Compute Engine machine types with up to 96 vCPUs and 624GB of memory - <AUTHOR> https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/10/new-compute-engine-machine-types.html <comment><USER2> Why would you use that instead of bare metal? You'll come out >$4k per month with sustainable use, for that price you get the same power in bare metal?

Preemptible is a bit cheaper but are 600GB memory really worth it for short running applications? Until you loaded everything in memory your machine probably gets destroyed..

EDIT: Not sure about the exact CPU performance but should be quite close to what OVH offers here? With the same memory configuration and 2TB NVMe this still costs <$1,500/month ([https://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/hg/180bhg1.xml](https://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/hg/180bhg1.xml)).

<comment><USER3> > >$4k per month with sustainable use, for that price you get the same power > in bare metal?

not so sure about that + a hoster who provides such a machine as bare metal wants a setup fee, needs time to setup and a minimum contract duration much longer than one month

guess there are not many hosters which have such a beast as bare metal in stock and available in few minutes (are they any hosters at all?); they will order sch machine themselves and you will wait at least a week

<comment><USER4> You could order 16 of these [https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated- rootserver/px121-ssd](https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/px121-ssd)

Minimum contract length: 1 month, total cost (including setup): $4,384 (on- going month to month cost thereafter: ~$2,191.20).

For that you'd get an aggregate total of 4TB RAM, 7.6TB HDD (SSD), 96 real Intel E5-1650 v3 cores (or 192 vCPUs) and 800TB of bandwidth.

Sprinkle with terraform/ansible/k8s/docker and you have a resilient, massively powerful compute cloud with no long term obligation that's about half the price of GCE if you keep it around beyond 30 days. Or another way to look at it: if you needed such a platform for two years, your second year would be free compared to GCE.

One major issue with this approach (versus GCE's "all in one" box) could be network performance bottlenecks depending on what task(s) you were using such a cluster for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting that usually GCP is one upping AWS on some metric but in this case it isn't touching the current largest compute/memory instance on EC2, the X1 family with up to 128 vCPUs and 4TB of memory. Though the blog does allude to them testing such types in a closed beta, it still is a game of catch up still.

<comment><USER6> Yikes, I'm a little out of the loop. I didn't realize you could get 4TB of RAM in a single machine on EC2.

I've been seeing that medium data keeps getting bigger (i.e. the features of traditional RDBMS are eating away at the need for specialized / distributed stores for data analysis). But so too does it appear that small data is getting a lot bigger too—just load that dataset into memory for analysis. 4TB of memory allows for pretty big "small data."

"I remember back when we used to do gradient descent to estimate linear models; back in the long ago when we didn't have 900 exabytes of memory attached to our NVidia Matrix Crusher 9000 linear algebra accelerator unit."

<comment><USER7> Is it possible that data isn't getting bigger - but that the people who work with it just want to process larger data sets than before?

I mean before they'd train a model of 1,000 inputs and then test it against another 50 and call it a day. Now they want to train it against 1,000,000 inputs.

Am I completely off base? It's not my area, though I work with databases, my observation is that developers always want to use the most data possible even when it doesn't really provide any benefit.

<comment><USER6> Sorry, I was being a bit playful with language. What I mean is that, if you roughly define small, medium, and large data in terms of the strategies required to process, then the absolute size of the data that can be processed using simpler methods grows.

And whether or not more data is needed or collectible varies by discipline. Astrophysics collects way more data than they used to because 1. they need it. 2. instrumentation allows it.

Some kinds of data collection hasn't scaled up however. Surveying humans is expensive and labor intensive. And for many things that you might want to study about humans, you can't simply afix a sensor to them. So, what might have been only accomplished through big data, or medium data methods a few years ago can now be loaded into memory (i.e. small data strategies).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Could be useful if you wrote your neural net with Applescript, I guess.

<comment><USER9> I agree. Once we passed the 640k mark it all became an excuse for lazy tool development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If a VM with 96 cpus is being offered, how many cpus does the bare metal behind the VM have? What is the hardware like here?

<comment><USER11> I imagine you get that 96 if you stick together 4x Xeon CPUs with 24 cores each onto one server.

[https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/processors/...](https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/processors/xeon/e7-processors/e7-8890-v4.html)

<comment><USER12> You only need 2 processors, since each cores gives you 2 vCPUs. "For the n1 series of machine types, a virtual CPU is implemented as a single hardware hyper-thread" \--[https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/machine- types](https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/machine-types)

<comment><USER10> so the bare metal might still have 4, such that it could host 2 of these VMs at once I guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I honestly wonder why did Google cite "SAP HANA" as the _reference_ workload for such setups. I never heard of that product. Noobie asking here, is it the _reference_ workload for such setups ? And are there more demanding workloads ?

<comment><USER14> Maybe because SAP HANA requires vertical scaling. For horizontal scaling, I don't see a point in using such big instances.

<comment><USER15> You can scale HANA vertically and horizontally. Vertical makes sense for ERP workloads where you want low latency (avoiding communication). The ERP workloads of most companies can fit in RAM easily nowadays. Horizontal scaling is best for data warehousing/analytical workloads, which tend to be more CPU bound due to lots of calculations.

<comment><USER14> > You can scale HANA vertically and horizontally

Nah, with scaling, I'm more referring to approaches of eg Cassandra instead of "add another read replica".

<comment><USER15> I wasn't talking about replicas either. HANA can distribute data over many clusters.

[https://blogs.saphana.com/2014/12/10/sap-hana-scale-scale- ha...](https://blogs.saphana.com/2014/12/10/sap-hana-scale-scale-hardware/)

HANA's roots lie in BWA (SAP BW accelerator), whose main game was distributing large amounts of data across commodity clusters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Did they increase the per-instance network bandwidth caps? Previously instances had 2Gb/s/core of network bandwidth capped at 16Gb/s, which makes 8-core nodes the sweet spot for network bandwidth.

I never quite understood why this is necessary if they're cutting up larger machines. Why should the total network cap matter if I have two 8-core instances or one 16-core instance on the same physical machine?

edit:

[https://cloud.google.com/docs/compare/data- centers/networkin...](https://cloud.google.com/docs/compare/data- centers/networking)

"The egress traffic from a given VM instance is subject to maximum network egress throughput caps. These caps are dependent on the number of cores that the VM instance has. Each core is subject to a 2 Gbps cap for peak performance. Each additional core increases the network cap, up to a theoretical maximum of 16 Gbps for each instance. The actual performance you experience will vary depending on your workload. All caps are meant as maximum possible performance, and not sustained performance."

<comment><USER17> I doubt the average mysql server needs more than 16gb of bandwidth.

<comment><USER7> ... let me show you the queries the developers are writing ^^

<comment><USER17> So you need to fix the developers not upgrade your network cards :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Can you really spin one of these up on demand? That obviously means that they have machines of that size (or greater) sitting idle, waiting for someone to use them. That's mind-boggling.

<comment><USER19> Yes, I configured a 64 cpu machine in a matter of minutes, ran a test on it for 24 hours, then shut it down and deleted the instance. Total cost was around $200.

<comment><USER20> *vCPU.

But yes, they probably strive to keep below 10% vacancy on all hardware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Intel pages says these 28-core hyperthreaded processors work for 8+ sockets. Let's see...8 sockets * 56 virtual processors per socket = 448 virtual processors potentially in one VM.

[https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/processors/...](https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/processors/xeon/scalable/platinum- processors/platinum-8180.html)

</comment><comment><USER22> Does someone have experience using this (or other) cloud solutions in a scientific HPC context? The only obvious disadvantage I can think of is that every student running something incurs a certain cost whereas after one has bought the actual computers, running jobs is somewhat free.

<comment><USER23> Depends heavily on the projected utilization. If you know your compute node is going to be computing for the next 3 years with at least medium utilization, then the self hosted metal is probably going to be quite a bit cheaper.

Its amazing how much hardware you can pack into a single machine for 10k€. Last year our group bought two additional high-memory (768GB) nodes for around that price each (including support for a couple years from the vendor).

A few years before we bought 40 nodes with 128GB RAM each, for a similar price to last years high-memory nodes (and a fast interconnect and a lot of storage).

If you are at a larger research institution, you probably also have an IT department that can co-locate your hardware for next to nothing (compared to cloud). There you also will save a lot of ingress/egress, storage, backup, etc. costs.

Regarding the per student costs, even with cloud instances I would consider running a traditional HPC job system (grid engine, lsf, torque, ...). The MIT had a nice solution with Starcluster [1] to easily deploy a SGE on AWS. It looks a bit dead now though.

[1] [http://star.mit.edu/cluster/](http://star.mit.edu/cluster/)

<comment><USER2> > Depends heavily on the projected utilization. If you know your compute node > is going to be computing for the next 3 years with at least medium > utilization, then the self hosted metal is probably going to be quite a bit > cheaper.

