First Experiment to Attempt Prevention of Homosexuality in Womb  - <AUTHOR> http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2010/07/dreger.html <comment><USER2> Good grief! I can't believe it, but North Western's article is a trolling linkbait compared to the Time Magazine and the Hastings Center's articles, which it cites.

The Time article was first, it was cited by Hastings, and the two were cited by North Western, but the content becomes increasingly unscientific and partisan.

TIME:

" _The early prenatal use of dexamethasone, or dex, has been shown to prevent some of the symptoms of CAH in girls, namely ambiguous genitalia. Because the condition causes overproduction of male hormones in the womb, girls who are affected tend to have genitals that look more male than female, though internal sex organs are normal. (In boys, in contrast, the condition leads to early signs of puberty, such as deep voice, body hair and enlarged penis by age 2 or 3.) But while the prenatal treatment may address girls' physical symptoms, it does not prevent the underlying, medical condition, which in some severe cases can be life-threatening, nor does it preclude the need for medication throughout life._ "

Hastings Center acknowledges the medical application of dex to prevent CAH, but cites the lead researcher's other interests in "curing" homosexuality in girls:

" _The majority of researchers and clinicians interested in the use of prenatal "dex" focus on preventing development of ambiguous genitalia in girls with CAH. CAH results in an excess of androgens prenatally, and this can lead to a "masculinizing" of a female fetus's genitals. One group of researchers, however, seems to be suggesting that prenatal dex also might prevent affected girls from turning out to be homosexual or bisexual._ "

The news will get further diluted as it gets excerpted and cited from tertiary sources, and I have a feeling Dr. New will soon have a legion of clinic protesters, and face massive character assassination among her peers.

<comment><USER2> I knew it! See here for the opinionated public outcry: <http://www.vitals.com/doctors/Dr_Maria_New.html>

All her feedback was from yesterday. The wider this news circulates the more scarce information on her research will become. In her own words, here are the disorders she treats, which doesn't mention homosexuality:

<http://www.newchf.org/disorders.php></comment></comment>


The Future of Developer Education with Avi Flombaum, Dean of The Flatiron School - <AUTHOR> http://blog.thinkful.com/post/52143980897/interview-the-future-of-developer-education-with-avi?src=hn

<comment><USER2> Pretty neat. Flatiron School is definitely one of the better programs out there, but if you're not prepared you won't get in.</comment>


Ask HN: Which startups are providing services to professional photographers? - <AUTHOR>

What are some startups/companies/side-projects that are serving the needs of professional photographers?
What are some of the top sites that professional photographers use to upload/show/share their photographs or build their portfolio?
and if you are a photographer are you happy with existing offerings or do you need a better solution? <comment><USER2> "serving the needs of pro photographers" is a little vague, but I'll try to answer anyway :

Top¹ portfolio building/hosting/sharing : ProPhoto [1], 500px [2], behance.net [3]

Printing+Selling services : bigcartel [10], platform-photo [11], prints995 [12], etsy [13], sssquare [14]

[1] <http://www.prophotoblogs.com/>

[2] <http://500px.com>

[3] <http://behance.net>

[10] <http://bigcartel.com>

[11] <http://platform-photo.com>

[12] <http://prints995.com>

[13] <http://etsy.com>

[14] <http://sssquare.com/>

¹Top used, not "best services". I'm sure they are great, but I still prefer building my own private solution, let's say WordPress. ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> How do you use Wordpress for this? Do you use any particular theme that suits your requirement?

<comment><USER3> Look at the hundreds of WP photo themes on themeforest

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I know professional photographers (and amateurs) use Fickr and Smugmug a lot to show their portfolios.</comment>


Death pools can bring financial security for the long-lived - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21723413-modern-day-enthusiasts-hope-revive-ancient-financial-instrument-death-pools?fsrc=scn/fb/te/bl/ed/ <comment><USER2> This is the fourth thinkpiece advocating tontines I've seen in the past month. WTF is up with that?

<comment><USER3> Perhaps people have been rewatching S07E22 of The Simpsons.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raging_Abe_Simpson_and_His_Gru...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raging_Abe_Simpson_and_His_Grumbling_Grandson_in_%22The_Curse_of_the_Flying_Hellfish%22)

<comment><USER4> Or Archer: [http://archer.wikia.com/wiki/The_Double_Deuce](http://archer.wikia.com/wiki/The_Double_Deuce)

<comment><USER5> Or Barney Miller: [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0519144/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0519144/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > and the blockchain, a type of decentralised ledger, could anonymise it

How would "the blockchain" anonymise anything? Isn't it the opposite, if all transactions are transparent?

<comment><USER7> ZCash and Monero have strong cryptographic privacy (ZCash with zksnarks, Monero with ring signatures). Neither has smart contracts, which you'd want for this application, but the privacy technologies from both will be available in Ethereum after the upcoming Metropolis release.

<comment><USER8> And both technologies are at the research stage, it should be noted (both ZCash and Monero have suffered from vulnerabilities that allowed attackers to create tokens out of nowhere).

<comment><USER9> The attack you're thinking of was on Zerocoin, not ZCash; Zerocoin wasn't built by the team that came up with the zero-knowledge proof ideas, and was built on top of the original Bitcoin client code IIRC.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13672117](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13672117)

<comment><USER8> I stand corrected. However, in the thread you link you it's pointed out that ZCash has no auditing built in, so it's not possible to actually see how many coins are in circulation. So saying ZCash hasn't suffered from a bug of this nature would be presumptuous, although it may be perfectly correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _The eventual disruption will come not from a traditional asset manager, but > from a 22-year-old kid in Silicon Valley_

Someone please prove me wrong, but I don't think this is a start-up idea. The big problem is how would you sell this? It's going to be very difficult.

I have several comments:

(1) The idea is sufficiently complicated that average people won't understand it. And with retirement money, if they've managed to save some, the average Joe will be fearful about switching it to something new and different. (Bitcoin is complicated too, but the average Joe--not the techie Joe--is driven by greed if he gets into Bitcoin. There's a huge possible upside to Bitcoin, mining stocks, options and commodities trading, etc. No get-rich- quick option exists for a tontine.)

(2) The name tontine has to change. There are too many murder mystery and ghastly "death pool" associations. Beside changing the name, you need to tweak the concept just enough to deny that the new thing you're selling is a tontine. "No, ours is not a tontine because ours maximizes payout when it reaches 100 long-life members, not the last survivor as in a tontine."

(3) The only way I see tontines coming about is by edict. The teachers' pension fund or the government employee pension proclaims that they are switching, and that's that. Or they give employees a harsh choice: pay a huge fee to continue with the normal pension or enroll for free in the tontine.

I suppose a start-up could implement the technology and try to sell it to big pension funds. That's more like contract work rather than a high-growth business.

</comment><comment><USER10> They can indeed, at the expensive of also bringing a range of perverse incentives which result in a whole bunch o' mayhem.

<comment><USER11> Care to expand on the potential perverse incentives?

Like everything, there are downsides, but there's nothing terribly crazy-bad about tontines.

<comment><USER12> I imagine he means that participants might want kill one another when the pool of cash becomes large enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Isnt this basically what pensions / social security is?

<comment><USER14> The incentives involved are completely different. Pensioners don't directly benefit from the deaths of other pensioners, as their individual payments are unrelated to how many pensioners are out there. They aren't drawing from some collective pool of money that has been invested in some interest paying account, but are rather either drawing from their individual savings or are living off money raised through taxes in the case of state pensions. In both cases their own pension payments are independent of payments to others.

[Which IMO makes tontines sound even more sucky, because it encourages free- riding when it comes to how much people put in.]

<comment><USER15> But pensions are just the same thing as tontines on a larger scale, right? If in a pension scheme people live longer than expected, pensions will have to fall (or contributions rise). What's the difference (except scale)?

The article mentions annuities, which are again, in my understanding, basically the same thing, and highlights that tontines "could be much less costly than annuities because the risks are not taken onto the balance-sheet of an insurer" \- not sure I understand that.

The difference alluded to might be that while both annuities and tontines insure against individual longevity risk, the case of unexpected collective longevity is borne by the insurer in the case of annuities, but the insured in the case of tontines.

<comment><USER16> Let's have a quick break down. There are two core types of pension:

Defined Benefit: Provider promises to pay $n per year for the duration of your retirement. Usually inflation linked etc.

Defined contribution: You and your employer put money in an investment vehicle and on retirement that pot can be used in a variety of ways to fund retirement (ie annuity, drawdown etc).

