Show HN: Lightweight Microservices Architecture for the Internet of Things - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/lelylan/lelylan <comment><USER2> Not trying to troll but wouldn't it be easier to just use Elixir and Phoenix with OTP to run microservices for IoT?

IoT typically will have long lived connections and Erlang was built on computers much smaller than raspberry pi's.

Perhaps i'm not fully grasping the library though.

<comment><USER3> My thoughts are similar :) I work in IOT and we use Scala, Akka for the backend. Recently I am checking Elixir / OTP and think it would make a great candidate for IOT microservices with a lot of IO, routing and dispatching. OTP can suit very good for microservices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The title does not do justice to the project. Lelylan seems to be to IoT what rails is to web app development. The title sound very underwhelming, my first thought was, well I can just use zeromq with service discovery. But Lelylan is much more than that it seems to provide an opinionated full stack framework for create IoT and related services.

The description from GitHub is much better, Lelylan is an iot cloud platform based on a lightweight microservices architecture.

Look here www.lelylan.com to get a much better idea about what it is.

</comment><comment><USER5> Mongodb sounds like a disaster for IoT backend. Sorry for hatred but just can't see that scaling well.

<comment><USER6> Why is that bad? Mongodb is great for data ingestion.

<comment><USER7> MongoDB has a reputation for losing data. I'll try to find the reference. EDIT: [http://www.mongodb-is-web-scale.com/](http://www.mongodb-is-web- scale.com/) [https://aphyr.com/posts/322-call-me-maybe-mongodb-stale- read...](https://aphyr.com/posts/322-call-me-maybe-mongodb-stale-reads)

<comment><USER6> In some IoT scenarios you could afford losing a little bit of data. For instance this component does it with MongoDB [https://github.com/telefonicaid/fiware- orion](https://github.com/telefonicaid/fiware-orion)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So, its a distributed system architecture using SOA principles. Looks like there's some hand-waving about implementing a couple of obvious interfaces when applying this technical approach to IoT.

From what I gathered - this "framework" is nothing but a specification, and doesn't actually do anything for you.

Am I missing something?

<comment><USER9> Yes. That repository is just the architecture documentation. Check out the GitHub organization and you'll find that it's all implemented: [https://github.com/lelylan](https://github.com/lelylan)

<comment><USER8> So it's Middleware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In the Internet of Things, either devices will send data to one server that other Applications subscribe to or devices will send data directly to the Applications. This one of many examples of a server that devices can send data to. In contrast, Open Pipe Kit project ([http://openpipekit.github.io](http://openpipekit.github.io)) is an effort to empower devices to send data directly to Applications by utilizing the power of the Unix Pipe.

</comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone know what theme/tool is being used for those docs? ([http://dev.lelylan.com/](http://dev.lelylan.com/))

<comment><USER12> As vicentereig said, structure is just a rails view; theme is bootstrap with some customization:

[https://github.com/lelylan/dev/blob/master/app/assets/styles...](https://github.com/lelylan/dev/blob/master/app/assets/stylesheets/application.css.scss)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Andrea, you should point out some examples of this in use - as it is, it looks kind of dry.

I see there are a few things filed under 'tutorials', but I'd add it more prominently.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion David. I'll bo my best to add some more examples. Do you have something specific in mind?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Can someone tell me what problem it solves that other architectures don't? All I see is a lot of buzzwords and very little technical details on why it is better...

</comment><comment><USER15> Where's the code? I just see docs and images in the repo.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here you can find the services list [https://github.com/lelylan/lelylan#development](https://github.com/lelylan/lelylan#development). Any idea to avoid this problem? I just added a note section in the beginning of the documentation to mitigate it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> the mother of click bait titles

<comment><USER17> Pretty sure we do better than that on a regular basis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Dumb question: I've looked through the demo and the tutorials and I'd like to know how does this compare to using something like OpenHab?

<comment><AUTHOR> As far as I know of OpenHAB, I would say that lelylan main difference consists on the microservices architecture. What they actually do, is pretty similar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Bizarre choice of tech for a project called "lightweight". I'll pass.

<comment><AUTHOR> The choice of using lightweight comes out from the fact that each service in lelylan solve one specific problem, which make it easy to replace or extend existing and new functionalities. I'll think about a more proper word to express it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is this weave/brillo but not Google?

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm wondering if using Apache Kafka and Hadoop Stack, would be a better approach for IoT.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think so. I'm investigating on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> looks good for noobs like me

</comment><comment><USER22>
        There are only two hard things in Computer Science:
        cache invalidation and naming things.
          -- Phil Karlton

This looks like an extremely feature-complete and cool piece of software but the name needs to be revisited.

<comment><USER8> there's actually only _two_ hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off by one errors.

<comment><USER23> If there's anything the SAT tried to prepare us for...</comment></comment></comment>


Who wants to be Intel's new CEO? - <AUTHOR> https://mondaynote.com/intels-toxic-culture-1b79905adf45 <comment><USER2> I worked at Intel 2005-2007. I read the article hoping to see an independent description of the culture I observed. I hoped to see someone use words to explain something that I can't explain.

The thing about Intel's culture that I observed was that it wasn't toxic at all. The worst thing that I could say about it was that it was boring, which was why I left so quickly.

If anything was "toxic," it could be that some managers and co-workers had very bad people skills... But that happens at all large companies. HR can't witness and guide every interaction between employees. In reality, when I was there, Intel's HR made every effort to create a culture where, if something "toxic" happened, they could fix the situation as quickly as possible.

Granted, things did happen. The "toxic" situations were more of ordinary human nature, and can happen anywhere, even in non work situations.

<comment><USER3> At a big corporation, like Intel, we cannot really talk about just one culture. I would say that your experience can vary quite a lot based on the team you're in and to a certain degree the org you're in.

Various people assign the 'toxic' label to various things. What may be 'meh' for one person could be 'toxic' to another.

Also: Mandatory HR is not your friend reminder. HR is there and it's trained to protect the corporation.

<comment><USER2> > At a big corporation, like Intel, we cannot really talk about just one > culture. I would say that your experience can vary quite a lot based on the > team you're in and to a certain degree the org you're in.

Slightly. Ultimately, the high-level culture is set by the execs.

> Various people assign the 'toxic' label to various things. What may be 'meh' > for one person could be 'toxic' to another.

No, definitions are important. The word "toxic culture" has a very clear meaning; and the article does not use it correctly.

Specifically, toxic culture means an environment that leads to high stress and _poor_ _mental_ _health_. That's not what the article discussed, and it's completely appropriate to criticize. A "toxic culture" is a very serious accusation, so incorrectly using the term isn't something that falls under the "I say toe-may-toe, you say toe-mah-toe" attitude.

<comment><USER3> Re: definitions are important

Yes and no. Some of the biggest conflicts I've seen started because of misunderstanding 'basic words'. So definitions matter in the sense that they help clarify intent. But they also can make things harder if you insisting on a certain definition comes across as condescending.

<comment><USER4> Possibly true but irrelevant here, since the OP does not come across as condescending, and their distinction between Intel's culture and a toxic culture is making it easier to understand Intel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The term 'toxic culture' is mostly used to describe widespread harassment and bullying. 'Ossified' or 'stagnant' are more apt terms for a company that can't seem to seize new opportunities.

The thing about margins is that it's a lot more fun to work in a division with high margins. Low margin businesses are grim, because every cost matters. When you can charge $5000 for the latest Xeon, you can pay high salaries and have fat travel budgets. So it's hard to get people used to working on high-margin divisions to move into a new low-margin division, even if it might eventually be bigger.

<comment><USER6> You can't prescribe how language is used. Toxic culture now means this. Changes in usage happen over time.

