craigslist-inc-v-3taps-inc-et-al/)

</comment><comment><USER25> Wow that's quite a spin on the fact that they lost the lawsuit and had to fork over $1 million.

</comment><comment><USER26> So 3taps has to pay craigslist $1M, and craigslist then has to pay that to the EFF. That seems pretty odd.

<comment><USER27> 3taps may not have been able to keep fighting it, but they were able to keep Craigslist from profiting by driving them under. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some element of "agree to this or we spend it all making you pay your lawyers then fold the company with all assets completely exhausted - we'll even sell the name and spend that against you."

I believe the term is pyrrhic victory.

And there may also be a (future) kneecapping element to it with the release of their scraping source code.

<comment><USER5> Right, and CL's lawyers would still be OK with the outcome because now they have established precedent for a million-dollar settlement of a lawsuit for scraping data. If anybody is dumb enough to use that open source code to provide a service that uses scraped CL data, CL's lawyers will be able to open with a settlement offer well in excess of a million dollars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Not sure if I understand this correctly. Does this mean that if Instagram or Twitter terms does not allow scraping of their user's generated content, any developer can just go ahead and do it because the copyright holder of the post is the user?

Since the site does not hold the copyright (and rightly so), the site owner does not have the rights to say what can be done with the data. That belongs to the users that generates it.

In that case, how do we know if all the individual users consent to the scraping? If you scrape 10,000 data, and one user complains, would you be in trouble? And does the user has the right to know who are accessing the data outside of the normal use (since if they don't know, they can't object)?

</comment><comment><USER29> "3taps replied that it did not access craigslist and instead obtained the data from Google" What does this mean? how do they get that data from Google?

<comment><USER30> Probably scraped Google's cache pages, so they would never touch Craigslist servers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Company A made a chocolate fountain for the "public" to see. People enjoyed it. Company B thought this is a great opportunity to make cakes out of it. Because the fountain is "public" they made this as the source of their cake business. Company A complained to take down the fountain and....

Well you know the rest of the story. :)

<comment><USER32> If only the chocolate fountain was infinitely copy-able :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> interesting outcome. Do users own the copyright to their pictures and postings on Facebook? twitter?

Can I build a Facebook scrapper and redistribute it to other sites?

<comment><USER34> You can read the various terms of service and user agreements to find out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Would a "cannot use for commercial purposes" clause have nipped this one in the bud? I'm still on the fence with this one. I think Craigslist could have played it a lot better but I find it hard to believe no-one here can empathise with the founder.

</comment><comment><USER36> _3taps built a data exchange that aggregated user-generated data housed on various websites and then made that data available through an API to developers, including PadMapper and Lovely._

Craigslist discovered that it had become (has become) the "MLS" of rentals... and perhaps even more accurately -- it's a brokerage of _housing_ data -- both rentals and sales. So when property management companies (PMCs) discovered how darn easy it was, for example, to flood craigslist with multiple ads for the same unit, or to flood it with units that were never available to begin and thus alter market perception -- certain people got exactly what they wanted: hyperinflation in rents, or the subsequent upward pressure on housing prices, or both.

 _As recently as 2010, craigslist welcomed innovative uses of the publicly available data ... Over the next two years, as innovators like PadMapper and AirBnB began to thrive, craigslist reversed course, and punished the innovators it previously welcomed to use the data. In February 2012, craigslist rewrote its Terms of Use, abandoning its long-articulated position that users own their own content which was freely available on the "public" part of craigslist 's website._

As outraged as everybody was about this, it is exactly what the real MLS does when you decide to sell your house. You sign a contract promising to pay some Realtor's brokerage company 6 percent of whatever your house goes for -- in that contract you are essentially giving them the "copyright" of your house listing; they own it on the MLS and that is why you have to pay them the big bucks. Never mind that they do basically NOTHING other than simple photography and data entry to post on the MLS... but now they require you give them ~$66K of your equity for their 3 hours of work. (Source: [http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_28512250/report- silic...](http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_28512250/report-silicon- valleys-housing-affordability-crisis-worsens) Median price of "entry level" home in San Mateo County = $1.1M).

Same thing is happening in rentals / property management co's (PMCs), but slightly different symptoms.

