It's not just metadata – the NSA is getting everything - <AUTHOR> http://blog.rubbingalcoholic.com/post/52913031241/its-not-just-meta-data-the-nsa-is-getting-everything <comment><USER2> Last month an FBI agent admitted on CNN that the contents of phone calls are being collected[1]. It was written up by none other than...Glenn Greenwald(GG).

One thing that has really bothered me since I become a hardcore HN regular is that GG articles almost never come to the front page, even when they are entirely on topic. I recall, on multiple occasions, finding links to places like Ars or a similar site which are basically just doing a summary of GG's latest article.

I really hope after the latest NSA revelations that HN will begin to take GG seriously, get his articles to the front page, and give him the respect he more than deserves.

[1] [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/04/telephon...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/04/telephone- calls-recorded-fbi-boston)

<comment><USER3> Wow. I hadn't read that article. One thing that really stood out was the "Information Awareness" office and it's ultra creepy logo that looks like something straight off an underground conspiracy website.

Edit: Found a Guardian article from 2002 - [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/feb/18/september11.usa](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/feb/18/september11.usa)

"The agency which Poindexter will run is called the Information Awareness Office. You want to know what that is? Think, Big Brother is Watching You. IAO will supply federal officials with "instant" analysis on what is being written on email and said on phones all over the US. Domestic espionage."

<comment><USER4> [http://www.rotten.com/library/conspiracy/information- awarene...](http://www.rotten.com/library/conspiracy/information-awareness- office/)

"In the Defense Department budget submitted in September 2003, the Information Awareness office had mysteriously disappeared. As if belatedly realizing that it's better not to tell people when you're preparing an oppressive evil computer system designed to crush their individual privacy, the office's functions were shuffled into an unknown number of "black bag" budget items — intelligence appropriations which do not have to be explained to the public or justified to legislators.

So be grateful that the Bush Administration was stupid enough to let you have a glimpse of Big Brother before he slinks off to the shadows. The next time you see him, he'll be kicking in your door."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This hinges on the same re-definition of "collect" that Clapper tried to make, equating "go into the world and gather" with "go to the secret library of everything and retrieve."

The essential implication is that we're constructing a mirror of the world (or at least, as much of it as can be reduced to information). Unnervingly, we're operating as though law and language which developed in the original world will map directly to this new realm, even though it's obviously and radically different.

We really need to start talking about the Mirror World as such. Security and surveillance is just one (hugely problematic) aspect of what could easily be the 21st century's defining development. I suspect we're not going to reach a suitable détente on police and military surveillance until we've developed a commonly accepted sense of what the Mirror World entails for a constellation of considerations, from energy, economy and ecology to culture and education.

This really is the tip of a very big iceberg.

<comment><USER6> Clapper just made up a new definition of "collect" to excuse his brazen lie. I don't understand why Clapper still has a job.

But there's nothing in this article that indicates that either Senator Feinstein or Senator Nelson was using the word in anything but the ordinary sense.

After the FBI or NSA get a court order, they can look at the content of emails and listen in on phone calls going forward, and they can also get past communications that are still stored on the server--or the target's own computer, if they have access.

Local police also get warrants to look at past emails and they sure don't use a database of everyone's emails.

<comment><USER7> > _But there 's nothing in this article that indicates that either Senator > Feinstein or Senator Nelson was using the word in anything but the ordinary > sense._

Supporting implication is in the video in the article. Listen all the way through the video.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It also enrages me how they dismiss the metadata as a "nothing burger".

Does it occur to anyone how much leverage you can exert with that information alone in such areas as finance, divorce proceedings, opposition research, leak investigations, and good old fashioned blackmail?

To add to it, they don't even need a court order or oversight to do the metadata searches per Feinstein (today).

<comment><USER9> What blows my mind is the conservatives worried about the government taking their guns - but not at all worried about the government knowing they called the gun store yesterday or paid $300 there last Friday.

<comment><USER10> There are plenty of conservatives that are worried about both, why does this have to be such a partisan thing for you? Why are not people from both sides of the aisle trying to stop the destruction of the constitution rather than just blaming the other side for whatever?

<comment><USER9> I know there are plenty of conservatives worried about both - they're not the ones blowing my mind. Why does this have to be such a partisan thing for _you_?

But in answer to your second question, it's not progressive liberals who passed the Patriot Act in the first place. We don't really have any representation in Congress at all, any more than libertarians do. Why do you persist in talking about an aisle when both sides of the aisle are wholly owned subsidiaries of corporate America?

<comment><USER8> Were you not the first person to inject "conservative" into the thread?

<comment><USER9> What, by mentioning that there is a group of people who blow my mind, I'm being partisan? What is the matter with you? Did a liberal frighten your mother?

Did I say "all conservatives" are inconsistent? No. I said there are people who simultaneously believe Obama is after their guns, but the NSA is just peachy keen, and I find this astonishing, and you think I'm being unfair to the poor little snowflakes.

Good day to you, sir.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Indeed, it increasingly seems 'content' is a consciously-chosen term, which is intentionally time-tense-ambiguous, to obscure the fact that calls and other communications have slready been recorded to NSA systems. They're not tslking about a warrant to truly start 'collection' of future communications (in the normal senses of English).

Getting a warrant just sets the read-access bit on already ingested 'content': "Oh, the secret court approved the warrant? OK, let me run `chmod a+r /calls/by-person-id/us-gz-74916949/*` - now you're in!"

This might also explain the growing pursuit of mandatory-total-traffic- retention policies in other countries. Their security establishment has a hint of how nifty this has been for the NSA, but might not be able to pull off — legslly or financially — the same broad ingest feeds and giant datacenters as in the US... so they try to offload the obligation to regulated private entities, and still have the arbitrary lookback when they need it.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think while some may view this as speculation, it's extremely fair reasoning given a) the people we're dealing with and b) how carefully they're choosing very specific words. They got caught with their hand in the cookie jar and are now dancing around the issues.

It's upsetting that using a word like "collect" can give any sort of plausible deniability. "Oh, I didn't mean 'collect' _in the traditional sense_ , lol!"

This is all just one big lie on top of another on top of another. I think we'd all be ridiculously stupid to not acknowledge that.

</comment><comment><USER13> this isn't 'everything' \- the article 'only' mentions phone calls and emails. that's the easy stuff NSA can access from ISPs like AT&T, Verizon, etc.

that's important because it doesn't contradict respected people at Google, or require magic crypto cracking.

i'm repeating myself here, so sorry, but there are two separate issues:

1 - nsa is getting a _lot_ of data from the people routing traffic. likely _all_ metadata. and perhaps some (significant) subset of unencrypted traffic.

2 - despite the misleading prism slide, they don't seem to be getting complete, direct access to the web companies' data.

the uproar about the slides put the initial emphasis on the web companies and has confused discussion since.

but the consistent story that seems to be emerging is that it's the ISPs, who have much more of a tradition of collaborating with NSA, who are providing a lot more data than people expected. and that data is being stored without legal approval, relying on the idea that "no-one looks at it" without a warrant.

at least, that's the most consistent view i can find.

what worries me most at the moment is how much hardware would be needed to store and process all that data, and whether that is feasible.

<comment><USER14> [http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/al...](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/)

 _As a result of this "expanding array of theater airborne and other sensor networks," as a 2007 Department of Defense report puts it, the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (1024 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.)

It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte._

<comment><USER15> This is insane. Apparently Titan can do 10-20 petaflops per second. I didn't think before, but they may be decoding AES-128.

<comment><USER16> No. Titan is not fast enough to brute force AES128. All of the computers in the world put together are not fast enough.

      If you assume:
      Every person on the planet owns 10 computers.
      There are 7 billion people on the planet.
      Each of these computers can test 1 billion key combinations per second.
      On average, you can crack the key after testing 50% of the possibilities.
      Then the earth's population can crack one encryption key in 77,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years!

If you want to decode AES, you either need the key or find a weakness in the algo.

[http://www.eetimes.com/design/embedded-internet- design/43724...](http://www.eetimes.com/design/embedded-internet- design/4372428/How-secure-is-AES-against-brute-force-attacks-)

<comment><USER15> Well, if they _are_ storing all internet traffic, then they would have a pretty large sample of documents/packets encrypted using the same private keys. I don't think it's unreasonable to think that Titan could be leveraging this when trying to decode.

Also, I didn't say "brute force", I said "decode".

<comment><USER14> If you can "decode" more efficiently than you can "brute force", then you have an "attack on AES".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I know hunches don't count for anything on HN, and we still don't have enough information, and may never. But I think this is right, they're storing all major forms of communication. If so, it's incredibly dangerous.

<comment><USER18> >If so, it's incredibly dangerous.

I think it's absolutely thrilling. Just imagine, all it takes is one disgruntled, lucky cypherpunk to crack into the NSA content database and reveal its content to all.

Unencrypted emails, text messages, phone calls between you and your mum. Let's be honest, leaking that database is probably what it's going to take to see any kind of real attention/change on this issue.

<comment><USER14> Maybe that's what those 19998 other unreleased documents are.

<comment><USER19> I haven't seen 20,000 documents reported anywhere, or perhaps I just missed it. Do you have a link to an article mentioning this? Thanks.

<comment><USER14> I don't recall where I heard that, I may be mistaken. I'll keep looking around and update here when/if I find it again.

EDIT: Possibly [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/us/how-edward-j-snowden- or...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/us/how-edward-j-snowden-orchestrated- a-blockbuster-story.html?pagewanted=all) "Mr. Snowden has now turned over archives of "thousands" of documents, according to Mr. Greenwald, and "dozens" are newsworthy."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is outrageous. And much more upsetting. I don't think it is all that speculative. Everyone with access to classified information keeps saying there is much much more they are doing, which we don't know about. Well, what else would it be? Cameras in my house? What would MUCH MORE be?