<comment><USER5> If you google 'toxic culture', all the top results (other than this article) refer to harassment and bullying rather than slowness to adapt to change. Same with [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_workplace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_workplace). So a descriptive linguist would agree with me.

<comment><USER6> Maybe the phrase 'toxic culture' was imprecise and lazy to begin with. Now people are adapting it in a more precise way.

That wiki page was started in 2011 and it's based on a pop-management book. It's hardly an established term.

<comment><USER7> >It's hardly an established term

Yet you said...

>You can't prescribe how language is used. Toxic culture now means this.

So apparently you can.

<comment><USER6> For this author it does mean this. Feel free to use this phrase however you want though.

<comment><USER8> That's not how language works. Words and terms have meaning, you can't just make stuff up and say "languages evolve/everything is subjective/use whatever phrase you want whenever you want."

<comment><USER9> and then in the same breath state this is "adopting a more precise definition of the term". These comments are like arguing with my six year old.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I worked at Intel for two years. They don't have a "toxic" culture. They are just like any other big company. Believe it or not, Google and Facebook will end up like that in 25 years too.

Big organizations get like that. There's a generation that's raised on the company Kool-Aid and they live and breathe the company slogans and they forget that reality is a different place. That's not TOXIC ... that's just the nature of human organizations.

And I mean all organizations that are large. If you ever hang out with DNC or GOP people who work for the party you'll see the same blinders. Same goes for people that work at NASA ... or in certain academic fields. They all believe certain myths internally that no experts outside their group believe.

The point about Intel being addicted to narratives that aligned with its profits is true. And Microsoft was addicted to Windows and Office narratives too before Satya Nadella.

It certainly makes you admire IBM as a company a lot more, doesn't it? They have weathered so many changes in the landscape, and they are still around.

<comment><USER11> "Around" is relative. The last thing IBM innovated was Watson and they're downsizing that division because they can't figure out how to market it. IBM is mostly just a body shop for cheap overseas code monkeys now, isn't it?

<comment><USER12> Bit of an ignorant statement even if it is IBM. What's wrong with developers "overseas" (a completely relative term but forgivable in the YC context) why call them monkeys (not an sjw so not even going to go down that words rabbit hole). Having worked with many a yank their quality is just as variable and I've seen better output standard maintained by some European teams even if scale is limited.

<comment><USER13> > What's wrong with developers "overseas"

Often it's the culture and education system. Many cultures are very top down and everyone just says yes to whatever the boss wants and then tries to make it happen. The educations systems are often very focused on rote memorization. These translate to extremely poor software (among other things).

> why call them monkeys

It's a long standing term for people that write code but do little else. There has never been any racial undertone to the term.

<comment><USER12> Fair points in some places yeah!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting discussion here on the toxic culture reference. As I understand it, especially given the food analogy, Jean Gassee believes that the culture that Intel has evolved over time, prevents them from taking the steps that are necessary to continue to move forward. This culture is 'toxic' in that it is weakening the company rather than strengthening it.

Gassee also makes the point that the culture of the company is more influential on its success or failure than its financial position.

I found his argument fairly persuasive. Of course I worked at Intel during the Andy Grove years and understood that Intel is addicted to the high margins the x86 processors commanded. So when Gassee describes it as a cultural aversion to anything that might impact margins negatively, I can see that as a valid way of looking at it.

<comment><USER15> I'm surprised Jean-Louis didn't highlight the similarity between Intel's refusal to focus on mobile and his own push-back on licensing MacOS a decade earlier. Both decisions (cultures) have to do with switching from a high- margin product to a low-margin product, with no guarantee that you'll make up the difference in volume.

<comment><USER14> I agree that it would have been a good example of where Apple could have encroached on the Windows market more effectively.

That said, the margins Apple has continued to make on its hardware suggest that not licensing MacOS was the right choice for the company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've been reading "Measure What Matters" by John Doerr, which outlines Objectives and Key Results, a concept heavily influenced (invented?) by Andy Grove.

Would be interesting to hear from someone who knows if Intel still uses OKRs, and if their long-term usage contributed to the current "toxic culture". I really like OKRs as a concept, just wondering what long-term usage looks like, and what the downsides are.

Or maybe it's sensationalism, and the culture isn't that toxic?

<comment><USER17> Google uses OKRs (they took it from Intel). Not sure why I'm being downvoted

[http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-ranking-system- okr-20...](http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-ranking-system-okr-2014-1)

<comment><USER18> I think it's really funny that OKR grades are public but ostensibly not used for promotions... Everything associated with you gets entered in to people's brains, and they draw from it when evaluating you whether it's in the policy to do so or not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> No one going to point out that Diane Bryant mysteriously left Google recently? Long experience at Intel, expert in cloud, female face fits into the progressive culture they're trying to chase? Left Google at the perfect time?

Seems like a super obvious move to me.

<comment><USER20> > Left Google at the perfect time?

I agree this is really the most suggestive next step. I posit she left as a result of the CEO position opening up, not by mere coincidence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I worked at Intel for several years. I really enjoyed myself most of the time and got to work on interesting things.

Because I was not serious about staying at Intel for a long time, I took a lot of risks that made my experience more fun. Most people probably wouldn't do so.

There was significant beaurecratic bloat and overhead, the whole organization felt stodgy and a lot of the people simply weren't doing their jobs. This caused me to feel like I constantly had to cross lines I didn't want to cross in order to execute at a decent pace. I come from a startup background and couldn't tolerate the endless delays and lack of responsiveness I saw there.

From my part of the company I mostly had a good time but I did see that I would not have a good time at many other parts of the organization. There are a lot of dead product lines with no future that need to get cut. No two ways about it. Cutting those products won't be fun.

Ossified is a good word for many parts of the company.

I feel like the cultural harm caused by some of the layoffs left many people disenchanted. I heard one ex Intel employee say something like: "I got laid off because I am just another old white man." That sentiment really is corrosive, I heard of that several times.

Unfortunately, I think the successor to BK is going to be saddled with some ugly clean up work. Or they could be cowards and continue to turn the same crank for wall street. BK cleaned some of the mess (and created several new ones), there are many more to clean.

It's easy to be too pessimistic.

Intel has unbelievable engineering skills under the hood. They are incredibly dangerous if they are able to shake this off and re-energize.

I hope they find a truly progressive leader and don't continue their descent into mediocrity.

</comment><comment><USER22> The article is mentioning they missed the mobile revolution. How many mobile chip manufacturers are making that much money on mobile chips. If you look at QCOM's earnings a majority of it is licensing its patents. QCOM chip business net income is 15%. INTC net is almost 30%. In its data center business its 50%.

<comment><USER23> This is exactly the logic that led Intel down this path. They thought they were avoiding a field with low margins and could deepen their manufacturing advantage by remaining focused on the high-margin data center business. Meanwhile, the growth in mobile/GPU/SOC chips was so massive that it enabled Intel's competitors to actually catch up on manufacturing. Those competitors are going to eventually compete in the high end, and it's an uphill battle for Intel to become competitive in the fields they've ignored to date.

If Intel does survive, it will be as a company with far lower margins in a brutally competitive environment.

Read Ben Thompson on this: [https://stratechery.com/2018/intel-and-the-danger- of-integra...](https://stratechery.com/2018/intel-and-the-danger-of- integration/)

<comment><USER22> Which of intel's competitors that make mobile chips are doing as well as intel? Please give me an example. I gave you numbers for QCT which makes mobile chips.

TMSC and Samsung are going to spend money on R+D on chips irrespective of what intel does. Intel has a moat in the x86 market it has none in the ARM world. Read porters 5 forces and you will see why going into the mobile world made no sense for them.

In my opinion Intel throwing money at lower margin business would not make sense to me. I guess we will find out what happens in the future.