Isn't that already the case for 1 month? Bare metal doesn't mean own data centre or colocation. If you go with a hosting provider most offer dedicated hardware on a monthly contract. As long as you need them longer than 1-2 months that should be significantly cheaper than Google/AWS.

<comment><USER24> That's usually the case for almost everything on AWS/Google. If you're using them for specific features, or for very bursty work (e.g. if you use the instances less than about 6-8 hours a day), they can be cost effective, but the moment you use instances full time and don't leverage/depend on a ton of extra services, you're paying way above the odds.

<comment><USER17> Kubernetes helps this a bit with bin packing. Much easier to keep 3 32 core servers loaded than 32 4 core servers.

<comment><USER24> But that's the case whether you're using AWS or self-hosted, so it doesn't really alter that calculation much

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I couldn't see much info about how NUMA is handled

<comment><USER26> It's not exposed through their virtualization currently. I suspect it has something to do with making live migrations a lot harder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> With that many vCPUs I guess it becomes important to talk about things like how the memory hierarchy is wired.

I'm surprised no benchmarks are mentioned.

</comment><comment><USER28> I wonder who will use these types of instances?

<comment><USER29> scientific computing and simulation. I have had need for machines like this - for a project that was very compute heavy but embarrassingly parallel, but also was very "chatty" \- I.e updated the data structures a lot during compute

I can't be too specific about it, but if involved creating a very large tree structure and updating, pruning and transversing the tree a lot

If the algorithm is updating and reading a large data structure a lot it's only practical from a speed point of view to hold the whole structure in RAM

<comment><USER30> Is this really a better solution than just getting hours on NERSC (or some other government supercomputer)?

<comment><USER31> Private companies want to do simulations as well, and with this type of solution, you can pretty much run them on demand rather than having to wait in line.

<comment><USER30> ...I _guess_.

My advisor's company straddles the public / private divide, but we've definitely done some simulations for private clients on NERSC, and I assume we weren't misusing hours allocated for some other purpose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> price per second?

<comment><USER33> Pricing is here [0]. The 96 vCPU, 360GB instance costs $4.9405/hr. If you don't mind if it gets killed, $1.0401/hr (pre-emptible [1]).

[0] [https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#machinetype](https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#machinetype)

[1] [https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/preemptible](https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/preemptible)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> What kind of computer is this? What motherboard supports this much memory?

<comment><USER35> It's virtual, so it's up in the air. What motherboard supports 96 CPUs?

<comment><USER36> vCPU == cores. 2 Xeon Platinum 8180 get you 114 vCPUs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Azure's M128 VM size has 128 vCPUs and 2048GB of memory already.

<comment><USER38> sure, for $20/hour

<comment><USER37> This is not a SKU to play with. If $20/hr is indeed the price (I don't know), this is the hourly cost of a couple of waiters. You get to run SAP on someone's infra and someone to support it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> And still no IPv6. In 2017.

</comment><comment><USER40> Holy moly!

</comment><comment><USER41> Can we stop this whole vCpu nonsense

<comment><USER41> Do people really enjoy not knowing what they are buying some providers provide some info on what vCPU is other don't. Many people think it's actual CPU core.</comment></comment>


Zillow's second letter about McMansion Hell is still wrong - <AUTHOR> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170628/01531037682/zillow-still-doesnt-get-it-second-letter-about-mcmansion-hell-is-still-just-wrong.shtml <comment><USER3> I'm going to disagree with most of you (and most of the commentary I've seen) that McMansion Hell's assertions of fair use are easily defensible.

I come from a journalism background, where we had to wrestle with fair use restrictions quite often, and it turns out that fair-use claims when it comes to images are not as cut-and-dry as with, say, text.

I'm allowed to reprint a sentence from a book in a review about that book and claim fair use, but I'm not allowed to reprint the entire book, even if I'm reviewing it, and claim fair use. But with images, those who claim fair use are typically reprinting the entire work. That tends to be a problem, because one of the four prongs of the fair-use test is the amount of the original work used. Among the relevant questions here are: could the images have been shown at a lower resolution and still gotten the point across? Could only portions of the images have been shown and still gotten the point across?

Then there's the fact that she claimed in her official response that "this blog is my livelihood," which suggests that she's receiving income and is, essentially, operating as the sole proprietor of a business. Another one of the prongs of the fair-use test is the nature and purpose of the work, and you're more likely to prevail on this point if you're a nonprofit or can't be construed as a commercial operation.

I'm not saying that Zillow's threats have merits. I just don't think we should all be so quick to say, "Oh, well it's OBVIOUSLY fair use."

<comment><USER4> > I just don't think we should all be so quick to say, "Oh, well it's > OBVIOUSLY fair use."

You're absolutely right on that. ANY time a legal question rests on some multi-prong factor test, it's folly to say that there's an obvious answer. There can be strong arguments one way, but it's never a slam dunk.

Courts and juries are unpredictable.

<comment><USER5> I don't think anyone here is attempting to fathom what a court or jury _might_ decide, that's inherently unknowable. We're discussing what _should_ be decided.

Frankly I think this is a textbook case of Fair Use by a combination of parody and commentary, and it seems as though it would be trivial to take Zillow to task for attempting to enforce copyright law on property it doesn't own the rights to.

<comment><USER4> From the article:

> She doesn't need to find other sources. Fair use means she can do what she's > doing and Zillow should shut up, other than maybe offering an apology.

That sure sounds like an assertion of what a court or jury would actually decide, and it's far too strong. (I am a lawyer, and there's almost never a justification for being this absolute.)

As for Zillow not owning the rights, it's entirely possible that it has some licensing arrangement with the rights holders that empowers it to bring suit. I have no idea, _and neither does the author._

<comment><USER6> >That sure sounds like an assertion of what a court or jury would actually decide, and it's far too strong.

Right now, we're in the court of public opinion, and that is definitely appropriate language for that particular court... The court of law will come later, if ever.

And in this kind of business, most of damages are decided in the court of public opinion anyway, not the other one.

<comment><USER4> "Fair use means she can do what she's doing" sure sounds like legal advice to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This happened to me and I sent the lawyer a cease and desist letter.

He wanted me to take down my experiences I had with the company on my linkedin. After explaining to him that I have proof that I've worked on those projects the lawyers came up with bs reasons. I got angry for wasting some time of my life for proof of my work experiences so I sent him a cease and desist.

The loser sent one last email and I told him to get the fuck out of my life. And that was that.

I ain't ever using Zillow or Trulia.

These people are in alt-fact reality.

<comment><USER8> Fantastic! Knowing a little bit about the law can really help you out in modern life (one could say unfortunately).

<comment><USER9> That story would've been much sadder had the lawyer's client decided it was worth the money to pursue him. A lawsuit against a well-monied opponent is no joke, whether you're on the right side or not. AFAIK unlike a copyright case, it is pretty hard to lose a defamation case as long as you haven't gone too crazy, but a lawsuit can seriously damage your life whether you win or not.

Knowing a little bit about the law is indeed helpful, but it doesn't seem that a little bit of legal knowledge would lead one to congratulating the grandparent on sending an inflammatory mail to opposing counsel.

C&Ds are in fact frequently bluffs, so that should be considered in the response, but some companies are notoriously well-known non-bluffers; if they send a C&D, they are chomping at the bit to file the lawsuit for real. It's best to ask a real lawyer whenever you're staring down these types of possibilities.

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> FYI, I'm do technology for the real estate industry, here's some back story.

In Real Estate there's a huge concern about "where is my data going" (meaning the listings, photos, etc). This is a big deal to the brokers and agents. I literally just watched an hour long webinar over lunch by Wolf Net about data syndication and every few minutes they were mentioning how they've earned and work to maintain the trust of the brokers and agents by being careful with the data.

Now, a significant number of agents and brokers _HATE_ Zillow. There are entire sessions at the conferences about how to keep your listings off Zillow. The reasons are varied and I won't bore you with the details, largely it is because Zillow doesn't put the listing agent's details by the listing.

Zillow I imagine has to be very careful not to be seen by agents as releasing this information to other sources, or Zillow's lifeblood will cease to flow. They are teetering on the edge here and a perception by agents could cut off a lot of their data.

Zillow probably has to fight this fight. Even if they lose it. They are in a much better position if they say "Hey, we fought this and the courts said we had to", that is a defense against the agents and brokers. If they don't fight it, the sentiment in the RE community could quickly turn against Zillow and cause a lot of damage to their business. This is my speculation, I don't know the internal workings of Zillow.

<comment><USER11> Every time I look at listings on Zillow (hey, a person can dream) I see a realtor's photo and contact details, is that not the listing agent?

<comment><USER10> If the text next to the agent says "Listing Agent" then yes. For listings where the agent chose to share the listing with Zillow, they will show up, maybe with a good picture, maybe not, along with a bunch of "premier agent" listings. These are agents that paid to be put on this property, like Google Adwords for Real Estate.

But some listings don't have the listing agent on Zillow. See my example below.