Both Annuites and DB pension payments are largely immutable, short of bankruptcy (of the pension fund / insurer respectively) there is usually no way to alter the benefits due to pension laws. They cannot be modified down once promised. For DB schemes the promise could have been made 30 years ago when interest rates were 10% and life expectency was 10 years on retirement, annuities are promised on retirement so have a better expected accuracy on cost. This is why DB pensions are phasing out at high rates - they're completely unsustainable.

Your core point:

Annuities are just risk pooling, pure ins-sewer-ants, some people die early, some late, and the insurer redistributes such that everyone gets a slice of the pie. The insurer takes on the full risk of the average life being longer.

DB pensions are the same distribution/pooling principle, only it's the pension fund taking on the risk of cohort mortality. Note, there are some really cool longevity swap transactions being done so funds can better guard against this risk.

I don't have any sort of understanding of tontines - limited as I am to a couple of episodes in cartoons for sources. The reason that risks are expensive on an insurers balance sheet is because of capital requirements - all risks need to be provisioned for by holding liquid short term investment grade bonds ("cash") which is a horrific vehicle to hold assets in. Even though they're only holding a % of their exposure - the tontine avoids that cost, hence the "cheaper" argument.

IANAA

<comment><USER17> A tontine isn't really a modern thing--they were all outlawed. The only ones I am familiar with are from pop culture and literature. I think they are old world in origin and usually exist within a family or a small group like a fraternity or club of some kind and usually involve some item that can not be split up, such as a fine art or perhaps purloined treasure. The idea is that the last survivor gets the item. That's it. It's not insurance, it's more of a blood oath.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My grandfather just turned 100, and we have no idea how long he'll live. He could die tomorrow, or he could live another few years.

Most likely, I won't live to his age, but if I do, I don't want the money to run out.

I don't believe in leaving a large inheritance for my children. (They need to work for the position in society.)

Some kind of "outlive my savings" insurance is quite appealing because then I don't have to leave someone or something an inheritance.

Perhaps at a certain age, maybe 80, I could just turn over my retirement for a guaranteed payment until I die?

<comment><USER19>
      Perhaps at a certain age, maybe 80, I could just turn
      over my retirement for a guaranteed payment until I die?

Here in the UK, you can buy something called an 'annuity' \- in exchange for a lump sum, a company offers you a fixed monthly payment until you die.

Some have extra features - like paying out for your spouse's life after your death; increasing the payment annually based on inflation; and even partial refunds if you die in the first five years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'd encourage anyone interested in the subject to read this paper doesn't cover tontine's directly...

[https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.25.4.143](https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.25.4.143)

</comment><comment><USER21> Okay, so the argument against tontines that I know of is that it encourages murder, but that argument doesn't seem persuasive to me. The same can be said for life insurance, which is a commonplace financial instrument. Is there any other reason that tontines are bad?

</comment><comment><USER22> Plan accordingly and leave what is left to your children or the less fortunate relatives, family first!

<comment><USER23> Why? It seems arbitrary to me.

<comment><USER22> Why not? Maybe it is a culture thing, being originally from Southern part of Europe...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm sure that's an interesting article behind the paywall.

<comment><USER25> I'm not seeing a paywall?

<comment><USER26> I'm seeing a "You've reached your article limit" kind of paywall.

<comment> Digit-Al This relies on cookies. Just open the article in a private browser session and you will be fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Tontine? Not a new concept.</comment>


Lenovo Just Released a New Laptop That Beats the MacBook on Basically Everything - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/05/04/lenovo_s_13_inch_lavie_z_laptop_is_lighter_than_a_macbook_has_multiple_ports.html?wpisrc=obnetwork <comment><USER2> Bait and switch title. Most of the comparisons in the article are contrived because the laptops being compared are very different types of machines. Even so, the article itself lists quite a few areas where the new laptop doesn't come close to beating the Macbook (e.g. battery life). All that is followed by the admission "I also haven't tested the LaVie Z in person, so it could be a crappy computer, who knows".

<comment><USER3> it really is a terrible article. "To pack it all in, the Lenovo laptop is thicker than the MacBook. Apple's offering is 0.52 inches at its thickest, whereas the LaVie Z is 0.67 inches at its thickest point. _But still._ "

"The LaVie Z is currently shipping for $1,500 or $1,700 depending on which model you get, compared with the MacBook, which is priced at $1,300 or $1,600."

"Lenovo only estimates six hours of battery life for the LaVie Z...Apple estimates nine hours for its new MacBooks."

"Even if the MacBook is a superior product, it's not way out in front like the MacBook Air was."</comment></comment>


Aus govt monitors media critics, releases private data to "correct the record" - <AUTHOR> https://newmatilda.com/2017/03/03/how-to-get-alan-tudge-to-notice-you-without-even-really-trying-criticize-centrelink-hell-pull-your-file/ <comment><AUTHOR> > [Campbell] described an official program of social media surveillance, in > which Centrelink monitors social media for critics, and sends private > information about those critics to the Minister's office.

> Campbell also described an interpretation of social security law so broad > that it effectively adds up to a license for the Department to disclose > information against any citizen criticising government policy.

> the Department believes it can disclose private data on individuals from > other government agencies such as the Australian Tax Office.</comment>


Harvey's Casino Bomb - <AUTHOR> https://www.fbi.gov/news/videos/harveys-casino-bomb/view

<comment><AUTHOR> Here is a picture of the see-through FBI model: [https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2009/november/fbi- technolog...](https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2009/november/fbi-technology- expo/tech-expo-gallery/model-of-harveys-bomb)

and an explanation of the triggers [https://dh1rvgpokacch.cloudfront.net/atavist/1/video/iphone/...](https://dh1rvgpokacch.cloudfront.net/atavist/1/video/iphone/animationw-1406828466-38.mov.mp4)

<comment><USER2> That is terrifyingly well thought out.

<comment><USER3> Seriously, this guy should manufacture tamper-resistant cryptographic module enclosures!

<comment><USER4> Just put it in those hard plastic blister packs, those are _impossible_ to open.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A much more lengthy write-up was on HN front page a couple months ago. Here's a quote from it [1]:

"""

Decades after "the machine" radically remodeled a portion of Harvey's Wagon Wheel Casino, Big John's masterpiece bomb maintains legendary status at the FBI. Bureau agents acknowledge that it is unlikely that even modern bomb squads and technology could make much headway disarming Big John's improvised explosive without setting it off...the Harvey's bomb was the largest domestic bomb ever to explode in the United States until the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993...why so few people these days seem to remember...Jonkey's speculation is succinct: "Nobody died."

"""

[1] [http://www.damninteresting.com/the-zero-armed- bandit/](http://www.damninteresting.com/the-zero-armed-bandit/)

<comment><USER6> No wonder why it just fell off the front page. Thanks for sharing that link.

I've been in that casino so many times and never knew about this event. Crazy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Damn Interesting did a full episode on the entire event - [http://www.damninteresting.com/the-zero-armed- bandit/](http://www.damninteresting.com/the-zero-armed-bandit/)

It's really fascinating stuff.

</comment><comment><USER8> More story: [http://web.archive.org/web/20121028034758/http://www.reviewj...](http://web.archive.org/web/20121028034758/http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2005/Aug-27-Sat-2005/news/27105542.html)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey%27s_Resort_Hotel_bombin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey%27s_Resort_Hotel_bombing)

<comment><USER9> Another article: [https://read.atavist.com/a-thousand-pounds-of-dynamite?no- ov...](https://read.atavist.com/a-thousand-pounds-of-dynamite?no- overlay&preview)

<comment><USER10> That was a hell of an article! Excellent read.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Quite an intriguing set of circumstances and malicious creativity.

My takeaway is to re-work of an old proverb, one that seems describe the attitude for Las Vegas in this situation:

 _When life gives you a casino bomb, turn it into a gambling and tourism opportunity._

</comment><comment><USER12>
        The casino operation wanted to open part of their gambling area that was not damaged. And they did build this big wall and put a big picture window in it so that the gamblers could watch the FBI process the crime scene for the next few weeks.

Hah! This would never be allowed today!

</comment><comment><USER13> I can't help but think that the bomb maker was inspired by the movie Juggernaut[1], which came out just a few years before this event. In that movie, the bomb maker designed and built-in several layers of booby-traps, including vibration switches, layers of detonation circuits, etc. as was used here. Not a bad movie, FWIW.

[1] [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071706/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071706/)

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm curious how such a device would be approached with today's knowledge, seeing that one of the links mentioned in the comments noted that it's still being used in FBI training.

<comment><USER15> I always wondered if the problem with the shaped charge was that the battery served to keep it from somehow being mechanically detonated rather than the battery being used to provide power for detonation. Seemed like the kind of red herring this bomb maker would use but I can't imagine how that would be hidden from x-rays.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> How did he arm the darn thing without setting it off?