<comment><USER24> The problem is we are forecasting the future. Today Intel makes better product that their mobile competitors. However those competitors are making their product better and better all the time. Already companies are starting to look at those cheaper mobile CPUs and ask if they are good enough, some are answering yes, and there are signs that more will in the future.

For a long time intel could hold all this off - sure competitors were cheaper, but intel was enough faster that they were worth it just because you could get more done with them (time is money). However intel has been facing issues with the laws of physics that limit their ability to get better. As their competition catches up intel has nowhere to go.

<comment><USER22> If they did go make mobile chips what is their value proposition? How are they any different than any other chip maker. Qcom has its modem what does Intel have?

They have generated 50 billion in cash over the last 5 years. Let the shareholders pick who they want to invest in.

<comment><USER24> If they don't make mobile chips what is their value proposition? They used to be on the forefront of what manufacturing could do and thus the fastest. However everyone is running into limits of physics, meaning their competitors are catching up.

Can they find a next step? I don't know. I'd benefit if they do (faster CPUs would help me), but if they can't I benefit as well (I switch to cheaper mobile chips that are just as fast)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Six months of doing my best but failing miserably because I have no idea how to run a massive company, followed by a multi-million-dollar golden parachute? Sign me up!

</comment><comment><USER26> In an organisation like Intel, how much fight is needed for a new CEO to break the Company into three, Intel Foundry, Intel Silicon, and Intel IP, along with Intel Holding being the holding company?

Intel Silicon will continue to produce the best in class x86 chip, from Desktop, Server, Notebook to Modem, FPGA, GPGPU and Network processor. And Storage like Optane and SSD.

Intel Foundry will focus to be the best Foundry on the planet. Not only just tech and yield, but also the ecosystem around it; from tools to libraries.

Intel IP will allow customers to use Intel's IP to fab their custom solution in Intel Foundry. x86 Core, 5G Modem, WiFi, Bluetooth, Network Processor, Memory controller, GPU, every building block Intel uses for Intel silicon. To be make to anything from SoC for PS5, Xbox with CPU and GPU, to Mobile SoC using ARM CPU + Intel Modem.

</comment><comment><USER27> Firms with greater market power may innovate less [https://www.economist.com/finance-and- economics/2018/07/07/c...](https://www.economist.com/finance-and- economics/2018/07/07/companies-appear-to-be-gaining-market-power)

</comment><comment><USER28> Intel PR was always too much addicted to Moore's Law. The Moore's Law is almost dead and so is Intel (Most semiconductor industry forecasters, including Gordon Moore, expect Moore's law will end by around 2025)

Source: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#Near- term_limits](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#Near-term_limits)

<comment><USER29> I mean, in the strict formulation of "transistor counts doubling every 2 years" it's been dead since like 2015 if not earlier.

That said, the "death of Moore's law" is kind of this memetic doomsday device that doesn't really mean anything. We haven't had significantly faster single- threaded performance for _years_ and we're developing ways to cope with that.

Intel's real problem is that they keep missing the boat on new markets for chips. ARM got smartphones. Nvidia got machine learning. (Xeon Phi is cool. Maybe someone will notice. Maybe they'll fix the instruction decoder so it can actually operate at full speed. Who knows.) Intel killed off Itanium and then we discovered that every modern CPU design except Itanium is horrifically vulnerable. IBM is rapidly encroaching on the server market with innovations like CAPI/BlueLink.

If Intel is "dead", it's not because of the death of Moore's Law, it's because they let everyone else eat their lunch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> >Money, or its lack, doesn't cause a financial collapse, human folly does; the numbers simply follow

iow, the symptom should not be confused with the cause.

</comment><comment><USER31> I feel that their hegemony in the server market might be lost even faster: [https://ashishb.net/tech/three-reasons-why-intel-might- lose-...](https://ashishb.net/tech/three-reasons-why-intel-might-lose-server- market-even-faster-than-consumer/)

</comment><comment><USER32> Saw this the other day. Seems like it would make sense. [https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/03/google-clouds-coo- departs-...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/03/google-clouds-coo-departs- after-7-months/)

</comment><comment><USER33> I'd do it.

No one else really seems to have the vision that a CEO needs to step up to that particular plate.

<comment><USER5> Could you articulate your vision here?

<comment><USER33> Sure.

Intel has an insane treasure trove of technology that they don't seem to know what to do with because they have confused profit with market domination (related ideas, but not equivalent, and one often leads to the other in both directions).

Example: Intel obsesses over x86 in a very weird and unhealthy way. Intel has repeatedly developed new CPU architectures that did not suffer from the burden of the technical debt that has accrued.

A lot of money was sank into, for example, the XScale ARM series. What killed it off was not because there was something technologically inferior with the product (it was rather popular for the time, the Snapdragon of it's age): what killed it was upper management thinking ARM sales could harm x86 sales, instead of just focusing on making sales happen.

The result? Marvell bought it, and turned merely took the breaks off the product line and let it naturally evolve. Marvell didn't really do anything other than that; Intel intentionally strangled the project and that's why it was sold.

That made no financial or logical sense no matter how much Intel apologists try to spin it. Intel cannot change the reality that their x86 designs are not for low power (which they finally admitted when they killed off the Atom SoC line for phones and tablets, which was drank power like it was going out of style), and Intel has locked itself out of one of the largest markets in the world.

Another Example: I have two Haswell-era machines in my house. Both of them are intended to be used with CPUs that have iGPUs. They both have mini-Displayport plugs. Neither have Thunderbolt controllers.

My Ivy Bridge-era MBP? Has a Thunderbolt controller, and it is the only machine in my house that would never benefit from it. The inclusion of said Thunderbolt controller was at the behest of Apple, not because of Intel.

What could have happened? Every Intel machine since Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge should have had a Thunderbolt controller baked into iGPU, and Intel's sales of Thunderbolt controllers would have gone through the roof. Instead, Intel has to compete with USB 3.x, produces controllers intended for TB-over-Type-C, and does not produce USB 3.x device SoCs (essentially losing money on every sale since Intel _should_ be doing this), only integrated host controllers for existing Intel platforms.

The job of the CEO is to promote a culture inside of management where such decisions happen regularly. As CEO, I wouldn't be the one making decisions such as, say, making onboard Thunderbolt the default: I'd be making it possible for such decisions to happen naturally, to make sure the proper behavior is rewarded and diagnose issues in the corporate policy on why Intel isn't promoting the desired outcome internally.

From everything I have seen, Intel doesn't particularly have a toxic culture internally, not in a way that compares to the posterchildren of that particular disease. What Intel has is a weird obsession with the past, and an absolutely immense treasure trove of technology that just sits there and isn't sold or marketed meaningfully.

I think people have written entire books about the missteps of Intel. The problem is, all of us here know they were missteps, but Intel management glorifies them as the right choice and what lead to Intel's greatness.

I just see a company that doesn't understand how to profit in the right ways, and instead has lead to a public perception that Intel doesn't care about customers, hides ticking time bombs in their products intentionally (Meltdown et al.), and has lead to the term "Intel Tax".

AMD doens't sell a better CPU, nor a faster one. What they sell is a CPU that is fit correctly for the market, and have a public perception of actually caring about customers, caring about the long term support of their products, and try to leverage their technology in ways that benefit both the customer AND the shareholder.

If I was tossed in as the CEO today? I'd try fix the public perception, try to figure out why Intel just sits on endless technology and isn't part of the right markets (even though they have or had technology that fits those markets), and try to figure out why good ideas (and the people that make them) are not promoted from with in.

