Testimony of Mark Zuckerberg – Hearing Before US House of Representatives [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://docs.house.gov/meetings/IF/IF00/20180411/108090/HHRG-115-IF00-Wstate-ZuckerbergM-20180411.pdf <comment><USER2> _> But it's clear now that we didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well. That goes for [...] data privacy. We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I'm sorry._

I was going through some old news archives about Facebook and their privacy policies. I came across the dire EFF warning in December 2009 [1]:

 _> "The issue of privacy when it comes to Facebook apps such as those innocent-seeming quizzes has been well-publicized by our friends at the ACLU and was a major concern for the Canadian Privacy Commissioner, which concluded that app developers had far too much freedom to suck up users' personal data, including the data of Facebook users who don't use apps at all. Facebook previously offered a solution to users who didn't want their info being shared with app developers over the Facebook Platform every time a one of their friends added an app: users could select a privacy option telling Facebook to "not share any information about me through the Facebook API.""_

Well, it turns out EFF was correct and accurately predicted the unethical scenario of Cambridge Analytica siphoning data from Facebook users who didn't even take their quiz.

The bullet points of "fixes" that MZ outlined don't really address the fundamental problem. Facebook's "data privacy" problem is not fixable if they have to ultimately run valuable ads against that data.

[1] [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/facebooks-new- privacy-...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/facebooks-new-privacy- changes-good-bad-and-ugly)

<comment><USER3> _> The bullet points of "fixes" that MZ outlined don't really address the fundamental problem. Facebook's "data privacy" problem is not fixable if they have to ultimately run valuable ads against that data._

I wholly disagree. They don't have to disclose the data to anyone in order to use it to target ads. Their targeting system works by allowing advertisers to specify targeting criteria, and then using logic on Facebook's own servers to match users to targeted ads. They aren't selling or disclosing the data to _anyone_. People keep conflating the CA situation with the business of targeted ads. One has nothing to do with the other.

<comment><USER4> Your argument makes sense as long as you consider something "private" if it's shared with Facebook _itself_.

You might, if you consider your personal interests to be consistently and permanently aligned with the ToS which best serves shareholder interest of the entity which controls the exploitation of the historical data, and on-going surveillance capability.

The data is pretty much unregulated, and there's no reason for it to ever be deleted; given it's size and value it's likely to live-on much longer than Facebook (the company/legal entity) as we know it today. If they got in financial trouble, the prudent thing would be to flog the lot to a data broker to be resold and repackaged indefinitely.

Facebook themselves have a long established reputation for doing whatever they like and apologizing only if and when they get caught, and doing the minimum possible to ward off regulation or churn.

Just like the use of the term "breach", there's a broader use of the term which makes sense given the _expectations_ of a user-base that's been kept in the dark for years (as opposed to technical people with an understanding of the industry).

For example, my contact list is not "private" if it's exfiltrated from my phone without my knowledge or consent, to be used for whatever purpose makes most money to whoever controls it (currently Facebook), against a ToS which can change at any time without notice, with almost no legal protection, regulation, or oversight.

<comment><USER3> _Your argument makes sense as long as you consider something "private" if it's shared with Facebook itself._

If you consider something so "private" that you would be upset that an algorithm on a secure serve might use it to target an ad to you - after you read and agreed to exactly that behavior when signing up - perhaps you shouldn't have given it to them in the first place. At what point do you take personal responsibility for giving away this information you consider to be so private and valuable?

<comment><USER4> > _At what point do you take personal responsibility for giving away this > information you consider to be so private and valuable?_

Informed consent seems like a reasonable place to start.

<comment><USER3> Yes, you were informed when you signed up. Your failure to read TOS, but agree to them anyway, is nobody's fault but your own. This whole culture of "well yeah, I did it, but obviously that doesn't mean I am responsible for it" is ludicrous to me. We are all responsible for our own choices in life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "What We Are Doing" under the "Cambridge Analytica" section is crap, _i.e._ lightweight or hypothetical ( _e.g._ "we're in the process of investigating every app that had access to a large amount of information before we locked down our platform in 2014").

By contrast, the same section under "Russian Election Interference" is well thought out. There's some hand-wavy stuff ( _e.g._ "in the U.S. Senate Alabama special election last year, we deployed new AI tools that proactively detected and removed fake accounts from Macedonia trying to spread misinformation"). But requiring "every advertiser who wants to run political or issue ads...confirm their identity and location" and mandating the ads "show...who paid for them" is meaningful. That they're "starting this in the U.S. and expanding to the rest of the world in the coming months" is more encouraging. I'm also genuinely optimistic about their "tool that lets anyone see all of the ads a page is running" and "searchable archive of past political ads."

With Cambridge Analytica, a core component of Facebook's advertising business model is threatened. Hence the inaction. With Russia, Facebook and political advertisers' interests are aligned. Hence, action.

<comment><USER6> > With Cambridge Analytica, a core component of Facebook's advertising > business model is threatened. Hence the inaction.

If they already disabled the API that CA was using, is "inaction" really the right word?

<comment><USER5> > _If they already disabled the API that CA was using, is "inaction" really > the right word?_

You don't find yourself testifying to the Congress because of a single technical loophole. This happens when a series of failures occur and fail to be remedied. In some cases they may not even be seen, internally, as failures [1][2].

Zuckerberg is there to tell the Congress "you can trust me." The Congress wants him to say that publicly to gauge if there's political will, amongst voters, to go after Facebook. Treating this as a narrow reaction to limited failures as opposed to a general questioning of the viability of an internationally-scoped ad-driven politically-volatile social network is what I expect Zuckerberg to do, and why I expect him to fall down.

[1] [https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/30/17179100/facebook-memo- le...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/30/17179100/facebook-memo-leaks-boz- andrew-bosworth)

[2] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2018/03/25/faceboo...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2018/03/25/facebook- android-data-collection/#5a25f38325db)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I do this often:

1) Go to pcpartpicker, pick Storage, sort by Price/GB:

[https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard- drive/#sort=...](https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard- drive/#sort=ppgb&page=1)

3TB (for $57.50)

2) Go to Google, look up number of people in the United States:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=us+population](https://www.google.com/search?q=us+population)

325.7 million

3) Divide

You can store 9.2 kilobytes for every single person in the United States, for just $57.50.

9.2 kilobytes is actually a pretty decent amount of data. For comparison, this is Chapter 40 of Pride and Prejudice, at 9kb:

[http://www.kellynch.com/e-texts/Pride%20and%20Prejudice/Prid...](http://www.kellynch.com/e-texts/Pride%20and%20Prejudice/Pride%20and%20Prejudice,%20Chapter%2039.txt)

The complete works of Shakespeare fit into 5 MB.

To store the equivalent of the complete works of Shakespeare for every person in the US would cost: $31,222.50.

Heck, I know small businesses that could afford that, let alone the mega-corp media conglomerates.

How much data does Verizon store about me? Comcast? Target? Visa?

<comment><USER8> This line of thinking is extremely reductionist to the point of uselessness. Anyone who's built products at scale can tell you this. There are thousands of things you aren't thinking of.

<comment><USER9> Why is it useless?

<comment><USER8> Say you buy those drives.

What's the cost to implement GDPR? What about storing high definition photos? What does availability across regions look like? What does latency look like? What does backup look like?

Do you see where I'm going with this?

<comment><USER10> Say I am an unhinged individual with $120 and I buy that one (1) drive.

>What's the cost to implement GDPR?: I laugh and continue to compile a list of where all crossbow enthusiasts with type-O blood have been in the past 6 months.

>What about storing high definition photos?: Facebook can handle that. All I want to do is store a 9KB index file on every US citizen, because I believe I am a vampiric J. Edgar Hoover.

>What does availability across regions look like?: The drive sits in my mom's basement as I continue to scrape crossbowforums.org against the Red Cross donors list.

>What does latency look like?: I guess however well a 50-centimeter SATA cable does.

>What does backup look like?: I buy two drives at once for $115 and get free shipping on the second one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "From now on, every advertiser who wants to run political or issue ads will need to be authorized. To get authorized, advertisers will need to confirm their identity and location. Any advertiser who doesn't pass will be prohibited from running political or issue ads. We will also label them and advertisers will have to show you who paid for them. We're starting this in the U.S. and expanding to the rest of the world in the coming months."

Interesting!

<comment><USER12> Edit: I mistook this from being a government action, not a private company action. I totally agree a private company is allowed to restrict things in this way.

>Any advertiser who doesn't pass will be prohibited from running political or issue ads.

How does this interact with the First Amendment? If I'm paying for a local TV company to run an add, wouldn't restricting my ability be in violation? What if I buy the local TV company and choose which ads are ran?

Edit: What about non-political or non-issue ads that still have a political component? For example, if I was a billionaire wanting to cause some certain political divides, I could definitely create ads that still cause great controversy. For example, spend some money developing a bullet proof school outfit, and then advertise it heavily. It is a bunch of extra work and expenditure I wouldn't do if I could just run gun control ads, but if those were banned are you going to ban any advertisements related to any merchandise that is related to political issues?