Take for example this:

[https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/13911266_zpid/globalre...](https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/13911266_zpid/globalrelevanceex_sort/40.587494,-105.084014,40.537612,-105.142894_rect/13_zm/)

vs:

[https://www.coloproperty.com/listing/details/1125163](https://www.coloproperty.com/listing/details/1125163)

Jesse is the listing agent, that second page is from the MLS and is definitely correct. The Zillow listing only lists a Premier Agent, and that is not the listing agent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What are the limits to what rights you can waive under the ToS of a website or app? If a website says you waive fair use, first amendment right, and your right to use your computer as you see fit for as long as you are using the website, who's to stop them from kicking you off the website and suing you for breach of contract?

I'm kind of curious because I received a C&D from craigslist a few years ago ([https://github.com/yonran/craigslist- shortcuts/blob/master/c...](https://github.com/yonran/craigslist- shortcuts/blob/master/cease-and-desist.md)). Technically I _was_ breaking the terms of service (after they revised the terms), so as I understood it, if I wanted to continue to use the website I had to comply with the terms, however onerous they were.

<comment><USER13> At best they could stop you from using their site. If they put terms in their ToS that are not legally enforceable, they'd never win a suit for breach of contract.

<comment><USER14> Slightly related, Facebook lost a case in Canada over a forum selection clause in their standard online contract (that any legal actions have to be brought against FB in California).

[1] [http://www.michaelgeist.ca/2017/06/clicking-agree-may-no- lon...](http://www.michaelgeist.ca/2017/06/clicking-agree-may-no-longer-mean- agree-everything/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I find it funny that big corporations routinely bully small players into submission through these bogus legal shenanigans, but when Peter Thiel bankrolled a private individual in a legitimate, bonafide court case against a big media corporation, many people had ethical issues with it.

How is an individual with limited resources (money and time) supposed to ever hold their ground against $BIG_CORP?

<comment><USER16> "Big media corporation" is an exaggeration in that case. Peter Thiel's personal wealth is such that he could have bought out Gawker dozens of times over if it had been a publicly traded company. Gawker actually settled because THEY ("$BIG_CORP") lacked the resources to fight through the whole process, and decided to cut their losses.

<comment><USER15> Yeah but Hulk Hogan (who is admittedly rich but maybe not fuck-you rich) was the plaintiff. Not Thiel.

And you are only proving my point. In most cases, individuals are the ones forced to settle with corporations because they don't have the resources to fight corps.

The same would have happened with Hulk Hogan if he had not been bankrolled by Thiel.

So, if anything, it was Thiel's actions that tipped the balance in the direction of the individual, who, mind you, was entirely in the right in this particular case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Bummer. Great site, in an ironically snobby kind of way. I'd tell them to use Open Listings pages but we get similar takedown requests from our data providers (regional MLS associations) regarding shittylistings.com. They can revoke membership (and listings) pretty much at will. So while there's no strict legal argument against it, they probably got a vague threat from an MLS and were spooked. On that note, I'd be really interested in how their data licensing agreements work because I had heard that they pull from aggregators and not directly from MLS RETS hookups.

</comment><comment><USER18> 1\. Zillow should have to pay a fine for getting the law so wrong.

2\. There needs to be proper legal protections for people against Big Co. doing this. Maybe a third party set up to look over the C & D's issued to bloggers. I don't know how this should or would work, but something needs to change.

<comment><USER19> Can Zillow be held liable for lost revenues since Kate felt compelled to shut down the site?

<comment><USER20> Was she making money off of it?

<comment><USER19> She's claimed the site was her livelihood:

[https://twitter.com/mcmansionhell/status/879432256363925507](https://twitter.com/mcmansionhell/status/879432256363925507)

I would assume and hope that she was. I enjoyed the content and she deserved to be paid for it. But I don't know if she meant livelihood in the financial context or not, so I couldn't tell you definitively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I can't attest to any legality of what McMansion Hell was doing. And I think she was well meaning in her goals--to keep people from buying and building oversized, poorly built houses--but there is still an underlying social class issue here. I was always hesitant to talk about McMansions with my friends, many of whom probably grew up in McMansions (and they already think I'm a snob).

Additionally, have you ever had a friend who came to you showing off a new purchase and you were tempted to tell them that there was an objectively better choice for them? If they don't take it personally and get offended (they probably will) then they'll at least feel really shitty and probably embarrassed. It's best to let them live in ignorant bliss.

<comment><USER22> McManison buyers are not socioeconomically disadvantaged.

There is plenty of architectural snobbery directed at the socioeconomically disadvantaged - "overlarge ticky-tacky" is a common enough phrase in Berkeley Planning Commission meetings with respect to apartment buildings - <USER2> criticizing $900k 3000sqft single family houses isn't that.

<comment><USER21> > McManison buyers are not socioeconomically disadvantaged.

I never said they were, and that's not the point. Social class and economic class are not the same. Criticizing someone's tastes doesn't just become totally acceptable to that person if they're rich. You're still going to make them feel like crap for spending their life savings on an inferior product. And there are still going to superiority undertones to what you're saying, at least to their ear.

<comment><USER22> Sure, it would be malicious to mail people the McMansion hell posts on the houses they've just signed for, but that's not what she was doing.

I used to think snobbery was obnoxious, but now the constant stream of "there's no such thing as quality, but even if there is, we shouldn't acknowledge it or its absence" seems even more grating.

<comment><USER23> > "there's no such thing as quality, but even if there is, we shouldn't > acknowledge it or its absence"

Where do you live where this is the case?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Ok, so Zillow has no copyright claim to the images. The article follows that up by loudly and repeatedly reminding us that even if Zillow did have a copyright claim, that the use of the images falls under fair use.

However, is that really true? The article backs up most of its claims, except for the "fair use" one. The disclaimer on the McMansion Hell site claimed that they were used under fair use, but the author of the site is admittedly a bit unfamiliar with the law. I haven't seen an analysis of if it really is fair use from any of the coverage.

<comment> mark-r Zillow claims "we have an obligation to protect the interest of the copyright holders". If that obligation is contractual, they are acting as the agent of the copyright holder and should have the right to take legal action on their behalf. In fact they might be _compelled_ to take legal action, even if that action puts them in a poor light as it does in this case. This is where I think Techdirt is missing the picture.

<comment><USER25> If that were the case, then why didn't Zillow just say that?

<comment> mark-r Saying "but the lawyers made me do it" doesn't get you a lot of sympathy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> In my brief time dealing with this kind of stuff, the usual best response is to simply say "See you in Delaware." And put the ball in their court to escalate to a full blown lawsuit.

</comment><comment><USER19> Vote with your wallet. Donate to the EFF. Boycott companies like Zillow/Trulia who behave like this and use their position to harm the community.

<comment><USER27> Use Redfin instead of Zillow/Trulia whenever possible. Starve the beast. (Zillow makes its money off of income from realtors seeking leads, RedFin makes its money off of actual real estate transaction fees [discounted compared to traditional commissions])

EDIT: Just read the end of the post: "Meanwhile, another organization that does understand copyright and fair use much better than Zillow is EFF. And EFF is now representing McMansion Hell."

Zillow has brought a knife to a gun fight.

<comment><USER28> My wife and I bought our house using a Redfin agent. They were as hands-on or -off as we liked. We could look at listings online and schedule tours and we could ask the agent for any recommendations that might fit what we're looking for, but maybe not where we were originally looking. They also helped with negotiating and closing (as you'd expect of any Realtor, but it was nice dealing with the same 2 people the whole time).

> Zillow has brought a knife to a gun fight.

:) I wonder if this will have any outcome for ToS, as that's was one of Zillow's complaints.

<comment><USER29> To add to this point, I contacted a realtor through Zillow, had two email exchanges with him where I asked specific questions about a property. Each time, my questions were ignored, and his responses can be summarized as "are you pre-approved?" In the second email, he politely redirected me to another realtor that it appeared he was managing and I never heard from them again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> still alive on google image search!

</comment><comment><USER31> My reply would probably be something like this, after checking it with a copyright lawyer:

Dear whomever it may concern at Zillow group,

As you do not have rights to the images are you authorised on behalf of the rights owners to issue DMCA take-down requests under title 17 of the United States Code under penalty of perjury?

Should this be the case I suggest you read Lenz v. Universal Music Corp., 801 F.3d 1126 (2015) in the 9th circuit which has just been refused certioari in the US Supreme Court (2017-06-19).

If you wish to continue this matter please submit a properly worded DMCA take down request.

Regards, ....

P.S. If you do continue this matter you obviously didn't read Lenz Vs. Universal and therefore I'll see you in court.

</comment><comment><USER32> Here's what I don't get: why didn't McM Hell go to an attorney right away? This seems like a no-brainer case of fair use that any competent attorney could tell you in a free consult or less than 2 hours of billable time.