Intel is pretty much no different than Broadcom or Qualcomm, yet Intel can't sell the stuff they need to in a way that makes sense. Yet, every cell phone has Qualcomm parts in it, tons of IoC and network and NAS stuff has Broadcom parts in it (due to their huge family of ARM and MIPS SoCs), Broadcom also sells more Ethernet controllers than Intel.

So, what the hell. If I become CEO today, I am delivering disruption to the management culture that prevents Intel from thriving the way it should.

<comment><USER24> Sounds good to me. However I don't think you could pull it off - you could start but I think that you would be fired for non-performance before your efforts can actually make a difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> WTF does "toxic culture" even mean, other than clickbait?

Some people seems to use this as meaning "anti-social" or "excessively aggressive" but the word only appears in the article as "toxic fixation on margins" where it's equivalent to "harmful".

The gist of the article seems to be that Intel lost in the mobile space because it refused to chase opportunities with lower margins. But decisions regarding such deals are made by a small handful of people at the top, the "culture" of the rest of the organization is irrelevant.

<comment><USER35> "Toxic" is one of those terms like "problematic" that rely on in-group knowledge to understand. I've often heard it in reference to masculinity; often used by feminists who have a more concrete definition in mind. And, sure you can look at any violent crime stats to see masculinity has its problems, but instead of the more reasonable claim they're making a very nasty one that's indefensible.

Allusions to people being poisonous are particularly destructive. This was very common in the military, if a soldier didn't fit in, he was labeled as something similar to toxic so that others knew not to associate with him. Even then, when the military does it, there's a practical solution: the soldiers get out of the military.

If you claim a larger group is toxic, you have to ask: these are our neighbors, what do we do with them?

> But decisions regarding such deals are made by a small handful of people at > the top

Yeah, that really blew the article for me. Something like not-invented-here syndrome is a cultural issue, not bad corporate strategy.

<comment><USER36> > Allusions to people being poisonous are particularly destructive.

The phrase "toxic masculinity" isn't directed at one SPECIFIC man, so you can dry your tears.

<comment><USER37> Please don't post ideological swipes or personally nasty remarks ("you can dry your tears") to HN. It only makes things worse.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I volunteer myself. I promise to make only the best decisions. Forever.

<comment><USER39> Can you break the laws of physics and help us get Moore's Law back on track?

<comment><AUTHOR> He can promise to :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> me

</comment><comment><USER41> >Who wants to be Intel's new CEO?

I do

</comment><comment><USER42> I volunteer. Gimme that golden parachute.

</comment><comment><USER43> Missing an opportunity isn't a Toxic Culture problem, eh? I disagree with this narrative.

<comment><USER44> I'm not sure if the author understands the word's context or usage; the article also links to "Intel's toxic fixation on margins" but nowhere on the target page does the word toxic appear.</comment></comment>


Who is to? - <AUTHOR>

Who is http://to/ <comment><USER2> Perhaps I'm not understanding the question?

<comment><AUTHOR> i mean the domain name works, which is kind of suprising? I am asking about the who.is details.

<comment><USER2> I think maybe you're seeing some sort of internal DNS resolution on your side. [http://to](http://to) is not valid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> clickable [http://to/](http://to/)</comment>


App Store Cranking - <AUTHOR>

iTunes connect was down for a week (vacation). but on the first day they came back up, they seem to be re-energized. We submitted BA.net Live Webcams on dec 28. It was approved an live on the app store on dec 29!
That was fast check it out atitms://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ba-net-live-webcams/id348529659?mt=8
or
http://m.ba.net <comment><USER2> itms://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ba-net-live-webcams/id348529659?mt=8</comment>


Disabling Docker ICC still allows raw ethernet communication between containers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/brthor/docker-layer2-icc <comment><AUTHOR> Note that this repros on a default unprivileged container, with the default seccomp profile, and SELinux enabled.

Relevant filed issue: [https://github.com/moby/moby/issues/36355](https://github.com/moby/moby/issues/36355)

There are three immediate workarounds.

1\. Dropping `CAP_SYS_RAW` in docker run will prevent the raw socket from being opened (and is always a good idea).

2\. Placing each container on it's own bridge network blocks this communication but requires you to manually specify the subnets of those networks to work around dockers default limit of 31 networks.

3\. Create ebtables rules, to filter below the ip layer (layer 2) see the repo for an example.

<comment><USER2> For #2 did you mean CAP_NET_RAW or CAP_SYS_RAWIO?

<comment><AUTHOR> CAP_SYS_RAWIO looks even more terrifying, but CAP_NET_RAW gates your ability to use raw sockets.

[https://linux.die.net/man/7/capabilities](https://linux.die.net/man/7/capabilities)

<comment><USER3> I raised this stuff in 2014.

[https://github.com/moby/moby/issues/5661](https://github.com/moby/moby/issues/5661)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> FreeBSD's Jails doesnt allow raw socket access by default since i have been using it (~10Y) and probably even much longer.

edit: Since 2004 to be precise.

[https://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.3R/relnotes- amd64.html](https://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.3R/relnotes-amd64.html)

So well documented. Gotta love it.

<comment><AUTHOR> How does the isolation compare with docker in general?

Not familiar with freeBSD jails.

<comment><USER5> I'm sure this isn't a total list of features, but Wikipedia's comparison shows jails having all the features of Docker. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating-system- level_virtual...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating-system- level_virtualization#Implementations)

<comment><USER6> As someone who has used both extensively. I wouldn't say Docker and Jails are directly comparable; Jails are a lot more comparable to something like LXC.

Jails doesn't have any of the deployment, tools for creating images, building of images, registry for images etc. Docker also automates a lot of networking stuff away whereas with jails I usually have to use something like PF to set up port forwards; I also sometimes run into problems with the fact it shares the network stack with the host.

That being said, all the configuration is quite simple and building exactly what I need for running an application isn't too difficult. The big advantage after that being that I understand how everything is wired together and I can debug easier when something goes wrong. Doing it manually however takes up much more time.

<comment><USER5> Terribly late reply, sorry, but the deployment tools are all in ZFS. Giving each jail it's own ZFS file system let's you have templates with a bunch of steps done, or mass copy a complete jail. And with ZFS send/receive, you can share them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Even if you used ebtables to filter out containers talking to each others' MAC addresses, wouldn't they be able to send broadcast or multicast packets to communicate with each other?

I guess it's not clear to me if the vulnerability/bug/whatever here is "two conspiring containers can establish a covert channel" or "a malicious container can send normal-looking traffic to a container, bypassing that container's firewall rules."

It does seem like the right answer is unique bridge networks per container. On physical networks, it's hard to prevent two untrusted devices on the same L2 domain from establishing a covert channel. (And it's hard to prevent two networked untrusted, conspiring devices anywhere on the internet from establishing a covert channel, if they're trying hard enough.)

<comment><AUTHOR> > Even if you used ebtables to filter out containers talking to each others' > MAC addresses, wouldn't they be able to send broadcast or multicast packets > to communicate with each other?

I'm afraid my initiation to ebtables (and iptables) was yesterday, so feedback such as this is highly appreciated. I will explore this and add a test to the repo.

> I guess it's not clear to me if the vulnerability/bug/whatever here is "two > conspiring containers can establish a covert channel" or "a malicious > container can send normal-looking traffic to a container, bypassing that > container's firewall rules."

In the context of a sandbox, I purport the vulnerability is that a malicious container can bypass the firewall. The covert channel is largely inevitable because ultimately the containers can modulate cpu usage to communicate via cpu timing (I read this in a security paper somewhere, not sure how actual implementation works).

The impact of bypassing the firewall can be serious if the non-malicious container exposes any service without proper authentication (as is often done behind VPCs in the cloud).

Given that a high number of official containers contain known vulnerabilities (according to dockerhub). This is a potential issue for a large number of docker users.