<comment><USER13> A private advertising medium (Facebook, twitter, the TV station, etc) are not responsible for upholding your first amendment right to free speech. They are a private entity that get to decide what gets published on their platform.

The first amendment only frees your speech from state suppression.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, upon rereading it I realize it was speaking from the point of Facebook. I though it had been speaking from the point of a government requirement, as in making a suggestion of what should be required by law. That one was my mistake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> >We also learned about a disinformation campaign run by the Internet Research Agency (IRA) — a Russian agency that has repeatedly acted deceptively and tried to manipulate people in the US, Europe, and Russia. We found about 470 accounts and pages linked to the IRA, which generated around 80,000 Facebook posts over about a two-year period. Our best estimate is that approximately 126 million people may have been served content from a Facebook Page associated with the IRA at some point during that period. On Instagram, where our data on reach is not as complete, we found about 120,000 pieces of content, and estimate that an additional 20 million people were likely served it.

This part seems to be rather interesting. The number of people who viewed the content created by IRA in general is appalling.

<comment><USER15> Is this appalling? What's appalling to me is the number of people who can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality.

I'm sure governments are going to come down hard on Zuck for "allowing disinformation to be spread", but won't give a second thought about cutting education budgets.

It's hard for politicians to make it illegal to lie or to run a platform where people might lie. People are always going to lie and try to deceive others. It would be more effective for these politicians to actually educate their constituents. This is just one of many benefits of having educated citizenry...

<comment><USER16> It can be easy for some people to forget that most people are generally spiteful, vindictive, petty jerks who can't look past the chips on their own shoulders and only rarely act kindly towards people who they want something from.

It's not that people don't deserve compassion and empathy, but don't ever expect positive things from others if you want to avoid spending your life perpetually disappointed.

<comment><USER17> Most people? No. But there are enough "spiteful, vindictive, petty jerks" out there that they need to be taken into consideration.

<comment><USER16> Well, I envy you your life experience but that doesn't look like the case from my viewpoint.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > In 2007, we launched the Facebook Platform with the vision that more apps > should be social. Your calendar should be able to show your friends' > birthdays, your maps should show where your friends live, and your address > book should show their pictures. To do this, we enabled people to log into > apps and share who their friends were and some information about them.

Anyone who was in a FB sales meeting when OpenGraph was launched knows this is a very calculated understatement. I've heard them explicitly sell the information of an entire user's friends list to anyone willing to pay.

<comment> squeaky-clean > I've heard them explicitly sell the information of an entire user's friends > list to anyone willing to pay.

Source? If this were true and they'd do it for anyone willing to pay, where can I give them money for user's personal data?

<comment><USER19> There is no source, because it's bullshit. FB has never sold access to their API. Access to the friend's data permission, like all other permissions, was free.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > "It's not enough to just connect people, we have to make sure those > connections are positive. It's not enough to just give people a voice, we > have to make sure people aren't using it to hurt people or spread > misinformation."

And be sure to report your fellow citizens for reeducation when they spread "negativity" and "misinformed opinions".

</comment><comment><USER20> Before anyone says Facebook's testimony is just fluff, we're a business that relies on Facebook's API to monitor activity, and we've been severely impacted. We no longer can get data as before - it's having a large effect on our business. So we definitely feel that action is being taken.

<comment><USER21> _We no longer can get data as before - it 's having a large effect on our business_

What sort of honest business depends on the Facebook API?

<comment><USER22> We were scraping data for a client for public events like music shows, business special days/etc, and that's been severely shut down and apparently on hold to approve any new apps. Again this is just getting like the date/location/ticket URL for a public page FB event that presumably businesses want people to know about - no private data about attendees/humans at all.

<comment><USER21> That seems like a legitimate use case.

(it was a genuine question!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I am not greatly concerned with Facebook's privacy policy. People voluntarily give up their personal information in order to use this free service.

I am more concerned about his identification of "fake news" and "hate speech" as issues without any clarification. These are both subjective descriptions with the potential for damaging abuse, which we are already seeing with the banning of Diamonds and Silk from Facebook.

In my opinion, Facebook, Google, and other social media platforms should be required to be content neutral and its users given first amendment protection (with its concomitant limits). This would require federal legislation.

<comment><USER24> I get a chill down my spine any time someone uses the phrase "hate speech". Who gets to decide what qualifies? The first amendment must be protected at all costs.

<comment><USER25> Whoever's exploiting the network effects decides what qualifies, and the First Amendment doesn't apply to them.

It's heartening that OStatus (GNU Social, Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) are getting some uptake, but existing federated networks are even more poorly equipped to compete with Facebook than with Twitter and Tumblr. The nice thing about Facebook is its privacy settings -- I can, say, post about going to Pride and make sure no one in my family sees it.

The problem is, Facebook could set up its rules so that campaign messaging for candidates they dislike just happens to violate them, and campaign messaging for candidates they like just happens not to. There's a lot of potential for abuse of power here.

It seems like a lot of people aren't worried about that, because they figure the targets of the current uses of this power really need to be suppressed. But there's no reason this power can't be directed elsewhere. I bet there are people who thought it was OK to fire us for being gay who are now pretty mad that people can be fired for donating to Prop 8.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Seems weak, I hope some of the representatives have read Tim Wu.

For example when Zuck says:

>My top priority has always been our social mission of connecting people, building community and bringing the world closer together. Advertisers and developers will never take priority over that as long as I'm running Facebook.

This is either misleading or a lie. Facebook is a corporation, what Zuckerberg wants to do as an individual isn't even relevant, what's relevant is what the corporation "wants" to do to increase profit. So far that has been pursuing connecting people and building communities and then taking that information and selling it to developers and advertisers. The phrasing places community and monetization in competition but Facebook's model isn't of competition between those it's model is a monetization _of_ community. So the testimony never speaks to the fundamental problem of having advertisers as any level of priority here.

Also to say that Cambridge Analytica abused the system sidesteps the issue of whether it was in Facebook's interest to allow this data to be collected and then misused. Cambridge Analytica purchased data which made Facebook the most attractive advertising platform for them because of the targeting they could do. That is good for Facebook's bottom line. They also don't address the total amount of information that may be out there, floating through advertisers outside of Facebook's control right now. Despite new restrictions how much about me is already out there? That's what I want to know.

Overall, it's basically what I expected but I really hope there are a few representatives who can set aside the specifics of this one incident and attack the wider notion of Facebook's purpose.

<comment><USER27> > Facebook is a corporation, what Zuckerberg wants to do as an individual > isn't even relevant

Zuck is a majority shareholder, so what he wants to do as an individual can actually be fairly significant here.

<comment><USER26> Fair. Perhaps the most salient criticism is that Zuckerberg's top priority is connecting people because his company is designed to use those connections in order to sell lots of advertising.

<comment><USER19> Advertising is the best way to pay for the servers, lawyers, developers, office space, and everything else FB needs, while keeping the cost for users low.

I believe they are investigating options for letting you pay for FB to turn off advertisements, however.

In the end, it's hard to know for sure what Mark's true motivations are, just as it is for anyone else. The only person who knows Mark's true intentions is Mark. That said, I personally believe him. When I listen to him talk about what he wants to do with Facebook, it seems obvious to me that he has good intentions at heart.

He's about my age, and when I was young the internet let me communicate with people from different areas of the world, different backgrounds, and helped me expand my own understanding of humanity. The internet made me a better person -- a more tolerant, more thoughtful, less prejudiced person. I hoped that the internet could facilitate the same personal growth in the rest of humanity, too. By drawing people together from the disparate corners of the world online, we could become a more tolerant, more understanding species. Mark has said similar things.

Unfortunately, things haven't quite worked out as he, or I, hoped, it seems. =(

<comment><USER28> about same age too and you express well how I feel about the situation.

We are not done here though, the fight to use the internet to connect the world continues!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Here is the personality insight from IBM Watson on the text [https://www.dropbox.com/s/j4ftupd4jd612ma/Screen%20Shot%2020...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/j4ftupd4jd612ma/Screen%20Shot%202018-04-09%20at%202.18.00%20PM.png?dl=0)

(using [https://personality-insights- demo.ng.bluemix.net/](https://personality-insights-demo.ng.bluemix.net/))

<comment><USER30> It saddens me that IBM is setting the expectations so low for natural language processing that they're basically reducing it to a Myers-Briggs test.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Interesting. He really puts Facebook into the role of policing its users (and advertisers). He describes taking down thousands of fake accounts, investigating whether certain pages have connections with IRA and taking them down if so.

This will probably sound reassuring to legislators, but it pretty much permanently accepts the burden of responsibility for misinformation on the site. It sounds likely to force Facebook into a costly permanent arms race against every malicious political actor in the world. I wonder how regular users will get caught in the crossfire.

Not that I feel bad for FB here -- they make tons of money because they have the most captive attention of any entity in the world. Attention is valuable because it allows platforms to influence people's behavior toward certain actions. Advertisers are not the only ones who realize this, and FB has to take responsibility for all forms of influence on its site, not just commercial ads.

<comment><USER32> Actually under section 310, he doesn't bear liability for failures.

However SESTA and FOSTA have eroded that for "sex trafficking". I expect more exceptions to sneak in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> As shitty as Facebook is as a service, I don't think they should have any legal obligation to 'protect' users from their own neglect.