And, yes, the threat letter from Zillow is total BS. But that doesn't mean Zillow _" doesn't get it"_. That's just what attorneys do. I thought everyone knew this.

<comment><USER19> "I thought everyone knew this" is a dangerous assumption. Not only are you assuming equal knowledge access but you're also assuming equal legal access. I'd argue the legal system is not equally accessible and knowledge of the system is even less accessible. I think the only safe assumption here is that Kate did _not_ know the proper way to respond to this and asked for help from the community. I would've done the same.

<comment><USER32> I mistakenly assumed McM Hell was something closer to a business or run by business person(s). As opposed to just a blog run by a single person.

My bad.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to develop clarity of thoughts? - <AUTHOR> How can I go about developing clarity and organization of thoughts? For example, Given an ambiguous problem statement or topic of discussion, how to break it into coherent rational pieces.
I am looking for books, articles, videos, courses or any resources that might be helpful.
Thanks. <comment><USER2> Oh!! That is an excellent question. How can we think better? For me the Books that have helped me the most are:

It's Not Luck by Eliyahu M. Goldratt Link: [http://a.co/jeboGiN](http://a.co/jeboGiN) It's a business novel, where Alex Rogo has to decide what to do with 3 factories on his division. And uses critical thinking steps to come to the solution.

then if you like the approach the next book is:

Thinking for a Change: Putting the TOC Thinking Processes to Use (The CRC Press Series on Constraints Management) by Lisa J. Scheinkopf Link: [http://a.co/6Gq4DxP](http://a.co/6Gq4DxP)

And finally the Bible for Thinking Processes

The Logical Thinking Process: A Systems Approach to Complex Problem Solving by H. William Dettmer Link: [http://a.co/0hDYTsZ](http://a.co/0hDYTsZ)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>


Svelte Society Day 2020 – An online conference on April 26th - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Sounds great. Can you provide any details - what time, how to connect, what will be covered?

</comment><comment><USER3> looks like: [https://sveltesociety.dev/](https://sveltesociety.dev/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Awesome. I have signed up!</comment>


Free Bieber: Campaign against making streaming a felony (S. 978) - <AUTHOR> http://freebieber.org/

<comment><USER2> While we all want to see Bieber jailed, it's important that it's done right. Let's get this ludicrous bill squashed quickly so that we're free to organise the more proper mental-anguish class-action suit...</comment>


MySpace: what went wrong – by its former VP of online marketing - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/06/myspace-what-went-wrong-sean-percival-spotify <comment><USER2> I was an early user of both MySpace and Facebook. MySpace came first. It seemed like an easy way to create a rather customizable web presence. I created a page myself. But the experience sucked. Most customizers turned their MySpace page into a really bad website, with (loud) music that would automatically start up, and you were always a click away from a near- pornographic image (uh, Dad, Mom, no it's just MySpace, I'm not surfing for porn!)

The article seems off base. I don't get how Facebook avoids being all over the place. But, yeah, they did avoid the obnoxious ads (at first), and I can visit someone's page without blasting music or getting an eyeful of html poop.

Could they have avoided losing out to Facebook? I think if they created MySpace 2.0 without all the crap (essentially what Facebook did) and made it easy to migrate your accounts and activity, they could have prevented Facebook from taking over social. But they didn't, and it was crap, and I basically put up a MySpace message saying I was moving to Facebook for all the reasons, and that's where people could find me. And I think a lot of other people followed suit.

<comment><USER3> I totally agree with this, and when Facebook launched it was clear to me that the restrictions it placed on customization of profile pages, and providing smart defaults for layout, don't, and color would make social more functional and valuable for most users.

But I still appreciate Ze Frank's defense of ugly wrt MySpace democratizing design tools, and his observations that the fact that so many people were cutting, modifying, and pasting css was at the time weird and kind of wonderful.

[http://interconnected.org/home/2012/05/22/ze_frank_on_ugly](http://interconnected.org/home/2012/05/22/ze_frank_on_ugly)

> As people start learning and experimenting with these languages authorship, > they don't necessarily follow the rules of good taste. This scares the shit > out of designers. > > In Myspace, millions of people have opted out of pre- > made templates that "work" in exchange for ugly. Ugly when compared to pre- > existing notions of taste is a bummer. But ugly as a representation of mass > experimentation and learning is pretty damn cool.

<comment><USER4> Its not just ugly as some kind of aesthetic issue, it also hurt functionality. Buttons could be moved or made invisible. Animated backgrounds would make things hard to find, etc.

But that's not MySpace's biggest sin. Its biggest problem was all the freedom it gave just helped turn into a defacto dating site. With no real rules and no focus on anything, girls put up lots of cleavage photos for attention and guys hit on them. Guys put up shirtless leering photos and girls responded. Comments were more often bawdy talk than not. Teens and 20 somethings ruled. It never migrated past a high school mentality. A bit like how Second Life has now pretty much become a fetish site for furries.

Then Facebook showed up with its academic focus. The existing userbase were all college students whose peers, professors, potential employers, family, etc had access to their profiles, so there was a disincentive to treat it like "da club." People put their personal and semi-professional faces up and when the floodgates were open to Joe User, he saw the culture there, the lack of customizations, etc and conformed to what Facebook was. It had the mainstream professional and familial mores its roots were built upon. The Wild West of the Myspace world was just too self-limiting in this case. It couldn't go mainstream with its culture. It was too "young person trying to get laid" focused.

<comment><USER5> _A bit like how Second Life has now pretty much become a fetish site for furries._

I think many of us realized that SL had little potential beyond that even in its infancy. Minecraft soaked up the remaining interest in the potential of the programmable, realtime virtual worlds quite nicely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When FB went public at that "insane market cap," the IPO kerfuffle and all that followed, I had a few interesting conversations. I had been working for a while in online advertising, a lot of adwords and other ad platforms so I had a fairly good understanding of the forthcoming advertising product that was supposedly going to determine FB's actual value.

Anyway, my take on it was this: FB stock (at the time) is mostly a bet on two questions. (1) Can they remain the major social network where everyone has a profile and logs in regularly? (2) Can they build an ad platform that makes money off that position. Most people were curious about #2, I think because FB delayed really finding out the answer until after the IPO.

For the second question, I thought 'yes' was most likely. I had (and still have) a lot of confidence in the power of scale to add value to an ad network. The bigger the userbase, the more targeting opportunities you have. If you can limit your audience to people in their 30s, with kids, within 5 miles^ and still end up with enough people to bother I think you have a valuable ad platform.^^ Anyway, the answer _is_ yes. FB advertising is one of the world's blue ribbon cash cows.

That's the difference between millions and billions.

The first question though, I was (and am) less confident about. For FB to be a good investment it needs to last decades. Google has maintained its search position for a decade, but who knows if Facebook can in social. A lot of the forces at work are more cultural than economic or technological and unpredictable. Will it become uncool, unpopular. Will popular focus shift to some new shiny thing. It's a much harder question. Maybe a reason to think that it can is if you think FB-size and network effects locks a service into position in ways that Myspace-size doesn't. Maybe FB's deep pockets will let them acquire, innovate, advertise and otherwise spend their way to long term survival. I don't really have and _educate_ way of guessing at this question.

^ _Add in "who are within 2 degrees of people that have visited your site"_ and you're really cookin.

^^tangent: if you could combine a streaming TV service with Netflix-like penetration using FB login and FB ad targeting, I'd wager you could make more in ad revenue using only a small fraction of airtime than traditional TV. IE 10 second "preroll" ads, unobtrusive banner ads (on pause, buffer, etc) with FB's targeting would earn more per viewer than traditional TV's.

<comment><USER7> > _if you could combine a streaming TV service with Netflix-like penetration > using FB login and FB ad targeting, I 'd wager you could make more in ad > revenue using only a small fraction of airtime than traditional TV. IE 10 > second "preroll" ads, unobtrusive banner ads (on pause, buffer, etc) with > FB's targeting would earn more per viewer than traditional TV's._

It's coming. The next wave in advertising will be ad targeting based on addressable set top boxes, which basically means targeted video ads on TV. Advertisers will be able to do things like "make sure each household sees my ad five times" to avoid cases where people who watch lots of TV see it twenty times and people who don't watch much only see it once. With addressable STB's + microtargeting there will be a whole new set of companies for which it will be profitable to advertise on TV. Right now the long tail of niche companies has no chance of profitably advertising on TV because their target only makes up a very, very, very small percentage of an individual program (think about a company advertising Bitcoin ASIC's for example). But if they get addressability + microtargeting right then they can make sure that only households which are interested in Bitcoin ASIC's see the ads.

[https://www.experian.com/assets/marketing-services/white- pap...](https://www.experian.com/assets/marketing-services/white- papers/audience-iq-addressable-tv-wp.pdf)

<comment><USER8> I dread this scenario and hope an alternative to pay more for television programming is provided. We're down to 45 minutes a day of television right now. Shows consist entirely of Netflix/Amazon Streaming/AppleTV. Forcing ads on us would cause us to drop it all and go back to a movie outing every few weeks.