> It does seem like the right answer is unique bridge networks per container.

My thinking is along the same lines, although I'm wondering if a container can communicate with the host if L2 packets may be able to traverse the network bridges. If anyone has input here, it'd be greatly appreciated.

<comment><USER8> Re: bridge filtering

You can use the iptables physdev extension to match based on a bridge port rather than a mac address.

So to filter between containers, you can do:

      iptables -I FORWARD -m physdev --physdev-in vetha056126 -j DROP

where vetha056126 is the name of the container's veth adapter's peer interface on the host.

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps I don't understand this rule properly, but isn't this dropping all traffic being forwarded from the interface?

<comment><USER8> When the sysctl net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-iptables=1 is set, bridged packets will traverse iptables rules. I believe this is the default on modern Linux kernels, but may not be set by default on RHEL/CentOS systems.

The iptables filter table has three chains: INPUT, OUTPUT, FORWARD. In a traditional non-bridge context:

\- INPUT means packets entering the host

\- OUTPUT means packets leaving the host

\- FORWARD means packets being forwarded through the host which are not destined for the host itself.

In the context of a bridge, FORWARD means forwarding packets from one bridge port to another. You can test the simplest case of this with:

      iptables -I FORWARD -j DROP

by adding that rule, two containers on the same host cannot communicate with each other despite the fact that their communication did not require any traditional routing from the host. This is because the bridge traffic also traversed iptables rules.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > This behavior is highly unexpected, and in highly secure environments, > likely to be an issue.

If your "highly secure" environment relies on docker for isolation (a software neither meant nor designed for security), then it hardly qualifies as "highly secure" in the first place.

<comment><AUTHOR> > If your "highly secure" environment relies on docker for isolation (a > software neither meant nor designed for security), then it hardly qualifies > as "highly secure" in the first place.

This is just not true. Docker by default requires hardening, but container implementations are fairly secure. With Kernel/OS hardening they are quite secure.

Docker security by default is actually quite good outside of a few issues (like raw sockets), and as long as you don't mount '/' or something. Seccomp is enabled by default to mitigate attack surface on the kernel, SELinux can be enabled to further enforce access control.

Plenty of sandboxes are relying on containers now seemingly successfully. Sandstorm.io is a good example (and where I picked up a lot of tips for securing containers).

If you're convinced otherwise, feel free to share some research.

<comment><USER10> As the author of Sandstorm, I'm going to say: "ehh... maybe."

There's still some big differences between Sandstorm and Docker's sandboxes -- not as big as there used to be, but non-trivial. For example, Docker mounts /proc, albeit read-only; Sandstorm doesn't mount it at all. Docker lets the container talk to the network; Sandstorm gives it only a loopback device and forces all external communication through one inherited socket speaking Cap'n Proto. In general, Sandstorm is willing to break more things to reduce attack surface; Docker puts more priority on compatibility.

So is it "secure"? That's not a yes/no question. Security is about risk management; you can always reduce your risk further by jumping through more hoops. There will certainly be more container breakout bugs found in the future, including bugs affecting Docker and affecting Sandstorm. There will probably be more that affect Docker, because its attack surface is larger.

There will also be VM breakouts. VM breakouts appear to be less common than container breakouts, but not by as much as some people seem to think. Anyone who makes a blanket statement that VMs are secure and Docker is not does not know what they are talking about.

The only thing I'd feel comfortable saying is "totally secure" is a computer that is physically unable to receive or transmit information (airgapped, no microphone/speaker, etc.), but that's hardly useful.

In general, if you are going to run possibly-malicious code, the better way to reduce your risk is not to use a better sandbox, but to use multiple layered sandboxes. The effect is multiplicative: now the attacker must simultaneously obtain zero-days in both layers. For example, Google Chrome employs the V8 sandbox as well as a secondary container-based sandbox.

In Sandstorm's case, the "second layer" is that application packages are signed with the UI presenting to you the signer's public identity (e.g. Github profile) at install time, and the fact that most people only let relatively trustworthy users install apps on their Sandstorm servers. (For Sandstorm Oasis, the cloud version that anyone can sign up to, application code runs on physically separate machines from storage and other trusted code, for a different kind of second layer.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for commenting here!

I was inspired by sandstorm's supervisor.c++ while looking into container security which actually eventually led me to this issue.

> For example, Docker mounts /proc, albeit read-only;

I can't find too much information on this, does docker mount /proc from the host by default in each of the containers?

> In general, if you are going to run possibly-malicious code, the better way > to reduce your risk is not to use a better sandbox, but to use multiple > layered sandboxes. The effect is multiplicative: now the attacker must > simultaneously obtain zero-days in both layers. For example, Google Chrome > employs the V8 sandbox as well as a secondary container-based sandbox.

I think that sandboxing the language is pretty tough in the general case, since every language takes a lot of effort. In non-managed, compiled languages, it will be even tougher.

What is your opinion on tools like SELinux as a secondary layers?

<comment><USER8> > I can't find too much information on this, does docker mount /proc from the > host by default in each of the containers?

I'm curious what kentonv has to say, but on modern kernels docker can make use of PID namespaces, so /proc only shows PIDs from the container's PID namespace. That said, it does still provide several information leaks like /proc/self/mountinfo showing which host directories are mounted where in the container.

In addition to PID namespaces, another isolation gotcha is users, and docker does not enable user namespaces by default since it's a relatively new kernel feature and it breaks backwards compatibility (ex: kubernetes doesn't yet support them). A good example of this in practice that many people hit issues with in the past was ulimits: if UID 1000 in a container exceeds a ulimit, it also affects UID 1000 in every other container. Docker solved this by setting ulimits to unlimited on the docker daemon process, which are then inherited by containers (this also happens to be good for performance). User namespaces are one of the big recent improvements to container security.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is the idea that an attacker would enumerate mac addresses and scan for connections? Or is there a way for an attacker to discover neighboring container mac addresses?

<comment><USER12> I'm curious about this as well. It seems like this would be pretty difficult to exploit in the real world.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think some more research is needed here.

I'm wondering if containers could abuse ARP to find the neighboring addresses.

<comment><USER13> sudo arp-scan --interface=br0 --localnet --bandwidth=8192000 --numeric --retry=1

Should return mac addresses plus the associated IP address

although nmap would probably yield more interesting results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Since iptables only works for IPv4 packets (EthType 0x0800), it doesn't really seem unusual that you could still pass back and forth frames with different EtherTypes.

There's a reason why filtering frames at layer 2 is a thing, but I suppose the average developer/Docker user wouldn't really be aware of it. I'm a senior network engineer at $work (ISP) and there are several locations in the network where I do this (the most common location is probably at IXP exchanges).

Layer 2 security is something that most people overlook.

</comment><comment><USER15> Well, this is kind of unexpected, but "highly secure" environments surely won't be running containers on the default bridge without any of the capabilities configured.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is true. I suppose the issue is if people naively rely on defaults with ICC disabled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Could it be possible to spoof ether frames with udp in them? Like say dns responses from the othe containers dns queries? Or to spoof the same MAC address as a peer container?

</comment><comment><USER17> The interesting question will be how this applies to Kubernetes using flannel, considering that creates a separate network bridge per container.

<comment><USER18> Kubernetes using flannel creates a veth pair per container, but they're all attached to the same bridge.

<comment><USER19> I'd be curious of what would happen between nodes; could you get to the virtual mac address of another container on another node? It's also be interesting to see what happens in Flannel, WeaveNet and other docker network implementations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why not just put each docker container in its own VM? Problem solved without any ugly hacks, clean and elegant.

<comment><USER21> What do you need docker for if you put each container in a VM of its own?