<comment><USER17> Either the switches activate the battery or they activate the trigger circuits (probably both).

I should also note that, unless you had extremely detailed pictures of the switches themselves (or part numbers), you could easily use a combination of switches which appears to do one thing but instead does another, so X-Rays and a wiring diagram wouldn't necessarily be helpful in discovering the actual path of electricity. You could maybe do something clever with a very sensitive electrometer, but that would take way too long.

Arming it doesn't seem like the hard part to me. I think the hard part, with all the foil based triggers and spring loaded screws, would be construction and QA and making sure you don't kill yourself activating the thing because there's some filings completing a circuit you didn't know about.

<comment><USER18> Before you arm the thing you also have to make sure it's tilted just right, because of the tilt switch, which I imagine is rather tricky.

<comment><USER19> It was made with threaded leveling feet and bubble levels. According to Wikipedia, bubble levels can be made with quite a bit of precision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Discussed recently: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9816123](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9816123).

</comment><comment><USER21> Terrorism tourism? The future is going to be interesting.</comment>


Science says liberals, not conservatives, are psychotic (2016) - <AUTHOR> http://nyp.st/1U4pb3d <comment><USER2> Let's see:

A journal owned by the Midwest Political Science Association, edited by a person who lies about being President of the Southern Political Science Association on his university webpage. Hm. Not fishy at all, no way no how.

[http://polisci.msu.edu/jacoby/](http://polisci.msu.edu/jacoby/)

[http://spsa.net/about-spsa/spsa-leadership/](http://spsa.net/about-spsa/spsa- leadership/)

<comment><USER3> For a second there I was worried I gone crazy, thanks for confirming I am. :)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: viability of a startup based on screen scraping? - <AUTHOR>

I'm working on a side project that involves scraping pricing data from a site and making it much more accessible and usable, and ultimately providing a better answer to the type of question a user would normally have about the data in its original form (sorry, I'd rather not give specifics at this point).  I am considering evolving it into a business, where users would pay for access.  I was wondering, what are the legal ramifications of attempting such a business?  Are there any real world examples of successful businesses that used screen scraping at the core of their service/offering, as well as hurdles or obstacles they faced?  Finally, would this severely hamper my chances of securing funding? <comment><USER2> I'm not a lawyer, but I did look at this issue about a year ago for a feature I was considering for our own startup. You can most certainly be sued, defending will be pricey, and you may lose the lawsuit - although case law in America isn't completely settled. The key case _against_ is probably eBay vs. Bidder's Edge.

Having a single point of failure like this certainly won't help your fundraising efforts. If you're going to take the legal risk, why not bootstrap? That way you can put the money in your pocket as you go along and if the site does get shut down, at least you've extracted the profits along the way.

<comment><USER3> I concur. Make something cool and figure out if there's a market especially when you are 'disrupting' an existing model and possible existing in someone else's ecosystem (ex Ebay). That way you don't lose much but have lots to gain if you create something people want. Corporations can be bought and lawyers leashed if there's money in it for both sides.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Databases are protected under copyright law.

Also, most databases that you can scrape will contain sentinels to tip off the database owner that you've scraped their content. The sentinels are typically bogus records that are hard to spot, including them in your output will do a good job of proving that you ripped the data.

If you're just going to regurgitate the data you would have to have a better excuse than 'making it more accessible and useable', you could offer your services to the current owner of the data. If they abandon the data that's a different story, but it sounds to me like they are not.

Another option is to license the data, simply contact them to ask if they have licensing options, this is the usual way to go about this.

Scraping is also a heavy drain on the resources of the company whose data you intend to harvest, this means that if they sue you successfully for breach of copyright that they have a fairly clear path to claiming damages.

good luck!

ps: if you have a corporate lawyer that would be a good spot to ask for advice.

<comment><USER5> > Databases are protected under copyright law.

This depends on the jurisdiction. I believe the EU has a specific database copyright, while the US explicitly doesn't recognize one. A database may be copyrightable under normal copyright law in the US, but only if it's sufficiently creative (e.g. a database containing nothing but a mechanical listing of stock closing prices wouldn't be copyrightable).

<comment><USER4> That's quite similar actually. The thing you copyright is the aggregation effort, so a mechanical process does not add anything copyrightable.

But annotation and such do add value, as does the original collection of data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yodlee seem to do okay out of it. Their SDK offers a way to extract statement data from online banking sites which, I believe, is a glorified screen scraper.

<http://www.yodlee.com/>

</comment><comment><USER7> I think it's a legal can of worms any way you look at it, but especially if you plan to charge for it. I think you would have to get permission from all of the sites you plan to scrape before you sell the data to someone. It might be ok if you gave it away for free and linked back to the original source, but even then it's sketchy.

</comment><comment><USER8> I worked for a company that essentially was based on it, and know of another that via "scraping" and related automation makes its living as well. Both have been alive and well for years and have grown quite a bit. The trick is that you work with the companies/sites you are scraping from the beginning as a business relationship of some kind if possible, and not as a parasitic relationship. Basically if you are trying to help them sell their products/services/data and they benefit, even though you will likely have to fix the "scrapers" _all the time_ , it works out.

</comment><comment><USER9> see [http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-potential-legal-issues- in-...](http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-potential-legal-issues-in-running-a- web-crawler)

<http://www.quora.com/Is-web-scraping-legal>

[http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-resources-to-learn- ab...](http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-resources-to-learn-about-web- crawling-and-scraping)

</comment><comment><USER10> Sorry to hijack your thread, but I've had some questions from cofounders about screen scraping.

Am I allowed to scrape information from their websites and use it to populate my system? Isn't that effectively what google does?

Is there a limit to what is considered acceptable/not acceptable? E.g., is it OK to scrape for email addresses that they publish on their site, but not for their part numbers?

Thanks!

<comment><USER11> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping#Legal_issues>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is essentially what Merkel, RapLeaf and Palantir do.

I used to make money by doing this and selling the results to financial research firms. But, I didn't make any of the details of what I was doing public.

</comment><comment><USER11> Why don't you check out the tou of a scraping service like mozenda <http://www.mozenda.com/policies>

or fetch.com

</comment><comment><USER13> Indeed.com does this and appears to be doing well.

</comment><comment><USER14> Rapportive?</comment>


I, Too, Left the Tech Industry (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://evgeniagotfi.wordpress.com/2015/06/13/i-too-left-the-tech-industry/ <comment><USER2> As a non-American working in tech, I read this with horror. Tech jobs are not like this in my experience.

Yes, there are always the odd asshat and bad manager. But generally speaking, if a manager asks you to work more hours and you reply "you need to pay me more money for that" (as I did) then the rest of the workplace will applaud you.

Crunch time and death marches happen occasionally to meet stupid deadlines, but in most cases we've been given time off / slack after the deadline to compensate.

The sexism exists, yeah. I've fought that for my whole career, and still see it cropping up. Much worse in Australia than the UK, but still present in tech culture.

Also, vacation... most of us in the Anglosphere get 4 weeks paid vacation (plus about another 2 weeks paid sick leave). I gather that's not normal for the US.

If an employer asked me to fly long distance in my own time, and then work ~20 hours a day for a week, I'd quit the job too. How on earth is anyone supposed to produce good work without sleep? Wtf is the company thinking?

<comment><USER3> I'm in the UK and agree 100%. Reading this my only thought was: How the fuck do these places retain employees? There must be better places to work? Are most places like this in the US?

<comment><USER4> Most places are. It's because people are afraid of not having a job and they have no spines.

<comment><USER5> We are force-fed the idea that dog-eat-dog competition and working our tails off is what Jesus wants. Unions are ran by "commie" devils. The culture is sometimes referred to as Caffeinated Calvinism. Corporate Christianity has deep pockets to spread Corporate Christianity further.

<comment><USER5> (I should clarify that not all Christian sects are like this. Just too many. My apologies for sounding overly broad.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Sea planes to islands, chartered private boats to uninhabited places, hiking > in remote mountains.

The alternative to being surrounded with exploitive asshats is not secluded exotic place. In fact from my observation travelling to secluded exotic places is a common practice of employees of soulless exploitive workplaces. Instead I prefer talking to and visiting my family, visiting doctor, maintaining the car and bicycle - you know, the regular human stuff.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is it not possible that this is unique to the Bay area and SV and not representative at all of the tech industry, in general ?

Whenever there's a "gold rush" mentality around anything, you're going to get more than your fair share of assholes, sociopaths, and all-around weirdos showing up to claim their prize...

</comment><comment><USER8> I wish I had seen this earlier.