Nobody is attacking the problem the right way, though. 42Floors tried the experiment and found it to be a failure, too. (Source: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9881213](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9881213))

The market should be putting more pressure on brokers to compete with each other ... damn that 6 percent. (Right, but the NAR signed a non-compete agreement with itself so it gets to do that)

Hackers should stop building tools that make it easier and cheaper for the PMCs and real estate agents to steal everybody's equity.

<comment><USER37> > You sign a contract promising to pay some Realtor's brokerage company 6 > percent of whatever your house goes for

For comparison: NL is roughly at 1,85 (negotiable).

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Do you think the sentence has impact on other scraping scenarios, say scraping for travel data for instance

</comment><comment><USER39> why they took on CL instead of, say, FB? Or they think it is better to start with an easy/smaller guy and ramp it up to the bigger fish?</comment>


Dropbox May Not Be LeBron James, but Is Still in the Game - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/04/technology/dropbox-may-not-be-lebron-james-but-it-is-still-in-the-game.html <comment><USER3> > Dropbox is not laying off workers or shrinking; it hired nearly 500 people > last year, 75 since the start of this year, and it plans to soon move into a > sprawling, custom-designed office building for which it has signed a long- > term lease.

Honest question: WTF are they doing?

<comment><USER4> Nail on the head right here. The only thing Dropbox has these days is consumer confidence in it's syncing process. Beyond that, they trail every competitor feature-wise and frankly, they are succeeding despite their management, not because of it. Recent product enhancements have been, let's be honest, mediocre at best across the board and show no signs of that changing anytime soon. They exist now solely due to brand recognition when it comes to cloud file sync'ing and the moment one of their competitors cracks the consumer confidence equation with the brand image to match, Dropbox is done.

<comment><USER5> What if -- hold your breath! -- Dropbox is simply a medium-sized, privately held, profit-generating company that will end up satisfying a certain customer segment and paying dividends to investors? The horror!

<comment><USER6> Their investors will revolt. Their investors need 10X returns in the next couple years to satisfy their fund's existence to their LPs. Funds need a few big wins like Hollywood studios need a couple blockbusters every year. Dropbox's investors are counting on them being a blockbuster. Dropbox's private valuation is an order of magnitude higher than Box's public valuation. And Box has a bigger sales team, more revenue, and more inroads into big enterprise than Dropbox. So it's a real pickle and dividends aren't going to get them out of it.

<comment><USER5> I fully concede your point. I think the private financing markets need to become more sophisticated out here, such that they enable the type of company I described -- which I reckon is the type of company Dropbox should be -- to thrive. There are a few very clever and small investors who already do this. But they're a minority.

<comment><USER7> I agree with what you're saying.

I'm not an expert - just learning more about this myself over the last few months, but it sounds to me like the investment style you're talking about exists inside the world of private equity.

They're not playing the venture game - it's a different model. Buy and hold for either cashflow/dividends, or do some financial/managerial engineering and flip the asset.

Outside of the world of Venture Capital, there's a HUGE spectrum of investors out there doing every kind of investment - just gotta tune into it I've found.

(Great place to start is a podcast called PE Funcast - seems to me they've been doing this type of investing.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Unless I'm reading this wrong, the takeaway from this article is that Dropbox is a reasonably successful company, with enviable brand-recognition and reach, that's `suffering' from being overvalued early on and is simply no longer hot and new. That seems like a reasonably good problem to have, and is certainly better than being a loss-maker.

<comment><USER9> Better than a loss-maker, but that's a low bar.

For all of the employees that received options based on the inflated $10bn valuation, not a good problem to have.

This is the danger of VCs wanting everyone to be a unicorn, and structuring their firms around that mindset. I agree that a $5bn or $2bn company is fantastic. Until those with capital agree, however, founders are almost required to pitch a fantasy.

<comment><USER10> I obviously don't know the specifics of the dropbox option pool, but it's not uncommon to have employee options issued at a 409(a) valuation instead of the fundraising valuation.

So even if money was raised at a 10bn valuation based on the expectation of future value, a 409(a) valuation would probably place the company at somewhere closer to 10-40% of that, which puts employees in a much better situation.