<comment><USER22> Once use case is if you're running a multi-tenant service, where customers can deploy their own docker containers. In terms of developer usability, it's way easier to have them push containers to a registry than it is to ask them to package a custom ISO for upload into a VM. To your customers, it appears you are just running docker, but on the backend you isolate each container in a VM for OS-level security isolation.

The Intel Clear Containers project [0] is working on this.

[0] [https://github.com/clearcontainers](https://github.com/clearcontainers)</comment></comment></comment>


Hybrid Embryos of Near-Extinct Rhino Created in Lab - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/04/science/northern-white-rhino-embryo.html <comment><USER2> I was recently thinking about this. With the advances made in crispr we can perhaps bring back species that we made go extinct. Some people might not like this idea but if you think about it, much of the 'nature' we think is untouched was created by man. So why not accept the fact that we as homo Sapiens have a unusually large footprint on the world and try to create a world we'd like (create nature and bring back extinct animals anywhere we want)</comment>


Deep Learning Basics with Python, TensorFlow and Keras - <AUTHOR> https://pythonprogramming.net/introduction-deep-learning-python-tensorflow-keras/ <comment><USER2> Sigh, I know there is interest in learning, but there are a few things that (IMHO) don't follow the best practices.

For example - pickle for saving numerical data. Please, use h5py. Pickle can save any Python objects... and execute any (also - not-python) code. Or in general - you load a pickle, and cannot guess what had happened. With h5py - you have a tree of numerical objects, nothing more, nothing less.

Fo those reasons, I use pickle only when there is no other way to go - i.e. Python objects that cannot be serialized into anything language-agnostic. For saving purely numerical data, h5py is my way to go ([http://docs.h5py.org/en/latest/quick.html](http://docs.h5py.org/en/latest/quick.html)).

</comment><comment><USER3> Check out Jeremy Howard and Fastai. I like sentex, their videos are good, but Jeremy is another level.

[http://course.fast.ai/index.html](http://course.fast.ai/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> I have used this website when I had itch about doing Monte-Carlo. I went through the course at a good pace. The beauty was you can follow the video or the text or both depending on your style of learning.

I will definitely check the deep learning course.

note: I am not a python programmer.

</comment><comment><USER5> Can anyone recommend good books for learning deep learning with python?

<comment><USER2> For a very practical introduction to deep learning with Keras, I recommend Deep Learning with Python by François Chollet, [https://www.manning.com/books/deep-learning-with- python](https://www.manning.com/books/deep-learning-with-python).

For a general context, my post "Learning Deep Learning with Keras" [https://p.migdal.pl/2017/04/30/teaching-deep- learning.html](https://p.migdal.pl/2017/04/30/teaching-deep-learning.html) or for a practical quick start - "Starting deep learning hands-on: image classification on CIFAR-10" [https://deepsense.ai/deep-learning-hands-on- image-classifica...](https://deepsense.ai/deep-learning-hands-on-image- classification/).

<comment><USER5> Thank you!

In general I prefer reading technical material (to really learn something) from a piece of paper rather than from a screen. I'll order the book :)

<comment><USER6> Try the CS231n course from Stanford. Assignments, solutions, slides and lectures are available. Proper grad level deep learning course with excellent notes. The assignments are IMO, the best way to get good and in-depth knowledge of deep learning.

For books, Ian Goodfellow's deep learning is the best theory (as theoretical as Deep Learning gets ) oriented book.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I know a machine learning engineer from a certain massive lending company. I asked him "How do you decide which strategy to use and which algorithms to pay attention to? There are so many, and it's hard to figure out which ones are production grade."

He said gradient boosting. I pointed out that that implies there would be some period of time where the algorithm makes bad decisions. He said yup, that's why it's hard to start a lending company. Gotta find the data on the bad performers.

Apparently their original decision model was just a hand crafted set of if- statements.

I suspect most ML endeavors that seem impressive have origin stories like that, but it's only anecdata.

<comment><USER8> > He said gradient boosting. I pointed out that that implies there would be > some period of time where the algorithm makes bad decisions.

How are the first and second sentences related? Would other algorithms make better decisions?

<comment><USER7> Sure, self-play. Generate the data and search through the problem space for optimal decisions before they come up.</comment></comment></comment>


Open-Source Watch - <AUTHOR> http://oswatch.org/build_page_1.php <comment><USER2> This should be marked (2014) as the post is last updated April 24, 2014 (and (c) 2013). Would note that several of the links to components are dead, specifically the links to microduino.cc (check this link [1] and select the 3.3v/8mhz option) and radioshack.com (the link in the series is to the pre- petition website, try this link [2] for the motor but believe it's currently out of stock).

[1] [https://www.microduino.cc/product/core- copy](https://www.microduino.cc/product/core-copy)

[2] [https://www.radioshack.com/products/radioshack-3vdc-micro- vi...](https://www.radioshack.com/products/radioshack-3vdc-micro-vibration- motor?variant=5717362821)

</comment><comment><USER3> There's also [http://www.ohwr.org/projects/f-watch/wiki](http://www.ohwr.org/projects/f-watch/wiki), a smart watch made by a team at CERN for a retiring researcher. It's powered by a very low-power EFM32/ARM microcontroller, uses a metallic e-ink display, the board is designed with KiKad, and has all the resources they used on the website.

</comment><comment><USER4> Better would be an e-ink display. OLED consumes too much battery. Using e-ink and writing power efficient code such a watch weeks or even months on battery.

<comment><USER5> It depends on your priorities. If you want a pretty display with lots of color, fast updates, and easy visibility in the dark, e-ink is out. All-day battery life is more than sufficient for many watch-wearers who aren't interested in sleeping with the thing on.

<comment> mike-cardwell One of my favourite use cases for my Pebble Time requires wearing it whilst I'm asleep: I use it as an alarm clock. I'm awoken by it vibrating on my wrist. I find this a much more pleasant way to wake up than a normal audio based alarm. Being able to snooze an alarm without having to open my eyes or reach out of my warm bed and without waking my partner is brilliant. I would be annoyed by a watch which I had to remove each night to charge.

<comment><USER6> I've got an LG Urbane which I charge every morning while I'm showering and getting ready. It's on my wrist overnight for sleep tracking and the morning alarm. I can agree with your judgement on alarms, but my experience of an OLED-based watch differs from what you seem to expect :).

<comment><USER7> How long does it spend charging? How much does it charge in that time?

<comment><USER6> 30 minutes is usually long enough, although I usually leave it longer than that because I'm still doing stuff. The last 5% charge is a lot slower, but isn't really necessary -- it doesn't matter if the battery drains from 95%--45% rather than 100%--50%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow! You just made my weekend. Some projects take time and to see you do this from start to end is inspiring to me. I have some projects sitting for months and find it hard, sometimes, to just get them done.

</comment><comment><USER9> Can't scroll up or down on mobile. Chrome 47/Android 6.0

<comment><USER10> Same problem. Same versions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Oh man, I wish the OscilloscopeWatch project would finish:

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/920064946/oscilloscope-...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/920064946/oscilloscope- watch)

Then maybe there'd be _two_ open source watches out there ..

<comment><USER12> Other interesting specialised watch is µWatch:

[http://www.calcwatch.com](http://www.calcwatch.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> On mobile, I can't scroll down on the page this link leads to or on the Home page.

Chrome 44, Android 4.4.2.

<comment><USER13> Same here, but it works fine with the current Android version of Firefox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Build the hardware with 100% Arduino Compatibility"

That was his first mistake, :-) I like arduino for fast, quick and dirty stuff, but for a finished product, I'd rather try to do a closer to bare metal implementation. But otherwise, very cool project.