</comment><comment><USER9> Yeah, well, long hours, people taking credit for your work, the expectation that you advocate for yourself, and bad managers are things you have to deal with in every highly paid corporate job, not just tech...

<comment><USER10> yeah, but this is their specific experience. I don't subscribe to the idea that just because it's a sometimes common occurance the response has to be 'everybody has that'. Acknowledge the content first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm a guy in tech. Most of what she says applies to men and women.

> At my last work week, I worked 14-20 hour days, five days in a row.

Man or woman, you are foolish at best to do this to yourself. Everything you do sets expectations. If you work very long hours without being compensated, then people will expect you to keep doing so. If you say, "yes" to everything, then people will expect you to keep doing so. Not just work people but family and friends too.

> "Why is this my job?"

It isn't. It was never supposed to be. Your job is to do what you think is in your and your company's best interest. There are plenty of men that are complete doormats. The reason women get away with complaining so much is tied to the reason why they're thought of as bitches for standing up for themselves. Men don't get to complain - they get to be stubborn. Even though it is acceptable for men to be stubborn, it makes others less wanting to work with them. Instead, I'd suggest becoming a better negotiator. There is a book called "getting more". It is a great book. Everyone should read it.

> Can you be healthy in a toxic, sick environment?

Yes you can. Do your job as well as you can. Keep it professional. Go home on time.

> Don't work for frightened people, especially adults who are children.

Wholeheartedly agree. Here's a tip: never take a lower salary in exchange for more equity. Your salary should always be market! The equity is what you get in exchange for the risk of working for a child-run startup. If you do plan to give up some salary for more equity, then shouldn't they be willing to let you earn it without a cliff? You're obviously investing in the company by giving up salary.

> Practice saying "That's none of your business."

Yes. Oh wholeheartedly yes. Not only are vacations none of their business, sick and personal time off are also none of their business.

<comment><USER12> I can't agree with this more. Way to get beyond the sexism.</comment></comment>


Founders: It's not 1990. Stop treating your employees like it is - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@tikhon/founders-it-s-not-1990-stop-treating-your-employees-like-it-is-523f48fe90cb#.hdegartfi <comment><USER2> "Founders can start a company for $7 on Digital Ocean with almost no risk. Founders complain constantly they can't hire engineers."

I disagree with this and the point of the article that it's not very risky to start a company these days. Out of all the people creating startups, very few get investors. Especially early on when the company has no customers.

It's also not easy to hire anyone..let alone an engineer. It's so easy to fake experience with a fake resume, fake startup experience, and a few Github projects.

..and saying that you can start a company with only $7 and a digital ocean account shows me that the author doesn't really know that much about what it takes to start a company. Even if one person does all the work, it still takes money to start a company. Much more than $7 and many startup owners are using credit cards or savings.

"Employees take the most risk today. Not the investors or the founders — it's the employees. Yet they're still compensated like it's 1990"

I finally see why the author doesn't know anything about running a startup: they are an employee. Yes, an Employee does take some risk with a startup.

However:

-Employees can quit at any time

-Employees, while working at a company, are paid hourly or salary, regardless of the profits of the company. I own a company now and my pay is directly effected by the amount of money the company is making (this isn't the case for my employees).

-9 times out of 10, Owners invested their own money in the company. If the company goes bust, the employee is inconvenienced, might even be able to go on unemployment, and can just get another job. Owners now have credit card debt/other debt that they need to pay off.

-Owners and investors risk reputation as well as money. If the company is unsuccessful, it does not matter to a future employer (for an employee). It definitely does for an owner and investor.

-If an owner takes on VC, they almost always end up in the same position as an employee. Aside from a few anomalies, most founders that graduate from YC and take VC end up getting pushed out of positions of power and having their shares heavily diluted. I think it has to do with the fact that many founders don't have the experience to run a company with hundreds or thousands of employees and the investors aren't willing to risk their money to find out. This is a huge risk.

"There's a strong slant toward the status quo, and most still try to force this outdated 90's math on today's startups and employees"

It's not 'outdated math'. An employees doesn't risk money or reputation and can leave at any time with little consequences. This is reflective of the potential shares they get of the company above and beyond their paycheck.

Why should someone get more shares of the company without taking on more risk?

<comment><USER3> I think you may be underestimating the amount of risk an engineer takes on by working at a particular startup.

For instance, consider your statement here:

"Employees… are paid hourly or salary, regardless of the profits of the company"

I can assure you that this isn't necessarily true. I've seen startups go kaput and fail to make payroll. Employees may not always be aware of the risks, but they are exposed to them.

However, even that doesn't really capture the risk an employee takes on, if you look at missed opportunities as a risk. It varies, of course, as some startups pay better than others, and not all employees have the same ability to easily find jobs. But consider someone who has the ability to get hired as a senior SE at a place like google or netflix, who instead works at a startup for, say, $150k a year. That's still probably close to $75K in lost income a year, and I really do think I'm keeping these numbers conservative. You go for four years, and not including interest on investments (there are enough factors, taxes, and so forth, that I'll hand waive here)... and that's $300k in lost salary. Keep in mind, it could be considerably more! Alternatively, working for one startup means not working for another, so a relatively unknown founder may need to compensate for the lower probability that you will succeed with higher equity levels than someone with a more celebrated track record would need to offer.

Lastly, you are underestimating the value of stable employment. It's as hard to understand now as it was in 2000, but I saw plenty of good programmers go without work for quite a while. Some were left in pretty dire financial situations. Some people, on H1Bs, left stable jobs that would have led permanent residency in a few more years, for startups that folded, in an environment where getting new sponsorship was difficult - in short, had they stayed with the stable employer, they would have gotten residency. Now, they had to start all over! We're in a boom right now, but the environment in a serious recession has very severe consequences for people who haven't found a place to weather the storm.

Also there may simply be an imbalance here. I know it's hard to accept, but it may actually be harder to become an exceptional engineer than a startup founder. A nontechnical founder may be taking on more risk simply because there aren't as many other options. Again, it all depends on the founder, and the engineer - some founders have exceptional options and amazing track records and tech skills to boot, others are vastly overestimating the value they bring to the table.

In short, to answer your last question of "why should someone should get more shares of the company without taking on more risk?" My answer is twofold. 1) they _may_ be taking on vastly more risk than you have estimated through lost opportunities/salary/lack of job stability, 2) they may be entitled to more shares even at lower risk levels because their skills are very valuable (truth is, they may be more valuable than the founder in some cases).

<comment><USER2> "Employees may not always be aware of the risks, but they are exposed to them."

Everyone is exposed to risks. Jobs are never a sure thing in the first place and being a first employee or an employee at a newly funded startup is always going to have some risk. If you aren't willing to take on the risk that comes along with the job, you can work for a non-startup. Plenty of people do this.

"But consider someone who has the ability to get hired as a senior SE at a place like google or netflix, who instead works at a startup for, say, $150k a year. That's still probably close to $75K in lost income a year, and I really do think I'm keeping these numbers conservative."

An opportunity risk, maybe. However, if the person loses their job..they don't really lose that money. It's pretty unfair to put that responsibility on the employer and impossible to prove one way or the other (How are you going to prove an opportunity that will or will not happen??)

You could also make that same argument for any company (not just a startup). If I work at a place making $75K, I could be potentially leaving money on the table because another unknown company might want to hire me for $100K.

"1) they may be taking on vastly more risk than you have estimated through lost opportunities/salary/lack of job stability,"

Which really isn't taking on more risk in regards to the company, which is my point. We are all taking on risk with almost every decision we make. Nothing is a sure thing.

"they may be entitled to more shares even at lower risk levels because their skills are very valuable (truth is, they may be more valuable than the founder in some cases)."

They aren't entitled to anything and nearly all employees are expendable. How do I know? I was the valuable employee in many companies before I started my own. I, and everyone I ever worked with, could be replaced. Was it easy? Of course not. But the work in most companies isn't rocket science...and when it is, the company compensates the employee accordingly and tries to keep them there at all costs.

Once again, shares in the company is directly proportional to risk. If as an employee, you are willing to take a paycheck directly related to the success of the company and, or take on debt when the everything crashes, they you have the leverage to get a higher percentage of the profits.

The way I see it, you want a higher percentage of the profits for no more increase in risk, which doesn't really make sense.</comment></comment></comment>


Student mistook examples of unsolved math problems for homework, solves them - <AUTHOR> http://www.snopes.com/college/homework/unsolvable.asp <comment><USER2> Huffman Codes have a similar origin.