I don't use facebook, because I think a free-software based & decentralized social network would be the right way to do social networking, but if the rest of the people want to give away their info, fine by me.

If someone I know wants to give my info to fb, it's fine too, but he/she loses part of my trust.

I value the freedom to do whatever you want with the data you have more than the convenience of the government protecting whatever data I foolishly gave away to someone.

<comment><USER34> You make it sound like the users aren't even on the Facebook site. Remember that the 'users' are using a _Facebook_ service, a consumer product provided by Facebook. They are responsible for what the product is, and does, regardless of what the users think.

<comment><USER35> Do we need to keep reminding people that even if you never created an account, you have a facebook user associated with your real life identity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I stopped reading at that paragraph. That Zuckerberg is seriously out of its league.

>> It's not enough to just connect people, we have to make sure those connections are positive.

Does he really think he can define what "positive" means with a platform hosting hundred of millions of communications ? There is no positive, there's human nature. Regulating that by FB itself won't work but worse, it will be a tyranny. The gated wall of FB will mean gated psychology, sociology, etc. FB could be great if it was run by people who think about people, not shareholders...

</comment><comment><USER37> All this says is they don't have control over their network and they're just bleeding out data everywhere. The primary takeaway especially with regard to the election tampering is that this (Facebook) is a huge, free, open tool to abuse and control elections.

</comment><comment><USER38> Your credit data had been stolen, your health data had been stolen, your government records every word you say online, your "smart" fridge is ddosing wikipedia, you worry about being unreachable by silly spam that may or may not effect your voting for one of the two equally horrible politicians

</comment><comment><USER39> "This is me telling you what you want to hear, but I don't mean a word of it and I will continue to get away with whatever I can until I get caught at which time I will tell you what you want to hear again."

<comment><USER40> "Dumb fucks"

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Why is the date set in the future? April 11?

<comment><USER42> This is the notes he will be presenting.

<comment><USER43> This really confused me, thanks for the clarification

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> What exactly is this, and why is it dated 2 days from now?

<comment><USER45> Good catch - [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-43698739](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-43698739)

Edit - Explanation: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16795723](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16795723)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Surprised at Zuckerberg/Facebook's response to all this. The cynical part of me says it's only due to the negative PR all this has generated but I hope this works out for better privacy for all those who continue to use Facebook.

I wonder if other tech companies will be called on to testify, Dorsey, Page, et. al.

</comment><comment><USER47> It's good to see Zuckerberg taking swift and decisive action to try and plug the leaks related to Cambridge Analytica. I think that it is sorely needed, and it is probably too late for many on the Facebook platform.

However, what's more interesting to me is the disturbing details about the spread of political advertising on Facebook. It seems that elections were much more heavily data mined and influenced than before. A nation state level attack on elections seems plausible and highly achievable, and was done not just in the US but France, Germany and elsewhere.

I will be closely following whether the radical transparency measures proposed will have much impact given the upcoming elections in much more corruption prone countries such as India.

<comment><USER48> You can't plug a data leak. It's too late. The data is out there in the wild and will be forever: [https://slate.com/technology/2018/04/facebook-cant- clean-up-...](https://slate.com/technology/2018/04/facebook-cant-clean-up-its- data-spill.html)

<comment><USER49> It does become less relevant, moreso when the existence of the data itself is a major story.

<comment><USER48> I guess it depends what use somebody can make of the data itself. Presumably human psychology doesn't change very much, so you could still use it to train and validate models years or decades later.

<comment><USER50> Not to mention using it to support a status quo that prevents the information from aging so quickly, maintaining its relevance. News about rocks will remain popular if the spear is never invented.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Did anyone look at the pictures of him at the hearing? I am now certain zuckerberg sent a robot instead of him. You can tell by the lifeless emotiona.

</comment><comment><USER52> I am fascinated to watch his testimony. Regardless of what is submitted, it will be highly interesting to see him deliver these words and stand up to questioning.

<comment><USER53> This written testimony is offered in addition to his in person testimony, he won't repeat it.

That way Congress has both the information "for the record" and the opportunity to grandstand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Chrome web store should be locking things down as well. But that's a bit more difficult.

</comment><comment><USER18> > "Facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company. For most of our > existence, we focused on all the good that connecting people can bring." \- > Mark Zuckerberg 2018

> "They trust me — dumb fucks." \- Mark Zuckerberg 2010

Interesting placement of "most"

<comment><USER55> That second quote is from 2004, although it wasn't reported until 2010

<comment><USER54> Plus, he was a kid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Zuckerberg will tell to the whole world they are sorry and they will do everything in their power that CA will not happen again and people will forget. But the issue is not in CA abusing the access. The issue is they are having the data. And they can and they are abusing them in same manner as CA did. CA is just a good example how much power you have with the information the FB has. And they have more. FB is public enemy #1 on global scale and they should be shot down. They're corrupting the whole society and this has to stop wherever you like them or not.

</comment><comment><USER57> I'm confused - did he read all that as his opening remarks? Seems pretty wrong, but it's written that way...

</comment><comment><USER58> Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

Zuck: Just ask

Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

Zuck: People just submitted it.

Zuck: I don't know why.

Zuck: They "trust me"

Zuck: Dumb fucks

<comment><USER59> Please, enough with this. The tedium is overwhelming.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why is the tech world quiet on the possible impact of solar flares? - <AUTHOR> With the last wave of solar flares it seems that GPS tracking is going to unpredictable/inaccurate for some time in the near future. With the predicted (and predictable) increase in solar flares up to 2013 how come there's barely any discussion on this? Forget debt ceilings. This hitting could destroy everything the life we are used to is built on.<p>Now I know that some of this is speculative on my part but my question still stands. Why is there little to no noise about it? <comment><USER2> How is GPS going to be "inaccurate for some time in the near future" with the recent solar flares? Could you give me some links to articles or something? I read a lot of space related stuff and I haven't come across something like this.

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/mobile/08/05/solar.flare.gp...](http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/mobile/08/05/solar.flare.gps/)

The peak is set to hit towards 2013. ZDNet (I think) ran an article on how it would mean that power would need shutting down for 3 months to avoid being burnt out during the peak

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It falls into the category of crazy until it happens, and likely given enough time. It's in the same category as CA falling into the Pacific Ocean, World War III and a new volcano forming in a populated area.</comment>


Google's link shortener is officially dead - <AUTHOR> https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/03/30/googles-link-shortener-is-officially-dead/ <comment><USER2> Good. Now hopefully others follow suit.

There's no legitimate reason to use URL shorteners. It's only if you want to hide malware, tracking links, referral links, etc - none of which benefit the user.

</comment><comment><USER3> Curious: any idea how much would it cost to run a year?

<comment><USER2> Probably not that much, there's not much processing power involved nor bandwidth used (it's really just serving 301 redirects). A bare-metal dedicated server should handle quite a bit of traffic and remain cost effective (compared to their "cloud" equivalents).</comment></comment>


Build an NB-IoT GPS Tracker on STM32 L476 with Apache Mynewt and Embedded Rust - <AUTHOR> https://firstname.lastname@example.com/build-an-nb-iot-gps-tracker-on-stm32-l476-with-apache-mynewt-and-embedded-rust-8c095a925546 <comment><AUTHOR> Let's build an NB-IoT GPS Tracker with STM32 L476, Quectel L70-R GPS module and Quectel BC95 NB-IoT module... And discover how Apache Mynewt OS and Embedded Rust make it so easy!</comment>


Ask HN: What did you do a decade ago that you would never do now? - <AUTHOR> Inspired by reading this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILOVEYOU
I'd never open an attachment from someone unless I was expecting it but this email and attachment were opened by a lot of people. <comment><USER2> Actively show off/try to impress everyone I meet

</comment><comment><USER3> Not caring at all about what I eat.

</comment><comment><USER4> Smoking

<comment><AUTHOR> Vaping?</comment></comment>


Show HN: My 1-week project, OpenCombinator.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.opencombinator.com Anyone can be a mentor or investor in some walk of life. Anyone can be a founder, creator or student in another. Anyone can mod their own, or someone else's news list.<p>A tool without restrictions, operating on a finite set of rules. You decide whether it evolves to be used for good or evil. <comment><USER2> Interesting idea but to be honest, the color palette is quite distracting - there's too much going on.

* the yellow background for the news items is a show stopper - the text will look just fine on it's own!

* the two-tone peach/cream background for the main content blocks is distracting. instead try a subtle tone for the left section and the page body color for the news section

* the dark grey background + blue headers and footers is not cohesive. make the background a very light grey or creme color (#f8f8f8 for example) and if you want the headers and footers to have a color, I'd make them extend the full width of the page or else make them flat (no-gradient)

Of course, this is all my opinion, and you get what you pay for right? :)

Good luck with this interesting idea!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I pro'lly gotta work on that. I get a little carried away once I start CSS'ing.

<comment><USER3> Cool project, I played around with the CSS a little bit myself but didn't have as much time a I thought (running late right now) but I'll still show you what I came up with so far just so you can see an alternate perspective.