<comment><USER11> You're right that options are granted at the 409a price (the common stock price) instead of the price investors pay in the financing, but as companies become more mature, the common and preferred prices usually begin to converge somewhat. In a seed financing you might see common stock valued at 10% of the preferred price, but in a late stage, billion dollar company there will be much less of a discount applied.

Employees granted options recently after the highest valuation financing would probably be completely underwater if the company is really worth $2b.

<comment><USER10> Right, but if the 10bn funding was at a high multiple relative to revenue, the 409a will probably still be a lot lower. I'm not saying that it would be at 2bn, but the GP was talking about people being granted options at 10bn, and potentially they're being granted at a much lower value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My dropbox scenario is I have a 2TB HD and 2TB dropbox storage with the 1year packrat service. I record and edit music on the HD and dropbox is always syncing my changes. The next day, when I'm at work, I can pull up the website and listen to the stuff I worked on the previous night. If I go into a studio I connect to dropbox and sync whatever folder(s) that contains the song(s) I'm working on. When I get home the files are there.

Once I forgot to disconnect my dropbox and someone at the studio trashed the folders and they were deleted on my home machine. I remotely disconnected their connection from the web interface and restored my folders to the previous checkpoint.

I can't imagine a simpler, more efficient mechanism for keeping things organized and backed up. I also have a separate backup service on the same drive of course, just in case.

The only annoyance with dropbox I have is there are certain scenarios where you can't play audio from the website and are forced to download it, which is annoying when sharing links.

That and I wish I could give them more money for more space.

<comment><USER13> Have you tried asking to pay for more space? I would be willing to pay for a package somewhere between the 1TB pro account and the very expensive Business account.

<comment><USER14> Not OP, but I've asked for more space and was told the business account was my only option, so now I've hacked together a Dropbox/S3 hybrid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I really don't understand all the negative Dropbox sentiment these days. Who cares if the investors aren't getting a 10x return? How does that materially affect you as a customer? Why are you even cheering for that anyways?

I am a very happy paying Dropbox customer. It's a solid product that does the job very well and isn't stuffed with a bunch of other useless features I don't need. It's pretty much perfect.

<comment><USER16> Companies that don't satisfy their investors' expectations... they often resort to moves of desperation. And those moves are more often than not anti- consumer and even anti-business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'd be shocked if Dropbox is still in business in 5 years. It's kind of sad because it was the first mover and I loved the service when it was the only one, but now there are a million options that are probably just as good. Not to mention they've never made a dime on me personally or anyone I know (and as I understand it that's true for 95% of their user-base). Our company actually banned Dropbox.com because we decided we'd rather do everything on Google drive for free instead of pay Dropbox for corporate use. The whole industry also has bearish macro outlook as storage continues to get cheaper and yet people's need for it doesn't grow proportionately.

<comment><USER18> I pay for Dropbox, and their sync is the industry's best.

They'll be here in 5. 10 is the bigger question mark when files go away.

<comment><USER13> Files will never go away.

<comment><USER19> Probably not for 'power' (does that work?) users, but for people like my mom they're pretty much already gone. They started disappearing for her when iTunes was dumping her music into a directory and she had no idea, to her it was indistinguishable from how Spotify works, so now that everything streams like magic she pays zero attention to files or the idea of files. She thinks in terms of galleries, not image files. If I open some sort of file explorer in front of her, I've just gotten 'techy' on her.

A few years ago when I was doing a help desk job, the sentiment was similar. I asked a user to navigate to a directory on Windows and he stopped me. He said, "Hold it now, I'm not a computer person."

So maybe not 'go away,' but perhaps become increasingly invisible and especially so to average users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> People stick with Dropbox for a simple reason: they do the syncing thing faster and more painlessly than anyone else out there.

If Apple ever gets their act together and makes iCloud actually fast and reliable a syncing service, Dropbox might be in trouble.

<comment><USER21> What's the actual issue with iCloud? It takes three seconds to turn it on, and select what I want to sync. Done. Backing up, syncing calendars, contacts, and notes to all my devices with zero problem.

<comment><USER22> > What's the actual issue with iCloud?

I'll admit I haven't tried yet, but I'm going to hazard a guess that if I try to setup icloud on my Linux machines at home or my Android devices, I'm not going to get very far.