[https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/images/upload_librar...](https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/images/upload_library/46/Pengelley_projects/Project-14/Huffman.pdf)

 _In 1951 David A. Huffman and his classmates in an electrical engineering graduate course on information theory were given the choice of a term paper or a final exam. For the term paper, Huffman's professor, Robert M. Fano, had assigned what at first appeared to be a simple problem. Students were asked to find the most efficient method of representing numbers, letters or other symbols using a binary code. Besides being a nimble intellectual exercise, finding such a code would enable information to be compressed for transmission over a computer network or for storage in a computer's memory.

Huffman worked on the problem for months, developing a number of approaches, but none that he could prove to be the most efficient. Finally, he despaired of ever reaching a solution and decided to start studying for the final. Just as he was throwing his notes in the garbage, the solution came to him. "It was the most singular moment of my life," Huffman says. "There was the absolute lightning of sudden realization.

[...]

Huffman says he might never have tried his hand at the problem - much less solved it at the age of 25 - if he had known that Fano, his professor, and Claude E. Shannon, the creator of information theory, had struggled with it._

</comment><comment><USER3> George Pólya on von Neumann:

 _" Johnny was the only student I was ever afraid of. If in the course of a lecture I stated an unsolved problem, the chances were he'd come to me at the end of the lecture with the complete solution scribbled on a slip of paper."_

<comment><USER4> I think everyone was worried about telling Johnny what they were working on inc case he solved it on the spot.

<comment><USER5> Ha ha

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A professor of mine told a similar story about John Milnor but apparently that's a garbled version.

[https://mathoverflow.net/questions/54513/the-story-about- mil...](https://mathoverflow.net/questions/54513/the-story-about-milnor- proving-the-f%C3%A1ry-milnor-theorem)

</comment><comment><USER7> For anyone interested in trying their own "homework": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_m...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_mathematics)

<comment><USER8> I don't think it works if you know they're difficult unsolved problems.

<comment><USER9> I think having someone pick a problem for you (thereby removing the option of choice) also focuses the mind.

It likely prevents you from doing a breadth-first search across the many problems, whereas a correct solution probably requires a depth-first approach.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _A year later, when I began to worry about a thesis topic, Neyman just shrugged and told me to wrap the two problems in a binder and he would accept them as my thesis._

I like the professor.

</comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone know what were the theorems that Dantzig proved there?

<comment><USER12> According to stackexchange ([https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/533146/dantzigs- uns...](https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/533146/dantzigs-unsolved- homework-problems)) they were these two:

[https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aoms/1177731912](https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aoms/1177731912)

[https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aoms/1177729695](https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aoms/1177729695)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> _...the Reverend Schuler [sic] of the Crystal Cathedral in Los Angeles._

That building is in Orange County, not Los Angeles.</comment>


The company's sorta adopting Amazon's leadership principles. Should I fear that? - <AUTHOR> I'm an engineer for a well-known media/tech company. The executives are drilling down on company culture, building a clear identity and becoming more efficient. I think that's great.
This year, the company decided it would be great to adopt the OKR system (used at Google, conceived with love at Intel). I'm not a manager, but the push to accurately measure performance and identify pitfalls seems to be reasonable.
We all heard of Amazon's infamous leadership principles. I'm sure there are plenty of tech companies out there that are striving to reproduce Amazon's amazing success (we should be). The sphere of tech leadership where I work (wonderful folk) unanimously decided that we take a page out of Amazon's book of military-grade operation and adopt their leadership principles.
We aren't following the leadership principles verbatim. Those behind the adoption chopped and screwed Amazon's document, manufacturing a customized, Company-esque version of leadership principles. It mostly looks like a summary of the original, with a friendlier, less boarding-school-like tone.
The adoption/adaptation is scary. We aren't robots. We aren't numbers. Not everyone is built to lead (not saying I'm not, but some will take certain things too far). I've already seen the sociopathic nature of those in finance and other industries. More importantly, I'm aware of how depressing the Amazon culture has been to plenty of Amazon engineers (the NYT wrote about it, ask employees of Amazon, and google 'amazon FACE'). While efficiency is important, so is my health. I like where I work, and I haven't been with the company very long, but already, so much has changed—sometimes for better, sometimes for worse if you're at the bottom of the totem pole.
Should I be afraid of these changes? If so, why? Have you dealt with such a transition? If so, how'd it go? I'd ask someone about these changes internally and voice my concerns, but I fear that higher-ups will consider me poisonous to the company for being worried. <comment><USER2> Any time management mentions "leadership" they are trying to set up a system in which managers, by the nature of their job, are succeeding and every else is failing. No management ever adopts things like superior knowledge or ability or even competence, because obviously they would fail at it. For instance, one of Amazon's is 'hire and develop the best' which has nothing to do with any individual jobs at all. So, yes, 'leadership' buzz phrases are a warning sign. As an engineer you learn to ignore this shit. Follow the money. Can the company hire your replacement? Do they have enough money that they don't need engineers? If not, just keep doing your job and following the engineer playbook.

</comment><comment><USER3> (This probably should've been tagged "Ask HN:"...)

For what my opinion is worth, I don't think there's much to be afraid of here. There's a pretty big gulf between mouthing Amazon's cant and actually becoming that sort of Darwinian hell workplace. Amazon is the way it is because Jeff Bezos wants it to be so.

I've been through several different episodes where the PHBs decide to adopt some philosophy that doesn't really affect daily work life.

My current workplace has hired some senior Amazon management and beyond adopting their sort of product definition (the infamous PR/FAQ), has had no other effects. We're still dreadful incompetents with or without them, but seemingly no more cruel.</comment>


The 115 Men Who Will Choose the Next Pope - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/02/17/world/europe/pope-cardinals.html?_r=0

<comment><USER2> ... technically... shouldn't it be god?... just saying...</comment>


Show HN: Auto updating social testimonial widget like Airtable and Webflow - <AUTHOR> https://sentiments.co/ <comment><USER2> No example? "Get started" brings me to a google thing that demands a login. This is not a Show HN.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think people are going to pay for this.

<comment><AUTHOR> As of now we are giving it for free to all our Beta users to test it and improve it further as per their feedback. We'll see how the pricing works for it, else we'll open-source it for teams to use</comment></comment>


For some reason, Ron Paul has taken to Fox News to skewer SpaceX - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/09/for-some-reason-ron-paul-has-taken-to-fox-news-to-skewer-spacex/ <comment><USER2> another asinine commentary from ARS writers.</comment>


Aerial Images of World War II Destruction With Today in Google Earth - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/02/compare-aerial-images-of-wwii-destruction-with-today-in-google-earth/

<comment><USER2> More proof that war is great for the economy.</comment>


Torn Between Two YouTubes - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2016-05-13/record-labels-battle-youtube-with-complicated-emotions <comment><USER2> > _half of Internet users in the U.S. listen to music on YouTube -- by far the > most popular access point -- but YouTube is responsible for only 4 percent > of revenue to the industry,_

> _Song downloads and streaming music account for 70 percent of U.S. music > sales. But the industry 's total revenue has dropped by 66 percent since > 1999._

The profusion of bullshit "statistics" being used the advance a prejudiced position is so grating. I know why the music publishers are doing it, but the journalists don't have to just repeat it. There are actual interesting numbers that could be calculated.

Of course music revenue is down after moving to a massively more efficient platform. Profit is the relevant metric.

50% "listen on youtube", and generate "4% of revenue" ... I don't even know how this could be changed into a meaningful statistic. I guess you could compare TV+radio listener numbers and revenue share 1996 versus 2016 ... for it to really make any sense you'd have to compare listeners and revenue through all mediums. If there is a change of composition away from high- revenue mediums to lower revenue mediums, that would be more relevant.

And why use the year 2000 as the baseline, when recorded music has a 100-year history.

<comment><USER3> > half of Internet users in the U.S. listen to music on YouTube

The question is: how often?

<comment><USER4> No, my question is why? There are so many other platforms optimized for music listening. Why YouTube?

<comment><USER5> Search, easy playlists, video, and ok suggestions. It's good enough and has pretty much every song.

<comment><USER6> Also free and no login or special application necessary. Just grab a browser and go.

<comment><USER5> That's probably two of the bigger reasons. Youtube has no ceremony to watch videos. Its a website with little friction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's a good article. I think attorneys of Google, etc should repeat every chance they get the part about how music industry destroyed all the people doing what they say they want. And show the greed of the split they ask for with its effects on other business. As in, the music industry is the perp instead of the victim.

Also, people should bring up just how hard and expensive it was (or is) to acquire licenses for things like wedding videos. Distributing your wedding video is a cppyright violation if an unlicensed song happens to be playing. Music industry, if you could get to them, would license you the rights for sometimes $10,000 or something. Absolutely ridiculous. A modern service exists that makes it easier but still doesn't for all songs & still can be expensive. This kind of crap is why they have so much opposition even from those who otherwise would want to pay them.