<comment><USER15> Newbie to hardware development here. Could you explain what "bare metal" is? Is that programmer + stand-alone chip?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep. Bare metal refers to your code accessing the silicon without the help of other drivers or an OS. You write the code to directly access the IO pins that drives the LCD or LEDs or to read the buttons, or other on board circuitry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is awesome. The maker was my booth neighbor at Maker Faire two years ago, sound guy!

</comment><comment><USER17> There's also the ijWatch that a few friends of mine are working on. [https://ijwatch.org/](https://ijwatch.org/)

Using OLED display and ESP8266 NodeMCU, running Lua apps. Quite nice so far

</comment><comment><USER18> Thanks for sharing this. I am thinking about creating a smartwatch. A nicely built smartwatch can replace smartphone. Instead of building the parts ourselves would not it be better to import parts?

</comment><comment><USER19> what type of 3d printer is best for making the casing?

</comment><comment><USER20> calcwatch.com also plays chess.

</comment><comment><USER21> compact size.... bwahaha</comment>


Analysis of Kepler data finds 20 habitable worlds including 'frozen Earth' - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5033439/Kepler-finds-20-habitable-worlds-plain-sight.html <comment><USER2> Are you sure that Frozen Earth is not Hoth? :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you sure that Earth is not just Tropical Hoth?</comment></comment>


Facebook Q3 2016 Results - <AUTHOR> https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2016/Facebook-Reports-Third-Quarter-2016-Results/default.aspx <comment><USER3> Tried Facebook ads for Pokemon Go ( 2nd largest Facebook group in my country - Belgium), had some success there ( 330.000 people reach / week for a month). But it's not worth it for regular businesses. I started a webshop and Google AdWords seems to be the way to go.

Side note, we did events. One Facebook group had 2x as many members and was also spanning the Netherlands, they had 1/10th of our ticket sales. We were the first to combine amusement parks with Pokémon Go ( and cheaper then normal tickets, our revenue was a % on the ticket price)

Facebook seems to be an empty bucket. The ones who share your posts, share everything from everyone, while you give things away for free. It's the only way to receive a lot of likes, but those aren't the people you want and going to buy your stuff.

You aren't anything with likes. Invest in newsletters and a decent email campaign, that way you don't have to pay for the people that 'subscribed' to you, to let them see posts.

Ps. Pokemon Go was 0,03 € / like. Normal businesses pay 1€ / like in my experience. Don't go that road :)

Ps2. I don't do remarketing too. But that's personal preference, as i don't want to stalk people. I want them to find me, when they are looking for me

Ps3. AdWords for me is 1€/ day, which is the minimum. And I'm quite happy with it for my niche, which gives me 10 visitors and 1 purchase every 2 days ( pretty high margin)

Ps4. If you want to go on Facebook, remember you have to pay for: promoting your post, promoting your page and promoting your website. So facebook passes 3 times at the cash register. Pokemon Go was all on max for several days, which is 50€ x 3 per day! And in case you forgot, likes !== Customers and you still have to write good content :)

<comment><USER4> Facebook's encouragement of businesses to build FB pages, then have _their own_ customers like them on Facebook seemed like a win-win--a mutual leveraging of cross-engagement.

But, Facebook's later flipping the switch to make those businesses pay to reach their own customers was a completely underhanded bait-and-switch.

Still leaves a bad taste in my mouth all of these years later.

<comment><USER5> Hard lesson for companies that you need to own your subscribers, not lease them from twitter/facebook/instagram.

<comment><USER4> What's worse is that it's "buying" them (via hard-won marketing efforts), giving them _to_ FB, then paying FB to lease them back.

But, of course, that wasn't the original deal--else no one would have signed up for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm CTO at a local newspaper chain. I ran a seminar on how to digital advertising, then ran $500 in advertising to promote the event -- all as a test to see which advertising mediums I could use to get people to show up to learn about advertising.

Here's the data and a summary:

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DsJYUYETwQ7a-hISFPcC...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DsJYUYETwQ7a-hISFPcCI7ojGtk2WtyGdxwQXSN6szQ/edit?usp=sharing)

[http://www.davisenterprise.com/special-projects/how-to- waste...](http://www.davisenterprise.com/special-projects/how-to-waste-less- money-doing-digital-advertising-next-time/)

<comment><USER7> Paid $200+ for e-mail marketing? What does that actually mean? You bought someone's mailing list?

<comment><USER8> Or paid for an email delivery service? (such as MailChimp)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wanna know why tech companies get such high valuations?

Look at the operating margin and net income increase in just 1 year: [https://twitter.com/mbesto/status/793921076820459520](https://twitter.com/mbesto/status/793921076820459520)

That makes investors absolutely drool.

<comment><USER10> Powerball ticket pools make people drool, too. Companies like this are called unicorns for a reason-they don't exist (statistically speaking).

<comment><USER11> I'm curious - are you comparing Facebook, the company with nearly 5 years of success as a public company based on strategic decisions, to someone who wins a random chance lottery?

<comment><USER12> Because just like with lotteries, there are a lot of blanks, few small wins and a tiny amount of never-work-again wins: Many startups don't net the investor much, some make quite a bit after being acquired, and very few - <USER2> as facebook - turn out to be really successfull.

Your phrasing suggests that you compare Facebook (now) with lottery as a _system_. You should rather see Facebook as a lottery _ticket_ that turned out to be the jackpot.

<comment><USER11> Every lottery ticket has the same odds of winning, no matter the "strategy" employed in picking numbers, location of buying the ticket, etc. Facebook is not in any way a analogue, unless you are arguing that its success was entirely random, and would have stood an equal chance of happening if I had started it at a community college, then put the headquarters in Alaska, which is false.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Facebook is the least transparent ecosystem. As a marketer, I find it hard to invest dollars without being able to see or understand what percent of custom audiences are exposed to ads. For example, one can upload a file (list of emails) to a custom audience, lets say 1 M big, for FB to ingest. Voila your audience is active for targeting, but how many of those emails (users) will be targeted, who knows. FB's inventory is overpriced and untraceable.

<comment><USER14> Untraceable? You should buy a print ad and try to figure out if it was worthwhile!

<comment><USER13> If the digital landscape allows for transparent reporting to measure marketing's incremental lift or ROI, then that becomes the baseline. Facebook believes its inventory (users) are a cut above the rest, thus their opaque model.

FB's advertising revenue is up 59% YOY, but that is not a clear signal growth will continue at the same clip. I foresee, digital marketers pushing back as marketing moves to a revenue generating business unit. Measurement becomes the backbone of all digital initiatives, can't measure FB as granular as display.

Yes, you can't track traditional media's impact. At least not yet. Its the reason why digital marketing overall has been growing at ~30% YoY.

<comment><USER14> Facebook provides plenty of conversion tracking features, if you can't figure out your ROI on FB advertising you're doing it wrong. There are obvious reasons why they wouldn't want to provide reports on what email addresses were marketed to (Google doesn't let you do that either...).

<comment><USER15> Figuring out cross channel attribution is far from an easy or solved problem in terms of determining ROI for a high funnel channel like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How did they go from paying an effective tax rate of around 40% between Q3-14 to Q4-15 to an tax rate of 25% this quarter?

Notably, they had 2,557 MUSD in income in Q4-15 and paid 995 MUSD in taxes and this quarter they have a larger income of 3,169 MUSD but pay less in taxes, 790 MUSD. [0]

[0] [https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_presentations/FB-Q...](https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_presentations/FB-Q316-Earnings- Slides.pdf) \- slide 22

<comment><USER14> It's a pretty meaningless number, they don't really pay that much in taxes. Their stock based compensation is artificially inflating it and that also explains the wild differences between quarters.