Besides, ads are all over streaming television but they're in the form of product placements within the content. They're more subtle and don't interrupt the flow of what you are watching.

<comment><USER9> I think that at least in theory, the idea is akin to what Google did for regular web advertising. Originally before targeting the only real strategy was to blanket sites with every sort of ad imaginable and the only way to stand out was to be more annoying and more flashy. Ad space was worth less so site owners made less money to support their services. People looking for new customers wasted more money because they could only target very broadly based on the topic or general demographic of a website.

Then you got Google ads and the like. Since you could target based on someone's general region or search topics or some other demographic info, ads could be more relevant. They didn't need to be flashy and noisy and could sit alongside search results or website contents as plain text or simple images. People trying to attract customers could focus their ad budgets where they were more likely to have a return and site owners could charge more for ad space since it was worth more.

I think that in theory, cable and other ways of getting TV-type content could move in much the same direction. Instead of just running more ads and hoping that people watching show (x) will be interested, they could run ads for stuff in your city or things in the categories you're interested in. Higher relevance would mean less total ads for the TV company to make the same profit selling ad space. It would mean less ads for things you'll never be interested in. And it would mean less money wasted by companies advertising on deaf ears.

But yeah...while this could happen I'm not really that optimistic. A young Google could take on the old model and replace it but the entrenched TV and cable companies would likely just add it to their arsenal. Instead of fewer, more lucrative targeted ads paying for now-free service, you'll just see the same subscription fees and the same pile of interruptions. Just now they'll be targeted.

<comment><USER8> Targeted ads have some appeal. But, I'm still not sold. Here's an example of why. My wife and I started watching Parenthood recently. There are some very moving scenes in which a couple comes to terms with their Aspberger child's condition. Having the scene ripped away from me to see a car ad (for example) would be maddening.

While it's a good show the scenes are definitely written to have an ad every 10-15 minutes or so. Writers who make it in screenwriting know their bread- and-butter comes from advertisers, so they alter natural story arcs to fit 10-15 minutes slots. It's no wonder that BBC and PBS have better stories: their writers don't have to worry about fitting ads in.

Again, I don't mind product placement to an extent. Parenthood must have 2-3 scenes every episode with an Apple product in focus. Don't alter the flow of a story to fit in an ad though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I may be off on the timeline a little bit, but this guy started off at MySpace in 2009. From what I remember, Facebook had clearly "won" at that point as the personal social network (like, where you interacted with your friends) and had been for at least a year or two.

MySpace was largely regarded, at that point, as a cesspool, but still had the appeal of being the place to interact with famous people and the platform famous people used to interact with their fans.

In that sense, MySpace had already lost to Facebook in one aspect and was about ready to lose to Twitter in the other.

<comment><USER11> The article clearly states, "By 2009, MySpace was still the biggest website in terms of traffic, but Facebook was growing fast by this point, and according to Percival the atmosphere was defeatist when he joined the company.

"I remember the first meeting they had me set up with the whole team, and it was the saddest, most awkward meeting I've ever been in, in my life. And I've been in some really sad meetings. Literally sat there and everyone was so defeated," he said.

"The analogy I use is like you were the half-time [basketball] coach, and I walk in and it's half-time, and you're down by 100 points … They had been beat down by that corporate bureaucracy, they knew they were about to lose to Facebook. They knew that the end was near. They could smell it.""

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Former MySpace engineer here. Got there when it was 1500 people and left when it was 300. The company failed for these reasons:

* MySpace sold ads to Google when they didn't have ad inventory to sell. MySpace had to meet impression thresholds each month or pay penalties to Google. To meet those requirements, MySpace added ads where they should not have been. Impression ads were put up in odd places. MySpace forced users to log in for the sake of generating an impression. The result was a poor user experience.

* Tom & Chris were from an email spam shop background. eUniverse bought Tom & Chris email spam company. Once eUniverse had the emails, Tom & Chris had nothing to do, so they put their effort into creating something new. Friendster was doing well at the time, they decided to clone it, the result was MySpace. Spam and poor user experiences were part of their upbringing and it showed in MySpace.

* There were no coding standards. Engineering teams worked in silos with each team having their own standards. For example, at one time someone put a picture of all the different submit buttons in the break room. Tom & Chris shared this brake room. I'm not sure if the poster was motivational or insulting. We all knew the site looked ugly and this picture of all the different submit buttons quantified it.

* MySpace didn't leverage an API. FB users had the ability to add plug ins like calendars and classified ads from a myriad of sources. The result was users were able to choose the best solution. MySpace users were given the same tools built internally. Those tools were pushed out in rapid succession, without much effort, and users were left with poorly created solutions.

* MySpace cherished metrics that had no meaning. Your number of friends, for example, were meaningless. People like Percival created companies to help people add friends under the guise that having friends meant something. MySpace bought into that snake oil, Percival perpetuated it, then they hired him on as a VP.

* MySpace thought allowing users to create their own unique page was a competitive advantage. Users were given the ability to embed their own HTML within their own page. The result was ugly bloated pages. At MySpace, we had an internal message board to debate ideas. This idea was debated and people in product defended the ability to customize pages as a competitive advantage.

* Chris & Aber were distracted by 'partying'. Hang out at the bars on Wilshire Blvd, you'll hear things and I'll leave it at that.

* Employees were not given stock. Given salaries were great, people did not seem to be emotionally invested in the companies success.

<comment><USER13>
        Chris & Aber were distracted by 'partying'.
        Hang out at the bars on Wilshire Blvd, you'll
        hear things and I'll leave it at that.

I was at a tech conference in the late 00's where I heard a VP (of Engineering?) from MySpace give a talk about the site's architecture. This was probably 9 or 9:30 in the morning, and—I swear—he must've been totally coked up. If that's how you, as a vice president, behave when you're up on a stage at a conference, I wonder how you'd behave behind closed doors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Here's the Guardian in 2007 worrying about how Myspace will never lose its monopoly:

[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/feb/08/business.c...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/feb/08/business.comment)

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't understand this notion that "Google and Apple don't get social". What's to get or not get? Google+ beats FB for features and usability by a mile. Who could have possibly thought that Twitter would be a huge success? I still don't get it! What does Instagram do that FB didn't already do? I love all these analysts tripping over themselves to come up with a formula for a business model that at it's core relies on dumb luck.

<comment><USER16> Google have repeatedly gone to the mat to fight what its users want and request, overridden those requests, and/or taken what people consider to be absolutely and beyond any call _theirs_ and made clear it was Google's.

Nymwars, Real Names, spamming contacts with G+ Circles, spamming Calendar with G+ events selected by other people, Notifications spam, forced integration of products, an absolutely deaf ear on any privacy issues or concerns, an insistence that "you're doing it wrong" (Circles, various settings, lord knows what), forced YouTube integration with G+, make-work interfaces, and more.

Experiences with Glass, Streetview, WiFi snooping, Do Not Track bypassing, or the many, many, many other killed Google products only hammer home how Google simply fails to comprehend issues of privacy. They're not defined by technology, they're not defined by law. They're defined by social norms, and the boundaries people define. Boundaries Google crosses _all the fucking time._

The conflicts between what Google _does_ , and what their former Director of Privacy, Alma Whitten, _said_ , is staggering. Look up her old talks. I've got a few quotes on my G+ profile ("Edward Morbius").

People's use-cases differ, but in a nutshell, I'm looking for a way to have good an interesting conversations with people, without a tremendous breach in my personal privacy. Google ultimately wants to sell ads, but I'm 1) not buying those and 2) really not a choice target regardless.

There's an inherent conflict in the "social" space, and I don't really see any way around it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I never understood the website besides listening to band songs. But at least it was a feature that Facebook has never really done and it took some time (for me) for Spotify, Grooveshark or Youtube to fill in.

You heard about about a band and you could listen to some songs instantaneously without downloading it on eMule or Torrent, it was great.

<comment><USER18> That was also the only use I ever got out of MySpace, checking out new bands/musicians quickly to decide whether I wanted to hear more. IIRC facebook did try a similar feature but never really catched on.

<comment><USER19> For me it was also the 'groups', which were basically a free one-click alternative to PHPBB, albeit more primitive. For many niche interests, it was actually livelier than reddit is today.

Persistent security holes plagued them, though, and it sort of disappeared shortly after the News Corp buyout. Nothing I've read paints a picture of Myspace as a classic feat of software engineering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Great article but it misses an essential difference between MySpace and Facebook. Facebook was built for Mark Zuckerberg and MySpace was built for News Corporation. Zuckerberg understood the interests and tastes of his generation. MySpace only understood the interests of their advertisers.

<comment><USER21> Is that true? I recall myspace creator "tom" being its very public face in the early days, and it only got sold to newscorp after it was already big.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Good history transcript. Has the Guardian given any other conference speeches this quality of transcript?