<comment><USER21> Over here in Asia, where there can be fear of maids kidnapping children, a big trend is CCTV in the home. This is then sent out over the internet to the CCTV collection company and visible via the internet if you have a username or password.

For those who have watched the movie "So Close" (I recommend it-- sexy, tragic, thrilling, thought provoking), the idea of global surveillance of cameras in houses and businesses is something well within the possibility over here, though perhaps not to the same extent in the US.

<comment><USER22> I'm genuinely curious, how often do maids actually kidnap children where you're at?

<comment><USER21> There are stories. I doubt it is as common as the fear is. Certainly not a threat that I would give anyone with the influence cameras in my house to solve.

<comment><USER22> Figured as much, was wondering if it were close to the russian dash cameras or more of a boogeyman that isn't likely to be reality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Complete and utter speculation. This is wordplay for page views, I'm disgusted to have given them one.

<comment><USER24> It's certainly speculation with a linkbait title, but the apparent consistency between Clemente and Feinstein makes it not-completely-woolly speculation. It's certainly more than possible that that Feinstein's statement should be interpreted straightforwardly while Clemente was just largeing it up for TV though.

<comment><USER23> More than possible? What does that even mean?

Speculation. Complete speculation. Not worth any rational thinker's time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The article conducts a fairly scrupulous analysis of what politicians and officials are saying, and likely is correct in its assertions. However, it doesn't mention (within the same post) that the NSA has been operating DPI gear at the carrier level for a long time now. Mainstream media has overlooked this fact more often than not recently.

DPI sitting on carrier pipes is what the Room 641A scandal in 2006 was about. Its disclosure helped kick off the warrantless wiretap debate we're currently having. Virtually every NSA whistleblower since has mentioned the operation of Narus devices.

Consider the following:

A) NSA is confirmed to be operating Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) devices on internet backbone fiber-optic cables within the United States, with telecom cooperation.

B) The recent revelation that Verizon has been providing NSA call metadata and routing information (but not content) on a massive scale. Obviously not just Verizon, but every major telco.

C) Construction of NSA's Bluffdale, Utah data storage facility is almost complete. The storage capacity varies depending on who you ask, but most conservative estimates put it at a scale such that it can hold the entirety of the world's communications well into the foreseeable future.

It's not rocket science they're already intercepting and storing the content of traffic. The Verizon metadata and routing information is certainly used in conjunction with DPI for attribution and deduplication of intercepted traffic.

It's a simple matter of 1 + 1 + 1 = 3.

\---

Except the number of operands is more likely in the double digits. If I may indulge in speculation and conduct some quotation analysis of my own:

OP's article cites many officials hinting that what we currently know, even in light of the recent debate, is only the tip of the iceberg. However, in my opinion the foremost quote in this regard occurred seven years ago:

In 2006, Russel Tice, NSA whistleblower, was quoted as saying:

"In my case, there's no way the programs I want to talk to Congress about should be public ever, unless maybe in 200 years they want to declassify them." [1]

OK, 200 years is probably a bit of an embellishment, especially if you listen to Singularity folks who suggest the human race won't even be the human race by then.

However, Tice explicitly mentioned this in context of a "different angle" from the warrantless intercept operations just seeing the light of day at the time. [2]

If he wasn't even talking about what's currently being debated in the media, then what was he referring to?

My guess would be something on the analysis side of the equation. Perhaps collection and subsequent analysis of mobile device geolocation data.

Imagine employing the technique of geofencing on individual citizens at a national or even global scale. Non-targeted individuals entering within a certain radius of targeted individuals at sufficiently similar velocity for a specific duration or frequency could end up drawing suspicion upon themselves. Combined with other data points, individuals who are societal outliers in terms of behavior could be detected with ease.

Or, maybe it's that and more. There's all sorts of enterprise-class big data simulation products out there where you can simulate an environment in extremely fine-grained fashion using a near-unfathomable amount of data points.

\--

TL;DR - The notion that NSA isn't getting everything is laughable. Comprehensive, retroactive surveillance is already a reality.

\---

1\. [http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2006/07/10/hoekstra_blow...](http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2006/07/10/hoekstra_blows_the_whistle)

2\. [http://thinkprogress.org/security/2006/05/12/5319/more- unlaw...](http://thinkprogress.org/security/2006/05/12/5319/more-unlawful- activity/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I covered a lot of the historical stuff about carrier-level monitoring in a previous post ( [http://blog.rubbingalcoholic.com/post/52361697693/a-tale- of-...](http://blog.rubbingalcoholic.com/post/52361697693/a-tale-of- surveillance) ). I could literally write a book about all of this nonsense, but I wanted to take a narrow focus with this post, specifically that the government is lying, changing definitions of words, and backpedaling to cover up its shameful and unconstitutional surveillance practices.

You're absolutely right. When you connect all the dots, especially with the Utah Data Center, the big picture is really pretty scary.

<comment><USER25> Sorry, the tone of my original opener was unduly harsh and slightly ignorant; fortunately the edit window was still open.

Good articles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Doesn't it feel like we're all just playing along when it comes to whether they're getting email and call contents? We all suspect they're getting everything, but the acceptable range of debate for now is just metadata.

With so many people in the know saying "tip of the iceberg" it should be pretty obvious they're AT LEAST getting calls & emails. The horrific details may be some other shit we didn't even think of like alt uses of OnStar-type systems, data over powerlines (PDSL), hidden capabilities in mobiles, hijacked root CAs, etc.

</comment><comment><USER27> I went through a similar analysis a few days ago: [http://www.dbms2.com/2013/06/10/where-things-stand-in-us- gov...](http://www.dbms2.com/2013/06/10/where-things-stand-in-us-government- surveillance/) See also the comment thread, and the followup[http://www.dbms2.com/2013/06/13/how-is-the-surveillance- data...](http://www.dbms2.com/2013/06/13/how-is-the-surveillance-data-used/)

</comment><comment><USER28> everything is being saved. _everything._

it's massively compressed, so they need _pointers_ to review anything specific.

but if they really _want_ to, they _can_.

they're telling you this in dribs and drabs, because it'd be too big a shock to tell you all at once. you'll get used to the idea...

after all, "it's for your own good". right?

-bowerbird

<comment><USER29> They've got it all, but they promise not to look. Unless there's a chance you are a terrorist, and it's hard to know without looking.

<comment><USER30> How about a cast iron definition of "terrorist" before we get that far?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is not proof at all. It's a theory, based on the phrasing used, but nowhere near conclusive.

<comment><USER2> Watch the video at the end of the article.

<comment><USER31> He says "No digital communication is secure" (this is obviously an embellishment; this is trivial to show unless the U.S. government has broken every major encryption scheme), "and so these communications will be found out".

He does not specifically say these _phone calls_ will be found out. He could very well be referring simply to the ability for FISA requests to receive information about an individual that has been stored by companies like facebook, google, etc. The interviewer's question was "And you're not talking about a voicemail, right?"

It is not clear in any way that he is saying the government has recorded all phone calls and can go back and listen to them.

Additionally,

 _sources tell CNN the wife of Tamerlan Tsarnaev spoke with her husband on the phone after his pictures and video appeared around the country as the prime suspect._

If this was after he was already named as the prime suspect, you are telling me they didn't have a traditional wiretap on him and his relatives at that point?

Btw the transcript linked in the article ([http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1305/01/ebo.01.html](http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1305/01/ebo.01.html)) and the video don't match up, so it is hard to get context.

<comment><USER32> It's not clear that the government has recorded all telephone calls?

This interviewee says "All digital communications are ....are..." and uncharacteristically hesitates. Evidently he doesn't want to complete that sentence. So he tries again: "There's a way to look at digital communications in the past and I can't go into details."

No need to - it's called 'recording the entire communication'.

<comment><USER33> Nah, they have a machine that can see into the past[1].

[1] Asimov, I. _The Dead Past_ , 1956.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 If this was the case, how come the leaked FISA order about Verizon's metadata doesn't refer to it?

The theory relies on two people from two different backgrounds using the same meaning for "collect".</comment>


UniversalComet: Make any web page a Comet end point - <AUTHOR> http://ajaxian.com/archives/universalcomet

<comment><USER2> This isn't comet at all and it is pretty inefficient. The script uses zero of YOUR server resources but some server somewhere is getting absolutely slammed. I made a chat application using this method thta allowd you to share photos as well. Worked reasonably well on a very small scale but it certainly is not comet.

</comment><comment><USER3> Doesn't look particularly Comet like to me, it's polling the server every 2 seconds for new messages. (Fair bit of bandwidth also).

Interesting though.</comment>


Telephony Fraud – Further Analysis - <AUTHOR> http://www.greenfieldtech.net/telephony-further-analysis/ <comment><USER2> This expands quite a bit on yesterday's posts.</comment>


Every company that works online today ought to consider hiring three amazing people. - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/11/three-new-jobs.html <comment><USER2> Cool, he gives no good reasons _why_ we should be hiring any of these people. My company already has the first two (and for our business, they are very worthwhile and valued employees) but it doesn't have the third. I am skeptical of drawing on outside talent to get things done because it inevitably leads to a situation where two parties are deeply invested in the product but have no understanding of one anothers' systems. From personal experience, this led to a product that was inefficient and hard to maintain for no good reason other than that it was spread across several organizations that could not directly manage one other.