<comment><USER8> I see the record labels greed as a feedback loop: People think music is worth less than its price, so they pirate it. Piracy lowers sales. To compensate, the prices go up causing more people to pirate.

When selling a product, what would you prefer? 100 sales at $10 or 20 sales at $20? What the record labels see is that less people buy it less at the higher price, so it must be piracy!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Without YouTube, I dare say I might not have bought… what… sixteen of the albums in my current collection? Almost all of the music I've bought is from artists I first heard on YouTube.

<comment><USER10> I think Neil Young said something along the lines of "I look at radio as gone … Piracy is the new radio, that's how music gets around."

He uses the word piracy which doesn't apply here, but I think what he says is relevant in this context: a lot of people hear music for free, like it, and then buy it. Maybe they hear it for free on the radio, through torrenting, or through youtube. Although the radio and torrenting does generate revenue as well as promotion whereas torrenting only does promotion.

<comment><USER11> Or better yet, go to a concert. Most artists could never live off CDs, but from $30 tickets they could.

<comment><USER12> my startup idea that someone else should totally build:

Sell a soundboard recording of the show I went to for $25 on the spot as I leave. I went to the show so I now have an emotional connection to that particular performance. Will this get shared? Sure, but the majority of people downloading bootlegs own the artists' oeuvre anyway.

<comment><USER13> At least for Springsteen's current tour, this is almost the case (modulo a couple of days). I think livedownloads.com is the backing entity.

<comment><USER14> The fact that larger bands don't up sell a drone video of each show is just leaving cash on the table. I'd happily pay $30-$50 for a video recording of every show I attend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The graph doesn't show revenue from FM or AM radio.

YouTube is comparable to radio. A place people discover and listen to music, which they later buy as downloads, CDs, vinyl, etc.

Much YouTube music views are of official videos that the artists and labels themselves upload.

If anything, the record industry should be paying YouTube more for exposure and marketing. It's time for the record companies to stop freeloading off YouTube and pay their fair share for their use of this important music marketing channel.

<comment><USER16> Agreed. I think some of good indie musician on YouTube are much better off alone than with a record company.

People these days have many more means of entertainment. I think it is hard to get super popular by just doing music alone. Pairing with movie, games, or other multi-media seem to be a better strategy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't where people get this notion that the music business is somehow "greedy" when the profits and margins are small.

The record companies are not mere "middle-men" between artist and fans. They actually fund the costly process of creating and marketing music.

For better or worse, we have an economic system grounded in the concept of intellectual property.

Only with the music business are the producers of a good, who undertake the production of that good at a ridiculously high risk, branded as "greedy" if they attempt to sustain a viable business from their efforts.

As far as I'm concerned, Apple, Google, Spotify, Pandora, Amazon and the like are parasitic "middle-men" who bring a commodity level service to the industry.

Through quirks of the market structure, they have been able to extract the bulk of the value from one of our sublime cultural goods, and leave the actual producers scrambling for crumbs.

If Google thinks it's no big deal, why don't they just undertake the production of the content that they monetize? They won't, because it's a crap business, and only exists because the people who create music are at least in part driven by non-pecuniary rewards.

That's the way it goes, but spare us this attempt to paint this as a morality tale.

<comment><USER18> "Somehow greedy"? I don't think this is really debatable: Steve Albini put the case succintly in the 1990s, and things haven't really changed from the musician's point of view. Check out the math here:

[http://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=17](http://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=17)

TL;DR: If a record grosses $3 million, making $710,000 in profit, the band makes _$12,000_ (1.6%), in this case split between three people at that. Including "salary", since this is their sole payment for working their ass off for a full year.

<comment><USER17> I'm familiar with the argument. Courtney Love did a similar article called Courtney Love Does the Math.

[http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/](http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/)

The argument is wrong.

I'm generalizing, but more or less here is the issue with record companies. Only a small number of albums released come close to making a profit. The vast majority of albums generate very little revenue, and don't even come close to covering the costs of producing the record.

So the business model of the record company is to fund a bunch of albums in the hope that one of them becomes a hit, and generates enough revenue to cover the production and marketing costs of all the others too. Whatever is left after that is the profit.

The contracts are structured to reflect this reality. i.e. very low royalty rates, like maybe 10% of the gross sale price per album. From this small royalty, it doesn't even kick in until the entire costs of the production and marketing have been "recouped" from this royalty!

The artist has an "account" at the label to keep track of how much they have recouped to date. Usually the costs hold over from project to project as well, so the artist can get deeper and deeper in the hole if they release a series of poor selling records. An artist can wind up a situation where they have a massive hit, but receive no royalties on sales as they haven't recouped earlier releases

As an example, let's look at a hypothetical album release. (This model doesn't apply as much anymore as the role of the album is much smaller in music sales, but the principle is the same).

let's say the cost of production and marketing the album is one million dollars, and the artist royalty rate is 50 cents per unit on a wholesale price of $5 per unit.

That means the artist won't see a penny of royalties on record sales until they sell two million units. After that they get their 50 cents per unit. The record label "advances" the funds to make the record to the artist.

While it does look like at first glance like such an agreement is horribly unfair, and can only be explained as exploitive, this is really the only viable business model possible if you want to have a business producing and releasing music.

Why would an artists sign such a contract, with so little hope of making money. The main reason is that if the record fails to recoup, once the contract is over they are not personally responsible for the debt. The record company pools the projects under a business umbrella, which allows the individual artists to pool the risk.

Here's another way to look at it. If you are an artist under a recording contract, you are guaranteed access to the capital you need to make an actual business of being a professional artist under a much less risky structure.

Only a few number of serious musical artist who might be able to fund the project through sources where profit is only possible if the project is commercially successful. If you had to, say take out a personal loan for $500,000 to make and market a record, given that the odds of success are incredibly low, that would be pretty much insanely risky.

The reality is that most musical artist never come close to creating a viable, marketable product, as the talent and capital required are too scarce. Even the few that manage to make a really good product independently do not have access to the capital and organizational resources to market it properly.

Another factor at play, is that there are other ways of making money as an artists outside of record royalties. Having a "record deal" gives you much greater access to those opportunities. For example, there what's called writer's royalties which are connected to the copyright on the composition, not the recording. These are not subject to the same agreement, and are paid on every sales. There are also opportunities for performances, personal appearances, endorsements, merchandise sales, sales of back catalog, etc...

At a minimum, while you are under contract, if your advance is large enough, you can also at least cover living expenses.

From the point of view of a record company, here is how the vast majority of their deals look: They put up a significant chunk of cash, and they take a virtual total loss on their investment.

There are cases where artists can successfully sell records independently. Often, this will be an artist who has had significant commercial success in the past, and who has access to other sources of capital (personal or otherwise). In such a case, if everything goes well, they can make a profit at a much lower number of sales, as their business will get the entire wholesale price of the product as revenue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is the crux of the argument ", the record labels squeezed to death nearly every upstart that wanted to become a Tower Records" Perhaps if the music industry had embraced digital 15 years ago instead of crushing it, they would be in more control today.

<comment><USER20> > This is the crux of the argument ", the record labels squeezed to death > nearly every upstart that wanted to become a Tower Records" Perhaps if the > music industry had embraced digital 15 years ago instead of crushing it, > they would be in more control today.

It wouldn't have changed a damn thing. People would still be sharing music for free today, like they did as soon as the medium allowed it (tapes).

<comment><USER21> Sure. But music sharing didn't kill the industry then; there's little reason to believe it'll be the reason for its death now.

The problem is there is only so much profit to be had. The recording industry is not interested in trying to sell their own product digitally at a price consumers want. So instead, either a company is large enough and entrenched enough (like Google with Youtube) that that company is able to capture the profit, and the music industry complains, or the company is small enough that the music industry captures the profit, and the company goes under or operates at a loss (too many to name, but Spotify and Pandora both fall under this).

There may not be a good split, that sees both the recording company and the distributor seeing a profit, at the prices consumers are willing to pay, which if the case explains why they've fought tooth and nail against every form of digital distribution. But I don't see how the recording companies can stay afloat without it. It may be we'll have to see how music works without them.

<comment><USER22> _> But music sharing didn't kill the industry then; there's little reason to believe it'll be the reason for its death now._

Not a valid extrapolation. The Internet is billions of times faster and more densely connected than the sneakernet.