<comment><USER23> Steve Albini (the noted musician and producer) had a great talk about the Internet and the music industry at a conference a few months ago. The Guardian wrote a nice a recap [0] and published a full transcript (enriched with pull quotes and some images) [1].

[0] [http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albini- at...](http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albini-at-face-the- music-how-the-internet-solved-problem-with-music)

[1] [http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve- albinis-k...](http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis- keynote-address-at-face-the-music-in-full)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I was kind of hoping a Panic at the Disco song started playing when I opened the article/

</comment><comment><USER25> Maybe related..

[http://www.businessinsider.com/myspaces-death-spiral- insider...](http://www.businessinsider.com/myspaces-death-spiral-insiders-say- its-due-to-bets-on-los-angeles-and-microsoft-2011-3)

</comment><comment><USER26> I wonder what would happen if MySpace were to suddenly revert back to the old version.

What would they have to lose? It would make the headlines the world over, and people would be getting back the MySpace they signed up for.

</comment><comment><USER27> I went to a marketing conference in the UK in around 2004 or 2005 where someone from MySpace was talking about what a great opportunity it was for marketing to their audience. At the time I was using [http://mixi.jp](http://mixi.jp) which was way ahead in terms of usability and reliability than MySpace (mixi later lost out to Facebook too, mainly because of their own missteps). But it was obvious even in ~ 2005 that a reliable, usable social network would kill MySpace dead.

</comment><comment><USER28> What destroys a lot of huge companies? Lack of focus.

</comment><comment><USER29> >> "It was one of the most annoying things you could do with an ad, but they just didn't care: they had no respect for the users. It was all about monetisation. Making money, squeezing every dollar out of it," said Percival.

You can say this about pretty much every traditional news site out there today. Most of them are just horrible.

</comment><comment><USER30> He's a "VP of online marketing", not a VP of UX. He wouldn't know what went wrong.

MySpace had a horrible UX. You felt _dirty_ after browsing a few pages. Everything was all over the place; the form (UI) destroyed the function (social network). It was like Geocities and Friendster had a love-child that was addicted to LSD.

<comment><USER31> Stereotypically, no one on LSD would be nearly so tasteless.

MySpace felt more like a raging alcoholic to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Yeah, this is a guy getting a lot of press about something he was at best tangentially involved with.

</comment><comment><USER33> I think you can't look at the "how MySpace" lost story without considering the "how Facebook won" angle.

Myspace lost, in part, because it found itself in competition with a company run by a very talented team with big ambitions and ample connections.

</comment><comment><USER34> They should have sold Spyspace as ten bucks a month feature. That was a great hack, loved seeing who had visited my page and the gotcha of catching some weird things in my friends cliboards when they visited my page.

</comment><comment><USER35> In the article I find these two statements, from Percival, contradicting:

"Percival talked about what the company might have done differently, and admitted that by the time he arrived in 2009, it was possibly unsaveable – not least because by that time, it was difficult to hire the most talented engineers against competition from Facebook, Google and other rising tech companies."

"There are companies that do not get social and they never will. Apple's one of them, Google is the other: they've failed with Google+. When your culture is engineering-focused, you do not understand social. Social is a very emotional experience. Engineers are not so much, in a lot of cases,"

<comment><USER36> Not contradictory to me. The second statement does not say nor imply anything about Myspace, or anything about an engineering culture at Myspace.

<comment><USER35> Maybe I didn't make it clear enough.

In the first quote he basically says MySpace didn't have the engineers to save the company.

In the second quote he basically says engineers are not what make the social industry tick. Yes, he's talking about Apple and Google here, but he's contradicting what he said.

Regardless I'm not sure why he said the first quote in the at all. The problem they had, had nothing to do with Engineers, but had everything to do with the company culture.

<comment><USER36> The first quote is there for the benefit of people who aren't in the industry, and did not realize that Myspace wasn't hot among engineers in 2009.

You are misconceiving the second quote. That quote is the end of the article, where it has moved on from the topic of "What happened at Myspace", and is talking about the social networking industry at large. I do not interpret it as being a stab at Myspace specifically, nor about what happened there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> They messed up the show listings. It went from the definitive listing of every event in the country, to being unusable overnight.

</comment><comment><USER38> "The baggage was really intense."

What an odd metaphor!

</comment><comment><USER39> It amazes me how they could manage to keep that thing alive for all these years.

<comment><USER40> It was the classic "spend a billion to make a million." It works every time!

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The customizable web presence is what killed it.

</comment><comment><USER42> There a good book about the whole history of MySpace: [http://www.amazon.com/Stealing-MySpace-Control-Popular- Websi...](http://www.amazon.com/Stealing-MySpace-Control-Popular-Website- ebook/dp/B001VT3L3C/)

<comment><USER43> It was a good read. The most interesting parts were the backstory behind how MySpace got started. In particular, how the company pivoted a number of times before getting the social network idea to really catch on. It was fascinating to see how they went from selling these cheap toys at kiosks in the mall to becoming a tech media network.

I'm just finishing reading another book called Click by Bill Tancer written around the same period. And Myspace had 3 out of the top 10 searches for brand websites (myspace, myspace.com, and www.myspace.com). Facebook had just appeared on the scene and was in the 10th search spot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> " "They went to Friendster and found all the hot girls who got kicked off Friendster. You may remember Tila Tequila. She was a very very big deal on MySpace. But she was a Friendster user," he said.

"They kicked her off because she was just too damn sexy. "

UH OK?

I think that we are missing part of the story here. I mean, come on! I stopped reading at this point.

<comment><USER45> Why do you find it unthinkable that Friendster might ban users for posting racy pictures?

Of course he is painting in broad strokes in the interview, but MySpace's 'in' was that they started by attracting creative people, such as wannabe models, musicians and photographers.

<comment><USER46> I don't remember anything even remotely shocking on MySpace, but the mere presence of people like Tila Tequila was a 'important' factor in MySpace fame at that point. Wasn't it the first breach between remote celebrities and you on the web ? Before that all you had was tiny bits of medias, and all of a sudden, you get to comment on their page. Not even an official website, but the same website you have a profile on.

<comment><USER37> They used to allow nudity, but then their sponsors started cracking down on them.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: Software for simulating I/O, memory use, processor (Windows) - <AUTHOR>

We just got a couple of servers with Windows Server 2003 Standard. I was asked to do some stress testing on them for a couple of days, testing mainly how the server works under heavy load.<p>Anyone know of a program that would let me test some of the server capabilities and give a simple result afterwards? <comment><USER2> Microsoft has this page on stress testing web applications: <http://support.microsoft.com/kb/231282>.

Then there is always these tools: <http://www.opensourcetesting.org/performance.php></comment>


In Praise of Pretty Books - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/in-praise-of-pretty-books/2019/08/14/bfc77e44-bd1c-11e9-9b73-fd3c65ef8f9c_story.html <comment><USER2> It's unfortunate that the article doesn't really mention bindings properly. As I see it, there are three main issues in modern bindings:

\- the use of inflexible hotmelt glue instead of flexible cold glue,

\- the death of signatures in which paper is folded like in a booklet and sewn around in favour of perfect bindings in which the edge of each page is stuck with glue onto the spine, and

\- lack of awareness of grain.

It is common to find hardbacks that lack signatures and are bound using hotmelt. They are even worse than cold glue paperbacks of signatures. Sometimes printers even get the grain wrong.

This is awful for functionality as well. Books cannot open flat without splitting the spine, and signatures can be rebound many times. Hyphen Press's article is quite good, though incomplete.[0]

0\. [https://hyphenpress.co.uk/journal/article/bookbinding_survey](https://hyphenpress.co.uk/journal/article/bookbinding_survey)

</comment><comment><USER3> given that the article explicitly mentions science fiction I was really surprised to not see a reference to the great artwork of the Brazlian edition of Neuromancer:

[https://twitter.com/GreatDismal/status/790675203294580736](https://twitter.com/GreatDismal/status/790675203294580736)

</comment><comment><USER4> Anyone else getting an error (too many redirects) when following the link? I was able to find the article by searching for it directly on WaPo.

<comment><USER5> Nope. Got Paywall fuzz but the link worked fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> how nasty to link an article on a site that requests for memberships to read the content. Disgusting.

<comment><USER7> You can just bypass it with outline.com</comment></comment>


My first 'successful' open-source project (js continuous integration) hits 1.0.0 - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/dsimard/ready.js/tree/v1.0.0

<comment><USER2> It'd be really cool if the title would tell us what the project is, not that it hit 1.0.0. I don't care about the version particularly, but I might care about it if I know what it does...

<comment><AUTHOR> I added a micro-definition in the title. Here's the full description : continuous javascript integration using JSLint, Google Compiler and Node.js .

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't think I'd find this that useful. Coffeescript already has jslint support, and I'd only want to do minification right before deployment since minified JS is harder to debug.