Seth should be at least enumerating situations where these roles will shine.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was hoping he'd say hire 3 amazing programmers. In general any company that works online right now would benefit more from the order of magnitude increases in productivity that great programmers bring. The jobs he describes are all managerial (the stats guy less so), and as such require communication - which means that at best, they're going to bring incremental improvements. Obviously those get magnified by the staff that reports to them. Which means that you're actually hiring 3 amazing people and multiple more "staff" to magnify their effect.

In my opinion, you're better off hiring 3 amazing programmers.

</comment><comment><USER4> One and three are debatable, they depend heavily on the nature of your business.

Having a stats fiend, however, is not. The amount of actionable data available to online businesses is staggering. Ignore it at your peril.

</comment><comment><USER5> What a stupid title.

Edit: what a stupid article.

</comment><comment><USER6> 1 and 2 sound like MBA advice.

</comment><comment><USER7> oh, is that all?</comment>


You Should Be Paranoid About Your Company Monitoring Slack - <AUTHOR> http://time.com/money/4901549/you-should-be-paranoid-about-your-company-monitoring-slack/ <comment><USER2> Interesting. A coworker just told me it's impossible to get people's private messages. He was wrong.</comment>


Digg, Wikipedia, and the myth of web 2.0 democracy - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2184487/ Should YC news empower 'super-users' too? <comment><USER2> Even in a real world democracy, there are people whose opinions have a disproportionate influence. Why do we think that democracy would work differently in an online community?

Further, one would expect to see a power law distribution in things such as no of submissions, karma, edits etc. If somebody choses to spend 10 hours a day submitting links to digg, I don't think that is anybody's business.

What the article seems to be wishing for is a socialist utopia, not a democracy.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's not really possible to introduce a Surowiecki-style "Wisdom of the Crowds" model to online news sites. In his book, James Surowiecki is very specific about what makes for a good "WOTC" poll, and what doesn't. In particular, he mentions cascade-effect where people tend to accept social proof about what is good or not, hence what is worth promoting on a social news site.

The question asked has to be very specific, and preferably incentivised to avoid flippant answers. "Guess the weight of this calf and take home some meat", in one case, or "Help find this missing submarine and get a case of champagne" in another. Social media sites have none of this, and they should stop invoking "Wisdom of the Crowds" in defence of their many eccentricities and aberrations. Google's internal futures market is much closer to what Surowiecki was writing about - it has incentives, it avoids publishing other people's votes prior to the outcome, and it asks specific questions.</comment>


APIs are Eating Up Software - <AUTHOR> https://www.lob.com/blog/apis-eat-software

<comment><USER2> One thing that's been nice about the popularity trend concerning APIs, is that it's made is so much easier for programmers to prevent NIH syndrome. Things used to be a lot more difficult so developing large things in-house _seemed_ more defensible. And we suffered for it...

Not too many years ago, it was _much_ more difficult to find quality, pre- built software. Github did not exist. _Some_ APIs were available, but they were generally complicated or miles of WSDL files to get anything done. Implementing one of them was difficult! You could head to the search engines and rummage through all sorts of libraries, package managers, paid sites, SourceForge, and so on. Finding packages that were not only up to date, but functional, _and_ able to run on your OS and version, was more of a chore than it is now.

These days, anyone who is paying attention to trends in startups or software would scoff at the thought of having to implement complicated server-side software for payment gateways.

And why shouldn't they? There are _excellent_ services available that do not require knowledge of software to implement! If you can craft an HTTP request in your language of choice, you're off to the races! Database design? Storage? Encryption? OOP? MVC? TDD? Who cares? Since you _don 't have to write or install software_ you are up and operational with builtin scalability and functionality in: possibly minutes.

Awesome.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is it a good thing though? APIs are centralized and brittle. Sometimes an API makes sense, sometimes I'd rather buy a program or library that I'm sure won't change or go away.

<comment><USER4> I think the API trend now is here to stay in a large part, but there will always be a place for a complete embedded solution. One embarrassing outage and customers would loose faith in a solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is true of the startup universe, but businesses at large will- for the foreseeable future- want software that just works. In the rest of the world, businesses that don't want to be technical are developing their own solutions because the solutions they're using now suck.

<comment><USER6> In my line of work, biotech, API's are ideal for communication or some for exposed web services we can hammer into an API. Often times we are left to pass flat files around or have no hope of bidirectional communication between systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I do love the idea of an API-centred Lego-ish software assembly approach, but imagining a future when my entire app solely consists of calls to API's (maybe 100's of them), I worry a bit about wait times due to serial blocking calls (and failover generally), and dependency management at a business level (how do I track when one of them goes out of business or is having some downtime). I guess there will have to be a big industry out of wrapping and managing lower level API's in higher level abstractions (just as we see infrastructure businesses built on Amazon).

</comment><comment><USER8> Exactly, API are definitely the future. Many companies want to integrate products into their own software or solutions. API are easily allowing people to do that. Lob.com sounds awesome, and the prices are really good!

</comment><comment><USER9> Id love to use lob but theyre not operating in the uk. Does anyone know of a similar service for uk?</comment>


OpenSUSE 12.2 delayed again, project looks to reorganize - <AUTHOR> http://news.opensuse.org/2012/06/14/where-is-my-12-2-my-kingdom-for-a-12-2/

<comment><USER2> just saw this (and tried to submit). on the one hand, it's depressing that there's going to be a delay. on the other, the problems seem to be coming from a growing community, which is great.

have other people had good experiences with tumbleweed? i tried it once, but hit some issue (can't remember now, what) and rolled back.</comment>


30FPS vs. 60FPS - <AUTHOR> http://30vs60.com/ <comment><USER2> I don't think really anyone except marketing goons and the type of people that parrot marketing goons believes the "you can't see 60 fps" thing.</comment>


Consumers love Big Tech, even if they say they don't - <AUTHOR> https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/434200-actually-consumers-love-big-tech-even-if-they-say-they-dont <comment><USER2> If consumers love "big tech", they love it the same way that meth addicts love meth.

<comment><USER3> quite the assumption there.

<comment><USER2> That was never five minutes just now.</comment></comment></comment>


Social networking site for researchers: myexperiment.org - <AUTHOR> http://www.physorg.com/news166943362.html

<comment><AUTHOR> And here's a link to the actual site, if you want to explore: <http://www.myexperiment.org/></comment>


Exposed: green consumers' dirty little secrets  - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18686-exposed-green-consumers-dirty-little-secrets.html

<comment><USER2> I think it comes down to motive and the degree of selfishness behind actions.

For example, when someone buys green, or votes Obama (or Ron Paul or George Bush), whether they do it for themselves or for others. If they feel that they've made some sacrifice in taking the action - then they're likely to feel that something is owed to them. This could be social recognition, the license to get away with something questionable .. whatever it is.

If on the other hand they do it for themselves - "I vote Obama cuz I want healthcare" or "I bought this green bag cuz it serves me better / lets me dump it anywhere knowing that it'll just disintegrate after a few weeks... " whatever it may be - then they're less likely want something more to make up for the "sacrifice".

If I'm right, then we should try to make our customers feel as if they've won whenever they buy / interact with us ;-). "You clicked on THAT button! AWESOM!!!!E!" =)

<comment><USER3> While your conclusion was a bit silly, I still thought your comment was pretty insightful.

<comment><USER2> Thanks =). It was meant as a trailing joke. Can you imagine actually getting that every time you press a button? =)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I posted this because of our discussion on this post yesterday:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1207136>

It seems that "self-control fatigue," as they tested it, is indistinguishable from the "moral self-licensing" discussed here.

<comment><USER4> There's an essay on lesswrong that also addresses the implications of Mazar and Zhong's experiments: [http://lesswrong.com/lw/1d9/doing_your_good_deed_for_the_day...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/1d9/doing_your_good_deed_for_the_day/)

"This meshes nicely with a self-signalling conception of morality. If part of the point of behaving morally is to convince yourself that you're a good person, then once you're convinced, behaving morally loses a lot of its value."

Another example of moral self-licensing the essay brings up is how people having lunch after attending church tend to be more abusive with waitstaff and tip poorly.

<comment><USER5> The source for your last sentence: [http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2009/08/bait-and- sw...](http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2009/08/bait-and-switch-of- contemporary.html)

> _"The single most damaging phenomenon to the witness of Christianity in > America today is the collective behavior of the Sunday morning lunch crowd. > Never has a more well-dressed, entitled, dismissive, haughty or cheap > collection of Christians been seen on the face of the earth.

I exaggerate of course. [...]"_

I find this quite interesting as whenever I've been out with Christians they've always seemed well behaved, inhibited from complaining even about bad service and terrible food and overgenerous in their tips; my wife for example. But we're in the UK.

Observer bias is highly likely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So, the logic is that green consumers would think they have already done something good and so they can afford to be a bit loose in other things?

This logic looks like BS to me.

And why is this about green consumers in particular. This logic applies to anyone who does anything good in general. And what exactly is the 'dirty little' secret here?

<comment><USER7> _And why is this about green consumers in particular._

Because that's what they tested. It doesn't look to me like they're necessarily saying anything about people interested in the environment. It seems more to me like they think that doing _some_ morally-good thing makes people think like they've got a freebie coming.

<comment><USER6> "Because that's what they tested" is bad/fallacious reasoning.

That is like saying males in NYC have ears because they only saw them, when all humans and most animals have ears too

Is the statement 'NYC males have ears' incorrect? No. Misleading ? Definitely.

This might apply to green consumers, but talking about green consumers is misleading when this applies to anyone that did anything good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "such as the recent finding that people in the UK who have made their homes more energy-efficient are more likely to turn up their heating or keep it on for longer"

As far as this goes it's likely that people assume that with thermostats and modern heating systems, once the insulation is in, the house can be maintained at a higher temperature or heated longer for a lower cost in fuel/money.