Screenshot: <http://i.imgur.com/U4uO8.png> Color Scheme: <http://i.imgur.com/6oUyx.png>

If you like it and actually want to implement it, shoot me an email (proexploit[at]gmail.com) and I'll clean up the CSS and send it to you, this was all done in firebug and turned out messier than I intended.

<comment><USER2> That looks quite nice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I read everything on the page, but have no idea what it means.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've poked around and even created a SubCombinator. But, I'm still trying to figure out exactly what the site offers. In some aspects its feels like Hacker News with Reddit sort of categories.

Then you have this Expert/Student system. Honestly, I'm not completely sure I understand it. I see that I can set myself as the expert for a SubReddit...I mean SubCombinator.

 _"At the end of every month, the top five Sensei (advisers or investors) in each area will receive the proposals of the top ten Grasshoppers (entrepreneurs or activists), based on points earned for intelligent posts and comments that month."_

So, this didn't make sense to me until I registered. If I understand correctly, you 'pre-fill' a sort of pitch/proposal that you want to be sent out. Then based on your activity in the site it will be emailed to the 'Experts' of the SubCombinators where you've earned the most points recently. Does that sound right?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right. You fill in your proposal, which is kept hidden. If you're in the top 10-rated "grasshoppers" in a subcom, at the end of the month, your proposal gets packaged into a nice email that goes out to just the top 5-rated "sensei" or experts.

<comment><USER5> Have you shared this with people who would be experts and actually interested in receiving proposals? I guess I don't fully understand how my activity in a news sharing site makes me important to an investor. You're basically trying to reward people who participate and submit links with the idea that their pitch will be seen by an investor who is following a topic you contribute to.

Its definitely an interesting approach. And there's some work to be done on the UI, education and flow within the site. You just need to make sure there's real value for everyone involved.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have, and there are a few investors who are waiting to see what happens here. Myself included. It's got to be an organic process; hopefully some people with great ideas will start posting and sharing their concepts, and it will snowball. Although I should stress I don't see this as a primarily IT- oriented site, it could become anything, or go in any direction, depending on who gets involved. In a lot of ways it's an experimental, theoretical model. I have no idea if it will really work, but I can imagine a lot of interesting proposals being collected that would be interesting opportunities for investors, who in turn will have to work to get their ratings up, in order to see those proposals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Don't use terminology like Sensei and Grasshopper as it confused me with what the idea even is. Plus it means you've got a lot more text with all the brackets. Although I do not like the colour scheme, it's really distracting.

</comment><comment><USER7> Make it pretty. I cannot think when I see that page.

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't understand what an upvoting news site has to do with advisors or entrepeneurs. How does the right column relate to the left?

I understand that Ycombinator has hacker news, but the two aren't tied to each other very closely.

<comment><AUTHOR> YC is great, but it's essentially closed to other investors and, while the program is merit-based, it's a closed selection process.

HN is nice because there's a meritocracy at work; the concept is to allow that type of meritocracy to force both investors and entrepreneurs to have to work for one another's attention. The site is just a conduit for BPs or proposals from the most motivated idea-people to get into the hands of the most motivated action-people in any area. And every area can be broken into two parties with a mutual interest in industry news, who need to sift through each other to find the best people on the opposite team to work with. So; this is just an engine based on that concept, with up/down votes serving as an objective determinant every month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What the fuck was that about?

I'm so sorry to speak so frankly but I thought this time my unvarnished first impression would be useful

The overwhelming screaming in my head was

What the fuck was that about?

Make it clear what you are trying to achieve. fewer distractions. one goal

Good luck

</comment><comment><USER10> Here's my take on on the design (which should be priority #1 if you think the idea is any good):

Minimize the number of font styles. I'm counting over 10 distinct size/face/color/decoration combinations. Cutting that down to 3 or so will reduce the ugly tremendously.

Also try to figure out what you want users to read first, next, etc and figure out a structure where that feels more natural. At the moment, I'm totally confused when I look at it.

I'd also try to come up with a more concise description of what the site does. After reading the description on the left, I'm still kind of confused.

</comment><comment><USER11> For the design part, go through this ( <http://paulstamatiou.com/startup-web- design-ux-crash-course> ) post by Paul if you haven't already. That really is a crash course in design and should help you get started.

<comment><USER12> After that, <http://www.blueprintcss.org/> (or <http://960.gs/>) and <http://www.colourlovers.com/palettes>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Advertising that you only spent one week on it hardly makes me want to invest my own time in it. It sounds like a website thats going to rot away in the same timeframe.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Okay. CSS and color scheme need to be improved. Definitely need to think of how to explain the message more clearly. Nicer graphics, easier-to-read fonts. Check.

What does everyone think of the idea of a user-controlled, up-ranking newsgroup where the highest rated investors receive the proposals from the highest rated entrepreneurs? I know the site isn't beautiful. It's a concept. I just wanted to get the bare bones framework in place and launch it... Of course I want it to be pretty, but I'm more concerned about whether the idea can hold water. I spent a week on it because that's how long it took to write the code; the "graphics" took about an hour. I want to test the function before I spend time beautifying. I want to know if this idealistic model actually pans out and rewards the investors who take the time to rank on it.

Specifically, at the end of the month, I want to see the quality of the proposals that go to investors and whether we get any interesting startups funded out of it. Hopefully in green tech, non-profits/NGOs, etc, as that's where I'd really like to see this go.</comment>


Dozens of immigrants ... coerced into giving up visas and green cards - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-immigration-ban-travel-ban-2017-1 <comment><USER2> This article is garbage, read the introduction of the lawsuit itself: [https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3438631/EDVA- Amen...](https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3438631/EDVA-Amended- Complaint.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Here is the Introduction verbatim:

"This ban, when first promulgated, included individuals on immigrant visas and returning lawful permanent residents."

So why is it ok for returning lawful permanent residents to be banned ? To become a permanent resident, you have to go through tons of paperwork and background checks already. It takes anywhere from 9-12 months to even years to get a green card. The point is that this executive order completely ignored lawful PRs and that is totally unfair and probably unconstitutional. Whats next ? Naturalized citizens ? Then who is next ?

I can understand banning non-americans. But lawful Permanent Residents are considered "US Persons" as per definition which means they have all the rights as a citizen except the right to vote and run for office. If I was PR who was treated like this, I will be furious. Period. And I love America.

<comment><USER2> It's not OK, it's totally fucked. However, I was saying the article was poor reporting. That has nothing at all to do with with my views on the policies and actions in play.

<comment><USER3> oh ok. I read your post and my take away was that this entire topic is garbage. My bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Questions:

1\. Do these people, who were coerced into "cancelling" their immigrant visas, have to go through the whole process again, or, since they were coerced, will their visa be reactivated?

2\. What are the consequences of this on the administration?

<comment><USER5> I don't think anyone knows the answer to either of these questions at this point. It will depend on what happens next.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What's with the empty brackets in the title?

<comment><AUTHOR> I meant to say that the title is redacted. IIRC [...] would do it but the site skipped the ....

<comment><USER7> FWIW, a plain ellipsis should replace any number of words redacted for brevity. E.g., "The US government is violating the due process, equal protection, and habeas corpus rights of immigrants," becomes "The US government is violating the... rights of immigrants."

If replacing a word with another word to convey missing contextual meaning- e.g., "I won't do business with [Mr. Trump] in the future," that's when you pull out the brackets.

<comment><USER8> Bracketed ellipses are often used in quoted material to mark elisions to make clear that the ellipses are inserted by the party relaying the quote to mark a elision, not ellipses present in the original text.

 _Most_ (maybe even all) formal sources that I've encountered use this style, not unbracketed ellipses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> going to comment on my own submission: it's hard to underestimate the damage done to these people. Leaving aside the life /torture/death cases, and just assuming that they are regular immigrants: They have sold everything they own and probably gone heavily in debt to finance the trip....to essentially paradise. And now?

<comment><USER9> A similar thing happened to 91 Cuban refugees that were in transit to the US when Obama ended the policy of granting residency to any who reached the US.

<comment><USER10> There's a big difference between the current situation and the one you point out: the current immigrants were known in advance and traveling legally between their home country and ours. The Cubans were not known until they arrived. That is, Obama had no way to know they were in transit. Trump could have known he was stranding people, had he asked and if the INS has the data accessible.

<comment><USER9> The difference isn't that big. It had been US policy for decades to grant residency to Cuban refugees. Obama could have made the change effective as of a date a couple months in the future to avoid stranding those in transit but he chose instead to make it effective immediately.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Trouble with Brands - <AUTHOR> http://www.strategy-business.com/press/freearticle/09205

<comment><USER2> _The final major problem with brands is loss of trust. Our data shows that the amount of trust consumers place in a brand today is a ghost of what it was 10 years ago._

I remember the first time I bought a Sony walkman and it performed more poorly than a Sanyo of half the cost, then died completely. I opened it to try to fix it and found inside... all Sanyo parts!

The moral: Brands are (or were) more than a marketing gimmick. Putting a sticker on a white label product is not a magical transformation. Customers are not fooled. When someone dials your phone number for help, encasing them in inescapable machine menus, or connecting them to someone on another continent who's never even seen your product is _not_ an acceptable solution. A good brand used to be a promise that this kind of nonsense wouldn't happen; No more, it seems.