<comment><AUTHOR> ready.js won't overwrite your javascript, that would be stupid, it compiles your javascript in another folder. When you're in dev, you simply link to your uncompiled js. When in prod, you link to your compiled js.

<comment><USER3> My point was there's no incentive to have your js be compiled continuously. (I already have a deploy script, adding minification to that wouldn't be hard.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Bravo! Fantastic project. Keep it coming!

Any plans to be the Hudson of the node world?

</comment><comment><USER5> I can't seem to get this through npm. Has it been published?

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, it's available with `npm install ready`

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How is ready.js a first successful project? Are you defining 'first' in a nonstandard way or 'successful' has a special meaning?

<comment><AUTHOR> "first 'successful'" means that it's my first project used in production by other developers. For me, it's enough to consider it 'successful' (with the quotes).

<comment><USER6> I must have misread the title first time around (unless it changed). Did not see word 'my' there on first reading.</comment></comment></comment>


HN 2010: Who is the person of the year in computers/technology? - <AUTHOR>

It would be of course fair to give credit to the open source community that becomes bigger and more diverse by the day. But what about individuals? <comment><AUTHOR> see also

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1990612>

for the discussion of the TIME's person of the year

</comment><comment><USER3> Julian Assange - WikiLeaks Steve Jobs - iPad Ron Wyden - <USER2>

Odd, those are the only ones that come to mind.</comment>


Testing the Limits of Credit Card Signatures (Part 1) - <AUTHOR> http://www.zug.com/pranks/credit/ <comment><USER2> The trouble is that most of these "pranks" boil down to testing the attention of service-level employees of corporations. They don't give a shit, and shouldn't, given the realities of filling as many orders as possible during a shift.

</comment><comment><USER3> Signature is only required when a compliance process has begun. So, for example, when you check your transactions and see one that you can't recognize then you call your bank and object that trx. In that moment the bank ask for the physical documents and may check your signature, but it depends on the rules of your card operator (Visa, MasterCard, Amex).

<comment><USER4> But that opens up an obvious scam:

1\. Buy something with your credit card

2\. Sign with a false name

3\. Contest the charge

4\. Get a refund--keep the merchandise.

<comment><USER5> There are lots of soft was to scam the system. The question is are you that type of person? Is that the life you pick? Running small scams hoping you won't get caught. Focus your energy on building something useful. You've already completed step one of that process "read hacker news."

<comment><USER4> Don't worry--having the mindset and creativity to think of ways to break the system aren't always bundled with the inclination to actually do them. I have better ways of applying my creativity. I suspect I just have what Schneier calls a "security mindset": [http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/03/the_security_m...](http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/03/the_security_mi_1.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Be sure not to miss part 2, where the author takes things to the next level...

<http://www.zug.com/pranks/credit_card/>

<comment><USER6> That ended up being kinda mean to that Circuit City salesman. He probably thought he was making the sale of his life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Its more like testing the limits of the "next" button (since the article is broken down into 5-6 pages).

</comment><comment><USER8> It's because the signatures aren't used as a security system in the first world. Here in South America i get checks and credit card receipts rejected on a pretty regular basis because my signature is slightly off. By which i mean, i didn't make the curve of the P the same way. Believe me, i prefer they didn't check.

When i complain, they offer to let me put each variation of my signature on file, so i could have several which pass the test.

<comment><USER9> I was all set to agree with you, but then I looked up VISA's Merchant Agreement online [pdf]: [http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/rules_for_visa_mercha...](http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/rules_for_visa_merchants.pdf)

I was surprised to see on page 28 that it is considered a security feature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've done stuff like this - just made a smiley face on the sign line. Never had a problem with it. It's funny though, occasionally at a very official place I've had a staff member say my real signature that matches all my ID is too messy and ask me to write down my name beneath it in print. That happened to me at at least one or two consulates over the last few years when applying for visas.

Also, I remember one time a friend got a 250 euro ticket driving through Austria, and I thought it was nonsense. He was speeding sure, but I think they inflated it by more than it was, and they said he had to pay on the spot or they wouldn't let him go. If I was in that spot, I think I'd write "Coerced Void" in artful cursive on the receipt and protest it later with the credit card company.

</comment><comment><USER11> Anything under $25 no longer requires a signature anyways. I suspect that number will just keep getting larger.

All my credit cards are disabled the instant I take them out of my normal buying pattern, and even RedBox makes me enter my zipcode to rent a $1. movie on the CC, so there are clearly more effective mechanisms to preventing fraud than signature verification.

</comment><comment><USER12> Most cashiers hand my card back to me with the receipt to sign, and can't verify my signature. But many stores are now switching to using a PIN with chip cards, at least here in Canada. And Europe's had chip cards forever now. In fact, some places there no longer even have machines to read a magnetic stripe.

<comment><USER13> What's the advantage of chip + PIN over stripe + PIN?

<comment><USER14> In the first full year after chip & pin became mandatory in the UK card fraud in stores dropped by 47%. While retailers can still accept signatures, if they do so they are not guaranteed the funds. Before the change, if the signature matched then they got the funds regardless. Now the only way to be sure you get paid is to accept PIN authorised transactions.

What this article doesn't say is that a lot of stores ask for ID when paying by card... something that always surprises me; this NEVER happens at home.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have drawing a straight line for all my CC transactions for the past two years and no one has bothered about it.

I think this will automatically phase out automatically with new technologies like RFID...

</comment><comment><USER16> In most cases the only time a signature gets looked at is if someone is contesting a charge. The CC processor would ask the store for a record showing that they actually made a purchase.

In the end, signatures are really there to protect the store not you. It's in their best interest to have you sign with your actual signature. If you signed as Donald Duck and then contested the charge they'd probably have a hard time proving it was you and they'd lose money.

</comment><comment><USER17> While I was working in a supermarket on the till I once contested a signature. This women's signature didn't match the one on the back of the card one bit. So I said "Can you sign that again please", and she did, but it still didn't match. Then I said "these signatures don't match at all" and she got all shirty with me, at which point I decided I wasn't being paid enough to care and just put it through anyway.

</comment><comment><USER18> Just the other day I went out and bought gas at a gas station for my friend's bike, with his credit card and his cell phone in my pocket. (He got his licence the next day)

The scanner didn't work so I had to go to the counter, and had to fake a signature. Nobody even batted an eye. It was exhilarating, and unnerving at the same time...

Maybe I should just chalk it up to my mind-busting ability to play it cool?

<comment><USER18> (just kidding about that last bit!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The Lowes self checkout is annoying because you have to switch back and forth from the touch screan to the credit card pad thing several times, so by the time it wants me to sign, I just write something vulgar. It's never been a problem.

</comment><comment><USER20> IANAL, but legally, any mark you make with the intent of signing is a signature. I guess you could claim after the fact that it wasn't you who signed the receipt, though...

</comment><comment><USER21> We're working on fixing this issue. Fortunately, I think our system works better.

<http://www.facecash.com>

<comment><USER22> Your site looks gorgeous, but I think your tagline and copy could use some serious work. After I read "The future of payments has arrived" I had no idea what your product does, and you failed my 5 second filter. Since I wanted to maybe suggest an alternative, though, I spent some more time to figure out what you product does by reading the bottom. _I still couldn't figure out what your product does._ Does this thing link my face with my credit card somehow? Why on earth would I share banking details with you if I have no idea what the benefit will be. Why no about page, at least?

<comment><USER21> Thanks for the feedback. We were hoping that people would be intrigued by the photo of the product (the same image where you read the tagline), and then click on one of the links below (<https://www.thinklink.com/index.html?more=1>), but you're right that it's not clear enough. We'll work on it.

For the record, what it is: a pre-funded alternative payment system that uses your phone, a barcode, and your face to eliminate the need for a plastic card at the point of sale. Hence no crazy signature problems.

<comment><USER22> Ah OK, I didn't see those. I think a horizontal nav with About, Signup, etc. would do wonders, at least for those that expect an about page. A more explanatory tagline would help too, though. Thanks for the clarification.

How do you all plan to get around the very high hurdle of getting high penetration of point of sale systems that are compatible and can show a picture of someone's face? There're a lot of legacy systems out there... Don't mean to bust your chops, just curious. Could do phone-based required authorization instead, which would at least remove the picture requirement?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've often tested the limits of credit card signatures to the point that I now regularly pose as several Disney cartoon characters.

</comment><comment><USER24> forget credit cards, my name has been misspelled on my driver's license since i can remember, spanning 2 states and 1 decade. I've never been asked about it. Not when i bought my house or started a business or opened credit... no one cares.

</comment><comment><USER25> Signing a credit card receipt is not for signature verification. You are signing a contract that you agree to pay under the terms of your card agreement. Therefore, it doesn't matter how you sign as long as it was you. If you sign a multimillion dollar recording contract with a smiley face, you are still agreeing to the terms of the contract. Your signature doesn't have to match anything.