After all why insulate your home if you can't make it warmer?

That's like people buying jumpers, they wear them, they don't put them away so that they never need to buy a new one.

Generally speaking consumers have no direct information as to how much heating fuel is being used and what the cost is. Heating costs fluctuate so much and have risen rapidly, any increase after insulation installation would be assumed to be increasing fuel costs.

In short, I don't think this fits the general model.

</comment><comment><USER8> Is there some scientific methodology for this kind of trial?

If I knew I was participating in an experiment and I get presented with this kind of artificial test then I know they are looking for some kind of response, and my actions are highly liked to be influenced by the fact that I know I am under observation.

According to the paper (<http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/newthinking/greenproducts.pdf>) the sample sizes seem pretty small. I'm no statistician, but is it really valid to draw conclusion of people's behaviour from a sample size of < 100 people??

</comment><comment><USER9> It probably works in reverse too - if you've done a bad deed it will be easier to trick you into doing something "good".

</comment><comment><USER10> Who sponsored/paid for the research - that is also important. Indeed, it is liker saying that more green, let's say Europe, is full of cheats compared to USA, where people are "more conventional". There was by the way report that many studies are fraudulent nowadays. Perhaps this is the case.

<comment><AUTHOR> The title of the article is a little misleading, I think. It's really not about how being green makes you a cheater any more than being about how voting for Obama makes you a racist. I don't think the research is implying anything in particular about people who buy green, other than the fact that they believe they are doing something moral. Other self-perceived moral acts will presumably also result in an increased likelihood of cheating later as well.

<comment><USER11> Well, slightly OT but my work is actually in the green field (employer shall remain unnamed for this one).

What we've found is that there's a _huge_ difference between opinion polls on consumers' desire for green stuff, and their actions. Everyone _says_ , for example, that they'd be willing to pay X% extra to buy a similar product that is environmentally responsible - but in reality that number is actually very, very close to 0%.

This is very frustrating to me - consumers talk a lot of shit about companies needing to be environmentally responsible, but from the metrics I've seen first-hand, even making them pay a single penny extra for it is too much.

<comment><USER12> I am surprised that you would expect anything else. As Milton Friedman famously said, 'Never listen to what people say. Look at how they vote with their feet.'

<http://www.druglibrary.org/special/friedman/socialist.htm>

<comment><USER11> Well, it was pretty obvious the polls weren't going to be on the dot, but I was expecting consumers to claim to be willing to pay Y, but in reality only pay X, where X < Y.

I never expected X = 0.

<comment><USER13> X != 0

lim($price -> 0) [ c * $price ] = X

(Consider values less than $0.01 to be legal)

You're essentially right, but not _quite_.

P.S. make sure if you make your product more 'green' people are aware of this. If it's not clear, people may not understand why the price is higher, and when presented with two goods you believe are completely equal you will naturally choose the cheaper one.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Speculation on an Amazon iPad Competitor - <AUTHOR> http://www.marco.org/2011/04/15/kindle-tablet-speculation

<comment><USER2> When I was at the iTMS, the only competitor that anybody was afraid of was Amazon. I'm certain that that awareness hasn't changed in the last few years.

<comment><USER3> The Amazon MP3 album downloader thing is SO kludgy =( I think AMZN gets the broad strokes right but their details are just not top-shelf.

<comment><USER4> If you think that is bad, did you every try the Amazon Unbox video downloader? Horrendous performance to this day.

As for the Kindle app for the PC, Mac, and iOS, love it.

Amazon is capable of producing high quality products, but they really need to be careful about letting crap be released. It can do irreversible damage to your brand.

<comment><USER5> I don't think this is true. Auctions definitely didn't put any nails in Amazon's coffin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Amazon's core is the book model. People forget the two parts of even a paper book: content and delivery ("reader"). The reader part is so cheap people never think about it ... hence Amazon's focus on building an e-reader so cheap that customers won't think about it.

So while everyone else is making expensive tablets which customers must choose between, Amazon is making a tablet so cheap it will be ubiquitous. Sure, they'll improve it and add other media capabilities etc but the focus is on CHEAP.

When you buy a paper book, you get a reader without thinking about it. That's where Amazon is going for ebooks.

<comment><USER7> > Amazon's core is the book model.

Is it? It used to be, but I don't think their core is still concentrated on books. Go to Amazon, look at the left menu, where is Books? It isn't at the top.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Could Amazon fork Android? They're big enough and have enough engineering horsepower to do it. It feels like this is what they'd need to do to be confident that Android is feasible in the long run, since I think their cloud services/advertising and Google's eventually go head-on.

<comment><USER9> With the Amazon Appstore (one word, remember), I thought Android would become a lot more interesting, if Amazon made a phone for themselves that leverages the store, so it isn't as fragmented and unintelligible as "Android phones in general".

I'm sure Google wouldn't mind supporting their efforts.

As for a tablet, I don't really get where they're going with this; if I were them, I'd at least wait and let the other manufacturers test the waters first.

<comment><USER10> I don't think folks are talking about a phone - they're expecting a tablet. Amazon is already essentially the #2 player in the tablet market but they have no footprint in the phone market. I suspect they'd be perfectly happy leaving the phone market to other Android vendors and simply providing a Kindle reader app.

It doesn't seem like the other vendors are doing a very good job of "testing the waters". By the time they're done messing around, it might be too late. Seems like this is the year to either do it or not.

<comment><USER9> Eh, I think it's relevant to delineate e-readers like Kindle from app-centric tablets, "tAPPlets", like, say, the iPad.

E-ink readers are great on their own for obvious reasons and don't have to compete directly with the iPad. I don't know how well an app-centric Amazon tablet would do against Apple.

Amazon probably has the money to dip their feet and fail, but how well are any of the competitors doing by comparison?

They also obviously have an absurd customer base to tap, and they already have Kindle, on-demand video and rentals, but I don't know if that is going to cut it. If they focus on being cheaper, maybe, but good luck with that. It would be interesting if they partnered with Readability, at least just as a cute "fuck you" to Apple.

They'll have to focus a little differently or frame their device in an interesting way. Time will tell.

<comment><USER4> The fact that everyone else is doing a horrific job at making a tablet is a bigger sign, to me, that Amazon has a shot at pulling it off.

One thing that stuck out to me recently is that on Amazon's left sidebar digital content is now on the top. If Amazon loses their battle over state sales tax then they need something that puts them on a level playing field and that is going to be digital content.

In my opinion the difference between e-readers and tablets will very soon be non-existent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd say apple should just pull the kindle app right now and force the users to migrate to iBooks rather than do it later when Amazon provides an alternative. When(if) Amazon comes out with theirs they'll start making more demands to force apple to boot them out, at which point they'll get a bunch of kindle addicted ipad users migrating to their tablet for free.

</comment><comment><USER12> Why would they keep this as a threat? Why not release it when it was ready? They have little to lose? And can anyone secretly bring out a tablet anymore? Not even apple can.

</comment><comment><USER13> Yeah, but how long will it be before we get an SDK for it?

<comment><USER14> Could it be that they are stalling on the Kindle SDK because "Android is the future" or something like that?

<comment><USER13> I _hope_ it's something that simple and good for developers. I have no real trust that it will happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> May be the Honeycomb team thinks this too..

</comment><comment><USER16> Mirasol. It is the answer to everything. Alas, I have it on good authority that it is not happening his year.

So move along, nothing to see here.

<comment><USER17> It's nice technology but not really the answer to anything. For one, great tablets are already possible without that technology, it would merely be an incremental improvement. You don't need a Mirasol display in the living room or the kitchen (except insofar as power savings are concerned). And: one technology doesn't make the product. Especially tablets can only be great if the right technologies are combined in the right way. There are no miracle cures.</comment></comment>


Offline Book "Lending" Costs U.S. Publishers Nearly $1 Trillion - <AUTHOR> http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2010/01/offline-book-lending-costs-us.html <comment><USER2> In Europe authors get paid when their books are loaned by libraries: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Lending_Right>

<comment><USER3> To put this in perspective, in the UK (from <http://www.plr.uk.com/>):

 _The Rate Per Loan has now been confirmed and has increased for the first time in three years to 6.29 pence_

£0.0629 is somewhat different to the £7.99 that the average paperback costs in the UK these days.

Also:

 _Over 23,000 writers ... receive PLR payments each year_

Which seems a very small number to me.

<comment><USER2> A better comparison would be to compare that royalty rate with what the author gets from sales. A 'typical' rate would be 10% of what the publisher gets. If the retailer sells the book for £8 they'll keep something like 40% so the publisher will keep £4.80 and the author will get £0.48.

<comment><USER4> Not to mention that a single book can be loaned multiple times over the year. So, if you have a pay per loan rate of £0.0629, it would only have be loaned 8 times over the year to match the rate of one sale (for the author). Not to mention that they probably get the royalty from the first sale as well (or maybe not as part of the pay per loan agreement - I have no idea).

So, the pay per loan rate is probably pretty good.

<comment><USER5> There was a discussion in France, where the did not used to have a pay per loan system in the libraries and some people wanted to introduce one. I do not know however, what came out of it..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A related note: this is one reason why publishers like ebooks (obviously there are disadvantages for them, too). It's also why I don't like ebooks.

I guess I'm a cheapskate. Well over 50% of my personal book consumption comes from used or library books. Over 90% of my family's books come from such sources as well. I would absolutely _love_ to dive into ebooks, if only to massively reduce the physical volume said books take.