In short, if you want the return of customer loyalty to a brand, _try not sucking_.

</comment><comment><USER3> I made it through a few pages... it's interesting enough, but frankly a lot of it is common sense (brand saturation, loss of trust, uh-huh, tell me something that's not obvious). I shudder to think how they compute a figure like "brands provide 30% of shareholder value".</comment>


Teaching the Essentials of Garbage Collection - <AUTHOR> http://blog.brownplt.org/2013/02/19/teaching-gc.html

<comment><USER2> That's actually pretty cool; I remember the joy when my own malloc/free ran without crashing real-world programs; doing the same witha GC would be both satisfying and a good way to find bugs.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've actually used this system as a student in a programming language design class, in which we had to implement semispace and mark-and-sweep collectors. I had the misfortune (unique in 2 sections of the class that semester) of running into a bug in the framework, but I believe that got fixed, and it was otherwise pretty dang cool.

<comment><USER4> We used C++ to write a game and _SOMEHOW_ without knowing properly about how GC worked - learned to write our own garbage collectors for projectiles that went out of screen and enemies that died. :) It was basically the eye opener for how GC's worked. Though I am sure it's faaaaaar more complicated than the Sets we used to keep track. It still made me better at manually handling memory.

That being said, I prefer GC and/or Automatic Reference Counting at compile time. Still though, it was a nice "feeling" to manage your own memory in an (incredibly small) project.

<comment><USER5> "GC and/or Automatic Reference Counting at compile time" - What do you mean by that?

<comment><USER6> He's probably talking about ARC for Objective-C, that automatically releases references and allocations when it's impossible for those allocations to be used again in scope.

<comment><USER4> Heh, I would have thought spelling the acronym out might be more clear than just typing ARC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That looks like a great tool! I recently took a class in programming language design where we had to implement a simulated _Treadmill_ garbage collector using a circular linked list in Java. It taught us the basics of how the algorithm works but not really how it functions within the context of an actual programming language implementation.

The proposed framework looks like it has a lot of potential.

</comment><comment><USER8> Brown PLT is jokingly said to do every programming language research unrelated to the type theory (not saying the type theory is unimportant of course). I hope to see more researches and directions like that.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is really an awesome pedagogical tool.</comment>


GCable - #cablegate Google-search helper - <AUTHOR> http://www.aspektratio.net/gcable.html This (admittedly quite simple) tool will help you construct a Google query searching the contents of Wikileaks US Embasssy cables <comment><USER2> I have to say, I really like <http://cablesearch.org/> for this.

He's done an amazing job and as the entire corpus of cables is released, he'll have a valuable and useful little web property.</comment>


Ask HN: Midwest hardware startup (data storage) visiting SF. Meet for coffee? - <AUTHOR>

We'll will be bumming around the Bay Area all of next week. We're from St. Louis and looking to co-locate in San Francisco.
The CEO Andrew has an interesting story as a 19 year old founder and hardware inventor. Network World did a nice write-up on his back-story though the FB rumor was false and we've since dispelled it: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/110612-evtron-263983.html
Anyone with interest in high-capacity, high-efficiency data storage at a lower cost, feel free to email me at ivicars [at] evtron.com. I'd love to take you out for coffee or drinks so we can talk shop. Otherwise, we'll be taking in the sites or working our butts off at Startup Embassy.
Thank you to everyone in this community. As a non-Valley startup-type, I still feel connected to the Bay Area because of HN. <comment><USER2> I run some of the hardware startup events / community in SF - let me know who you want to talk with. Just email is my HN s/n + @gmail.com.</comment>


Google is kind of bad now? (Rather than finding answers it ranks SEO spam) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@4fbf2d0bfde1/e1c240fac6d9 <comment><USER2> Goodhart's Law: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law)

Google is the same thing it always was, but their measurements became a target. Thus the usefulness of Google as a yardstick of relevance against the backdrop of info on the Net came to a screeching halt.

This is why I've always thought search and advertising are not two sides of the same coin, even if it may look like it from a service providers point of view. After all, Google is basically advertising your search activity to business's potential entry point for a business relationship.

Fundamentally though, if you're searching, the more valuable service is to make minimal assumptions about what the searcher is looking for, while maybe helping empower them to be better at formulating good queries. I remember digital library catalogs were decent at cutting teeth for that sort of thing.

EDIT:Dropped a few necessary words. Oops.

</comment><comment><USER3> Google is always been giving me negative feelings. When this internet censorship started, they just manifest them self to clear to me. Then I was sure this company is nothing but trouble actually. Sad anyway so many good innovational products have to be part of censorship company. I can't support any of they actions against people and ideologys. Sorry google, but you are evil to me and many others.. lies lies .. and tax avoiding and people censorship is your core business.

</comment><comment><USER4> Google is a siren server. Read Who Owns the Future? by Lanier Jaron..

About the seo spam. It has always been like this.

The difference. Is that today. Google also wants to take over all the content you're interested in, be even more powerful, and steal the business from content creators through the short information at the top.

Basically. Yes.

Google is completely plagiarizing the entire web to improve your business returns, and yes.

Google is the one who penalizes you for creating plagiarized or copied content.

Although today. They. They are taking advantage of that very thing.

The only difference is that they give as real the content of the web pages that pay them the most.

Despite the fact that this content is stolen from another side or from your blog.

For Google it is more true / real / authentic / original, the content that offers more and more benefits to your own company.

So the internet is screwed up today. Even if you have a personal website and do not write on third party sites...

<comment><USER5> Your use of. linebreaks.

And punctuation. Makes.

this really hard

To read.

Basically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I also found this to be the case but check out verbatim mode under Google tools search it makes it all better apparently

</comment><comment><USER7> You could have the converse with duckduckgo and have searched hit or miss a lot</comment>


IBM's Old Playbook - <AUTHOR> https://stratechery.com/2018/ibms-old-playbook/ <comment><USER3> I'm really worried about Redhat. IBM is currently a sinking ship, they've laid off parts of their workforce, they're failing to capture the cloud market, and the Redhat buy seems to be a ploy to maintain relevance. I'm seriously anxious about Redhat being drug under during IBM's death throes.

Redhat isn't going to save IBM. They sold because they had an unsustainable business, and Openshift is still a risky play to run a stable business on. The container space is starting to get awfully crowded, and cloud providers can provide better tailored experiences and skip containers altogether with serverless.

As a long time taker of Redhat certs, I hope they pull through and still look something like the Redhat I have loved and known.

<comment><USER4> I've been keeping track of the various Kubernetes services and agree the market is massively crowded right now. AWS, Google and Azure dominate the cloud market. IBM is a distant joint last place by most metrics.

OpenShift won't compete with the cloud offerings in the long run. Redhat are currently competing with On-Prem offerings and trying to make a case for 'hybrid'.

Even in this market OpenShift is competing against at least 15 alternatives. For anyone interested I've been crowd sourcing data for each and trying to work out key differentiators.

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nAgDxQZYeAMLwz8iI3_a...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nAgDxQZYeAMLwz8iI3_aZ6lagDtEPg8X9PFqQvgtEjA/edit?ts=5bd7135b#gid=0)

OpenShift is definitely differentiated in terms of security. They also have network and storage features that are arguably valuable to enterprise customers.

Google GKE On-Prem is out soon. I never see Azure Stack mentioned so maybe Microsoft will look into a Docker acquisition to boost their enterprise footprint.

The cloud seems like the bigger growth area though so perhaps this On-Prem container platform land grab will be short lived.

<comment><USER5> > I never see Azure Stack mentioned so maybe Microsoft will look into a Docker > acquisition to boost their enterprise footprint.

The companies using Azure Stack today are some of the least likely to be parroting that fact. Microsoft's on-prem is pretty well entrenched, particularly in "boring enterprise" where pragmatism beats idealism, are quiet "do the work, don't leak the work" more than proudly proclaim to be chasing the trends.

That said, Azure Stack (and Azure) already have strong Docker support, without an acquisition to date.

More interestingly, in my opinion, though, is that right now Azure Functions is the only "serverless" runtime with a strong open source story, and equally strong on-prem (both as part of Azure Stack and, increasingly from what I hear, standalone) as well as Cloud support.

<comment><USER6> > That said, Azure Stack (and Azure) already have strong Docker support, > without an acquisition to date.

Maybe I'm confused about what you mean by "Azure Stack", but there was most certainly an acquisition[1] related to Azure's docker support, the Deis team (now part of Azure team) were some of the earliest contributors to the Helm project, and this buyout was widely hailed from what I can remember as Microsoft's first big investment in Kubernetes.

Many of those people remained with the Azure team, and none of them work on Deis today. So, instead, they are driving the development of tools like Draft, AKS, OSBA, and Virtual Kubelet.

And of course MS also made a high-profile acquisition of GitHub, just not sure that one is relevant to Azure Stack.

[1]: [https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/10/microsoft-acquires- contain...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/10/microsoft-acquires-container- platform-deis/)

<comment><USER5> It was in reference to an acquisition of Docker, Inc. itself. They've worked quite closely with Docker, Inc. but (so far?) haven't acquired them.