If signatures were for verification, then they wouldn't have you sign the back. That would be like writing your login on post-it note stuck to your computer.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is software often slow, despite the great advances in hardware? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> B L O A T

L

O

A

T

Why bother with optimisation these days? Who cares about making something fast when you can make it pretty? So what if everyone uses double precision floating point numbers? "Use assembly? But that's too hard." "So what if my CPU has an instruction that will let me multiply 32 integers at once? I want to use floats." "I want to do it in a browser."

Software runs slow because nobody cares any more.

</comment><comment><USER3> At least from the business side of things, code efficiency matters only when it makes a difference in the bottom line. If you can get the solution cranked out in half (or less) the time by being careless with memory, algorithms, and selection of third-party functions, the result is essentially double (or more) the return on investment. In many cases with routine processing of business data, a programmer would have to try to make a program run noticeably slowly. Put another way, paying a coder is often more expensive than buying and running a faster CPU.

PS: I have written some of my industries' most CPU efficient code on the market, but this is only because it matters in my industries. On the other hand, I have been in situations where efficiency is pretty insignificant, such as when programming an installation procedure that the user runs only when installing or removing the software.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yes, it's bad algorithms/bloat/poor code efficiency that are the immediate cause, but as Socrates pointed out re the Presocratic philosophers, describing only immediate causes can yield quite shallow explanations. The real question is why the bloat and awful code and algorithms? I'll add to my previous reply to that question, with an idea that occurred to me last night: one answer to prisoner's dilemmas/tragedies of the commons is to appoint a supervisor whose word is law, say when programs are running...

And what do you know, we already have one - called an OS. Someday, I expect that OSes will be smart enough to examine the executables they have been given (note that that can be done in parallel) and reward tight code with more cycles, and punish sloppy code with lower priority (unless the user says otherwise, which she may.) Our A.I. might well be good enough now, for that - to do at least crude reverse engineering or pattern recognition rapidly (doesn't have to be real time, of course.) This solves the prisoner's dilemma (which is also a freeloading problem) by punishing the freeloaders and rewarding the cooperators; now good code isn't slowed down just as if it too were bad code; and most companies are forced to start tightening things up, and to actually compete with each other to produce better code than most other outfits. (For webpages - either the browser or OS could police webpages after examining the code and load of pages.)

I do believe that's a patentable idea. Or two. Pity I'm working on another patentable idea I like still more - but if someone wants to front me some real money, please do drop a comment here.

<comment><USER4> Some editing by reply follows, since the editor just ate a lot of work (perhaps my edit straddled the time limit after posted when edits are allowed):

The identification of programs as well or badly coded can take place outside of the OS, and at a very different time and place, just as antivirus programs work. A bloat=identifying program can do the analysis, judge the programs and provide identifying bit sequences or hashes (if necessary to prevent evasion) to the OS, which can then use that information to police who gets what priority.

Other efficiency evaluation, including of script behavior, could be done either in nearly real time, or over days or months, by the OS or another program feeding data to it.

Some of this analysis would be straightforward, looking for known bad patterns, other analyses might requite AI, neural nets or the sort of combination (AI flags, humans confirm/disconfirm) that make Palintir hum.

Note that this doesn't just produce an immediate effect of shielding good programs from the sluggishness of bad ones; the competition that this sets up becomes something of a marketplace promoting efficiency that keeps becoming more demanding; a competition in which efficiency once again makes you look very good to your customers, as used to be the case when users could only run one program at a time. Back then, we knew who was feeding us garbage code and who wasn't. This invention let's us get back to something like that standard while keeping our shiny new hardware and multitasking, too.

Who knows, one edit at a time, I may have put a unicorn patent into the comments section of Hacker News as the idea occurred to me. Sliding down a slippery slope to publication.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The way I see it, it's essentially because of frameworks and engines. For example in games, I've seen simple isometric games with very little graphic intensity build with huge game engines like Unity or Unreal. 20 years ago, that same game would have been built almost directly with machine code and be just as beautiful (adjusting for screen resolution and quality from back then). Well, that's my theory based largely on assumptions.

Software and Web is probably the same - I remember building very small websites from scratch, painstakingly writing each line of HTML and CSS myself to be as optimized as possible. Today, I'd probably have to start with a framework like Foundation or Bootstrap. Or maybe Semantic-UI which would require node.js to be installed and gulp and whatever. That stack can help with fast development, but it's probably not as optimized as doing everything in notepad++, right?

The company I work for just re-built our whole flagship product from scratch. It was previously in Delphi 6, and now it's in Java. Notwithstanding the prejudice against Java and speed, the reality is that the software now requires like 16MB of RAM and _still_ takes more than a minute to load. And then it's slow as hell, both for use and for actually producing its output (it's print management and VDP).

Does it have anything to do with the number of librairies our dev team uses to "simplify their lives"? I'm guessing it might. [http://help.objectiflune.com/EN/planetpress-connect-user- gui...](http://help.objectiflune.com/EN/planetpress-connect-user- guide/1.1/Legal_Notices_and_Acknowledgements.htm)

</comment><comment><USER4> Note that clock speed hasn't been zooming ahead recently, compared to the astonishing past, which you can see a lovely illustration of at: [http://www.dailytech.com/A+Supercomputer+on+Your+Wrist+Infog...](http://www.dailytech.com/A+Supercomputer+on+Your+Wrist+Infographic+Series+Shows+Moores+Law+in+Action/article37369.htm) Instead we mostly get more cores, but there's no general solution to the Von Neumann bottleneck, so that's of limited help to the majority of software. A.I. is benefiting, though. Building a safe, self-driving car using one core would be rather difficult. So some software IS vastly improved.

And then there's Parkinson's Law, "work expands to fill the time allotted to it". Just substitute "sloppiness" for "work" and "bandwith" or "CPU cycles" for "time". Programmers haven't become cheaper or less in demand, so "sloppy" (resource heavy) code is way cheaper than tight-and-hard-to-debug-and- maintain. If you must hire more programmer hours to analyze bottlenecks or use a lower-level language you do. But only if you must. So homeostasis sets in (Parkinson's Law is all about effort-related-homeostasis.)"The hardware giveth and the software taketh away" because that's cheapest for competitive software businesses.

Part of that situation, too, is that the more the software/hardware is capable of, the more kinds of tasks get done with it; but that also means way more demand for programmers, so now you _really_ can't waste their time "optimizing" everything. And as a result we have word processors that are actually slower at times now, than back when the monitor screens were green dots on black backgrounds. So that's homeostasis at work, too.

And then there's multitasking. There are dozens of pages and programs open right now on my desktop, so a tragedy of the commons is taking place within the humming innards of my PC; a prisoner's dilemma in which each program (and the firm that made it) can hope that the others will only sip resources so that they can steal more cycles and download fatter ads in a browser tab and use sloppier code. They can be wasteful because the user won't usually know which code is being piggy, and because they know others will be piggy if they aren't. On the other hand, if they optimize like hell the customer probably won't notice (given the other piggy programs the customer is running in the background) so the software company has just thrown that money (a lot of money) away. More homeostasis.

<comment><USER2> Clock speed might not have been increasing but have you looked at how quick newer processors execute the same instructions?

<comment><USER4> You're right, there are complexities, and parallelism within each core, too - but again, some instructions will benefit from this a lot more than others (Von Neuman bottleneck, again.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "I can already tell you what's going to happen to all those extra cycles that faster hardware is going to give us in the next hundred years. They're nearly all going to be wasted."

[http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> Algorithms. I mean, bad algorithms.

When your algorithms is O(N^2) or worse, like O(N^3), the computer will handle small amount of data, and faster hardware will only allow your N to grow very little.

(N being the amount of data your algorithm is dealing with).

</comment><comment><USER8> because it ins't optimised as much mainly because hardware is so much faster and has greater capacity.

Back in the 90s you would still see big chunks of OSs and processor intensive applications written in assembly. But as the processors got more efficient and storage and operating RAM wasn't a limit, programs could achieve the same results with higher level languages and without much effort to optimise, so developers stopped putting in as much effort into it.</comment>


Is there a housing bubble brewing? - <AUTHOR> http://thehousingbubbleblog.com/?p=9479 <comment><USER2> Brewing? It got propped up by all the toxic MBSes being transferred onto the Fed's balance sheet, which they're still planning on rolling over (as of today's FOMC guidance). The housing bubble should have popped in '08, its practically a zombie at this point.

"The Committee is maintaining its existing policy of reinvesting principal payments from its holdings of agency debt and agency mortgage-backed securities in agency mortgage-backed securities and of rolling over maturing Treasury securities at auction, and it anticipates doing so until normalization of the level of the federal funds rate is well under way. This policy, by keeping the Committee's holdings of longer-term securities at sizable levels, should help maintain accommodative financial conditions."

</comment><comment><USER3> looks like the article comes from a non bias source...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats why it was posed as a question. It is not my personal hypothesis. I was hoping to hear differing opinions.</comment></comment>