With Dropbox I get all the way, everywhere, with no hassles. Thus Dropbox has my business.

<comment><USER21> That's like saying well I'm not going to get very far running a Playstation 4 game on my Super Nintendo. You can't count software that isn't even supported on a system. Yes, DropBox has a client for many systems, but saying DropBox is better because iCloud doesn't even exist on Linux make no sense.

<comment><USER23> > but saying DropBox is better because iCloud doesn't even exist on Linux make > no sense.

makes sense for me. I don't use iCloud because of that. It doesn't have the features that I need. Although "Better" is subjective. Dropbox might not be better for you, but it "makes sense" for some people

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Dropbox really proved out how valuable "it just works" in the cloud can be. Their first few years of execution were phenomenal and the product provided a real value. I remember discovering that I could mock up iPhone apps in photoshop on my desktop, save jpgs to dropbox and open in the app to see what the screens would look like immediately on my phone. Delightful. And then... none of their acquisitions or product initiatives stuck and they added a questionable board member. Anyone have insight in the last couple years of stumble? I'm at a loss.

<comment><USER24> It's not often that companies nail one thing really well ... and then nail a second and third thing. Dropbox is amazing at cloud storage and syncing. Why do people expect them to develop great products beyond that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Reasons it's still in the game:

1\. It works, with fewer problems than any other sync / cloud storage that I've used.

2\. It has enough people using it outside of work that it's getting paying business customers (the Linux effect?)

If either of these falters (if 1 falters, 2 does too) then they'll be gone. There are plenty of competitors and some even do sync well enough that people will use them.

I'm rather upset that they've dropped Carousel, as it's probably the app my girlfriend and I use most on our phones, but I'd only leave Dropbox if they didn't fold enough of the Carousel features back into the Dropbox client - <USER2> there wasn't a third party app that could provide similar functionality using our Dropbox storage.

<comment><USER26> I agree. I actually use Dropbox, Drive, and OneDrive. I've only used OneDrive once to share some download links once. The only real reason I use Drive is because of Google Docs. For everything else I use DropBox because I trust them more. I've never ever had a problem with it. Also DropBox hasn't had major scandals and for the most part stays out of the news. When a company is basically holding your private stuff for you that's a huge plus.

<comment><USER27> Hiring Condeleza Rice was scandalous to me, since I care about privacy.

Obviously, this is a non-issue for the general public, but it's a bit tone- deaf for "power users".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I very happily pay for Dropbox. I haven't found any of the alternatives as easy as Dropbox. The syncing is seamless.

<comment><USER29> I agree and I'm also a happy customer of Dropbox.

But how long will it be until OneDrive or iCloud Drive catch up? I have 1TB of OneDrive space for "free" with Office. I have plenty of spare space in my iCloud storage plan. If either of those two options catch up to Dropbox's reliability, why would I stay with Dropbox?

Long term, why will Dropbox survive?

<comment><USER30> Dropbox is much cheaper than either Office or an Apple device.

<comment><USER31> >Dropbox is much cheaper

[citation needed]

Office: [http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Office-Personal-Year- Card/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Office-Personal-Year- Card/dp/B00HV9IM58/)

$57 for 1 year of Office + 1 TB of storage

Dropbox: [https://www.dropbox.com/plans?trigger=homefoot](https://www.dropbox.com/plans?trigger=homefoot) $9.99 for 1 month of dropbox with 1TB (=> $120/year)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Only reason I still use Dropbox is because 1password integrates so nicely with it.

<comment><USER33> Now imagine there are many other people who have this one other reason they still use XYZ. That's how many companies stay in business. I worked at a company where customers would call angrily and shout "The only reason I am still with you guys is because of the designs you guys have, but your service sucks, blah, blah, blah...," and this conversation usually ended with "OK, 4125-5623-8451-XXX...Expiration Date XX-YY... OK, Thank you!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I stopped using Dropbox after the Snowden revelations broke loose. Dropbox does not use end-to-end encryption. You have to encrypt by yourself.

That is not particularly hard, but it still means that you are storing your files in a honeypot from which the NSA regularly draws a juicy feed.

Especially users outside the USA should never use a cloud service that lacks automatic end-to-end encryption.