But correct, there have been related acquisitions.

<comment><USER6> Interesting, I would say that it's fortunate nobody can buy Kubernetes (because it only is composed of acceptance and compliance with a conformance suite, there are dozens of separate implementations and they may all be Kubernetes.)

To be honest that's a great feature and one reason why I am not terribly scared about consequences of any news about a RedHat acquisition; that being so even though I do follow OpenShift with some interest.

I'm sure that Docker is also a target for acquisitions by these bigger companies but while we're on the subject thanks to Kubernetes and the CRI, it's pretty darn unlikely that anyone is ever going to totally corner the market on Linux containers, at least any time in the foreseeable future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Most of my experience with IBM has been pretty reliable:

1\. They bring the A players to the sales process 2\. They bring the B players to manage the account (technically and commercially) 3\. They bring the C/D players to do the actual work.

Wondering if I'm an outlier or if this is a standard mode of operation for them? I wonder how this plays in with their OSS strategy? Who works on things like OpenShift?

<comment><USER8> Whenever I meet with any of the big(ish) players to to assess a product I spesifically ask them to send engineers instead of sellers.

If they send sellers after that we usually just ask them to leave and send the engineers. I've seen quite a few pouts but it's impossible to get accurate product information out a seller, they just tell you what you want to hear.

I've never been in contact with IBM before but I'm not surprised about your experience.

<comment><USER9> What do you do when the engineers turn up and know nothing about the prices, contracts, or anything else like that?

<comment><USER10> You can usually negotiate that after you've confirmed that the product will actually do what you need it to do.

When I took sales calls, I would usually sit through the intro pitch from the salesperson, and if it seemed in the ballpark, I would cut the call short and ask to be put in touch with product/engineering by email. And if I liked what I saw, I'd go back to the salesperson for pricing, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A lot of ink spilled to reach these conclusions:

> one of the most important takeaways from the Red Hat acquisition is the > admission that IBM's public cloud efforts are effectively dead

> while IBM will certainly be happy to have the company's cash-generating RHEL > subscription business, the real prize is Openshift, a software suite for > building and managing Kubernetes containers

> IBM is betting it can again provide the solution [to cloud lock-in], > combining with Red Hat to build products that will seamlessly bridge private > data centers and all of the public clouds

To sum up - IBM lost the hardware cloud wars and is making big bets on cloud software. The author doesn't answer the key question posed at the end - <USER2> the problem of cloud vendor lock-in actually exist (and the implied question - if it does, how profitable is it)? I suppose that's the info he wants you to pay for ;)

<comment><USER12> > IBM lost the hardware cloud wars

This makes me scratch my head. I heard Power9 is getting more and more traction in some clouds, notably Google's.

Maybe IBM lost the "bog-standard VM-based cloud" wars, where the "standard" is what AWS / GCP / Linode / DO, etc offer. But that space is indeed crowded; doing something where you have little competition makes a lot of sense. (I wonder if they'll be able to.)

<comment><USER13> IBM bought SoftLayer 5 years ago, and was unable to capitalize on their niche (bare metal). Instead they decided to double down on provisioning VMs, which SoftLayer was never that great at. The set of features IBM's VM's provides compared to any other modern cloud is terrible (headed backwards in Gartner charts). It's barely getting any better, meanwhile Google/AWS/Azure are gobbing on features.

IBM effectively failed in their integration of SoftLayer. They bought SoftLayer but failed to modernize them. Why will RedHat be any different?

Take a look at what's left of SoftLayer today. Most folks who had the necessary skills to keep their ancient php platform relevant have left a long time ago.

I'm sure IBM is on their 5th iteration of their "next gen" VM provisioning system by now, due out any quarter...

<comment><USER14> Have they fixed their scheduler? For 5 years nothing has improved in the process of launching VMs. Sometimes it just barfs and goes to hell, requiring contacting support to terminate provisioning.

No joke, at one of the previous places we've implemented a task which would raise a support ticket via API if provisioning step was hanging for longer than x minutes. This is the case for years!

According to some people from IBM, the reason why IBM purchased SoftLayer was so they could tell their customers who were looking to move to the cloud "you want cloud, we have cloud" ... and keep the hefty support contract runing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Related reading is Cringely's long history of writing about IBM

Blog: [https://www.cringely.com/tag/ibm/](https://www.cringely.com/tag/ibm/)

The Decline and Fall of IBM [https://www.amazon.com/Decline-Fall-IBM-American- Icon/dp/099...](https://www.amazon.com/Decline-Fall-IBM-American- Icon/dp/0990444422/ref=as_sl_pc_ss_til?tag=icr0c-20&linkCode=w00&linkId=&creativeASIN=0990444422)

<comment><USER16> I would pay hard money to read Cringely's take on this.

<comment> J-dawg Looks like he's written it. It's surprisingly positive!

[https://www.cringely.com/2018/10/29/red-hat-takes-over- ibm/](https://www.cringely.com/2018/10/29/red-hat-takes-over-ibm/)

<comment><USER16> Yeah, wow, not what I expected at all. I don't know if I buy what he's saying? It seems to rely on things happening that I have my doubts about, like Ginni Rometty departing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> More than anything I've read recently, this article makes me bullish on Microsoft, who are successfully executing the playbook IBM ran to right the ship in the '90s:

> The problem for IBM is that they are not building solutions for clueless IT > departments bewildered by a dizzying array of open technologies: instead > they are building on top of three cloud providers, one of which (Microsoft) > is specializing in precisely the sort of hybrid solutions that IBM is > targeting. The difference is that because Microsoft has actually spent the > money on infrastructure their ability to extract money from the value chain > is correspondingly higher; IBM has to pay rent

<comment><USER18> The bearish argument to your bull is that it's fine that Microsoft dominates the hybrid cloud, but where is the growth after that? New companies are entirely serverless with no need for a hybrid solution. So where is the growth after they've converted all their existing Microsoft customers to Azure?

<comment><USER19> The bullish argument to your bearish argument...the ( yet to come) generation of github users growing up using azure cloud

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I find the directions the cloud space is evolving in completely fascinating. I suspect we're going to see some major shifts over the next decade.

Primarily: Azure is already super successful and I see it taking a solid #1 over the next few years. The main reason is that Microsoft is doing what they do best: offering a product in every category. Want Kubernetes? They've got it. Need issue management? Azure DevOps. Chat? Teams. Email and Office? 365. Once you're in that ecosystem you're just going to bleed into all of their products before suddenly you're a Microsoft shop.

Moreover, Microsoft has done an extraordinary job at revitalizing the user experience of many of their products. Azure DevOps and Teams has its issues, but they're miles ahead of the products they're replacing, and truly only maybe 10% behind the 'best in class' of each category.

Compare this positioning to Amazon: AWS still only competes solidly in the cloud space, without extending out into the rest of "development team support" that Azure/Microsoft does. They were also _ridiculously_ slow to accept that Kubernetes won the container war, and even today EKS is a comparatively garbage product when lined up against AKS/GKE (no managed worker nodes, $0.20/hour for the control plane, reliance on eksctl to do anything easily which isn't even an official AWS product, etc).

Amazon will be fine, but I worry about Google Cloud's future. They're industry leaders when it comes to new technology, no one else is even close, but that doesn't really matter when its open source and Microsoft is so quick to implement everything they make directly into Azure. Why isn't Google Cloud more successful? I think its enterprise support and respect, which isn't something you can just buy especially with Google's lackluster history in that domain.

<comment><USER21> The really scary thing about Google Cloud to me is that Google has a very long history of axing projects. I'm just trying to imagine what it would be like to be totally tied into GC and to receive an email along the lines of 'Dear customer, to serve you better we have decided to retire GC by the end of this year, as per your contract you have three months to move'.

<comment><USER20> Google takes G-Suite/Enterprise focused products very seriously. I can't think of many major examples of them axing one of their enterprise products (or really any, though I'm sure there's one or two fringe examples). In other words, I think they have an issue of reputation here, but that reputation is mostly unfounded because it applies to a different class of products.

I also think GCloud is very unique in that all of the capex that Google spends on it comes back to benefit Google. All of their product offerings need servers and world class networks behind them. So even if GCloud remains a solid third/fourth place in the cloud race, I doubt we'll see them go anywhere just because Google itself is probably using it internally to some degree.

I mostly worry about the scope of investment from management. I want to see way more products out of them. More managed databases, a better managed NoSQL database than Firestore, lower prices, more enterprise focused things like automated security auditing, better support. We're just not getting it; they're so focused on shiny trivialities like Firebase and Stackdriver while missing the basics.

<comment><USER21> > but that reputation is mostly unfounded because it applies to a different > class of products

That's not how reputation works. A brand has _one_ reputation. You mess with that at your peril.

<comment><USER22> A brand can have a reputation both per audience and per product segment.

<comment><USER21> How unfortunate when your audience crosses your carefully laid lines and is active both as a business user and as a private individual. Screw them on the one and expect mercy on the other and we'll see how that multiple reputations theory works out in practice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> _" The best thing going for this strategy is its pragmatism: IBM gave up its potential to compete in the public cloud a decade ago, faked it for the last five years, and now is finally admitting its best option is to build on top of everyone else's clouds."_

Ouch, but hard to argue against.