But I can't, not without either severely curtailing our family's reading or increasing our spending by, probably, a thousandfold.

</comment><comment><USER7> Nice satire.

<comment><USER8> Yes, but to be fair to publishers: libraries don't replace sales the way that piracy can. Borrowing requires a trip to the library, which has a limited number of copies of any book, borrowers have a limited time to read a book, they can't make notes in it, etc. Enthusiastic fans will often still buy. If they can get a permanent copy that's just as good as the paid version, without leaving home, for free, that's a different matter.

Not that piracy == lost sales in every case. But a pirated copy gives more of the value of the original than a borrowed book does.

<comment><USER9> I don't know that is true in all cases. For instance, if I were to pirate "ultimate programming reference book", yes what you say is true, i get far more value than borrowing it. On the other hand, if it is a novel I will read exactly 1 time, the difference in value transmitted is negligable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Since online thieves are already called "pirates", we need a new name for these hooligans. I propose "rats"!

<comment><USER11> Ninjas!

<comment><USER12> Eternal battle between pirates and ninjas... It will be interesting :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Obviously what's needed here is for more publishing industry executives to move into top roles in government organizations that oversee these "libraries". Then they can work to sabotage and choke this piracy from within. It worked for the energy industry; I can't see why it wouldn't work here.</comment>


Review our startup, Emotiv Control: focused on electronic vehicle stability control. - <AUTHOR>

http://eemotiv.com
It's a startup focused around tuning the electronic stability control systems in production cars, allowing the driver to electronically compensate and correct for any inherent understeer or oversteer that the car has.
I just wanted to run it by you guys and gather your thoughts on it. Any feedback?
Cheers, Pete. <comment><AUTHOR> <http://eemotiv.com></comment>


It's Time to Prepare for the End of the Web as We Know It - <AUTHOR> http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=144867

<comment><USER2> "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." - Mark Twain</comment>


TensorFlow Now Accepting Pull Requests on GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/commit/661530b3c01be63ab90919834d53a838a834bcf7 <comment><USER2> How difficult would it be to get up to date with their techniques? This is fascinating stuff, but I need to cover a lot of terrain to get up to speed. What's a good way to do so?</comment>


Amazon is among several companies interested in buying Slack - happy-go-lucky http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-interested-in-buying-slack-2017-6 <comment><AUTHOR> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14558035](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14558035).

</comment><comment><USER2> Here's a non-BI link if you don't want to turn off your ad-blocker

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-15/messaging...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-15/messaging- startup-slack-said-to-draw-interest-from-amazon-com)

<comment><USER3> Works for me with uBlock Origin on FireFox</comment></comment>


Show HN: Share Android xml resources - <AUTHOR> https://elfin-vibraphone.gomix.me/ <comment><AUTHOR> Developer here, feel free to ask or give comment :).</comment>


Will RISC-V Revolutionize Computing? - <AUTHOR> https://m-cacm.acm.org/magazines/2020/5/244325-will-risc-v-revolutionize-computing/fulltext <comment><USER2> I like the idea of RISC-V, applaud the designers and wish it well, but there is a lot of slightly purple prose here about the benefits of an open and 'free' ISA.

I can see how RISC-V works for SoC designers who either 1. Want to cut costs to a minimum or 2. Want to add their own proprietary extensions to distinguish it from the competition. I'm less sure that it works for everyone else.

The instruction set running on your Raspberry PI is the same as that running on your iPhone which in turn is the same as that running on an Ampere Server. Do we really want to be faced with a multiplicity of distinct ISAs?

<comment><USER3> It kind of "depends".

People are talking about cost of licensing, but the cost of ARM are peanuts compared to cost of design and fabrication. I am not even sure if the word peanuts correctly describes it.

ARM has made changes that you no longer need some one-off fees before you start producing "certain" ARM design. You get access to it and only paid for it once you start making revenue.

RISC-V makes sense for tiny microcontroller that ships in tens of millions. Western Digital saves millions every year just by switching to RISC-V for Microcontroller used in their HDD.

RISC-V's main competition is the like of ARC and some other DSP. It is competing with ARM in certain segment ( or the old ARM embedded segment ). But it is not competing ARMv8.

<comment><USER2> Agree 100%.

No argument that RISC-V is both interesting and has a lot of value. Just not that enthused by the "a new golden age" and "will eventually supplant x86 and ARM" commentary being presented (primarily) on the basis of ISA customisation without a broader discussion of the pros and cons and wider market issues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Me, I'm ready for a RISC-VI or RISC-W.

It would be quite a lot like RISC-V, except it would:

\- have rotate instructions in the core set

\- have popcount instructions in the core set

\- represent bool `true` with ~0 in the ABI

\- have all the add, subtract, and comparison instructions set two registers (in addition to the destination), one to 0 and the other to ~0, according to a test of the result.

\- have conditional branch and conditional move designate a register to be tested for equality to zero. Conditional move would move from one of two register sources, either of which could be the same as the destination.

\- have two ISA registers fixed at 0 and -1.

<comment><USER5> Sorry, but why do you need it in the base set? If it's a modular chip that also works for other applications then the base should be as slim as possible. As long as your targets all support it and likely any desktop chips would.

<comment><USER4> "As slim as possible" includes popcount and rotate, along with add and shift, if you seriously mean for a design to be useful.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to release research paper code? - <AUTHOR> How would you publicly release code from a recently published paper? I have some python notebooks and would like to present them as a library. Should I use docker? Pipenv? Poetry? <comment><USER2> Given [https://github.com/jupyter/docker- stacks](https://github.com/jupyter/docker-stacks) Docker might be appropriate. No matter which route you decide to take: make it easy. If you are using pipenv or poetry do so while offering a Makefile or documentation on what commands to run.

A Makefile with a decent "help" target would be perfect even if you do use Docker. I'd suggest looking at [https://marmelab.com/blog/2016/02/29/auto- documented-makefil...](https://marmelab.com/blog/2016/02/29/auto-documented- makefile.html) to spare you some work with maintaining the help target.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Putting it in a Github repo seems to be standard practice.

I personally would prefer a well-curated "requirements.txt" with which to create a virtual environment in Python. I would stay away from Docker mostly because researchers are not system administrators, and making them install a container solution seems a bit excessive to me.

</comment><comment><USER4> Check out Zenodo [1]. It lets you generate DOIs for Github releases.

[1] [https://zenodo.org/](https://zenodo.org/)</comment>


ASK HN: Are you receiving unsolicited seeds "from China"? - <AUTHOR> I would want to know if this piece of news is real or just an hoax:
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/27/us/unsolicited-seed-packages-china-trnd/index.html
The seeds shown seem to be clearly from Citrus (in my opinion). So this would be either an hoax to spread fear, or could be malicious and contain Citrus viruses. Have somebody received this or other seeds? Can you show the seeds? <comment><USER2> I think a third more plausible answer is that the companies in question are simply sending ultra cheap junk to random addresses in the USA as a way to pad their perceived business. This has been going on for years.

see:

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/fake-orders-brush-up-online- sal...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/fake-orders-brush-up-online-sales-in- china-1425386416)

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2019/10/25/american...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2019/10/25/americans- are-still-receiving-unordered-packages-from-asian-e-criminals/#3394ec1569f3)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow. But doing this with seeds is terrible. It has the potential to boycott the economy at national scale.

There are more than 230 viruses of useful plants that can be transmitted by seeds, and hundreds of invasive species... How can this packages be allowed to cross several frontiers and enter in a country?

<comment><USER3> it can be allowed by conforming to phytosanitary proceedures, this means inspection and permits. This is common and regular proseedure for agri/horti culture

<comment><AUTHOR> I assume that you can not obtain a permit if the origin of the alive material can't be verified, the sender is not identified, and unless somebody has paid for the permit (they aren't cheap).

Moreover, anybody that would send a package like those shown in the article, to an address in Florida, California, Arizona or Texas would be violating the Citrus quarantine, therefore commiting a crime.

And to finish, flooding frontiers with thousands of small packages of time consuming cheap material is evil. I assume that messing deliberately with the work of civil servants or slow customs is also typified as a crime.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


1984 ad remade..new Dictator: Steve Jobs - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/29/doubletwist-remakes-apples-classic-1984-ad-with-a-new-dictator-steve-jobs/ <comment><USER3> These guys are obviously savvy marketers. This isn't their first stunt...

[http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/05/apple-gets-pwned-sf- sto...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/05/apple-gets-pwned-sf-store-is-now- advertising-dvd-jons-doubletwist/)

Now if only they had a product that did something beyond letting you use iTunes with non-Apple devices. The user base for this won't be remarkably large (non tech-savvy people who have owned iPods in the past but who are now switching to a generic player).

<comment><USER4> you bet they are - after all DoubleTwist was founded by Jon Lech Johansen.

<comment><USER5> I wonder if Apple would be able to buy them off?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ha! Great commercial, but I wonder if it's really for the audience, or more for the clever zing that is aimed at the egos inside Apple.

Basically, the ad is an epic troll, which makes me smile, but leaves me wondering if it will effectively convert people.

</comment><comment><USER7> I thought she was throwing a Zune logo for a second!

</comment><comment><USER8> It doesn't really make sense. Apple was offering a competing hardware/software product to the IBM PC -- they were not writing software for IBM PCs as an alternative to MS-DOS.

<comment><USER9> The idea is that they're acting against a "tyrant."

<comment><USER10> I also thought the idea went as far as "If you hate Itunes; there will finally be a alternative" - at least thats what I'm interested in..

<comment><USER11> The Zune software is pretty awesome. Can't sync ipods though. Try Winamp for that. (assuming you're on windows)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> is it not a very bold commercial from Doubletwist..will they be able to reach the expectations..anyone tried the product ?