<comment><USER21> Of course it's faster and more densely connected. And? Extrapolating that because people shared before, and now they can share BETTER, to "the music industry is doomed" (or whatever statement you care to make), is what is 'not a valid extrapolation'. I wasn't extrapolating anything, just saying "this is not a new behavior", and given no other data, the fact of that behavior is not in and of itself a death knell.

<comment><USER22> You said:

 _> Sure. But music sharing didn't kill the industry then; there's little reason to believe it'll be the reason for its death now. _

To me that translated to: "Sharing some songs between a handful of friends once every few days didn't harm the music industry; hence being able to share hundreds of songs with millions of people in a few seconds will harm it now."

The second statement sure looks like an extrapolation from the first, and given the mind-boggling difference in scale, an invalid one.

As for lack of data, music industry revenues have been decimated since the turn of the industry. Sure, there are several factors involved, but can you really pretend the terabytes of copyrighted music being torrented every month has nothing to do with it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Although it is probably irrelevant streaming music videos is also the least cost effective way to stream music. So Google has to take a larger cut of the profits in order to offset that cost. (With he exception of physical media possibly)

</comment><comment><USER24> Google just released a YouTube music player to compete with Apple and Rdio. Coincidence?

<comment><USER25> Rdio was acquired by Pandora.

<comment><USER24> Ok point still stands

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Is Youtube more or less than Radio?

<comment><USER11> Except radio pays artists way more than Youtube. Just look up what one-hit wonders from the 80s are still earning every year - that's almost 100% radio.

<comment><USER27> In the US, radio royalties only go to the songwriter, not the performer/artist or recording owner. [http://blog.songtrust.com/publishing-tips-2/what-you- didnt-k...](http://blog.songtrust.com/publishing-tips-2/what-you-didnt-know- about-radio-royalties/)

If a radio play goes out to 50,000 listeners, the total paid is less per listener than YouTube.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't hear the fashion industry complaining that their creations are being used in photos and videos posted to youtube. So why should the music industry complain?

<comment><USER19> Because you can't wear a photo of video. The photo of video is simply an ad for the product, but for music it is the product

<comment><USER3> Ok, but for music it is also an ad for the product.

<comment><USER28> Could you elaborate ? It seems to me that music delivered via my speakers is the product itself.

<comment><USER29> Music is marketing for a live performance by the performer.

Trent Reznor probably cares more about the thousands of dollars (VIP tickets via his fan club site) I've paid to see him live over the last decade or so than the ~$150 I've spent on his albums (with the label taking most of that).

<comment><USER20> > Trent Reznor probably cares more about the thousands of dollars (VIP tickets > via his fan club site) I've paid to see him live over the last decade or so > than the ~$150 I've spent on his albums (with the label taking most of > that).

Trent Reznor made millions before the collapse of the music industry in the 2000s THANKS to big labels. It's easy for him not to care about your money, at all. He'd be nothing if no major label invested in him in the 90's .

<comment><USER30> No, he'd be very famous, and probably just as productive. Certainly not rich, though. He was on TVT records, one of the small labels snorted up by Interscope, later snorted up by Universal Music Group. He was associated with the Wax Trax! people, many of whom were extremely prolific, and extremely successful, and who were snorted up by TVT before they were snorted up by Interscope before they were snorted up by Universal.

The big labels didn't start anything, they just bought it up.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Vbot: a new player in virtual regression testing - <AUTHOR> http://katat.github.io/2017/01/09/vbot/ <comment><AUTHOR> A command line tool to do visual regression testings, support interaction flows with JSON based configurations without needing to write any JS code. Particularly helpful for testing SPA or complicated web apps.</comment>


Kevin Rose sits down with Sahil Lavingia, CEO of Gumroad - <AUTHOR> http://revision3.com/foundation/sahil-lavingia

<comment><USER2> Congrats Sahil!</comment>


Why Does This One Couch from West Elm Suck So Much? - <AUTHOR> https://theawl.com/why-does-this-one-couch-from-west-elm-suck-so-much-2fd9e4c7ce77#.p3y47lrlt <comment><USER2> I too have a couch from West Elm (not the Peggy). Don't know the name, because we fortunately got it gratis from my mother in law -- she has a matching twin but their recently downsized abode couldn't accommodate both.

The couch itself looks nice but is a terrible failure for comfort. The rear pillows are above half as tall as a normal persons back requires, making lounging in it a chore unless you have enough pillows to prop you up. My mother in law suffers from the same button plight as the article suggests: they seem to pop off like overripe fruit.

The worst part though is the flimsy legs. Every time I rise from my seat it makes a cracking sound like a wet twig. I know it will give out eventually, because the same couch at my in-laws' place is already propped up by a paint can in one legless corner.

I can appreciate this article like not many I've read before. West Elm truly does suck.

</comment><comment><USER3> This blew me away: "In both cases, I asked what the expected lifespan is for a West Elm couch like the Peggy. Both store employees told me that between one and three years was normal for a couch with light use."

1-3 years for a $1200 couch? Ikea warranties their couches for 10 years, which means you can reasonably expect them to go well beyond that. 1-3 years is ridiculously low.

<comment><USER4> Yea, that's nuts. Our first 'adult' piece of furniture was a couch from Crate & Barrel which was pricier than the West Elm piece in the article, but sold to us as something that if we took care of we'd have it a very long time. (It's been about 5 years and has held up well.)

Furniture and clothing are all over the map though. Some of the most expensive shirts I've bought, for instance, pop buttons super easily – a problem I've never had with shirts from, say, J-Crew. And my experience with the ironically named Design Within Reach* gave me reservations about buying from them again.

* DWR's name apparently comes not from being affordable, but from making mid-century classics available to you.

<comment><USER5> > Some of the most expensive shirts I've bought, for instance, pop buttons > super easily – a problem I've never had with shirts from, say, J-Crew

And most people would consider J-Crew pretty upscale...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> West Elm makes a living by being "not Ikea". You have to be willing to drop 4x the price on any piece of furniture to get something that's marginally better than Ikea. West Elm sells the same quality (or worse) with a 50% markup. The only problem is Ikea is too affordable so it seems "lazy".

</comment><comment><USER7> West Elm is mass-produced garbage. Quality couches are expensive and you need to do your research. I highly recommend the Danish "Innovation" brand of furniture, which sits in a similar price category, but made of much much better stuff. Check out [http://innovation-usa.com/](http://innovation- usa.com/). Quality springs are key.

The furniture market in general is extremely uneven: price is all over the place and does not really correspond to quality. It is an interesting problem. I truly enjoyed reading the write up!

</comment><comment><USER8> It's maybe pride talking, but Chartreuse is most certainly not an obscure liqueur.</comment>


Trump suggests he would ditch F-35 in favor of cheaper plane - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/12/22/trump-suggests-he-would-ditch-f-35-in-favor-of-alternate-plane/?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_checkpoint-trumpplane640p%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.326d636ca790 <comment><USER2> I think it's more a negotiation tactic than a real intention to ditch the project, a bit like he's doing with China and Taiwan.</comment>


Beautiful Decay of AOL - <AUTHOR> http://invisibleup.neocities.org/articles/5/ <comment><USER2> I think this classic _Onion_ piece from 2000 is always worth referencing in these situations - back then, using the internet for movie times and recipes was the subject for humor [http://www.theonion.com/article/area-man-consults- internet-w...](http://www.theonion.com/article/area-man-consults-internet- whenever-possible-1515)

We've come a long way in a short time, but AOL (etc) deserve to be remembered for inspiring what was possible, even if they ultimately failed in the execution.

<comment><USER3> They They were mocking his behaviour, but all those things were possible when that article was written, they were mocking him breaking conversation to look to see things up.

Society has changed so that it is now acceptable, technology has improved so it is quicker to look those things up but the article wasn't mocking the idea that those things were online.

<comment><USER4> It's still not socially acceptable to break convo to do a quick search

<comment><USER5> I so wish you weren't getting down voted.

<comment><USER6> I agree, since a downvote is inappropriate. But I must say that the post does not reflect my experience at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't know why the author's tone is so mean and snarky. Yes, the web won (inevitable and thank goodness), but it's not like many 19-year-old web pages are still around and serving working links either.

And for all its fundamental closed-ecosystem walled-garden flaws, AOL brought the first taste of the Internet to millions. We should celebrate the accomplishments and learn from the failings, not dance on the graves of the vanquished.

<comment><USER8> I didn't read it as 'mean and snarky'. Author sounds genuinely in awe and the quantity of material on there. It's an archiver's dream I imagine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is really old fuzzy memory, but at one point there was some kind of administrative or staff plugin for AOL that would let you put in a sub-site-ID and jump straight to some of these things. A bunch of people started using a several-years-old superbowl message board to trade warez. It was like operating out of an abandoned stadium... but over 28.8.