<comment><USER24> Too bad that Java thing isn't working out so well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Wow, that revenue graph is pretty shocking and enlightening to me. I know IBM is a huge behemoth but never knew it had much higher revenue than Microsoft for most of 2000s.

<comment><USER26> That's the problem with public perception. Everybody talks about the current superstars and thinks the the older companies are declining. If you have read news for the last year it would be hard to imagine that Microsoft just overtook Amazon in terms of valuation.

<comment><USER27> Microsoft took over Amazon in terms of Market Cap, but not valuation.

      MSFT
      Market Cap              $839.7
      Less: Net Cash           (59.7)
      Total Enterprise Value  $780.0

      AMZN
      Market Cap              $834.5
      Less: Net Cash            (5.6)
      Total Enterprise Value  $828.9

The discrepancy is all the more evident in terms of multiple (or the "exchange rate" for investing in these companies). MSFT trades at 21.0x 2019E P/E and 12.5 TEV / 2019E EBITDA while AMZN trades at 60.8x 2019E P/E and 19.5x TEV / 2019E EBITDA multiples.

<comment><USER26> I guess I confused the terms but I think my point still stands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Interesting read; I wonder if VMWare is subtly in similar position - transitioning their company from providing software which ran on bare metal and essentially managed the datacentre; to trying and not succeeding at their own cloud offering; to now attempting to provide layer on top of somebody else's cloud - currently a successful strategy, but perhaps one that'll see them squeezed out due to costs long term?

<comment><USER29> Yes that is pretty accurate. The difference is that Vmware is further along in revenue, and has already leveraged their position in compute to diversify into adjacent markets (storage and networking). Red Hat has failed to do that.

And of course Vmware has already been integrated into EMC years ago, quite successfully. Although you could argue the ongoing Dell/EMC saga could jeopardize that... Depending on how well you think it's going.

<comment><USER30> VmWare is part of Pivotal/EMC. They sell cloud foundry that is an on premise cloud directly competing against OpenShift from RedHat.

From what I've seen, they're doing a lot more sales than RedHat.

<comment><USER29> Yes Vmware does a lot more sales than Red Hat.

However Pivotal CloudFoundry is not their best-seller... I doubt it's even in the top 5. Vmware's empire is built on Vsphere/esx (their core business) and, more recently Vsan (storage) and NSX (networking). The former is the largest. The latter two are the fastest growing.

Container platforms are a relatively new category, so sales are not huge. In that category Cloudfoundry might be slightly ahead, but I think Openshift has more momentum because their early bet on Docker then Kubernetes is paying off. Pivotal has PKS but it feels half-hearted.

<comment><USER30> Pivotal is a separate entity and business model from VMWare, I wouldn't compare them directly. They are both owned by EMC/DELL.

I'm under the impression that cloud foundry is specifically targeting mega corporation like fortune 100 banks. In that context, it only takes a few sales to capture the market and a lot of money.

I didn't see OpenShift used anywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Another factor that is going to pinch IBM here: they're getting hit from the other side with professional services firms (McKinsey, Big Four, Booz Allen, etc.) now jumping into cloud implementation work. Also smaller but legitimate technical firms like Pivotal who capitalized on IBM dragging their feet in this marketplace.

So, if IBM's strength was "we can do services from anywhere," that gets busted by the rest of these players who can now compete at the same logistical level. And if they aren't hiring the best engineers, they're going to get slammed by Microsoft who will pay top dollar for them.

<comment><USER32> Doubly so because their investment into RHEL legitimizes the technology for anyone still so conservative as to be unsure. _Well if _IBM_ says it 's legitimate, it must be so._ But really once that barrier to entry is gone (as you said) anyone with enough credibility can sell the tech because it's open source. Arguably unsure people may want to buy Red Hat for support but they'll quickly find it's available elsewhere cheaper and possibly not needed at all.

<comment><USER30> The support from somewhere else raises the question of from where?

Which raise the risk that IBM could kill CentOS. Once done, there is no choice for company but to pay for RedHat or migrate to Debian.

<comment><USER33> This makes the openSUSE Leap -> SUSE Linux Enterprise supported upgrade strategy interesting, because if someone started out with openSUSE Leap 15.0, they can trivially attach a SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 subscription to it and convert the system, and remain fully supported by SUSE in the process.

So with that available, if SUSE isn't completely stupid on how to go to market, they'll actually figure out a way to capitalize on that.

<comment><USER30> Using SUSE in 2018? I don't want to be unfair to SUSE but I would probably put that in the abandoned OS along Solaris, HP and a few other I forgot the name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Not necessarily sure it'll work out for IBM, but the article brings up an interesting parallel.

In its previous comeback, part of its strategy was positioning itself one layer above the commodity layer. (The article says, "The actual technologies underlying the Internet were open and commoditized, which meant IBM could form a point of integration and extract profits, which is exactly what happened.")

Now with open cloud technologies aiming to make cloud providers (Amazon, MS, Google) into commodities, this new effort also shares that strategy.

Of course the other ingredients are that it must be a value-add that customers actually need and nobody else offers a better version of. But buying Redhat seems like a reasonable stab at achieving that. Overall, their strategy seems to make sense at a very high level.

</comment><comment><USER35> As someone who has had to deal with two cloud-phobic industries now (auto and healthcare). I have to say the hope of the hybrid cloud being a differentiator, for RedHat/IBM, is misplaced.

Getting these players into the cloud is always hard, but the hybrid cloud doesn't really soften the ground internally at most of these compliance heavy organizations. They are all aware of how awesome and wonderful the cloud is, it's always politics that get in the way. Once an organization goes through the incredibly difficult process of allowing cloud projects (which involves lawyers, rewriting policies, compliance officers, etc), the organization usually puts all projects going forward onto the cloud and views the old stuff as legacy. The idea of trying to bridge the two is rarely considered worth it.

Of course there are exceptions. However where I see hybrid clouds do well is in organizations that are taking the task of porting everything to the cloud very seriously, but they know the project will take a while, so it is worth everybody working off of the same infrastructure playbook until they can shove everything in the cloud.

The days are dark for the folks that missed the cloud bandwagon over a decade ago.

</comment><comment><USER36> I guess what IBM needs to do is to go talk to its customers.

Server-less is an interesting development. To avoid lock in though we would need a library API layer. Much like what Kubernetes provides at the application layer.

<comment><USER37> Both IBM and Red Hat have fulltime participants working on Knative (as well as Pivotal, SAP, VMWare and Google).

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> At this point, is IBM anything more than an accenture/infosys/cognizant style consulting firm with patents? I'm having a hard time understanding why they're supposedly different compared to any of the big players in that space.

</comment><comment><USER39> IBM today is Unisys of 1990, it's 2017 did you know that Unisys still sells Mainframes?

IBM has become completely dependent on consulting, and they did that because their hardware business has been shrinking. They are only selling hardward to a captive audience. The only companies buying Mainframes or AS400's are existing customers, but those customers are also converting portions of their business to other technologies, but not on IBM hardware, or the IBM cloud. It appears that IBM is still a technology company but it's an illusion.

IBM is dying and there is nothing that anyone can do about it, they won't fold, but in 20 years IBM will be as relevant as Unisys is today.

</comment><comment><USER40> I work on IBM clouds all day and what they have been doing for the last several year(s) is embracing Linux, much the same way that Microsoft has been embracing Linux with containers, WSL, github, and Azure.

The first thing I thought when I read this news was - good maybe they'll take their 360,000 employees, make them all use Linux, and as a consequence standardise a developer laptop to compete with MacBook.

The second thing I thought was - if there is 360,000 people with Linux laptops in your enterprise, what sort of creative uses could you come up with for container orchestration.

The third thing I thought was - I wonder how much they pay in Microsoft licensing per year.

<comment><USER41> IBM sold their laptop business to Lenovo years ago.

<comment><USER40> Not talking about starting a laptop business - talking about a major corporation with 360K people that are all-in on Linux. Someone needs to fulfill that hardware requirement - it doesn't have to be IBM. What does that sort of requirement do to the IT ecosystem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Off topic : Ben's articles on Stratechery were pretty much only becoming about one or two things only i.e Bundling and Aggregation. I am happy that from the Instagram's CEO article to this one all of the posts did not disappoint me at all and are not a unhealthy repeat of the same themes and or theories.

</comment><comment><USER43> If you force-divested IBM into constituent parts which one(s) would retain the IBM branding and why?

PowerPC was the last time I was aware of IBM making significant change in the VLSI market. Before that, it had been definitional in a number of things, not networking (!) but certainly high density storage.

</comment><comment><USER44> IBM just gave Ubuntu (Canonical) the biggest gift it can possibly imagine.

Now, will they be able to capitalize on it?

</comment><comment><USER45> _consumer technology will obliterate all computer science over the last 20 years_

What does this quote actually mean?

<comment><USER46> It means things were not going to go well for IBM with that CEO at the helm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Missing the key component. IBM mainframe colocated with a big three cloud provider. That's the secret sauce to shave latency.