As a non-American, you would also reveal your identity (along with your data) to a host of American surveillance agencies by paying by credit card. So, that is another non-starter. Along with unencrypted data, that is just an accident waiting to happen. They would store your dropbox data alongside Angela Merkel's digitized private phone calls to her husband. "I love you honey!". Seriously, I pay for cloud services only with bitcoin.

</comment><comment><USER35> Not to mention the top reason I dropped Dropbox: with Condolezza Rice on the board I feel they are a bit too chummy with the government and the NSA.

</comment><comment><USER13> As an otherwise-happy Dropbox customer, it does concern me somewhat that there has been very little innovation in the core product for several years. They seem focused on building a halo of lock-in services instead.

<comment><USER36> I don't know, their core product is so solid. It's one of those things I can install and never think about again, it just works. Maybe there's no need to innovate there?

<comment><USER37> There's need for innovation because Google/MS/Apple and such are integrating cloud-sync right into the operating system (and its only a matter of time before their sync tech is good enough or better than DB's sync tech).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> >>> Dropbox signed up 13 large companies with more than 1,000 users each

So let's say the average employee count is 2k and they negotiated to pay $100/user/year. 13 * 2000 * 100 = $2.6M. Even if we double the average employee count and assume they pay standard $150/yr, it's $7.8M.

Assuming that business offering is their strongest bet to get as strong as some investors might like (i.e. justify the valuation), how many of these do you need to justify $10B valuation? And how big is the market?

I am not sure that it all adds up.

</comment><comment><USER39> It's very hard to be optimistic about their future when their main competitors are Google (Drive), Microsoft (OneDrive), Apple (iCloud), Amazon (CloudDrive), Box etc. Virtually every single one of big players nowadays offers cloud storage. I cannot see Dropbox succeeding in the long run, especially with the amount of innovation they've put in their product in the past two years (close to none).

<comment><USER40> For my uses, DropBox is the best solution by far out of all of those.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I think they missed their opportunity - namely what they're doing with Paper now. I like Dropbox a lot, but most people I know work with Google Drive/Docs. The whole idea of "files", to me, is becoming more and more abstract and remote. I'd probably find more use for Dropbox if I was using Office 365, but then there is OneDrive for that.

Bottomline, I have less need for Dropbox outside of backing up photos. And there are any number of services for backing up photos that are frankly better from a usage PoV (though not from a syncing PoV where they are clearly better). I have an iPhone - I used iCloud to download the pictures to my MBP and then have Google Sync running to push them to Google Photos. iCloud's photo service is still pretty terrible - but using this method I get all the goodness of Google Photos (e.g. let me find all the pictures of my dog or my kid).

</comment><comment><USER42> Dropbox has the same problem a lot of the moderately successful unicorns have; it's a good product managed by smart people that would be much better off as a right-sized stable lifestyle business a la 37 Signals / Basecamp than as an attempt at a world-beating massive-growth juggernaut like Google or Facebook. Unfortunately for them (and Evernote, and a whole host of others), once you've signed that deal for the huge late-stage VC cash infusion at a fantasy-land valuation, there's no going back.

<comment><USER43> The problem being, how many of these businesses would have won any market share without early VC investment enabling the companies to dump money into customer acquisition at a loss?

Probably a few of them, but I'm guessing some other company with a similar business model would have come along with VC backing and eaten their lunch (sure, that company might then be in the exact same place as the current over- valued late stage companies).

Damned if you do, damned if you don't?

<comment><USER44> > The problem being, how many of these businesses would have won any market > share without early VC investment enabling the companies to dump money into > customer acquisition at a loss?

The problem isn't with early VC money. Dropbox's early backers would have still made a gigantic return on Dropbox setting at a $1bn valuation.

Really, it's not even a problem with their series B ($250M at $4bn). $4bn is a reasonable eventual valuation for Dropbox.

The problem is that they didn't stop there. They raised another $850M in 2014 (in two rounds), which was basically sold on the promise of it being necessary to "win" the storage wars and acquire a monopoly.

By 2014, Dropbox was already a stable company with hundreds of millions in revenue. The only reason to raise money was to shoot for hitting Google/Facebook status (owning a lucrative monopoly). If they had instead accepted that their eventual outcome was a $3-5bn software company, everyone could have won: employees, investors, founders, etc. (Atlassian is an example of a company which _did_ eventually raise substantial VC, but instead of gunning for a monopoly IPOed at a $4bn valuation.)