<comment><USER12> I installed doubleTwist some time ago, thinking the point was to unlock AAC content so I could play it on non-Apple stuff. (It was just an experiment; I have exactly 1 DRM'd AAC file.)

However, it seemed to come along with a whole social networking thingummy, and I couldn't really solve the very simple specific problem that - I thought - <USER2> was supposed to solve. After about 90 seconds, I uninstalled it.

<comment><USER13> Oh, the "social network included" syndrome...</comment></comment></comment>


Netflix's biggest bingers get hit with higher internet costs - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-08-13/netflixs-biggest-bingers-get-hit-with-higher-internet-costs <comment><USER2> As someone who comes from a country where monthly data caps for home internet are completely unheard of and it's standard to have internet with download speeds between 5 and 10 MB/s for roughly $20/month since circa 2006, I find it both puzzling and worrying that capped home broadband can still exist in any developed country, especially with such tiny limits and ridiculous prices that some of the posters here have mentioned.

A game can easily get up to 50 GB these days, and a even a single patch can be up to a few GB as well. I can't even begin to imagine how any sort of work gets done with something like a 500Gb monthly limit in anything above a single person household.

<comment><USER3> Capped broadband is a new development in the US.

The FCC (federal government) is actually adding new rules to prevent state and city governments from pushing back against the caps. For instance, without the rules, states could ban selling or renewing right of way contracts for internet providers that impose caps or violate network neutrality.

Some cities have started rolling out their own internet providers to compete with the commercial ones. This (or breaking up the big ISPs and moving to common carrier) seems like the right long term solution.

<comment><USER4> > Capped broadband is a new development in the US.

No, it's not. _Published_ cap policies are relatively new, because a lot of caps weren't published, despite caps existing and being applied to customers, prior to the transparency rule in the Open Internet Report & Order (the Title I net neutrality regulation that, except for the transparency rule, was struck down by the courts that came before the Title II net neutrality regulation which was repealed after Republicans took control of the FCC.)

<comment><USER5> Now we just need the caps to be mandatory with all service advertisements and signups and it almost might make sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some, but not all, US ISPs have caps on Internet use in the US. The cap is usually one terabyte. There's a long list of them at [https://broadbandnow.com/internet-providers-with-data- caps](https://broadbandnow.com/internet-providers-with-data-caps) , the biggest offenders being AT&T, CenturyLink, Cox, Viasat (which, yes, is satellite Internet), and Comcast (a.k.a. XFINITY).

The only reason why Spectrum, another big US ISP, does _not_ have data caps is because they agreed, back in 2016, to the US Government to not have them for seven years when trying to buy other companies.

<comment><USER7> A cap of 1 TB seems completely reasonable to me.

edit: After reading some replies, let me modify it and put it this way: the concept of a cap of n TB, where n is such that 99% of users don't ever reach it, seems completely reasonable to me.

<comment><USER8> It's not even remotely. It's equivalent to 3 mbps. It's not a technological limit. It's only imposed to extract more money and discourage streaming. It sets the country back technologically. It also discourages content creators from jumping to 4K.

<comment><USER7> Not sure what you mean by "It's equivalent to 3 mbps". Are you, like, streaming a video of an eagle nest 24/7?

You are paying for residential Internet service. The number of people who would legitimately need to transfer more than 1 TB per month over a residential Internet connection is vanishingly small. Bandwidth, particularly during high-demand hours, costs money. It is not fair for other users to subsidize your extreme usage scenario (since it is an axiom that all costs borne by the ISP are passed on to customers). It is far more fair that you, the extreme outlier, pays more.

<comment><USER9> The problem is that underprovisioning uses some statistical average that will fail on special situations. Content streaming is so common now that there are peak hours where almost everyone is streaming video. If ISPs need to have that use case in mind, it should be possible for them to sustain that demand 24/7\. If they don't do that, it's for one of two reasons. Either they can't sustain peak demand and they are trying to disincentivize usage, or they can handle a heavy demand but want to charge extra for off-peak bandwitdh usage, thus earning money for an already amortized infrastructure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is there any cost that an ISP company has related to the amount of data transferred? All the costs that I'm aware of are related to the bandwidth, not the total transmitted data (eg.: IX connections and such).

The ISP companies want to do this because they get more money, that's simple, and usually followed by awful things like exemption for certain services.

In Brazilian Facebook IT groups it's already common to see people from Angola using the group to google things, because Facebook usage is out of the data cap. Some Brazilians even created groups specialized in this "facebook googling" for Angolans.

It makes me sad knowing how far ISPs are being able to push such bad things.

\- edit to add more info about the current state in Brazil: Mobile internet plans all have data cap and most have exemption on WhatsApp and Facebook, while house data plans are forbidden to do so by Brazil's telecom regulator (ANATEL), unfortunately they are lobbying pretty hard to change that.

<comment><USER11> Yes, the costs are proportional to the bandwidth, but people want a fast connection at a low price, so ISP's sell a fast connection at a discount and limit how often you can use it through traffic shaping and/or data caps to still turn a profit on it. The business plans are often unlimited, and typically priced a multiple for what's the exact same technology as the home plans underneath. If you want to know what unlimited bandwidth really costs, look at the price of the business plans.

I think ISP's are often undeservedly painted as the bad guys. Yes, some are profiteers, but most are just turning a normal profit, just like any business. The only way for them to compete on price with other ISP's is to also impose caps, because what they charge is just not enough to fund the infrastructure for a dedicated connection with guaranteed bandwidth.

<comment><USER12> I assumed the extra cost was not because of the unrestricted bandwidth (Granted I have Xfinity in Chicago and only pay $15 a month for unlimited on Gigabit)but because of the static IP(s) associated with the service. In addition I would assume that trouble calls are elevated over that of a home user with quicker response times.

Just looking at Biz service vs home and assuming that's because of unlimited bandwidth is 1:1, there's more going on there that's different between the two.

<comment><USER13> Until a few years ago the cost to get additional IP addresses on most business ISPs was pretty minimal. The ISP my company uses does not even charge for additional IP addresses, you just need to give good reasons for why you need a larger IP space. With a previous ISP, additional IP addresses were about $10/mo but the cost of service was easily 3-4x similar rated speeds as a residential connection. Most of the additional cost is due to increased capacity planning and faster service times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The problem with this article is that it implies that the only use for high use of data transfer is to binge watch or consume various forms of media. Data caps don't kill that and never will.

What data caps kill are peer to peer services, self hosting, and anything where people actually participate in the internet rather than acting as consumers only. It's part of the ongoing push to make the internet into another television where people all use the same centralized services and never interact with each other directly.

Phone usage has made this even worse since smartphone network connectivity is not real internet connectivity. There people have learned to accept data caps (which make sense given the limited actual frequency bandwidth available for radio in free space). But also they've learned to accept the inability to host servers, use ports, or do anything other than HTTP/S. The ISPs have seen this and are now copying the violations that wireless telcos have brought in.

<comment><USER15> Why host a server at a home, with the security catastrophe that invites ot your local network, instead of running your peer node on a rented machine in a cloud or a colo, that you SSH into from your client?

<comment><USER16> To learn how to deal with the security catastrophe that is hosting your own stuff. Just putting your things on other people's servers doesn't necessarily make it secure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> >People who use more bandwidth should pay more, they say, especially since capacity isn't unlimited.

But don't people already pay more for higher bandwidth connections?

<comment><USER18> This is a key component of cable company advertising: they stress the _speed_ at which data is delivered to your home network and, somehow, leave out how much data they will allow to be delivered.

Thus the situation in this article: they subscriber purchases a 4K television and chooses a higher bandwidth cable internet plan. They do not realize that they are only paying to use the same fixed amount of data up more quickly.

I wonder if we'll eventually see companies like Netflix and Disney pressure cable companies to drop these bandwidth caps. In this article the subscriber cancels their Hulu account and turns down the Netflix video quality, directly costing Hulu money and devaluing their 4K television.

<comment><USER19> _This is a key component of cable company advertising: they stress the _speed_ at which data is delivered to your home network and, somehow, leave out how much data they will allow to be delivered._

To be more precise, they stress _download_ speed. Comcast's 1Tb plan has upload speeds of 30Mbps

<comment><USER20> In fairness, few people really need high upload speeds, which is why most plans are as asymmetrical as they are.

One exception may be content creators, who quickly become aware of this fact once they try uploading their first YouTube video.

In any case, although Comcast (and others) may advertise / stress download speeds, that information is really easy to look up for anyone who is interested [0], and is probably shown somewhere along the checkout path.

[0] [https://i.imgur.com/Jg94Nv6.png](https://i.imgur.com/Jg94Nv6.png)

<comment><USER19> Or anyone who uses a VPN for work. ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm working from home and have Swedish provider Bahnhof. Since I pull a lot of backups and use 4k TV in often at 100TB (Terrabyte). Not a single complaint and 40$/mo

<comment><USER22> You download 800MB/second, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for $40 per month? Color me incredulous.

Obviously you meant terabytes! 2TB/month I think is a lot to expect from a $40/month connection. The economics of that, in reality, is that your lower usage neighbors are heavily subsidizing your bandwidth costs.

<comment><USER23> This (terabytes, not petabytes) is a very standard connection here in Europe.

You can drive across remote parts of Norway, Sweden etc and have 20mbit+ 4G (probably more if you had a high gain antenna).

Externally it sounds more like the US just has shit infrastructure, sorry.

<comment><USER24> >Externally it sounds more like the US just has shit infrastructure, sorry.