<comment><USER10> Reminds me of [http://www.xkcd.com/1305/](http://www.xkcd.com/1305/)

<comment><USER11> Sounds like Yik Yak

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Many, many, many years ago, I took over an office space from Matt Goldman, who was one the founders of The Blue Man Group. His full time job, before starting Blue Man, was duplicating AOL disks. Day after day. Just one of those tidbits of AOL history.

</comment><comment><USER13> For some strange reason this reminded me of DeadAIM by Jdennis. Man AOL really handed the modern web to Facebook.

<comment><USER14> What I keep wondering is why do we keep boxing ourselves into these little walled gardens, when the world is so wide and the web so flexible?

<comment><USER15> It's cyclical. Having one protocol with multiple open clients prevents rapid (if any) innovation, and creates an opportunity for walled gardens to steal the market. And then once the walled garden converges on the local maximum, it creates an opportunity to build a stable open protocol. Which then lasts until someone comes up with the next big innovation that the open standard is too ossified to support.

For all the shit that AOL gets, they basically got the entire country on the Internet. Even the biggest unicorns today have nothing on AOL at its peak.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's amazing how differently time move online vs meatspace. Take computing out of the picture and 2007 isn't very long ago at all. Look at a few web pages from then and it feels like 20 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER17> AOL used to have an active hacking scene. Some of that is also still archived:

[http://mattmazur.com/projects/aol-files- com/](http://mattmazur.com/projects/aol-files-com/)

</comment><comment><USER18> The camo and leather fashion section is interesting as the second US Gulf War was just getting underway. Makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up in a _Oceania is at war with Eastasia._ kind of way.

</comment><comment><USER19> Fascinating how the comments here are uniformly praising AOL.

</comment><comment><USER20> How do we archive this?

<comment> slipstream- I was working on this at one time back in late 2014. A bunch of people used scripts I made to start downloading all the file areas. Then... AOL removed the files in January 2015. They also removed support for AOL 4.0 or 5.0 and below last April, and that was the version that a very incomplete Python client was claiming to be.

The research I did into archiving AOL helped me find this: [http://lizardhq.org/2015/12/05/aol- desktop.html](http://lizardhq.org/2015/12/05/aol-desktop.html)

Hopefully I'll do enough reversing to fix and finish the custom client one day. Newer clients wrap the login and just the login in some form of SSL/TLS. Which I still need to figure out.

Maybe people can help. There's a channel at efnet #aohell and plenty of information on the archiveteam wiki.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> AOL -> geocities -> friendster -> myspace -> facebook, the next AOL.

<comment><USER22> if, in 20 years, we view facebook the way everyone now views AOL, I will be a much happier old man.</comment></comment>


Django is Terrible - <AUTHOR> https://alexcbecker.net/blog.html#django-is-terrible <comment><USER2> I would suggest that the first complaint can be generalized to "ORM is terrible." I would be surprised if there haven't been a hundred submissions (of at least twenty unique articles) discussing why ORM creates more problems than it solves for both reading and modifying a database.</comment>


MongoDB Now Released Under the Server Side Public License – MongoDB - <AUTHOR> https://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/mongodb-now-released-under-the-server-side-public-license <comment><USER2> If anyone senses echoes to the recent Redis license related news, consider that only applied to specific plugins/extensions to Redis (whose core remains BSD), whereas this relicensing applies to all forthcoming versions of MongoDB's core open source/community variant.

</comment><comment><USER3> If this really gets OSI approved then OSI will practically redefine what OSS is. I doubt that anything that has limits in its usage and not just redistribution rules of modifications will have any chance to get OSI approved.

EDIT: here I better explained my POV -> [https://twitter.com/antirez/status/1052201491325284352](https://twitter.com/antirez/status/1052201491325284352)

<comment><USER4> From the OSI FAQ:

[https://opensource.org/faq#restrict](https://opensource.org/faq#restrict)

\-----

Can I restrict how people use an Open Source licensed program?

        No. The freedom to use the program for any purpose is
     part of the Open Source Definition. Open source licenses
     do not discriminate against fields of endeavor.

\</comment></comment><comment>

It is strange to me that Mongo would even couch such a change in its "open source-ness" when the FAQ from OSI specifically calls out what they have done as something that should _not_ be done.

<comment><AUTHOR> Disclosure: I work for MongoDB.

I suspect some people are responding to what they've heard, so I just want to post section 13 of the SSPL here for everyone's convenience. This section is the only part of the SSPL that isn't exactly the GPL:

> 13\. Offering the Program as a Service.

> If you make the functionality of the Program or a modified version available > to third parties as a service, you must make the Service Source Code > available via network download to everyone at no charge, under the terms of > this License. Making the functionality of the Program or modified version > available to third parties as a service includes, without limitation, > enabling third parties to interact with the functionality of the Program or > modified version remotely through a computer network, offering a service the > value of which entirely or primarily derives from the value of the Program > or modified version, or offering a service that accomplishes for users the > primary purpose of the Software or modified version.

> "Service Source Code" means the Corresponding Source for the Program or the > modified version, and the Corresponding Source for all programs that you use > to make the Program or modified version available as a service, including, > without limitation, management software, user interfaces, application > program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup > software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could > run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make > available.

Regardless of how you feel about the purpose of the SSPL, it absolutely does not apply any restrictions to using the licensed software. What it does is codify the responsibilities of someone who runs the software _as a service_.

<comment><USER5> Let's assume I'm running a commercially-available web application. I'm not reselling mongo as a service, but I'm using mongo in my stack. My web application arguably "... primarily derives from the value of the Program ..." because it is really just a mongoose crud layer on top of your mongo that serves up a dating service for ferrets or whatever. My dating site derives a lot of value from the mongo data layer.

I understand and empathize with the problems of creating and monetizing OSS in a SaaS world, but ultimately, I'm not confident one can write a license that focus-targets SaaS vendors without potentially exposing just plain mongo users to the same litigation.

I mean, the intent here is to make the mongo company more profitable, right? Like: we want to get our cut from SaaS vendors who are selling mongo. So when that dries up, who is to say you won't go after self-hosters as well? This whole thing is super-scary to small shops who don't want to find themselves on the hook for a commercial hosting license.

It just doesn't feel like open source anymore.

<comment><USER6> You're not offering MongoDB as a service though. I think that part is pretty explicit.

> It just doesn't feel like open source anymore.

I guess it depends on what generation you come from. The GPL was far more popular when I was coming up where as today the Apache License seems to be more popular. They have very different philosophies. I for one see no issue with companies that have invested a lot of money into OSS protect themselves from mega corporations which contribute nothing to the project and simply exploit it. This is more dangerous as the project we all take for granted could then dry up and then we're left with a mega corporation cloud provider offering that isn't interested in improving the software I use.

<comment><USER5> > You're not offering MongoDB as a service though. I think that part is pretty > explicit.

I agree that I _feel like_ I'm not offering it as a service, but according to your quote, "Making the functionality of the Program or modified version available to third parties as a service includes, without limitation, enabling third parties to interact with the functionality of the Program or modified version remotely through a computer network, offering a service the value of which entirely or primarily derives from the value of the Program or modified version"

And that does not actually map on to how I would define "offering the program as a service". I think with that definition it would not be difficult to argue that my ferrets using a webapp are "third parties interacting with a modified version of the program remotely through a computer network", because that is in fact what they are doing.

The fact that this might seem like a ridiculous twisting of the intent of "offering as a service" is somewhat immaterial. I'm old enough to have lived through the SCO trial. Companies and their lawyers, when the company is in need of ready cash, will do a lot of shaking of the couch cushions for loose change, and that includes changing how they interpret previously-acceptable behavior with their software.

Even if one argued that my ferret dating site was offering "value which primarily derives from the value of mongo" and failed to win that suit in the courts, I'd still have lost here - I'd still be on the hook for actually defending myself (or just give in to the hypothesized shakedown).

These are all the fears about open source that came from that first SCO trial and persisted via FUD from the 90s version of microsoft: that using open source platforms somehow opens corporations to legal liability, and it was (in part) to allay those fears that the OSI arose.

That's why I'm concerned about this development. I could be 100% overreacting here, but at the end of the day I am not convinced (with either this or the Redis module license thing) that it is possible to micro-target classical SaaS providers with a commercial-only license situation without collateral damage to self-hosters.

<comment><USER6> Similarly things happened when MySQL was an independent company in need of cash. Because the license was GPL and GPL law wasn't well established yet they were able to shakedown some companies using MySQL with veiled threats of GPL violations.

MongoDB client drivers are all Apache however.

But yes, I feel you have valid reasons to be concerned.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>