[http://qz.com/142032/why-is-facebooks-tax-rate-so-much- highe...](http://qz.com/142032/why-is-facebooks-tax-rate-so-much-higher-than- its-competitors/)

> Facebook pays its staff with stock options, and thanks to a quirk of tax > law, Facebook end up with large costs that can be deducted later. The > company issues options to executives and records their a rough estimate of > their value in its earnings report. When the options are exercised and the > executives purchase the stock, it has often increased in value beyond that > estimate—and the company can deduct that new, higher value, even though it > didn't cost it any real cash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Mobile advertising revenue represented approximately 84% of advertising revenue for the third quarter of 2016, up from approximately 78% of advertising revenue in the third quarter of 2015."

Is advertising dead on the desktop?

<comment><USER18> No one seems to have gotten it yet, but: Instagram.

You want to reach the cool kids, you must advertise on Instagram, and the only serious way to use ig is the app.

<comment><USER19> Instagram has ads?

<comment><USER18> Tons of them, in between posts, and they're fairly well targeted.

<comment><USER20> I manage three accounts and in the main one, I've never seen ads. Can't work out why.

<comment><USER21> 3 samples I just took (which actually made me realize i get a ton of ads cause I didn't scroll very far for this):

[https://i.gyazo.com/5d48e7d926ad5e237536c9dfb99d6aa1.png](https://i.gyazo.com/5d48e7d926ad5e237536c9dfb99d6aa1.png)

[https://i.gyazo.com/0194219ec43f3ce6e386f9d5b2443bc3.jpg](https://i.gyazo.com/0194219ec43f3ce6e386f9d5b2443bc3.jpg)

[https://i.gyazo.com/e7904940fab2d6b610cbac5f83d119d8.png](https://i.gyazo.com/e7904940fab2d6b610cbac5f83d119d8.png)

The last one is a gif or video.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> So Facebook is basically killing it in mobile without building phones and phone operating systems. Google whats up with that?

<comment><USER23> It's the stream; Facebook has a stream and Google does not.

After various experiments, I think people have figured out that the #1 way to make money on mobile is to have a stream of information that people willingly spend lots of time in. You just inject ads into that stream and bingo: profit. It's much harder for Google to win big here because while they have a very useful tool, people don't linger in it. They usually use it to get in, get what they need, and get out.

<comment><USER24> > _I think people have figured out that the #1 way to make money on mobile is > to have a stream of information that people willingly spend lots of time in_

Twitter says hi

<comment><USER11> Twitter has generally done decently well on revenue per user (although that has performed worse recently as they've reduced their sales force). Twitter's problem, more than anything else, has always been increasing active users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> That operating margin seems...impressive.

Well, hopefully it's not just me, but doesn't 45% seem like they're extraordinarily profitable?

<comment><USER17> It's pretty good, but not unheard of. Many banks and insurance companies hover around that number.

<comment><USER26> That's not really comparable because banks and insurers require a huge amount of capital to earn those margins. For example, JP Morgan (a pretty well-run and profitable bank) made a ~32% operating margin in fiscal 2015. But JP Morgan's return on tangible equity (a measure of net profitability relative to capital used) was only ~13%. Facebook, on the other hand, had a return on tangible equity of 25% in the last quarter. And as time goes by, that return on tangible equity should increase quite a bit for Facebook, while it is highly unlikely to improve all that much for JP Morgan because of competition in the banking industry.

<comment><USER27> Visa is the only financial company I know of with that kind of margin + profit scale. They're nearly capable of 50% net income margins (and $9b in operating income on $13.8b in sales). Also like Facebook they have relatively few employees compared to their immense profit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Will anyone explain why the stock is down quite a bit in extended house? The numbers look very strong to my non-finance background...

<comment><USER29> "Facebook shares declined as much as 7.8 percent Wednesday after two sobering comments on its conference call. First, Chief Financial Officer David Wehner said revenue growth rates will come down "meaningfully" next year, because the company won't keep increasing the percentage of ads that Facebook users see in their news feed. Second, capital expenditures will rise "substantially" in 2017 as the social network works to recruit the best engineers and build data centers, he said."

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-02/facebook-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-02/facebook- generates-record-revenue-on-growth-of-mobile-video-ads)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Stock is down 1.8% at time of this comment... Did 166% net income jump not meet expectations?

<comment><USER14> It was down 1.8% at the end of regular trading today (before the earnings call). It is down an additional 6.7% currently after bouncing around a bit-- the conference call is not going well!

You can see a chart of the after hours action by hitting "e" on the Google Finance chart (you may have to click on the chart first):

[https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...](https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1478123030266&chddm=391&chls=IntervalBasedLine&q=NASDAQ:FB&ntsp=0&ei=E14aWJnID6TKigKzxq64Bg)

<comment><USER31> "Facebook Reports $7 Billion Revenue, Beats Market Estimates" [http://www.inc.com/associated-press/facebook-third- quarter-e...](http://www.inc.com/associated-press/facebook-third-quarter- earnings-revenue-beat-market-expectations.html)

stock down 7% after hours. WTF

edit: ah, see: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12859949](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12859949)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Traditional media companies are really feeling the pain now, and it is probably going to be even worse for them when the advertisers turn even more of their money to google and facebook.

</comment><comment><USER33> Might be interesting for Facebook to move from charging for ads to start getting their cut of successful sale. If they would crack this, there might be positive loop effect. Getting to know if users actually purchased something would give FB more data, which would allow better targeting.

Implementation of course is not trivial. One way to make this work would be for Facebook to run the platform where purchase and payment takes place, like Amazon Marketplace.

</comment><comment><USER34> Are they including tablet numbers in mobile?

</comment><comment><USER35> I think we've seen Facebook all-time-highs.

</comment><comment><USER36> lol snapchat is starting to sting</comment>


Inappropriate for a start-up marketing video? - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNpz-44ZEuQ

<comment><USER2> personally it gets a thumbs down simply because it goes on too long, and the way it has been labelled as '10 easy ways to get rich', which would normally be an instant, 'wow! this looks like spam' <close page>.

I like the quality of the video, but it doesn't tell me anything about mo- grow. what makes it special, why I should trust mo-grow, etc.

You've definitely zigged where others in the financial services have zagged, but maybe you've gone too far. There is an element of trust that needs to be established, and the frat-boy voice-over, high-energy feel of the video just doesn't make me want to invest with you.

Now, if you were able to explain why your high-energy high-return mo-grow was the best investment plan guaranteed to make me millions, then I'd (possibly) give it more thought. But you've given me nothing but what is a bunch of useless facts about what I'd have to do to save x amount of money.

Ok, I'm not going to do any of those things. Why should I invest in Mo-grow? you forgot to mention that.

The video was also too long, and I can't imagine sharing it with anyone. What would make a person WANT to watch that video.

I'm sure you've seen this <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0zEXdDO5JU> \- that went viral because it was current, intelligent, interesting, etc. etc. and it didn't sell you anything (well, not obviously anyway). Now how can you take what mo-grow does, explain what everybody else does, how their way is wrong and your way is better.

Educate your audience, don't be condescending to them would be my advice.

The tact you took may work very well for some services, but I think financial services and this just doesn't fit.

</comment><comment><USER3> To be honest I thought you guys went a bit overboard on the examples of how to make money. There were just too many. I'd like to see you guys cut a few of those out and actually tell me what you do and give me a reason to think you are legitimate. Cool idea for a commercial though. Just a bit overdone.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Great feedback, thanks! We were trying to poke fun at all of the "get rich quick" tips out there, but I'd agree that the video is too long and doesn't offer much in the way of value to the viewer.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> We're playing around with a few different "grassroots" marketing ideas and wonder if this gets a thumbs up/thumbs down? Thanks for the feedback.</comment>