Sometimes I think Europeans have no real idea of how large the United States is. We have single states larger than several countries and single states with larger populations than several countries.

\- Norway is 148,728 square miles with 5.258 million people.

\- Sweden is 173,860 square miles with 9.995 million people.

\- The United States land area is 3,531,905 square miles with 327.2 million people.

Of course we have a lower quality of infrastructure, 2 of our 50 states are individually larger than Sweden. California is larger than Norway with nearly 8 times the population

<comment><USER23> Sure, the relevant comparison is roughly the US with all of Europe.

It seems like tons of people here are talking about actual real big cities in the US that have microscopic caps, though.

We're not talking about the outback.

<comment><USER24> >It seems like tons of people here are talking about actual real big cities in the US that have microscopic caps, though.

The internet isn't limited to a big city though, everything isn't mirrored in each large population center, that data has to cross vast distances.

And population density increases the need for more and more cable to be deployed, if you're feeding a podunk town of 5,000 people but NYC has 28,000~ people per square mile, San Francisco 19,000~ people per square mile, Chicago 11,600~ people per square mile.

Population dense areas are going to have a higher data consumption, a higher data consumption means you need that much more infrastructure at any given moment to handle peak.

Then factor in the United States has the 3rd largest number of internet users in the world, an estimated 292 million [1] and it is much more difficult to serve them all with the same level of service in a country orders of magnitude smaller with orders of magnitude fewer people.

The only country in Europe that begins to compare in both population and size is Russia at 1.8x larger land area and 44% of the population. Comparing physicall ysmall countries with 5-15 million. There are only 15 countries in Europe with populations over 10 million people, and only 1 of them (Russia) begins to come close to the US in size (being itself larger). The second largest country in Europe being The Ukraine and it's smaller than Texas.

You simply can't compare internet infrastructure in a random European country to the United States. It's like saying "Smart Cars get 40mpg, I don't see why NASA's Crawler-Transporter can't do 40mpg too, sounds like bad design!"

[1] [https://internetworldstats.com/top20.htm](https://internetworldstats.com/top20.htm)

<comment><USER21> Bahnhof also build their own infrastructure using their signed up customers and hosting clients money. AFAIK, internet providers in the us don't and can't invest like this to improve speed and lower cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Doesn't Netflix cache at most ISP's? That reduces the internal costs for the ISP substantially. Feels like they should factor that into their caps.

<comment><USER26> This is what the whole net neutrality debate was about. If ISPs cap data for small video sites, but not Netflix, that results in a massive advantage to Netflix (and, presumably, other large incumbents).

For what it's worth, T-Mobile did this with Binge-On: [https://www.t-mobile.com/offers/binge-on-streaming- video](https://www.t-mobile.com/offers/binge-on-streaming-video)

<comment><USER19> What T-mobile did for Binge On is allow _any_ legal video service to sign on and be zero rated. They didn't advertise it, but they even allowed some porn sites.

There was a poster on HN who said that his little small non profit was able to fill out a form and be zero rated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I want a no cap connection and I want a fast (200mbps+) connection but I'm also perfectly happy to accept that I can't have (don't want to pay the price of) a connection that allows me to use 200mbps 24/7 for a year.

That's why I'm thinking there should be some kind of tiering where I get unlimited 50 mbps (still ok for round the clock 4K) and also N terabytes at the 200mbps for those occasional big downloads.

My current broadband is 500mbit without data caps, but I suspect that if I do use 500mbit 24/7 for long then they'd start throttling of contacting me. I'd be happier with a model with public caps than one with secret caps and throttling. It could be that I really do have a true 500mbit no-cap subscription, I don't know!

<comment><USER28> Internet is sort of naturally capped and throttled for almost all residential users. You already can't easily download something at 500 mbit, servers do not stay underutilized and may not have enough bandwidth for your speed, and servers from more than a couple of hops away won't even be able to serve you at that speed over a single tcp connection, so you have to look at things like torrents. Then home routers, they suck too and might struggle with this speed, wifi most definitely is out of question. You also need to store all that data somewhere and at that speed you will run out of storage pretty quickly. ISPs are aware of all this and can bravely offer you speeds you will not be able to use beyond speed testing. They even expect new customers to go crazy with downloads in first months of broadband usage and eventually drop their usage to normal levels. Keep in mind, something like 10 mbit 24/7 usually costs them very little to even care and I think these days 50 mbits is at that level too, they are unlikely to mind if 1 out of 1000 users uses 50 mbits 24/7.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> How common is it to have data cap on cable internet? I lived in a few countries in the last 10 years and have never experienced it. Is US the exception here or other countries also have such limits?

<comment><USER30> On a consumer, not high-tier plan? It's a standard in close to every country. Where is that not the case? (I assume cable here as "any non mobile" rather than actual cable tv internet provider)

You can find a non-capped (at least in theory) plan everywhere if you pay enough of course.

<comment><USER31> In EU (the Netherlands) you can get 4G unlimited for phone for about 20$. I live with my friend hosts his own server for backups and home cinema.

For movies/tv shows/games we probably spend few TB a month.

I had never heard about such thing until now, it's ridiculous to have cap and I'm so glad that I don't have to live in such a place.

<comment> concert-gilled It is actually unlimited? Several companies in the United States offer "unlimited data" but throttle speeds after you use 50 GB~ so much that it is basically unusable.

<comment><USER32> Unlimited has to be unlimited by law. After 10gb of usage a day, you need to text a number (for free) to get a few more gb, and so on. That's just there to prevent flooding the network too much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I wonder why HNers are upset over this. Is this purely a framing issue? In other words, if the status quo is

 _$80 /month; 1 TB included, +$50 for unlimited_

Would people be happy with

 _$130 /month; $50 discount available if you stay within 1TB_

or what about

 _$80 /month†; †pricing includes $50 discount for staying within 1TB_

<comment><USER34> It's because most American HNers have no competition in their internet market and can't choose an alternative without a data cap.

<comment><USER35> Why would a lack of choice change how they interpret a simple reframing of the same cost?

<comment><USER36> The question was specifically "Would people be happy with" which also assumes that they would be happy with a reframing, but they are, in fact, not happy with that price at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> We have a 4k tv and watch quite a bit of Netflix/YouTube/NowTv. Our usage has been around ~ 450 GB/month, which apparently puts us on the 93 percentile of usage though not sure if this is for our plan (100 Mbit) or all of Virgin Media (our cable provider)

</comment><comment><USER38> > In the first quarter of this year, about 4% of internet subscribers consumed > at least 1 terabyte of data

How? I have a 4K TV (and a couple of 1080), I work from home, my wife streams all day, and my torrents are always seeding, and have a gigabit line (with unlimited data).

I only average about 500GB a month, and my peak was 772GB.

I guess the only thing I _don 't_ do on a regular basis is play games.

Don't get me wrong, the caps are just rent seeking and also totally unfair (how come watching Comcast on Demand doesn't count against the cap but Netflix does, even though both come from servers on Comcast's network?), but it blows my mind that people can actually hit that 1TB cap.

Hats off to y'all.

<comment><USER39> Sounds like you're not actually watching in 4k. A 4k video could be around 7-11GB/hour [1], so 10+ movies and binge several shows and you've over the 1TB easy. Sounds like a lot for a one person, but with a family it's easy to chew up 100+hrs in a month

A 1080p movie will be 2-4GB/hr.

 _[1][https://www.androidauthority.com/how-much-data-does- netflix-...](https://www.androidauthority.com/how-much-data-does-netflix- use-976146/) _

<comment><USER38> Yes, of course not, because no one has that much 4k content. I guess that was sort of implied in my comment. Even with a 4k TV it's pretty hard to find enough 4k content to blow out that cap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I don't really get why this is so controversial? I mean, all of the HN crowd here must understand the idea of oversubscription, and many of us have also seen prices for dedicated 1 Gb/s connection in data centers?

Am I missing something here? Am I overestimating the costs of bandwidth, does the Netflix/CDN edge serves inside of the ISP network lower it dramatically?

<comment><USER5> This is hardly the only possible response to oversubscription, just the one that maximizes short term profits. The customer certainly isn't funding better internet (if it did the government subsidies would have worked), and they certainly aren't getting the advertised service.

So yea, you could frame this in terms of rationality, but since when was rationality the sole basis of ethics, and since when have ethics become irrelevant to human life?

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Paying for bandwidth makes sense. More infrastructure is needed to move more bits around.

Paying for data transferred does not. Data isn't limited like water or electricity.

There ought to be a law that advertising a plan as "unlimited" is disallowed if there is a cap.

<comment><USER42> It's obviously way more complex than that, though. The ISP isn't going to make sure that all of their peering links have enough bandwidth to carry the full advertised bandwidth of all of their customers connections simultaneously, in case everyone tries to download at full speed from the same website at once. On their end, the bandwidth is under provisioned. Data caps are a way of managing that that give customers higher peak speeds in exchange for limited data transfer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Here in Vancouver BC Canada, we do have data caps but it appears to have been only $10 CAD ($7 US) to upgrade to unlimited for that month. Hence, it's not a massive issue other than in principle to some.

Currently there are two companies, Shaw (cable) and Telus (fibre to the home), and some smaller ISPs that use either Shaw cables or Telus DSL.

Internet pricing here tends to look like $20-35 CAD per month on the low end up to about $110 for a high end fibre symmetrical connection, with most plans coming in around $50-75 if you play the "bounce from ISP to ISP every few months" game. Data cap costs appear to look reasonable on most plans and you can get them without caps.