The problem is that founders ultimately have huge egos and want to be the next Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page: commanding monopolies so lucrative that they can spend billions on zero-return "cool nerd shit."

<comment><USER43> There has been a major shift as of late where IPOing at those mid-late rounds just isn't the trend anymore. Public markets are a cruel beast where companies are living and dying by quarterly reporting so these skyrocketing growth startups have less incentive to let the public judge them. They also don't want to leave too much growth opportunity on the table when going public anymore.

So it makes sense why companies would want to stay private if someone is willing to give them the cash they think they need. Problem is, those investors also want to make a huge return, so a 20B valuation is going to come with some nasty liquidation preferences/ratchets etc. to protect the money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> $5M valuation isn't exactly suffering. The problem is that the failure of Box as a thriving company has put a ceiling on how much Dropbox can make in the public markets.

If Dropbox does need more money, if it can't get profitable with the funding it already has, then it will be in for tough times. If it is forced to go public before it's ready, like Square, then its employees will suffer much like Square's employees have with its stock price.

</comment><comment><USER46> I have used Egnyte, almost since their beginning. Surprised no mention here. Pretty good enterprise offering, including hybrid cloud or self-hosted options. The only complaint I've had is they unilaterally tried to double my subscription price to match their competition. I negotiated a compromise and now I have some weird custom tier.

</comment><comment><USER47> Actually really love using Paper for simple product specs, cleaner simpler than google docs and uses markdown.

<comment><USER48> I really really wanted to like it. But it feels so cluttery and disorganized.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Completely commoditized service with a few core parterships scattered here and there. Not able to take on the better capitalized players i.e Microsoft, Google, Apple, heck even facebook. Long term odds are not great, unless they merge with a complete ecosystem player like the above

</comment><comment><USER50> I use rdiff as an open source, simpler alternative to Dropbox for syncing files across a network. Dropbox uses the same library of functions as rdiff: librsync.

</comment><comment><USER51> online consumer storage businesses are dead-ends; consumers will own data appliances in their homes that are as easy to use as a fridge, with massive symmetric piping, port control, redundancy, etc.

</comment><comment><USER52> In my mind Dropbox became a company not worth supporting when Rice joined Dropbox's board ([http://www.drop-dropbox.com/](http://www.drop- dropbox.com/)). I don't know what their future holds. But personally, with a board member who advocates warrentless surveillance it seems unlikely that we share similar views on the security of my data, and I wont be using their service.

I'd hope their customers are also looking at the security of their data in light of this and seeking out alternatives.

<comment><USER53> what's your take on this? - [https://blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2016/01/future- of-diversit...](https://blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2016/01/future-of-diversity- at-dropbox/)

<comment><USER54> Why do you ask? I don't see how the two are related.

<comment><USER53> they're not related, was just wondering is all

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I wish they had more choice regarding purchasing more space. I'm not interested in 1TB and find 10$ per month too much if I wont even use 10% of it. Although if there is a cloud provider I'd trust that sync would never fuck up, I'd be Dropbox.

Google Drive still thinks it's normal to re-download the cloud folder instead of letting me install Drive in the same location after a system reinstall, where all the files already exist. And to trust them 1TB with that behaviour ? Hahaha.

<comment> T-hawk Your first concern often comes up in Dropbox threads. Of course they could easily offer a plan at 0.5TB / $5 or some such. They just don't want to. They'd lose more revenue from existing customers dropping from $10 to $5 than they'd gain by new customers going from $0 to $5.

It's not that Dropbox can't offer less space, it's that they're not interested in making the baseline price anything lower than $10. Put another way, Dropbox is perfectly happy to get along without customers who think the difference between $5 and $10 is something to care about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> The problem is that Dropbox isn't that complicated. They were able to win in the beginning because they were a novel idea. Now that they have proven the business model, it will invite competitors (which has already happened).

A bigger company with more resources will eventually be able to put them out of business.

It would have been better to cash out. Unless they truly have something proprietary with a higher barrier to entry, it will be a difficult road ahead.</comment>