</comment><comment><USER48> "This is where the Red Hat acquisition comes in: while IBM will certainly be happy to have the company's cash-generating RHEL subscription business, the real prize is Openshift, a software suite for building and managing Kubernetes containers."

Small problem with that. Most of the progressive enterprises are trying to move AWAY from containers to fully serverless architectures (Lambda, Google functions, Azure, etc.)

Kubernetes is still hot but the momentum is definitely with Lambda and its ilk.

<comment><USER49> I'm a consultant who works with enterprises of all sizes (all sizes that could still be considered "enterprise" sized at least) and I've only encountered one that has used anything serverless, and then only in one production application. And I touch basically every IT application/environment across the entire business.

Now I don't want to say my experience is perfectly indicative of what big companies are doing in general, but I certainly haven't noticed this trend. Even containers are just starting to catch on in the enterprise market, and a lot of enterprise software doesn't currently support containerization.

<comment><USER50> I was an enterprise consultant, and I'll vouch for your experiences. It's moving in that direction, but it's a few years out of what people think.

Like, hdfs is far more common now. Technology starts at the larger companies, and trickles down over time.

<comment><USER30> We actually have serverless, that's called cgi scripts. Very stable and proven technology.

But for some reasons, nobody try to use that anymore or even think of it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to Focus If You Have ADHD - <AUTHOR> http://focusr.co

<comment><USER2> My particular neurological make-up made it impossible to focus on the website, as I was playing with the modified scrolling. It seems to accelerate!</comment>


The Blockchain Is the New Database, Get Ready to Rewrite Everything - <AUTHOR> http://startupmanagement.org/2014/12/27/the-blockchain-is-the-new-database-get-ready-to-rewrite-everything/

<comment><USER2> Bitshares is developing a graph database on top of their blockchain

[http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/article/2014/12/24/Introduci...](http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/article/2014/12/24/Introducing- BitShares-Object-Graph/)</comment>


Google Launches Mobile Game You Play in Real Life - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2012/11/15/google-ingress/ <comment><USER2> So what is Windows Phone 8 going to do to counter?

Remember Bing Cashback? Are they going to come up with something similar to Ingress, expect for that everything is free when you use Windows Phone 8 to scan the SKU? :)

</comment><comment><USER3> fyi: It's still in closed-beta, you'll have to request an invite for an activation code before you can do anything after you install it.

</comment><comment><USER4> unfortunately invitation only.</comment>


World record set for farthest flight by hoverboard - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/montrealer-sets-world-record-for-farthest-flight-by-hoverboard-1.3085052

<comment><USER2> So it's basically quadcopter (or octocopter in this case) controlled by feet that can lift a person.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hoverboards don't work on water…

<comment><USER4> This hoverboard appears to work over water. What do you mean?

<comment><USER5> I'm pretty sure he's referring to Back to the Future:

[http://backtothefuture.wikia.com/wiki/Hoverboard](http://backtothefuture.wikia.com/wiki/Hoverboard)

<comment><USER4> I feel sorry for the future people who are going to have to try and make sense of what's really real and what's only real in the context of a fictional movie.

<comment><USER6> Ok sure, and while we're at it, let's just start calling all birds ducks. Or all bipedal mammals humans.

The meaning of words is defined by consensus, which is not the same as unanimity. You can dig your heels in and call this a hoverboard, but the future won't remember it as one, because most people in the future will have the sense to see the differences between the hoverboard we were introduced to in _Back to the Future_ and this multi-rotor-powered contraption.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fine. Git is Awesome. - <AUTHOR> http://justin.harmonize.fm/index.php/2009/01/fine-git-is-awesome/

<comment><USER2> Summary

Git is Awesome because it is a Mercurial with easily editable commit history, "better" local branches and the killing feature -- git-svn.

<comment><USER3> It's also purely content addressed, doesn't attempt to make fake incremental revision numbers, and doesn't enforce any workflow.

<comment><USER4> Incremental version numbers have proven very useful in many scenarios. I'd be careful to list the lack of support as a feature for git.

I know that support can be hacky at best in a DVCS but often, especially in the common "semi-centralized" workflow, that's good enough. Don't underestimate the communication benefits of being able to talk about specific revisions in chronological context, in plain english. "That was fixed in 982" is much easier to parse and congest for a human than "That was fixed in d934c8" or "That was fixed on last Tuesday".

<comment><USER5> I agree. I actually wish git had something more like incremental revision #s

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think people need to worry less about their version control system and think more about writing useful code. Seriously, when I look at the time people waste making silly visualizations for commits done on some github project, or doing "version control advocacy", it blows my mind.

Why not do something to improve yourself, like learn C or Lisp, or port some sortware?

<comment><USER7> "I think people need to worry less about their version control system and think more about writing useful code."

If you seriously think those are in opposition, you either need more experience with version control (preferably a modern one) or more experience with coding in a real environment with many people. Possibly both.

There really isn't any two ways about that. The only two ways you can think version control is worthless is if you've only used worthless version control (Hi, Visual Source Safe!) or you're caught on the wrong end of a Blub paradox.

I have a guy at work who thinks version control is beneath him, too. I say him and his twenty distinct-and-slightly-different versions of critical scripts that require huge maintenance (often incompletely done) for every trivial change are wrong, and I end up paying the price.

<comment><USER6> Sorry if that came across the wrong way. I intended to say that fanboyism over a version control system seems foolish. I've used a couple version control systems, although currently Plan 9 does all the version control I need with its archival fileserver (works for my kernel modifications).

I would never suggest undertaking a major coding project without _some_ form of version control. However, it's a _tool_ used to improve your work; going nuts over git (which seems to be the fashionable thing these days) is like an artist raving over how great his paintbrushes are and making special little boxes for them, or a carpenter who won't stop talking about his hammer when he's supposed to be roofing your house.

<comment><USER7> Fair enough. I (obviously) misinterpreted your post as being against version control itself. Fanboyism does suck.

However, DVCS systems _are_ better than the previous state-of-the-art, by enough to be excited about. Not fanboyish about, but certainly excited about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As a corollary to the argument presented here, I had to give up Git the first two times I tried it because the Subversion integration wasn't all there yet. Git, on it's own, was miraculous and beautiful, but it all fell down when I couldn't push back to Subversion past a branch (this was in the 1.3 days of Git).

Now, though, I couldn't agree with this article more!

</comment><comment><USER9> Anyone know if there is git-svn integration with Eclipse?

<comment><USER10> Did you just admit to using Eclipse on _this_ site?

Seriously, though, git-svn is very low on user interface, so you should be able to take the standard git plugin:

<http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/EclipsePlugin>

and use that for most of your work. When you want to get changes from svn, or commit changes to svn, just open up an xterm and type "git svn rebase" or "git svn dcommit". You may even be able to get Eclipse to run an arbitrary shell command for you, if so, you're set.

<comment><USER11> Most of you who are punishing jrockway for his mild and inoffensive joke could take lessons from him on how to behave here. He has been an active member of the news.yc community for a couple of years now.

<comment><USER12> To add to this, it should be stated that downmodding a comment to less than 1 because you simply disagree with it is against the nature of the site. Negative points are for comments that are entirely out of line.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The compatibility with subversion is a major point, and reminds me of what Eric Raymond said about Wine being essential for linux to succeed (as macosx parallels is proving as well). See [http://catb.org/~esr/writings/world- domination/world-dominat...](http://catb.org/~esr/writings/world- domination/world-domination-201.html)

There is a pattern here: embrace the legacy without giving up any advantages of the modern.</comment>


Antitrust Thinker to Join Democratic Staff in the House; Silicon Valley Worried - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedailybeast.com/lina-khan-a-top-anti-trust-thinker-joins-democratic-staff-in-the-house-putting-silicon-valley-on-alert?ref=home <comment><USER2> Maybe its time to stop 'worrying' and start thinking about why that move happened in the first place?

</comment><comment><USER3> How exactly do you "break up" Facebook (FB + Messenger, not the subsidiaries) without breaking Facebook?

<comment><USER4> Facebook could allow access different instant-messaging clients to add contacts from Facebook. In this world, Messenger just becomes another instant- messaging client, but I don't see how this would break Facebook. It would totally devalue Messenger though.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, this seems like one fairly simple way of adding some competition without having to completely re-architect Facebook itself.

Facebook is already used a lot as an authentication service, after all, by third-parties such as Tinder.</comment></comment></comment>


Alley vs Valley: The Costs of Business in the Silicon Meccas - <AUTHOR> http://newyork.citypudding.com/more/technology/alley-vs-valley-the-costs-of-business-in-the-silicon-meccas

<comment><USER2> The article concludes that SF beats NYC, which surprised me. SF has an even bigger advantage if you locate on the Peninsula south of SF: no local payroll tax, cheaper office space. Northern San Mateo County has Bart service, so the commute is easy for those who live in SF. The local tax rates are misleading, they are the marginal rates not actual rates for developers. The SF talent pool is expensive, but very deep. I will concede that hiring is becoming very tight, especially if your company is not very interesting. In that case I suggest that you locate in LA, thereby raising the general level of developer excitement in both areas. :D</comment>