</comment><comment><USER44> This made me laugh out loud:

> Cable executives prefer not to call them caps, referring instead to "data > plans" and saying it's a matter of fairness. People who use more bandwidth > should pay more, they say, especially since capacity isn't unlimited

If _any_ internet provider or cell provider offered reasonable pay per GB data rates without an unreasonable minimum monthly usage charge, I would be all over it. Google Phi is probably by far the closest thing I've ever seen, but Comcast & Verizon are absolutely not willing to let me pay only for what I use, so it's very funny to hear rationalizing quotes about "fairness".

</comment><comment><USER45> Ran a business connection at home, and still on that account, it's about 50% more for the coverage but no caps and much more responsive when I've needed on-site service. Of course I'd like to save the extra ~$50/month for 1gig down, 80mb up vs the 200/20 I have now. But the static/unblocked IP and the better service level make it necessary for when I'm working at home.

For comparison, about $140/month with fees for 200/20 business, where consumer gigabit/80 is about $90/month iirc. Business gigabit is like $300/mo (f that).

</comment><comment><USER46> Maybe this is not the case for Comcast but Netflix deploys edge servers into the data centers of ISP to cache content local to the client. So this should make the data on-net and keeping it inside the ISP's pipes. if this is the case, why would overages be factored in with this traffic? Greed ... count all traffic as traffic on-net and off ?

[https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/](https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/)

</comment><comment><USER47> I have no problem with a data cap. But any and all services received from that provider (i.e. television service) should have to count towards that cap.

</comment><comment><USER48> Problem is the lack of real competition. Capping usage so it hits only X% is reasonable but then not if you already you pay $100 a month. Still, back to point one, only competition can sort this out and is lacking. Even if they raised prices to $150 after a few years, they'd raise them more.

On the other hand, Netflix, Microsoft, Apple etc have shifted everything online so they are saving on distribution.

</comment><comment><USER49> I have Netflix playback settings set at Low quality, which is <= 300 MB per hour which is 10% of High or 5% of ultra HD.

Seems fine to me.

<comment><USER50> Have fun wollen the VHS-like quality on a 4k screen.

<comment><USER49> It's on a forty something inch tv we generally watch netflix and maybe because we don't watch terrestrial tv at all any more, we don't notice the lower quality. As long as I don't have buffering I'm happy. Anyway we live in a rural area and get our internet by wireless so beggars can't be choosers!

<comment><USER51> If there was a show you wanted to watch in high quality, you can download it before watching.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Network congestion is a real thing. If everyone else in my neighborhood is streaming Netflix in 4k, it's going to reduce my connection's performance. Why shouldn't the cable company charge them more for that? If we all pay the same, I'm subsidizing them.

<comment><USER53> Because if there are that many people in your neighborhood who can stream Netflix in 4K, the ISP can lay fiber in a densely populated area making a metric shit ton of money for the foreseeable future, and the pipes will _not_ be clogged. They can easily fit everyone in their fiber infrastructure.

The ISP isn't losing money from offering fiber to New Yorkers. They lose money by paying for infrastructure in less populated areas in middle America. They're trying to make up for that by making urban customers effectively subsidize the Capex the company needs to spend elsewhere

This is a problem in the US and not elsewhere because it's a massive country with people spread all over

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> A monthly bandwidth limit corresponds to a lower average bandwidth. For instance, if my calculations aren't wrong, a monthly limit of 1TB corresponds to an average bandwidth limit of around 400KB/s, even if your link should be capable of much more than that.

</comment><comment><USER55> I know that its probably a cliche at this point but stories like this give me the forlorn hope that maybe, just maybe physical media will make a strong comeback.

</comment><comment><USER56> Maybe they are doing him a favor. Maybe he shouldn't be spending all of his time binge watching Netflix and perhaps he has a much larger problem ('why') that he should address instead.

</comment><comment><USER57> Here in Canada there was a huge problem with data caps when Netflix launched. Since then they've loosened a bit, but even now, most low-to-mid broadband internet packages have caps under 200GB.

</comment><comment><USER58> I have no issue with this. Unfortunately people have failed to recognize that pricing methods used by ISPs aren't related to the cost of providing some amount of data, but provided to cover their entire business + profit, divided out amongst the customer base.

The only thing data caps do is ensure that heavy users pay more. The alternative to them, is that Comcast would just raise all customers' bills even more.

In an ideal situation, we'd have pure metered data usage, and pay by the MB, similar to how we pay for electricity or natural gas usage. Then people who barely use it would pay drastically less, and yes, the heaviest users would pay even more.

</comment><comment><USER59> How much generated traffic are we talking about?

</comment><comment><USER60> An awful fact of life in pseudo-capitalist America: if a corporate entity can charge you more, they will (and it does NOT matter whether it aligns to traditional supply-and-demand models or not)...And in the case of internet service (in the U.S.), consumers can not exercise their market ability to move to an alternative provider. In America, on paper it states "market capitalism"...but - at least for internet service - in reality, it is nothing more than an awful form of the not-nice parts of communism. We lack choice in our markets. </vent>

<comment><USER61> >> An awful fact of life in pseudo-capitalist America: if a corporate entity can charge you more, they will

It's a bit myopic to say this only about America.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Data caps shouldn't exist on ISP plans

<comment><USER63> You can pay more to not have a cap.

<comment><USER62> These plans are already overpriced. Charging more for the same thing is fleecing, and an indicator of a sick monopolized market. Hopefully once low orbit satellite plans will kick off for real, crooks like Comcast and the like won't be able to do it anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Hot take: I watch almost no HD video, and I practically don't download anything. Why should I have to pay the same money than someone who spends all day streaming 4K Netflix from 5 screens?

"Just buy a lower speed" is not feasible since ISPs keep pushing the lower speed that you can get higher and higher. Overselling. If all you get is fibre, here the minimum is usually 100 Mbps, which I evidently don't need. Same about data caps in mobile connections.

<comment><USER50> Because that's how flat rates work: Everyone pairs the same price for the same product and the losses due to bad actors or power users are caught by the majority of users who don't use the product that much.

Gym memberships work the same way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> There shouldn't be allowed to be a top 1% of internet users.

<comment><USER66> There will always be a top 1%. That's how percentages work.

<comment><USER65> My comment was my obtuse way of pointing out that companies will therefore always have the excuse of "some users are using the system heavily" for pushing up prices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> TLDR; people who use more data have to pay for more data

<comment><USER68> Not in the UK. I've literally never had an ISP contain about bandwidth, and I use a _lot_ of bandwidth.

<comment><USER69> Either you're pretty young or you've been lucky. Unlimited broadband was not the norm in the UK around ten years ago.

<comment><USER70> Can confirm, metered and capped services were the norm, even after ADSL became mainstream.

<comment><USER71> Especially if you're paying for one of the better services, like Andrews and Arnold etc. They have caps listed on their broadband pages. There have been regular stories where customers have been sent letters about their bandwidth usage even though they're on 'unlimited' plans. The ISPs generally refer to clauses in ToS, which (imho) doesn't mean anything can be 'unlimited'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> There's no such thing as unlimited anything. If you use more, you pay more. If you find this notion ridiculous, imagine for a moment that a company offered unlimited gasoline for your car, or if your rental property advertised an unlimited number of occupants per bedroom. That's bananas!

As a side note, I'm horrified by the idea that there are people whose Netflix watching habit runs afoul of their ISP's data cap. Isn't that sort of existence depressing as all hell? Imagine the degree of brain rot caused by this quantity of video content.

<comment><USER73> Your mind seems really quite closed to other perspectives.

Internet is like nuclear power. When there's a lot of extra at night they can practically give it away. My ISP does this.

Also I can go through about 400GB a month of Netflix just by having it on in my home office as a sort of ambience.

<comment><USER72> I'm not denying that using a lot of bandwidth is a valid thing to do. My point is that heavy users must pay more than casual users.

<comment><USER73> I think your argument is valid but there are other valid arguments too.

I work from home and drive very little. I still pay an equal (more than equal actually) share of taxes for road maintenance.

I have a cottage at the very end of a private road. I pay the same amount for 20km of road maintenance that the poor sap at the beginning of the road pays, and he only uses about 100 metres of it.

None of my kids go to school yet, but I pay for public schools.

Obviously this isn't a new debate, but I wanted to draw the parallel with pay- per-use vs. spooky socialism because I think internet access is no different.

<comment><USER72> The poor sap and you don't pay the same amount. Fuel taxes, which are levied as a percentage of what you spend on fuel, will be different for you and the poor sap who drives less. The more you drive, the more you pay in fuel tax, which (ostensibly) goes towards road maintenance.

<comment><USER73> If we wanted a pay to play model, fuel tax is a great idea. But based on the breakdown of my city's funding, basically none of the roads are paid for by it.

The poor sap at the beginning of the road absolutely pays an equal amount. It's actually an interesting problem I'll try not to tangent on. You've got a road and each person needs a certain fraction of it. How do you equitably fund the road?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Materialized views vs. Rollup tables in Postgres - <AUTHOR> https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2018/10/31/materialized-views-vs-rollup-tables/ <comment><USER2> For a more general introduction to how materialized views fit into a larger ecosystem of derived data, I always recommend Martin Kleppmann's post/video on "Turning the Database Inside Out": [https://www.confluent.io/blog/turning-the- database-inside-ou...](https://www.confluent.io/blog/turning-the-database- inside-out-with-apache-samza/)</comment>


Google Chrome to block heavy ads that use too many system resources - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-chrome-to-block-heavy-ads-that-use-too-many-system-resources/ <comment><USER2> I hope this makes it into chromium-browser. A lot of sites push so much background tracking nonsense that it is easy to crash the Raspberry Pi. Especially when a video player is involved.</comment>